Book:
As You Like It
Author: William
Shakespeare
Number of pages: 39
What I’m watching: TV: Cadfael, Once Upon a Time, Community, South Park, The
Colbert Report
What I’m playing: Bioshock: Infinite, Catan, Skyrim, Bioshock, Uncharted 3,
Halo 4
Little Women rehearsals have been going long,
college courses are in the midst of projects and tests, and I had to beat
Bioshock Infinite. Even reading only short plays, my life has slowed down my
blogging. But here I am with a new book.
At
some point during this adventure through my personal library,1 I’ll
be spending quite a bit of time reading through my copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I have read a good
number of his plays, but when I get to it, I’m going to read all the rest. I have
a few extra stand-alone copies of his plays. I thought I’d read them now and
get them out of the way for later. So, that idea brought me to Shakespeare’s As You Like It for my next play.
I
opened up to the first page to find an editor’s note. Turns out “this version
of As You Like It, as arranged by Mr.
B Iden Payne for performance at the Globe Theatre in the Century of Progress,
1934, plays thirty-seven minutes” (3). My reaction was “WTF?” I’ve seen a few
Shakespeare plays performed. They usually run at least 2-3 hours. I found this
cool site explaining how to approximate each play’s run-time that puts As You Like It over 2 ½ hours.2
How the crap did Mr. B Iden Payne get it to just over half an hour?! That’s 80%
of the show being cut! And it looks like this company gave a similar treatment
to other plays listed in the front inside cover, including Macbeth, King Lear, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Romeo and Juliet.3
Turns
out now I’m not even going to be able to cross the play off my list when I get
to the complete works, because I’m only reading a fraction of it. Not being
able to get over how ridiculous such a cutting of the play had to be, I
compared it to the full play in my copy of the complete works. Turns out the
whole script is pretty fucked up. The sequence of scenes is as follows:
Act
I, scenes 2 and 3. Act II, scenes 3, 1, 7, and 4. Act III, scenes 2, 3, and 4.
Act IV, scene 1. Act V, scene 1. Back to Act IV, scene 3. Act V again, scenes
3, 2, and 4.
This
version cut out eight whole scenes. The scenes that got kept are super abridged
and not even in the right order! Act V is the only act that has some part of
all its scenes still in, but Mr. B Iden Payne threw some of Act IV in the
middle.
This is what Mr. B Iden Payne did to Shakespeare.
A whole list of characters got cut,
which I’m pretty sure reduced some complicated love triangles into simple love
stories. Characters names in the script are even abbreviated: Orlando’s lines
are prefaced with Orl, Charles is Cha, Amiens becomes Ami, Corin is Cor.
Really? Was that absolutely necessary? The play is presented in one act with
some scenes staged in front of a curtain to help the pace keep moving for any
scene changes.
Okay,
just one more thing I want to mention before I talk about the play itself. The
stage manager played the Banished Duke. Maybe only I think that’s interesting.
I think it’s neat.
The
play begins with a wrestling match between Charles and Orlando. Rosalind and
Celia watch. Orlando wins, and he and Rosalind fall in love at first glance.
But Rosalind gets banished by Celia’s father, the Duke, for I don’t know what
reason – I assume the explanation got cut. Celia decides to go with Rosalind to
the nearby forest because they’re friends. They decide to disguise themselves –
again, I don’t know why. Rosalind dresses up as a man.
The
Banished Duke, or Duke S, and his friends are all in the forest too. Then
Orlando shows up swinging a sword and asking for food. Why is he in the forest?
I don’t know. I guess the reason wasn’t important enough to keep in the story.
There’s
no denying that the language Shakespeare uses is very poetical and brilliant.
One outstanding image is from the Duke Senior saying “And churlish chiding of the
winter’s winds, / Which, when it bites and blows upon my body, / Even till I
shrink with cold, I smile” (With the sequence of scenes being a mangled up,
tangled up mess, I’m not bothering to search for scene lines. The quote’s on
page 14). As You Like It also holds
one of Shakespeare’s most famous monologues: his “All the world’s a stage”
speech. It’s spoken by Jacques, a name which my friend Hugh said is pronounced
in the play as “Jay-kweez.”
Anyway,
the banished folk let Orlando join them and they sing half a song. After that,
Orlando starts wandering alone in the forest. He runs into Rosalind and Celia,
but doesn’t recognize them. He tells them he is madly in love with Rosalind,
and Rosalind pretends to be a counselor offering to cure Orlando of his love.
I
always had trouble suspending my disbelief with Shakespeare’s convention of
disguises. How is it not obvious?
He’s deeply in love with Rosalind and
cannot tell the man he’s talking with is really her? I just saw Measure for Measure in Chicago earlier
this month, and one of the characters put on a pair of glasses as a disguise.
His close associate fails to recognize him until he removes the glasses. It’s
so stupid, but the associate’s exaggerated realization was so over the top that
it was hilarious because even the actors were like, “Yeah, it’s dumb, but just
go with it.”
Anyway,
Rosalind tells Orlando that the cure for loving Rosalind is to pretend that
he/she is Rosalind and have Orlando express his love to him/her. So Orlando
pretends that Rosalind is Rosalind, not realizing that Rosalind is Rosalind. Touchstone falls in love
with a girl named Audrey and has to fight off another guy named William. One
day, Orlando doesn’t show up to fake-woo Rosalind. His brother Oliver runs in
to tell her and Celia that Orlando was injured fighting a lion off Oliver.
Apparently, Oliver used to be a mean brother until Orlando saved his life.
Touchstone marries Audrey. Rosalind marries Orlando. Celia and Oliver end up
marrying, too. Why? I don’t know. He’s on third, and I don’t care.
As You Like It has a lot of good lines, either funny
or beautiful, but sometimes Shakespeare overdoes it. At one point Celia is
overcome and exclaims “O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful!
and yet again wonderful, and after that” (20). This 1930s company felt the need
to cut out over half the show, but had to keep this whole line? Celia’s line
reminds me of The Compleat Works of Wllm
Shkspr (abridged), when Adam sums up Juliet’s “Gallop apace, you
fiery-footed steeds” soliloquy with “’O night night night night…Come come come
come come!’ (aside to audience) I
didn’t write it” (Borgeson, Long, and Singer 21).
Ultimately,
too much of the story and the comedy was lost from the play in this copy of As You Like It. Hopefully, when it comes
time to read the whole thing, all these mixed up pieces of the play will come
together for a better comedy.
Like a puzzle, when someone knows what he or she's doing.
Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Going. I have the entire play in the
complete works. This copy doesn’t have any explanatory notes to help either, so
it doesn’t add anything more than the complete works.
Notes
1. Maybe this summer.
3. Apparently, 1930s people had really
short attention spans. After 40 minutes of Shakespeare, it was too much for
them.
Work
Cited
Borgeson, Jess, Adam Long, and Daniel
Singer. The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr
(abridged). Ed. J. M. Winfield. New York: Applause
Books. 1994. Print.
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Thomas Wood Stevens.
New York:
Samuel
French, 1935. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment