A Shakespearean Pastoral. Poetry on Stage in "As You Like It"

The paper sheds new light on the connection of As you like it with its main source, Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge, and with the recent, late Elizabethan genre of pastoral romance inspired by Sidney’s Arcadia and by Lyly’s Euphues. Reading works like Rosalynde, or like Menaphon by Greene, as personal collections of poems disguised in the frame of pastoral narratives, the treatment of Arcadian conventions and petrarchism in the Shakespearean comedy shows clearly a critical reply to those models. Taking a further step in the Shakespearean experience of poetry after the so-called “lyric phase”, As you like it, its characters and situations, and the practices of reading aloud written poems and singing ballads in the realm of Arden, are to be read as an ironic reworking, in terms of acting and performance traditions, of contemporary patterns, collections, and conventions of lyric. Some final considerations focus on the traces of pastoral poetry connecting the common players to the royal entertainments and their settings.