"Pastoral" (from pastor, Latin for "shepherd") refers to a literary work dealing with shepherds and rustic life.

Pastoral poetry is highly conventionalized; it presents an idealized rather than realistic view of rustic life. Classical (Greek and Latin) pastoral works date back to the 3rd century B.C., when the Greek poet Theocritus wrote his Idylls about the rustic life of Sicily for the sophisticated citizens of the city of Alexandria. In the first century B.C., Virgil wrote Latin poems depicting himself and his equally sophisticated friends and acquaintances as shepherds living a simple, rural life. Shakespeare's knowledge of pastoral conventions was drawn both from his humanist education (which included Virgil and possibly Theocritus) and from his familiarity with the works of contemporaries who imitated the ancients by writing pastoral poetry in English. Unlike Shakespeares other comedies, though, As You Like It frequently appears alongside Spensers Shepherdess Calendar and Sidneys Arcadia as examples of pastoral literature, popular in England from Spenser to Milton. Sometimes Shakespeares source, Thomas Lodges Rosalind, is included. Commentaries on Shakespeares debt to Lodge regularly describe a reduction of romance/adventure and a heightening of pastoral conventionswithout identifying those conventions. A pastoral lifestyle is that of shepherds herding livestock around open areas of land according to seasons and the changing availability of water and pasturage. Pastoral literature originated with Theocrituss Bucolic. In Eclogues Virgil introduces Arcadia, the symbolic location of any pastoral, idyllic, bucolic paradise inhabited by peaceful shepherds living a simple, happy life. Pastoral, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means of shepherds; appropriately, the genre features shepherdscowherds if the work is bucolic (from Greek for cowherd). Phebe and Silvius, shepherdess and her (whether she likes it or not) shepherd, not only appear in Lodges novel, but are also stock pastoral figureseven to their names. In classical pastoral, conventional shepherds and shepherdesses occur in pairs with names like Phoebe and Silvius (or Phoebus and Silvia). The shepherd is lovelorn, and the shepherdess disdainful. Phebe and Silvius perform these roles perfectly, as do Orlando and Rosalind (Ganymede).

The pastoral represents rural life as idyllic, idealized, and sweetly picturesque. No one feels hunger or cold. A few pure white, woolly lambs gambol among the flowers dotting the verdant hillside, at the base of which meanders a gurgling, tumbling brook. Rural life is unsullied, and therefore superior to urban. Lest the sweetness cloy, however, Shakespeare, himself a country lad, tempers the idyll with the adversity of Jaques, the malcontent, and Touchstone and Audrey, most unlikely lovers. Shakespeares additions, all touchstones in their own way, ensure that neither court life nor pastoral idyll is too sweet or too adverse. In Lodges original, the two cousins head for the forest without a man. Shakespeare gives them a male companion. Touchstone, a clownish fool, embodies the sophistry of court. Both court and country, compared to Touchstone as quality test, seem more genuine than he. Language is supposed to be a means of communication, polite forms marking civilized, courtly relations; yet Touchstone obfuscates, pontificates, and equivocates. In his eclogue with Corin (3.2), he attempts neither good sense or consistency, only verbal victory. Ironically, this master of pretense to courtliness, sniffing prettily at country ways, finds his love-match in the swills and becomes one of the country copulatives. Audrey, the goat girl of small brain and thick tongue, is better suited to a georgic, a poem that depicts the labor of the farm, than to a pastoral, as is Corins realistic description of rough, tarred hands from treating the ailments of sheepwhich Touchstone refutes. Audrey provides a third social stratum for the marriage-mill and a flip-side to Phebe, the disdainful pastoral beauty who woos Rosalind in blank verse. Audrey also, in her utter failure to understand the linguistic acrobatics of Touchstone, demonstrates the uselessness, not only of his talent for equivocating, but of language itself when lust prevails. The original Audrey was a seventh-century saint from East Anglia. At the fair on St. Audreys Day, one might purchase lace neckerchiefs, over the years progressively more cheaply made and sold. To distinguish this lace from more respectable varieties, it was called St. Audreys lace, which, with a slurred first syllable, becomes t Audreys lace, or tawdry lace. Touchstones lines, Come sweet Audrey [sweee-tawdry?] / We must marry or we must live in bawdry, certainly suggested rustic life, and very likely suggested a tawdry character for Audrey to go with her reeking goats. Shakespeares third adverse addition is Jaques. G. B. Harrison, editor of a Complete Works (New York: Harcourt, 1980), believes Jaques is Shakespeares first experiment in deep character study, which culminates

