Juliet Dusinberre on Shakespeare the Reviser

I had an amiable disagreement with Mrs. Buce once over the place of low comedy in Shakespeare’s Richard II. I said it was like snakes in Iceland: no low comedy in Richard II. BLA-A-A-P WRONG. There is low comedy in Richard II, but it is in verse. And verse doesn’t work in low company. You can almost picture Shakespeare in the audience watching his own verse low comedy and saying BLA-A-A-P WRONG. Next time, prose.

Indeed, one of the most attractive aspects of Shakespeare’s shadowy persona is his capacity to learn from himself. He often does the same thing over again, but it is same-only-different, and often better. In her splendid new introduction to As You Like It (in the Arden Shakespeare Third Series) Juliet Dusinberre elaborates on the point:

As You Like It is perfectly poised between the comedies of the 1590s and the romances of Shakespeare’s post-tragic period: Pericles (1607-8), Cymbeline (1609-10), The Two Winter’s Tale (1610-11), The Tempest (1611), The Two Noble Kinsmen (1612-13) and Henry VIII (1612-13). Valentine’s joining of the outlaws in the forest in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (probably Shakespeare’s first comedy and perhaps his first play) offers a preview of Duke Senior and his exiled courtiers in the Forest of Arden. The relation of Julia and Sylvia in the same play (though in some ways nearer ot Viola and Olivia in Twelfth Night than to Rosalind and Celia) nevertheless marks out—in Julia’s disguise as a page—the ground of Shakespeare’s virtuoso capacity to convert the convention of boy actors playing women’s parts from a restriction to a resource. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-6), despite the different atmosphere of the wood outside Athens in which the lovers, fairies and eventually Theseus and Hyppolyta all meet, the dramatist creates, as later in As You Like It, a ‘green world’ away from court. The Merchant of Venice (1596-7) and Much Ado About Nothing (1598-9) feature in Portia and Beatrice powerful women who, like Rosalind, suggest parallels with Elizabeth I, before whose court—as well as it the public theatre—most of the comedies would have been performed. Much Ado develops in the sparring of Beatrice and Benedick a flexible witty prose, perfected in As You Like It in the interchanges between Rosalind and Celia, Rosalind (as Ganymede) and Orlando, and between Touchstone and everyone else.

—Juliet Dusinberre,
Introduction to William Shakespeare, As You Like It 2-3
The Arden Shakespeare (2005)