Love and Disillusionment: As You Like It and Twelfth Night

Abstract

As You Like It and Twelfth Night are widely considered the high points of Shakespeare’s comedy, yet both have suffered from an overly sentimental approach which persists in seeing the plays as glorious love stories in idyllic settings. ‘There is something almost akin to fairyland ⋯ in the half-heavenly Forest of Arden’ was Swinburne’s verdict of As You Like It in 1909, and as late as 1962, Dover Wilson listed both plays as among Shakespeare’s ‘happy’ comedies.¹ The roles of Rosalind and Viola in particular have offered generations of leading ladies an opportunity to show off their talents in a breeches part and the plays are high on the list of those performed regularly by schools, by amateur groups and in provincial repertory, most of which tend to emphasise the light-heartedness of the plays. A great many productions of Twelfth Night, for example, have managed to avoid the ambiguities of the opening scene, where the melancholy Orsino calls for music, by following Kemble’s example of 1810, and opening the play with the shipwreck, thereby making Viola into the principal character who enters with the famous question ‘What country, friends, is this?’ and who then becomes the central focus of attention in the action that follows.