Trivia / As You Like It

• Accent Depundent:
  And so from hour to hour, we ripe, and ripe,
  And then from hour to hour, we rot, and rot,
  And thereby hangs a tale.
  • The lines make a lot more sense if you know that in Shakespearean English, they would sound something like this:
  And so from whore to whore, we rape, and rape,
  And then from whore to whore, we rut, and rot,
  And thereby hangs a tale/tail (meaning the penis).
• Acting for Two: As the two Dukes never appear on stage together, they are often played by the same actor.
• Cast the Expert: Amiens does all the singing, but has no dialog and no interaction with the other characters, indicating from the role was originally meant for a professional singer, rather than an actor. In some productions, the role is cut entirely, with no detriment to the plot.
• Descended Creator: Tradition dating back to the seventeenth century holds that Shakespeare played the role of Adam. (He pretty much always appeared in his own plays, as he seems to have started his theatrical career as an actor and is listed among the players in the First Folio, but the specific roles he played in each of them are usually not known).
• Trolling Creator: 1599, the year As You Like It was written and first performed, also saw the publication of a book called The Passionate Pilgrim which claimed to be a collection of Shakespeare's love sonnets. In reality, it consisted of two Shakespeare sonnets, three of the Stylistic Suck sonnets from Love's Labour's Lost, and several other poems which modern scholars believe were not by Shakespeare at all. Shakespeare may have found it extremely annoying that poems he wrote specifically to characterize a fictional speaker as a bad poet were being published as his actual, unironic work. As evidence, when Orlando reads another Stylistic Suck sonnet in As You Like It, the scene begins in the middle of his recitation. Cutting off the first quatrain would make it impossible to publish his purposely bad poetry as work by Shakespeare doing his best.

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