SOURCE: Bracher, Mark. “Contrary Notions of Identity in As You Like It.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 24, no. 2 (spring 1984): 225-40.

In the following essay, Bracher assesses the thematic structure of As You Like It in terms of two opposing conceptions of identity—one exclusive and expressed via satire, the other inclusive and portrayed through romance and love.

In her chapter on comedy in Feeling and Form, Susanne Langer observes that comedy “sets up in the audience a sense of general exhilaration, because it presents the very image of ‘livingness.’”¹ This “immediate sense of life” which is “the essence of comedy”² derives from the essential comic action, which, “whatever the story may be, … takes the form of a temporary triumph over the surrounding world.”³ The experience of comedy is thus an experience “of human vitality holding its own in the world,”⁴ an experience of “organic unity, growth, and self-preservation...