I finished reading my March Shakespeare play “As You Like It” in the nick of time! I finished it on Sunday, March 30th. After last week’s post about not being able to make time for reading a physical book, I really felt miserable about it, and used my misery to motivate me to make the time and start reading.
Thankfully, As You Like It, was both a super easy Shakespeare play to read in terms of its language, and a very light delightful play to read. That made finishing it quickly easy once I managed to start it.
Nothing much happens in As You Like It. Two sets of brothers in opposition come together at the end, four wedding happen, and no one dies. A delightful play about nothing…
The character of Rosalind shines like the bright star she is. Hopelessly in love, but still aware of the absurdities of romantics, and practical about how a lover never dies because of love, she is the very image of wit and practicalities and grace, and at the same time feeling nervous and impatient like any newly in-love. She basically carries this whole play of nothing on her dazzling shoulders.
And without any other character of her charisma in the whole play, including her love interest Orlando, she really shines by contrast. I cannot imagine one play with both the charismatic characters of Rosalind and Falstaff in one play…it would be interesting to see their intereaction and their spar of words, but they would not shine as much as each on their own. Shakespeare does well to divide them up in their own plays.
I am so glad to have met Rosalind and enjoyed her sunny disposition, and her wit and intelligence. I saw this play’s production of Canadian Stage in High Park here in Toronto back in 2022. And I did not know anything about the story line or the characters at that point. But I clearly remember the character of Rosalind if nothing else from that performance. Of course the credit goes to the director Anand Rajaram, as well as the actor Bren Eastcott for having pulled off that remarkable performance.
I love that as I am moving through the plays of Shakespeare’s I am collecting my own ensemble of favourite characters that have a lot to teach me about life, or just for me to delight in their wit, their humour, or their darkness.