Abstract
The youngest of three sons is neglected by his brother, who inherits the estate when his father dies. Though the heir was charged by their father with his education, the younger brother is treated, he complains, like a servant, or worse. The second son has at least been sent to school, but the third is barely distinguished from the farm animals:
he keeps me rustically at home, or, to speak more properly, stays me here at home unkept; for call you that keeping for a gentleman of my birth, that differs not from the stalling of an ox? His horses are bred better; for besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manage, and to that end riders dearly hired: but I, his brother, gain nothing under him but growth, for the which his animals on his dunghills are as much bound to him as I.
As You Like It (1.1.6–15)1
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Notes
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1975).
William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen, The Arden Shakespeare (Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1998).
Frances A. Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London: Warburg Institute, 1947).
Andrew Gurr, Play going in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 147–53.
‘Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show...’ (Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, 1.1, The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 165).
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brooks, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1979), 4.1.213.
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, ed. H. J. Oliver, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1971), 2.1.14–18; 1.1.179–80.
See Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 81–6 and passim.
For a sophisticated account of the racial implications of ‘fair’ in the period, see Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 62–122.
G. K. Hunter, ‘Poem and Context in Love’s Labour’s Lost’, Shakespeare’s Styles: Essays in Honour of Kenneth Muir, ed. Philip Edwards, Inga-Stina Ewbank and G. K. Hunter, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 25–38 (p. 36).
See, for example, Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis (Chapters 1–5), trans. George V. Schick, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, vol. 1 (Saint Louis, MI: Concordia, 1958), p. 115, but the point is confirmed in most discussions of the issue.
John Carey and Alastair Fowler, eds, The Poems of John Milton (London: Longman, 1968).
Ester Sowernam, Ester Hath Hang’d Haman (1617), The Women’s Sharp Revenge, ed. Simon Shepherd, (London: Fourth Estate, 1985), pp. 85–124
Josuah Sylvester, trans., The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur du Bartas, ed. Susan Snyder, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 1.6.959–66.
George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, eds, The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955), vol. 2, p. 336.
William Perkins, Christian Oeconomie, trans. Thomas Pickering, Works, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1618), p. 671.
John Milton, The Complete Prose Works, vol. 2, ed. Ernest Sirluck (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 447.
Marjorie Garber, ‘The Education of Orlando’, Comedy from Shakespeare to Sheridan: Change and Continuity in the English and European Dramatic Tradition, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman, (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), pp. 102–12.
Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 30–32.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Pyscho-analysis (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 107.
Martin Luther, The Estate of Marriage, trans. Walther I. Brandt, Luther’s Works, ed. Helmut T. Lehmann, vol. 45 (Philadelphia, PA: Muhlenberg, 1962), pp. 11–49 (p. 19).
John Lyly, Loves Metamorphosis, The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), vol. 3, 1.1.14–20.
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© 1999 Catherine Belsey
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Belsey, C. (1999). Desire in the Golden World: ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ and ‘As You Like It’. In: Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15047-2_2
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