not-quite-Media Thursday: As You Like It at American Shakespeare Center

OK, so it’s been a while since I waxed rhapsodic over the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia (last week’s announcement about their Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries competition was more about me than it). Not that I’ve ever been there, but I totally dig their mission, and the podcasts by Ralph Cohen. Guy has the professional life I covet.

So when I was on the site last week to check out the SNC stuff, what caught my eye was this…

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As You Like It character map

I know, it’s been a looooooong time since the last infographic, but preproduction on the new As You Like It show has stopped the drought!

Check out the brand spankin’ new As You Like It character map…

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As You Like It… a flashback

As You Like It.

Four years ago,  I was just returning from a three-year break from the Project. And the first play to get a discussion at that point was As You Like It.

And I’ve been thinking about that play a little lately.

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Podcast 83: As You Like It: an Overview, a Cast, a Direction, and a Wrap-Up

This week’s podcast concludes our two month-long discussion of As You Like It, with a general wrap-up and a directorial concept and a cast. Then we’ll talk about a new partner and look forward to the next play.

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As You Like It: Midpoint

Using Professor Rodes’ midpoint theory, let’s take a look at As You Like It.

There are 2678 lines in in the play, which means the midpoint is at line 1339, or at Act Three, Scene Two, line 213. This is the scene where everything regarding the Rosalind/Orlando relationship (and I mean just about EVERYthing) starts to come together: Orlando begins to hang poetry, Rosalind finds poetry, Celia finds more than poetry, and Orlando finds Ganymede.

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A Dip Into the Concordance

As I’ve mentioned in our “(the not-so-digital) Tools of the Trade” (and by its inclusion in the persistent left-hand navigation), I love OpenSource Shakespeare and their tools, especially their concordance.

What’s a concordance? It’s an exhaustive listing of the uses of any word within a given body of work. So… let’s say you need to know how many times the word “hand” is used in Titus? A concordance is where you find it.

Or in the case of As You Like It, I wanted to know how a handful of words were used, especially in comparison to their use in other plays…

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Speech Study: the Epilogue

As we near the end of our two-month discussion of As You Like It, let’s take a look at the end of the play–in particular, the epilogue to the play.

It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ’tis true that a good play needs no epilogue; yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! I am not furnished like a beggar, therefore to beg will not become me: my way is to conjure you; and I’ll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you: and I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women–as I perceive by your simpering, none of you hates them–that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not: and, I am sure, as many as have good beards or good faces or sweet breaths will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.

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Cruel (and not to be kind)

I’m trying to think of a more sincere cruelty displayed by a protagonist in a play thus far than what is displayed by Rosalind toward Phebe in Act Three, Scene Five of As You Like It.

And I cannot.

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