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Example research essay topic: Men And Women Nature Of Life - 2,068 words

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... de of their immediate dramatic context has the unfortunate tendency to immortalize a passage as some special insight into the nature of life when it is, in fact, quite the reverse. The speech of Jaques is, along with the advice of the Polonius to his son, the most famous example of this problem. Far from being a particularly mature earned insight into anything important, Jaques's speech is an indication of his limited and unwelcome sense of the unsatisfactory nature of life.

The entrance of Orlando and Adam underscores this point. ] Oscar Wilde, in one of his most famous apophthegms, once defined a cynic as one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. That definition applies very well to Jaques, and it helps us at once understand why Rosalind and Orlando will have nothing to do with him. Rosalind understands that love comes at a price. Time will change things, and a commitment in love brings with it the risk of infidelity (and there is much talk of that in the play). But she will not therefore deny its value or refuse to take the risk.

On the contrary, she determines to extract the full value from her excited feelings for Orlando, not by freezing those feelings in some sour poetical reflections but by experiencing them moment by moment, no matter what the future may bring. Orlando also is too full of the spirit of life to find anything in Jaques's gentle but persistent pessimism at all worth bothering about. I don't mean to over-emphasize the kill-joy quality of Jaques. He is generally harmless enough, particularly in this play where everyone recognizes him for what he is and where he has no particular interest in pulling others down to his level against their will. If they don't want to sit down with him and rail against the first born of Egypt, he's content to move away on his own. But it's significant that he's not a fully participating member of the final celebrations and that he is going to remain in the forest.

He has learned nothing and, indeed, is incapable of learning anything, simply because he is not open to experience (in terms of the earlier analysis I offered of Richard II and Hamlet, Jaques is a "chatterer"). He's made up his mind what life is all about, and he is seeking confirmation of a pre-set attitude. Traverse's summary comment on Jaques hits the mark precisely: ... Jacques' motive is, in the last analysis "observation, " the gratifying of a self regarding curiosity based on a kind of personal impotence, an inability to participate fully and naturally in the processes of life; and, since his attitude is one which implies throughout an incapacity for genuine giving, for the positive acceptance of an order, at once natural and distinctively human, beyond the isolated self -- the acceptance by which, in love or otherwise, the self is at last justified -- he remains a mere marginal presence in the process by which that order is finally... consummated. (An Approach to Shakespeare, Vol. 1, p. 328) The Question of Gender One of the most intriguing aspects of the treatment of love in As You Like It concerns the issue of gender.

And this issue, for obvious reasons, has generated a special interest in recent times. The principal reason for such a thematic concern in the play is the cross dressing and role playing. The central love interest between Rosalind and Orlando calls into question the conventional wisdom about men's and women's gender roles and challenges our preconceptions about these roles in courtship, erotic love, and beyond. At the heart of this courtship is a very complex ambiguity which it is difficult fully to appreciate without a production to refer to.

But here we have a man (the actor) playing a woman (Rosalind), who has dressed herself up as a man (Ganymede), and who is pretending to be a woman (Rosalind) in the courtship game with Orlando. Even if, in modern times, Rosalind is not played by a young male actor, the theatrical irony is complex enough. The most obvious issue raised by the cross dressing is the relationship between gender roles and clothes (or outer appearance). For Rosalind passes herself off easily enough as a man and, in the process, acquires a certain freedom to move around, give advice, and associate as an equal among other men (this freedom gives her the power to initiate the courtship). Her disguise is, in that sense, much more significant than Celia's, for Celia remains female in her role as Alien and is thus largely passive (her pseudonym meaning "Stranger" or "outsider" is an interesting one).

The fact that Celia is largely passive in the Forest of Ardenne (especially in contrast to Rosalind) and has to wait for life to deliver a man to her rather than seeking one out, as Rosalind does, is an interesting and important difference between the two friends. These points raise some interesting issues. If becoming accepted as a man and getting the freedom to act that comes with that acceptance is simply a matter of presenting oneself as a man, then what do we say about all the enshrined natural differences we claim as the basis for our different treatment of men and women? Given that Rosalind is clearly the most intelligent, active, and interesting character in the play and that these qualities would not be likely to manifest themselves so fully if she were not passing herself off as a man, the play raises some interesting questions about just what we mean by any insistence on gender differences as more than mere conventions.

But the issue is much more complicated than that. For Rosalind's assumed name, Ganymede, is a very deliberate reference to the young male lover Zeus carried up to Olympus, and it points us to what might be a very strong element in the courtship game between Orlando and Rosalind and in the feelings Phoebe has for Rosalind, namely homoerotic desire. There's little in the play to suggest this explicitly, but a production which showed, say, that Orlando's feelings were becoming involved with Ganymede, so that the pretend courtship has a strongly erotic undercurrent, would not be violating the text. Perhaps it's hard to distinguish totally between Orlando's feelings for Rosalind and Orlando's feelings for Ganymede. And that challenges all sorts of conventional expectations about erotic love, in order to "probe the surprisingly complex issue of what is natural in matters of love and sexual desire" (Jean Howard, Introduction to As You Like It in The Norton Shakespeare). That's why the play wedding ceremony that Rosalind and Orlando go through with Celia playing role of officiating minister (in 4. 1) is, for all the acting going on, quite powerfully charged.

