William Shakespeare: As You Like It. Ed. Juliet Dusinberre

Of the 142 pages of Juliet Dusinberre’s Introduction to Arden 3’s As You Like It, approximately one quarter are concerned with the hypothesis that its first performance was before the Court at Richmond Palace on Shrove Tuesday 1599. Hence Touchstone’s routine about the pancakes and the mustard in I.2 – funny for those who had just been eating pancakes, painfully laboured for any audience thereafter. This assumption largely dictates Dusinberre’s reading of the play as the most harmonious of Shakespeare’s comedies: its task is that of pastoral, that is, at one and the same time to compliment and subtly critique the behaviours of those at court.

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