Shakespeare - As You Like It

Description

This essential guide provides a comprehensive survey of the most important criticism surrounding As You Like It, one of Shakespeare's most popular and engaging comedies, from the earliest appraisals through to 21st century scholarship. Dana Aspinall outlines, assesses and explores the key critical issues, including As You Like It and the genre of comedy; Shakespeare's adaptation of sources; gender, love and marriage; and interrogations of power. Highlighting how critical and scholarly studies of As You Like It continue to enrich our understanding of this complex and popular play, this guide is an invaluable resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students of English literature, teachers, researchers, scholars, and lovers of Shakespeare everywhere.

Dana Aspinall is Associate Professor of English at Alma College, USA. He has published widely on Shakespeare's comedies.

Aspinall provides wonderfully cogent summaries of critical responses to As You Like It and its chief characters, placing those responses in a wider historical and intellectual context so as to illuminate how central the play has been to arguments over how to read Shakespeare-and, indeed, how to read at all. * Laurence Publicover, University of Bristol, UK * This erudite but accessible book navigates scholars and undergraduates through the critical reception of As You Like It. Aspinall deftly traces the characters and themes, and the interpretive and performative challenges, that have fascinated audiences for generations. * Rebecca Lartigue, Springfield College, USA *