The complete works of William Shakespeare Volume 5

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1907 Excerpt: ...the lyrics at the end of the play. In "As You Like It" we are steadily made to feel close to nature. There is nothing of that in " Love's Labour 's Lost." No, except for touches here and there which reveal Shakespeare in all his work as the patient and loving observer of Nature's moods and ways, we must look to the second half of " The Winter's Tale " for any such pervasive atmosphere of the open air as we find in " As You Like It." Within its own period, within the group of Shakespeare's plays, "As You Like It," then, is unusual. As I have already said, in no strict sense is the play a pastoral. This is no genuine tale of shepherds and shepherdesses. Though Corin, Sylvius, and Phebe tend flocks, though Rosalind and Celia live in a shepherd's hut, Shakespeare puts no emphasis on the manners and customs of the shepherds, but rather on the love story of all his figures as merely human beings. His emphasis for local colour and atmosphere comes instead in the brief scenes of the banished Duke and his companions. If the difference between what is and what might have been is not clear to a reader, let him turn to "The Faithful Shepherdess " or " The Sad Shepherd" and speedily it will be. As is always the case with Shakespeare after he passes, with "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the initial stage of his work, he individualises the conventional, humanises and simplifies the artificial and purely literary, bringing it all into relation with life as his audience knew and could understand it. What primarily interested him in writing the play was so to repeat a story known in Thomas Lodge's novel, "Rosalynde," that even those of his hearers who already were acquainted with it should...