The drama by Shakespeare "As you like it" is a pastoral comedy?
Answers
Answer:
AS YOU LIKE IT as a Pastoral Comedy
Shakespeare‘s As You Like It is based on a work entitled Rosalynde written by Thomas Lodge (Verity 2000 : xiii) The play is often categorized as a pastoral comedy . The term .pastoral. refers to the life of the shepherds or rural folk and their ways of living, manners and customs. However, pastoral poetry does not reflect the realities of country life and that from its beginning it created an imaginary landscape which was actually a projection of the poct‘s feelings and ideas. Hence the word 'pastoral‘ came to be .identified with an ideal space representing innocence, peace, philosophic contemplation. (Singh in Chandra 2000:111) Theocritus‘ Idylls and Virgil‘s Eclogues are two of the great examples of ancient pastoral poetry, which constructed rural life in this way.
During the Renaissance with its revival of the classical poetry, the pastoral as a literary form was practiced by the English poets as was done by the continental poets. So when the Elizabethan poets came to write their pastorals. They had before them a set of conventions and stock character types that inform
the genre of the pastoral. No doubt, Sidney and Spenser employed the pastoral in diverse and complex ways in their narratives. But it is also true that they followed the conventions closely. They saw the pastoral as an alternative mode of life. The shepherds who inhabited their rural landscape were metaphors
Explanation:
It is pastoral because it extols the virtues of life in the country, in the peace of Nature, as opposed to the life of the courtier.