in Hamlet (776). Conversely, Jaques may have been created to accommodate the latest theatre fashion: comedies of humor were now more popular than pastorals. Jonsons Every Man in His Humour had appeared, with Shakespeare in the cast, just a year before As You Like It. Jaques is a man in his humour, his personality determined by an imbalance of bodily fluids, or humours. Jaques is Monsieur Melancholy, suffering a preponderance of black bile (black = melan, bile = choler: melancholy), cold and dry like earth, the heaviest element and the heaviest humour. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a medical treatise from about 1400: Another substance [engendered] . . . is somewhat stinking and is called melancholy. The consequence of this condition (which seems to resemble constipation) is irascibility, illtemper, anger, sullenness, as well as sadness and depression of spirits, and in pastoral spirit, a tender or pensive sadness. Jacques displays all those moods in his various encounters. Before he appears, the lords in Arden describe his maudlin empathy with the weeping deer. Jaques is not organic to the plot; no action requires him; the play coheres without him. Still, Shakespeare gives the conventional pastoral singing match and shepherds discourse on the transitoriness of life to Jaques in his encounters with Orlando, Touchstone, and Rosalind. Jaques serves the sweet use of adversary to others. He answers Amienss Under the Greenwood Tree with If it do come to pass / That any man turn ass (2.5.51 59). Further, he gets the Seven Ages of Man speech, which Harrison considers magnificent (775-76), but which Anne Barton finds banal . . . generalized and demonstrably untrue in the play (Riverside Shakespeare, 367). Moreover, Jaques, the malcontent, is the reality-check for the optimistic Duke Senior, who in exile--bereft of his daughter, his property, and his poweremotes a classic pastoral speech: Hath not old custom made this life more sweet / Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods / More free from peril than the envious court? / Here feel we not the penalty of Adam, / The seasons difference, as the icy fang . . . / Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say, / This is not flattery: these are counsellors / That feelingly persuade me what I am. / Sweet are the uses of adversity, . . . / And this our life, exempt from public haunt, / Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything (2.1.1 17). Pastoral has no room for melancholy. In the end, Jaques joins ex-Duke Frederick in a monastery, Oliver decides to turn shepherd (with Celia), and

everyone else returns to court. Shakespeare replaced much of the action of Lodges original with encounters and cross-encounters of the various characters who inhabit the Forest of Arden. His touchstones test other characters by reminding us of mis-uses of adversity; they temper the idyllic pastoral by reminding us of goats and gross ignorance; and they temper court life by displaying its equivocating one-upsmanship and rhetorical tyranny, its incessant cynicism and melancholy, and its equally useless painted pomp (2.1.2). Perhaps the greatest use of adversity will be to preserve a measure of pastoral simplicity in the happily ever after. 'As You Like It' as Pastoral/Romantic Comedy

C.L. Barber says that As You Like It is one of the sweetest and sunniest comedies of Shakespeare. Cheralton observes that it is satirical and realistic, other critics have said that it is a pastoral comedy. According to Nicoll, a comedy ends on a note of tinkling of marital bliss. A Shakespearean comedy is different from classical comedy in which society is justified and individual is held up to ridicule so that he may conform to the social standards. Let us take the example of As You Like It. It is at once romantic ad realistic, critical and poetic, rational and imitative allowing individual freedom and justifying society. It is flexible and accomodating. It ends on a note of forgiveness. A note of reconciliation is affected between Oliver and Orlando, the senior Duke and his younger brother, Fredrick in the end. The comedy begins through a fissure in the courtly order but it ends on a note of resolution. The characters assume their normal routine. Orlando is united with Rosalind, Oliver with Celia, Silvius with Phebe and Touchtone with Audrey. After their adolescent love-making, it is expected that these pairs of lovers will lead a mature, balanced and suitable life. Romantic comedy is a comedy that suggests a variety of senses and means. Jonson and other playwrights have written realistic and satirical comedies. These comedies have ugly and harsh realities of life. But a romantic comedy creates imagination. Laughter, in realistic comedy, is directed as the follies of characters designated by another term: comedy of manners. In these comedies we laugh at characters and we find them in ourselves. Here the attitude is more sympathetic than criticism. We understand the characters and not judge them. Shakespeare demands