Celia, who loves Rosalind, supervises the wedding of the two people presenting themselves as men, and under the obvious fun of the make believe there's a powerful sense of the sexual attraction the two have for each other. It's worth asking at this point just how much Orlando might know or suspect or what feelings are keeping him in this game. There seems little doubt that underneath his play acting he is experiencing a strong bond with Rosalind/Ganymede, something which emerges as even more ironic if we sense (from the style of the production) that part of him either recognizes Rosalind or is responding to the same characteristics in Ganymede that make him so in love with Rosalind. The BBC production is worth attending to for its presentation of this complex moment in the play. This point is underscored by the very strong instant desire that Phoebe finds for Rosalind/Ganymede, which seems at first not unlike the feelings Orlando has for Rosalind.

Phoebe, of course, abandons her love as soon as she learns that Rosalind is a woman, but the play confronts us with the question about the validity of those feelings. If a set of men's clothes is the only thing distinguishing conventional sexual arrangements from alternatives, we are invited (at least) to wonder somewhat about the extent to which conventional arrangements do not exhaust the erotic possibilities. The play, of course, in its closing scene celebrates conventional heterosexual marriages. But by that time it has offered us, at least by powerful suggestions, some erotic alternatives, without condemning such possibilities as inherently unnatural. And, depending upon how some of these key scenes are played, a production of As You Like It can evoke in the audience some very interesting and (perhaps) ambivalent feelings about mature sexuality. This point seems to be emphasized in the epilogue spoken by the newly married Rosalind, where the boy actor playing the role calls attention to the fact that he is not a woman, as if to remind us (maybe) that the happy union of Orlando and Rosalind in which we take such delight has explored other possibilities than heterosexuality.

This point can be underscored strongly if Orlando is present with Rosalind during this epilogue (say, holding her in his arms) and the actor playing Rosalind is removing his make up (e. g. , wig). And, of course, if the actor playing Rosalind has made some erotic connections with the audience, then his final revelation in the Epilogue will force the audience member to confront some of his own feelings about gender attachments. As I say, it's rare to see Rosalind nowadays played by a boy, although there have been all-male productions in modern times.

And so the epilogue is often omitted or edited. As it stands, the boy actor's offer to kiss the desirable grown men in the audience ("If I were a woman") gives the last words of the play an ironic and erotic resonance that challenges gently the heterosexual weddings we have just celebrated. A Comment on Touchstone As You Like It features, like so many of Shakespeare's plays, a professional clown, Touchstone, and it's worth paying some attention to his role for what it contributes towards establishing and maintaining the upbeat comic spirit of the play. For the jester is the constant commentator on what is going on. His humour, pointed or otherwise, thus inevitably contributes to the audience's awareness of what is happening, and the way in which other characters treat him is often a key indicator of their sensibilities.

Touchstone is one of the gentlest and happiest clowns in all of Shakespeare. He comments on the action, makes jokes at other people's expense, and offers ironic insights about their situation. But throughout As You Like It, such traditional roles of the fool are offered and taken with a generosity of spirit so that his remarks never shake the firm comic energies of the play. When he ridicules Orlando's verses, Rosalind laughs along with him. When he points out to Corin (in 3. 2) that the shepherd must be damned for never having lived at court, Corin takes it as good natured jesting (which it is). When Touchstone takes Audrey away from her rural swain, William, there are apparently no hard feelings (although much here depends on the staging).

In this play, the professional jester participates in and contributes to a style of social interaction which is unqualified by any more sober and serious reflections. This makes Touchstone very different from the bitter fool of King Lear or from the most complex fool of all, the sad Feste of Twelfth Night, both of whom offer comments that cast either a shrewd, melancholy, or bitter irony on the proceedings. Touchstone himself becomes the target of much humour by his immediate attraction to Audrey, the "foul" country lass. There is something richly comic here, seeing the staunch apologist for the sophisticated life of the court fall so quickly to his animal lust. But the satire here is very good humoured. Touchstone himself acknowledges the frailty of his vows and does not attempt to deceive anyone about his intentions.

He knows he is serving his lusts and that that is no good basis for a lasting and significant marriage. But the play builds up no severe indictment against what he is doing, and Audrey herself makes no protest. So this most unlikely of unions becomes part of the celebration of love at the end of the play, an expression of the comic variety of the experience, rather than offering any ironic commentary.


Free research essays on topics related to: men and women, young male, gender roles, nature of life, cross dressing

Research essay sample on Men And Women Nature Of Life

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