Analysis of As You Like It, by William Shakespeare
In the play As You Like It, by William Shakespeare, Oliver and Orlando illustrate the Christian concepts of brother turning against brother and forgiveness. Shakespeare creates these characters as binary opposites, Orlando of the good and selfless variety, and Oliver as the jealous fiend who wishes death upon his younger brother.
This binary opposition of brothers sinning against each other relates to many stories in the Christian faith, such as Cain and Abel and Esau and Jacob, and is a signifier that the apocalypse has arrived. In As You Like It, Orlando is the favored brother, much like Abel, and Oliver is jealous of his brother’s position, much like Cain. Oliver wants Orlando dead at the beginning of the play, saying, “I hope I shall see an end of him, for my soul—yet I know not why—hates nothing more than he” (I.II.17). This is the same as God’s favoring of Abel for no specific reason, it’s just the way it is.
Another Christian concept that emerges through Orlando and Oliver is forgiveness. After Oliver recognizes his sins when Orlando saves him from a lioness, Orlando is quick to forgive him. In one passage of the bible, Peter asks Jesus how many times he should forgive his brother for sinning against him, asking up to seven times. Jesus replies that he should forgive him not seven, but seventy-seven times, and if you don’t forgive your brother with all your heart, you will be tortured until you do so. In As You Like It, Touchstone recounts a quarrel he had to Jaques and Duke Senior, and in the process going through the seven degrees of a lie. Touchstone says about the quarrel, “I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel…one of them thought but of an “if” as: “If you said so, then I said so.” And they shook hands and swore brothers. Your “if” is the only peacemaker: much virtue in “if”” (V.iv.195). Duke Senior and Jaques both think Touchstone a fool, illustrating Orlando’s goodness for forgiving Oliver for his sins.
Death Be Not Proud: Death Does Not Exist
John Donne’s sonnet “Death Be Not Proud” takes the common perception of death as a “mighty and dreadful” occurrence and flips it upside down. Donne says that death cannot be proud because death does not exist. The truth is that people live forever or eternally after “one short sleep.” Donne uses a person as the vehicle for death, which is the tenor, in an extended metaphor that lasts throughout the poem in order to unify the idea that death is altogether powerless.
“Death Be Not Proud” describes death as a swindler who uses tricks to deceive people and put them to rest. Donne conveys this by writing, “And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell / And poppy, or charms can make us sleep as well.” Death is a slave to the custom of inducing sleep or killing people, when natural medicine or spells actually outdo death in regards to sleeping. Death is also compared similarly to sleep throughout Donne’s poem. Donne writes in the fifth line, “From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures,” saying that rest and sleep are merely copying death. A paradox comes toward the end when Donne says, “One short sleep past, we wake eternally.” This line contradicts normal perceptions of death, which is depicted by many as a silent sleep, not an eternal awakening of the soul as this suggests.
Death is an authority that cannot be proud because it exists only as a lesser being of sleep and rest, thus it doesn’t exist at all. Donne’s use of personification and continuous metaphors united “Death Be Not Proud” under the theme that death is powerless to stop the soul from existing forever, and therefore “death, thou shalt die.”
A Basic Understanding of Structuralism and Deconstruction
Structuralism is an approach to literary material by examining the underlying structure in the body of text. It examines the individual text as a system of meaning. The goal of Structuralism is to see how everything in a given text fits or pieces together, and in the process find the structure of the work. Structuralism brings somewhat of a scientific approach to criticism, as it seeks to find the underlying similar aims in a given text, as well as the differences. The Structuralism theory also attempts to expose the system of meaning in the text that enables a response to occur. Structuralism has commonalities to the theory of New Criticism, but structuralists are interested in looking at an individual text as an example of a system of meaning, not as an artistic entity. The meaning of a text is made in Structuralism, it is not found.
Deconstruction exposes the gaps in the system, therefore showing how the system, or structure, falls apart. It basically reverses the ideas of Structuralism and New Criticism. Deconstruction assumes that gaps in texts are ever present by undoing them and showing the never-ending contradictions that are laced throughout a particular work. Deconstruction is an incomplete theory by nature, because there is an infinite amount of explanations for any text. When explaining something, a multitude of explanations can replace the first one, and another one can replace that, and so on and so forth. Deconstruction turns the text backwards upon itself, proliferating the meaning of the text. Deconstruction is very ironic and at times absurd, whereas Structuralism is very focused, organized, and structured.
