Woeful pageants

This chapter considers the screen history of the play, examining the major film versions (directed by Paul Czinner, 1936, Christine Edzard, 1992, and Kenneth Branagh, 2006) and the BBC-Time Life Television Shakespeare production of 1978. None of these has been particularly well-received by critics and audiences, and the chapter discusses their uneasy use of film and television realism to render the pastoral fantasy world of the play. The discussion of the BBC production draws upon the corporation’s audience research data to investigate what actual spectators made of it in the context of the late 1970s television viewing experience.

As we like it

This chapter focuses on the lived reality of Shakespearean theatre-going, recording the author’s experience of a performance of As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe towards the end of the summer of 2015. Offering a moment-by-moment response to this stage production, the chapter moves to situate this within the larger contexts of everyday interactions and encounters, and in relation to broader and deeper currents of performance memory and reminiscence.

At all points like a man

This chapter discusses two landmark all-male productions: the National Theatre’s in 1967, and Cheek by Jowl’s in 1991 (revived in 1995). The discussion takes account of how the casting of men in the female roles radically energized the gender dynamics of the productions, implicating them directly in the sexual politics of their own times, in the first instance in the context of the UK’s recent decriminalisation of homosexuality, and in the second in the wake of resurgent homophobia. The chapter also emphasises the significance of self-conscious performativity in these productions.

Between France and Germany

This chapter examines the play’s fortunes beyond the English-speaking theatre, focusing on two landmark productions: Jacques Copeau’s for l’Atelier, Paris, in 1934, and Peter Stein’s for the Schaubühne Berlin, in 1977. In both cases the discussion focuses on the visionary direction of two of Europe’s leading twentieth-century theatre directors, the cultural and political contexts of their productions, and the ramifications of translating Shakespeare’s text into, respectively, French and German.

Materials of performance: denim and silk

This chapter continues and concludes the story of As You Like It at Stratford-upon-Avon, focusing on two major productions, Buzz Goodbody’s in 1973, and Adrian Noble’s in 1985, and then providing a summary of the play’s performance history until 2013. Goodbody’s production is discussed in terms of its relation both to feminism and popular performance; Noble’s in relation to the phenomenon of Director’s Shakespeare.

Hunting for Arden in Warwickshire

This chapter covers the history of the play in performance at Stratford-upon-Avon, first at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and after 1960 under the auspices of the Royal Shakespeare Company, up until 1961. It focuses first on Nigel Playfair’s notorious decision in 1919 to banish the stuffed stag that had been ceremonially paraded in every production since 1879, as a means of introducing the dynamics of tradition and innovation that have informed the play’s performance history. The second part of the chapter examines Vanessa Redgrave’s legendary 1961 Rosalind, and the 1963 BBC Television film of her performance.

Play, parts and players

Through close reading of the text of As You Like It, this chapter traces the early performance and publication history of the play, focusing in particular on the significance of the part system and its implications for the role of Rosalind. It places the play in the contexts of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s repertoire and of Shakespeare’s radically innovatory and high-risk playwriting practice. It also examines the use of rhetorical tools in the players’ parts.

This strange, eventful history

This chapter offers an overview of the book’s contents and a summary of its main arguments and findings, and also presents an outline of the performance history of As You Like It from the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. It considers in particular the play’s relationship to the history of English pastoral.