AS YOU LIKE IT

Thu 24 July - Sat 2 August 2003 at 7.30pm (no performance on Sun)
Performed in the open air in grounds of St Andrew's Hospital, Billing Road, Northampton

Photo gallery

Shakespeare's most romantic and light-hearted comedy As You Like It is this year’s open-air production by the Northampton-based Masque Theatre, with two former students of Northampton college taking the lead roles.

It tells the story of young lovers Orlando and Rosalind who fall madly in love the minute they lay eyes on each other.

But Rosalind is the companion of Duke Frederick’s daughter Celia, who has deposed his older brother Duke Senior as the ruler of a French province.

Duke Senior has fled to the Forest of Arden with his followers.

When Duke Frederick finds out about Rosalind’s feelings for Orlando, whose father is one of his enemies, she also has to flee to the forest disguised as the shepherd Ganymede, with her friend Celia and the court jester Touchstone.

Orlando has to flee to the forest too but he is treated like a servant by his evil brother Oliver.

Then Phebe, a shepherdess, falls head over heels in love with Ganymede.

But of course by the end of the play everyone is reconciled and All’s Well That Ends Well.

As You Like It was written in 1599-1600, when Shakespeare was 35, and published in the First Folio of 1623.

It was based on a pastoral romance called Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge, published in 1590, which was itself derived from a Fourteenth Century narrative poem The Tale of Gamelyn, found in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

Shakespeare was in fact dramatising a well-known piece of romantic fiction, only adding the characters of Touchstone, William and Jacques to the original source material.

Pastoral prose and poetry was an important genre in Elizabethan literature. "Shepherds and shepherdesses fall in and out of love amid an Arcadian landscape inherited from the Greek and Latin poets.

Unlike their real-life namesakes, they are creatures of leisure, articulate and whimsical.

They sit on grassy knolls, or by babbling brooks, on sunlit May momings, soliloquising or discoursing of passion while their grateful sheep gambol contentedly at their feet.

They are an urban dream of the simple life and of fresh uncomplicated love," (Andrew Hilton)

This was one of the reasons why I chose to set our production in the 1820s.

Rousseau‘s philosophy of "back to nature" was colouring the vision of the English Romantic poets, and the influence of the American and French revolutions was being felt everywhere, in dreams of a new golden age of liberty and fraternity.

As the industrial revolution began to take hold, poets, novelists and anists evoked a life of rustic simplicity and dignity, contrasting with the corrupt and artificial court of the Prince Regent, caricatured by artists like Gilray and Cruikshank.

John Clare, Northampton's own pastoral poet (and from 1841 to 1864 a patient here at St. Andrew's Hospital, or Northampton General Lunatic Asylum as it was then called) published his Shepherd's Calendar in 1827.

I like to think that he might have sat writing poetry under the same tree as the one beneath which we play out Shakespeare's gentle parody of the pastoral dream.

He had a copy of As You Like It in his personal collection of books, still preserved in Northampton Central Reference Library.

As You Like It offers an exploration of contrasting themes: the court and the country, Nature or Fortune, realism and romanticism, inherent nobility or acquired virtue, truth and lies, disguise and revelation, wisdom and folly, youth and age, laughter and melancholy.

No correct choices are presented; it is up to us to decide.

In Arden, ideas and relationships are honestly examined and the self-knowledge gained in the forest must eventually be transferred back to the court.

Shakespeare's time was a transitional period of uncertain values; as were the 1820. So too, perhaps, is our own time.

Finally, and on a more practical note, the attractive costumes of the late Georgian period allow our male actors to avoid woolly tights and our female actors to show their ankles!