greater involvement in his characters. The focus is on the individual and individual alone. We can call it a romantic because it concerns with love, youth, happiness and marriage. Music makes us experienced, emotional and imaginative. It has sense of gaiety and spirit of joy. As a romantic comedy, it has loose structure also. In As You Like It Shakespeare takes different aspects of love between lovers and between the friends. Shakespeare has borrowed the clich of love at first sight from Marlowes Hero and Leander (whoever loved who loved not at first sight). Rosalind is banished by her uncle. She comes to the forest of Arden. Here all lovers are united. Before this, when Orlando fights a wrestling match, Rosalind is one of the onlookers. Spontaneously she offers him a gold chain as a token of her appreciation. This is the symbol of love at first sight. In doing so, she hands over her heart to him. In the forest of Arden, their love reaches at the climax. Rosalind points out the symptoms of a traditional lover and defines Orlandos asserting that he is truly in love with her: A sunken eye you have not A pale cheek you have not. When orlando boasts that if he does not meet her, he would die, Rosalind says: From time to time men have died but not of love. Another realistic and satitrical note is struck by Rosalind when she says, Men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Women are May when they are maids, But sky changes when they are wives. Sometimes we find Orlando as a conventional lover. He writes love poems but they lack feeling. It is bad poetry and invites the reader to laugh at the form of rhetoric. He carves Rosalinds name on the trees. All these things reveal Orlando as a conventional lover. Then their marriage takes place in the forest. Rosalind describes how Celia fell in love with Oliver at first sight: No sooner they must but they saw/ no sooner they saw but they fell in love with each other. Shakespeare has presented the love of the pastoral characters. Phebe is a pastoral nymph unwilling to surrender to her lover Silvius who makes obsequies. He complains to Rosalind about her harsh treatment. Phebe on the other hand, falls in love with Rosalind disguised as Genymede.

The love of Touchstone, with Audrey is a kind of satire on love and marriage. Touchstone does not seek to marry a genuine priest, for in that case it will not be easy for him to divorce his wife. Through Touchstone and Audrey, Shakespeare presents some kind of physical love. Touchstone is too much interested in physical relationship. Shakespeare avoids the games of love like seduction or physical love. Even Touchstone is interested but Shakespeare does not develop this love. Love experience in the play is happy and good challenge because no restriction is from the outward. The story ends on a note of rational explanation. It does not injure the expectations of the reader. The atmosphere in the forest is interesting. It is something more than romantic comedy. The play reflects Shakespeares ability, a certain attachment is there. Here romantic means highly sentimental and artificial. It is not only Orlando, who is mocked. The pastoral love and sensual is also mocked here. Rosalind mocks at romantic love. She is very frequently suggesting that infidelity is a challenge that lovers must accept. Her cynicism can be understood when we think that she speaks for Shakespeare. The writer insists on the reality of love. Phebe is in love Genymede. But Shakespeare does not want the settlement as Jonson or other playwrights. In this sense, it is philosophical too; Silvius and Phebe are highly sentimental characters. Touchstone and Audrey present sensual love. They are cynical, physical and sentimental both in words and actions. Marriage has a strange kind of value for Touchstone when he says: Faithless wife is better that no wife. Audrey too does not escape from the criticism of writer. She scores the good villain, Oliver and Celia present sudden love. Celia shows herself to practical, resourceful, even emotional and becomes a rash woman till this happens. Curing of Orlando by Rosalind is healthy and real relationship, which comes to existence and accepts the reality of love. The pair of Orlando and Rosalind has personified the refined love, true love and pure view of love. They also reinforce the idea that is romantic. This pair has stability and maturity of love. High romanticism is when Rosalind feels difficult to part from Orlando even for two hours. Then Silvius uses love conceits and these have been used by dramatist to expose the unnaturalness of pastoral love. To conclude, it may be said that a Shakespearean comedy is a complex irreducible to one level of meaning and is aimed at nature and society, lower classes and upper classes, individual and society; contemplation and action; cynicism and love; satire and spontaneity. In fact, it is as wide and varied as the modern sensibility. It does not give a picture of untainted joy, which verges on the border of melancholy and resignation. It is tolerant,

human, liberal and is definite experience contributing to the art of living boarding on common sense and outlook. AS YOU LIKE IT as a Pastoral Comedy Shakespeares 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 pocts 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 Virgils 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 for lovers, scholar poets and aristocrats in exile. Their primary concern is not the real rustics, even introduced, but the courtiers who led a shepherdlike existence. This article makes an attempt to show the note of criticism of the pastoral life in Shakespeares As You Like It . N.P. The conflict between the court and the country runs throughout the play. The pastoral poet argues in favour of rural life as against the court. At the same time he uses the pastoral space as a device for the restoration of the norm, i.e. life as lived in the courts. As You Like It is structured on this kind of exile-and-return pattern. (Singh 2000:113). The main action of the play takes place in Arden which is set off against the court of Duke Frederick.

