So, as this is the first of a new batch of lectures, it's worth me going over again how these lectures work.

They're each on a single play, and what I try and do is to collect some of the critical and kind of methodological issues about the play

by focusing on a single question, sometimes quite a silly or a naive question about the play.

And what I'm trying to do really is not to give you a reading of these individual plays,

but to give you a range of ways of thinking about them

that you might be able to follow up in your own work.

What I'm really trying to do is to stimulate you going off in one of the directions

that I might just touch on rather than to work,

to grind through a whole thing that you would write down and then and then try and reproduce.

So there's not a huge amount of factual content, I don't think, in the lectures, although I'll start always with a

kind of summary of the plot so that if you don't know the play already, you can at least try and follow what it is I'm talking about.

So the first play I'm going to talk about is

as you like it. As You Like, it's probably written and performed in early 1600 and I'm

going to come back to the historical context of the play in a minute. And as you know, it's first

published in the posthumous collected edition of Shakespeare's plays in 1623.

And the question I want to ask about this play is, what happens in As You Like It? What happens

in As You Like It? So I'll start by summarising As You Like It, which may look as if it's going to

give us the answer to that question immediately. So in as you like it, the Duke Frederick has exiled his older brother, Duke

Senior, but kept his daughter, Rosalind, his, that's Duke Senior's daughter, Rosalind, at court,

to be a companion to his own daughter, Celia. Meanwhile, Orlando, who is being persecuted by his older brother, Oliver, after the death of

their father, comes to court set up by Oliver in a wrestling match which, surprisingly, he wins,

and he also earns Rosalind's love in the process. Rosalind is banished from court by her uncle,

...