SOURCE: “Wrestling as Play and Game in As You Like It,” in Studies in English Literature, Vol. 33, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 265-87.

In the following essay, Marshall explores the way in which wrestling is used as a metaphor for socially constructed emotion.

As You Like It, long considered among the happiest and most refined of Shakespearean comedies, has lately been seen as shadowed by various social tensions. Critics have traced the difficulties of “fraternal enmity” and hostilities over primogeniture,¹ the bitter implications of a changing agricultural economy,² and the ambiguous resistances that were enacted against an oppressive sex and gender system.³ The shift from an idealizing critical tendency to a focus on dark implications enacts the general movement of responses to Shakespeare's comedies, which have appeared far more serious under the gazes of feminism and new historicism than an earlier aesthetic would have dreamed. Yet because what was traditionally...