Commentators have described As You Like It as both a celebration of the spirit of pastoral romance and a satire of the pastoral ideal. Traditionally, a pastoral is a poem focusing on shepherds and rustic life; it first appeared as a literary form in the third century. The term itself is derived from the Latin word for shepherd, pastor. A pastoral consists of artificial and unnatural elements, for the shepherd characters often speak with courtly eloquence and appear in aristocratic dress.
This poetic convention evolved over centuries until many of its features were incorporated into prose and drama. It was in these literary forms that pastoralism influenced English literature from about 1550 to 1750, most often as pastoral romance, a model featuring songs and characters with traditional pastoral names. Many of these elements manifest themselves in the commonly accepted source for Shakespeare's play, Thomas Lodge's popular pastoral novel Rosalynde, written in 1590. But by the time Shakespeare adapted Lodge's romance into As You Like It nearly a decade later, many pastoral themes were considered trite. As a result of these developments, Shakespeare treated pastoralism ambiguously in the comedy-it can be viewed as either an endorsement or a satire of the literary form-a method which is nowhere more evident than in the play's title.
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