"Being the thing I am": Converted Persons in As You Like It

• In Event: Shakespearean Persons

Abstract

As You Like It is skeptical of many things: country living, romantic love, primogeniture, combat sports, autocracy, pancakes, international travel. Odd then, that it voices no skepticism for the radical moral and psychological transformation of religious conversion, which prominently saves the play’s two villains from their sordid selves. Duke Frederick is converted, on the verge of wiping out the cast, to a solitary monastic life; Oliver, Orlando’s fratricidal brother, is converted into a new man, instantly suitable for marriage to Rosalind’s cousin Celia. How is it that a play that mobilizes so much social and political skepticism, that so much embodies English pastoral’s stern late sixteenth-century satirical bent, is so uncritically accommodating of religious conversion, of the figure of the “convertite”? This paper explores this question in the context of the poetics of early modern conversion in Shakespeare and elsewhere.

Author

• Paul J. Hecht, Purdue University North Central