Duke Senior banished by his brother enters the forest of Arden and begins to admire it. Similarly Orlando, the male protagonist of the play also runs away from the city and begins his pastoral romance in Arden. But the exiled aristocrats do not shed their courtly manners and behaviour. Loyalties are Strengthened. Orlando is recognized by the Duke (senior) as the son of one of his favorite courtiers. An alternative court begins to function in the midst of Arden. So the Usurper Frederick fears the gathering of .men of great worth. and decides to invade the forest. But he also comes under the pastoral influence and is convinced to end his illegitimate rule. Life in Arden is free from the .painted pomp. and flattery of the court. It is simple and natural hard but sweet. Duke Senior goes to Arden to seek peace,freedom, and serenity in the midst of natural sights and sounds. Here he finds : . . . . Tongues in trees, books in running brooks sermons in stones and good in everything.. (II,i.16-17) In fact, everyone comes to Arden as if it is a green refuge from all other trouble and complications of court life .Rosalind and Celia come to it, and Touchstone follows them. To them, life at the court was one of slavery, of inhibitions. The forest of Arden seems to them a symbol of liberty. So Celia says : .Now go we in content To liberty and not to banishment. (I, iii. 132-133) All the major characters are associated with woodland life. The heroine buys the estate of shepherd and takes to the life of a shepherd in the major part of the play. It is as a disguised shepherd that Rosalind appears in her best wit and intelligence and triumphs over all in the forest. In Silvius and Phebe, Shakespeare introduces some real shepherds and shepherdesses, and this enhances the pastoral charm of the play. However, the sylvan life is faithfully represented by the kind,old shepherd, Corin who claims :

Sir I am a true labourer. I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no mans happiness . . . . (III, ii. 69-70) The spirit of the true pastoral-carefree abandonment and gaiety -animates all the major characters, in spite of their apparent adversity. Happiness comes to all who come here. The forest of Arden embodies the freedom of spirit and it allows people to be themselves to make choices that determine their roles , functions, and relations with each other rather than having these forced on them.(Chandra 2000:7) Thus Rosalind and Orlando get each other. Chance stumbles Oliver into a lucky marriage and he gains the goodwill of his brother. The Duke is restored to his original possession. This is the pastoral world of the play, which transforms discord into harmony and morally corrupt human beings into paragons of human conduct. There is great deal of truth in this imaginary resolution of socialfamilial conflict. But a close analysis of the play will demonstrate an uneasiness or dissatisfaction with the pastoral on the part of the dramatist. In fact, As you like it is not merely a pastoral romance. It is also an ironical commentary on pastoral life -a commentary that works itself out through Rosalinds humour, the cynicism of Jaques, the pungent humour of Touchstone, and the sentimental exaggeration of the Silvius -Phebe episode. Rosalind has to struggle against the pastoral lovers-silvius and Phebe. Silivius is the victim of love-sickness. He is blind to all the defects of Phebe in the goodness of devotion. But Phebe is cold to him and turns her attention to Rosalind disguised as Ganymede. Rosalind tells her bluntly, I pray you do not fall in love with me . . . Besides, I like you not (III,v,69-71) Thus the dramatist makes a dig at these lovers, for sentimentalism is not laudable. Touchstone likes to have a fling at these lovers. But he goes a step further. He woos the rustic Audrey and , with folly, he frightens away his rival William. His marriage is a satire on the pastoral marriage because

