SOURCE: Daley, A. Stuart. “Calling and Commonwealth in As You Like It: A Late Elizabethan Political Play.” Upstart Crow 14 (1994): 28-46.

In the following essay, Daley emphasizes political issues in As You Like It, analyzing its dramatization of Tudor commonwealth ideology, in which the virtues of reason and temperance combine to regenerate a society corrupted by fraternal strife.

This paper proposes that in As You Like It Shakespeare designed a comedy about politics in the contemporary sense of pertaining to the art of governance and the state of the commonwealth. His subject is the problem of redeeming a sovereign dukedom from the tyranny of a usurper and, on the parallel level of an eminent family, the freeing of an orphan youngest brother from the oppression of his elder brother, now in loco parentis. Accordingly, the expository first act details the infection of the body politic by the vices typical...