For Friday: Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act 3

Remember, Act 3 is always the 'big' act in Shakespeare's plays. A lot of great stuff happens in this act, and everything that follows is really just a development of the 'plots' that occur here. 

Answer two of the following...

Q1: How does Act 3 satirize the conventions of love and how people speak (and write) of love? How does the play let us in on the joke? As an aside, Shakespeare loves to attack bathos in poetry, and did so most famously in Sonnet 130, which I’ve posted BELOW these questions (you might look for echoes of this sonnet in Act 3!).

Q2: How is the Touchstone and Audrey subplot a foil for that of Rosalind and Orlando? Similarly, when sets out to woo Audrey, how does he use wit rather than poetry to woo her?

Q3: In other Shakespeare comedies (Taming of the Shrew, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing), the headstrong, witty woman always has a foil, a man who can ultimately overpower her. Why doesn’t Orlando really fill this role for Rosalind? Why would Shakespeare allow her to basically run wild in the forest with no one to oppose her?

Q4: How does Rosalind/Ganymede intend to ‘cure’ Orlando of his love for her? Do you feel she really wants him to fall in love with him, meaning Ganymede, rather than her female alter ego? Is this scene merely a comedic game, or something a little more subversive and racy?  

SONNET 130 (from Shakespeare's Sonnets)

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

   As any she belied with false compare.