while others fall in love with beauty , he with ugliness. We see in Romeo and Juliet, even the illiterate men try to .ape. the urban civilized life Touchstone delivers a lecture on the theme of pastoral life which he dislikes. Finding himself in Arden he feels: Ay, now am I in Arden, the more fool I. when I was at home I was in a better place , but travelers must be content (II,iv,13-15) Touchestone reminds that there are such things as domestic comfort in the court, later in Act III, scene ii, he criticizes the .shepherds life.. The pastoral convention allows the exiled aristocrats to criticize the court for its violence and corruption. This criticism is based on the illusion that the banished lords are shepherds this illusion in As You Like It breaks down when we realize that the so-called shepherds are courtiers of the court they pretend to criticized. Jaques points out that the natural life in Arden is as cruel and unnatural as the other. It is because here also men usurp the forest from the deer and kill them in their .native dwelling place. when deer, like men, were in distressed, they are abandoned by their friends. To Amiens suggestion of giving up ambition, Jaques replies that to leave wealth and ease is the act of an as or a fool. Many of us have moods in which we may agree with him , and it is a mark of Shakespeares mature comedy that he permits this criticism of his ideal world in the very centre of it. The triumphant procession after the killing of deer, a symbolic ritual of the foresters prowess, is accompanied by a mocking song, while the slayer of the deer is given its horns to wear as a somewhat ambiguous trophy. Such is the criticism of the pastoral life in As You Like It. The observation of Anshuman sigh is worth quoting here; .As Jaques points out in the play, the exiled lords dont stop being violent in the pastoral. They merely transfer their violent ways of living to the country side, healing and killing the .native burghars. of Arden. Though ostensibly the victims clearly refer to the human beings living in the forest. The Duke thus begins to rule and tyrannize the country and becomes, like his brother , a usurper who appropriate the country for his own interests.(Singh in Chandra 2000 :17) Analyzing the theme of Orlandos wooing of the disguised Rosalind , J.C Maxwell observes .This theme not only provides continuity, it is also the occasion for the most subtle version of the ironic treatment of pastoral

convention with particular reference to love. 1991: 302( Maxwell in Ford Into the heart of love making , Shakespeare has introduced, his most balanced piece of irony which is at once sympathetic and detached: ORLANDO : Then in mine own person I die. ROSALIND : No, faith , die by attorney, the poor world is almost six thousand years old, and all this time there was not any man died in his own person, videlicet, in a love cause But these are all lies : men have died from time to time , and worms have eaten them , but not for love. (iv , I, 74-88) Rosalind is aware of the sentimental excess to which lovers are exposed. It is in this strain that she is making deliberately fun of those classical lovers like Leander and Troilus. In her attempt to test her lovers depth of passion for her, she employs such parodies and ironic views of lovers. Shakespeare has achieved a rare indictment on the pastoral and on the limitation of the pastoral convention of the day. In Corin Shakespeare provides us which a touchstone to test the pastoral. Corins attitude to love is that of sane man. He has been in love and can still guess what it is like, but now he has forgotten all the details. How little he belongs to Arcadia may be discovered from Sidney whose shepherd went on piping as though he should never be old. As You like It: Pastoral Comedy The theme of pastoral comedy is love in all its guises in a rustic setting, the genuine love embodied by Rosalind contrasted with the sentimentalized affectations of Orlando, and the improbable happenings that set the urban courtiers wandering to find exile, solace or freedom in a woodland setting are no more unrealistic than the string of chance encounters in the forest, provoking witty banter, which require no subtleties of plotting and character development. The main action of the first act is no more than a wrestling match, and the action throughout is often interrupted by a song. At the end, Hymen himself arrives to bless the wedding festivities.

William Shakespeares play As You Like It clearly falls into the Pastoral Romance genre; but Shakespeare does not merely use the genre, he develops it. Shakespeare also used the Pastoral genre in As You Like It to cast a critical eye on social practices that produce injustice and unhappiness, and to make fun of anti-social, foolish and self-destructive behaviour, most obviously through the theme of love, culminating in a rejection of the notion of the traditional Petrarchan lovers. Sarah Clough. "As You Like It: Pastoral Comedy, The Roots and History of Pastoral Romance". Sheffield Theatres The stock characters in conventional situations were familiar material for Shakespeare and his audience; it is the light repartee and the breadth of the subjects that provide texts for wit that put a fresh stamp on the proceedings. At the centre the optimism of Rosalind is contrasted with the misogynistic melancholy of Jaques. Shakespeare would take up some of the themes more seriously later: the usurper Duke and the Duke in exile provide themes for Measure for Measure and The Tempest. A play which turns upon chance encounters in the forest and several entangled love affairs, all in a serene pastoral setting has been found, by many directors, to be especially effective staged outdoors in a park or similar site.