As You Like It: Oberon Modern Plays

Venus and Adonis is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare published in 1593. It is probably Shakespeare's first publication.The poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of Love of her unrequited love and of her attempted seduction of Adonis, an extremely handsome young man, who would rather go hunting. The poem is pastoral, and at times erotic, comic, and tragic. It contains discourses on the nature of love, and observations of nature.It is written in stanzas of six lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ABABCC although this verse form was known before Shakespeare's use, it is now commonly known as the Venus and Adonis stanza, after this poem. This form was also used by Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge. The poem consists of 199 stanzas or 1,194 lines.It was published originally as a quarto pamphlet and published with great care. It was probably printed using Shakespeare's fair copy. The printer was Richard Field, who, like Shakespeare, was from Stratford. Venus and Adonis appeared in print before any of Shakespeare's plays were published, but not before some of his plays had been acted on stage. It has certain qualities in common with A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Love's Labour's Lost. It was written when the London theatres were closed for a time due to the plague.The poem begins with a brief dedication to Shakespeare's patron, Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, in which the poet describes the poem as "the first heir of my invention".The poem is inspired by and based on stories found in the Metamorphoses, a narrative poem by the Latin poet, Ovid (43 BC - AD 17/18). Ovid's much briefer version of the tale occurs in book ten of his Metamorphoses. It differs greatly from Shakespeare's version. Ovid's Venus goes hunting with Adonis to please him, but otherwise is uninterested in the out-of-doors. She wears "tucked up" robes, worries about her complexion, and particularly hates dangerous wild animals. Shakespeare's Venus is a bit like a wild animal herself: she apparently goes naked, and is not interested in hunting, but only in making love to Adonis, offering her body to him in graphically explicit terms. In the end, she insists that the boar's killing of Adonis happened accidentally as the animal, impressed by the young hunter's beauty, gored him while trying to kiss him.

'An Arden editor must present an overview of the play's criticism [and] must also take into account the play's ongoing dissemination through performance on stage and screen. Despite these arduous demands, Dusinberre's edition, with its editorial apparatus, its substantial introduction (142 pages), its notes, and its various appendices, fulfills the above requirements admirably...Dusinberre addresses a theatre history that bears witness to the impact that various social movements, especially feminism and gay/lesbian (and now queer) activism, have had on the performance of one of Shakespeare's most gender-bending plays...It inscribes the feminist, queer, and historicist criticism of the past thirty years into the historical memory of Shakespeare studies.'
'If As you Like It is rich in human feeing, a highly conceptualised Tempest seems to exist in the threshold between walking and dreaming.'
'This is one of Shakespeare's most sophisticated comedies, an ironic fairy tale of love and sex, sincerity and pretension, betrayal and loyalty.'

Leading actor Simon Russell Beale is one of three distinguished Series Editors who have developed the series

Introduction; Photo gallery; List of characters; Act 1; Act 2; Act 3; Act 4; Act 5; Perspectives and themes; Contexts and sources; Characters; The language of As You Like It; As You Like It in performance; Writing about Shakespeare; Writing about As You Like It; Timeline; Acknowledgements.