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A review by lilrusski
As You Like It by William Shakespeare
4.0
[4,5/5* || full review @grandepoque]
another sullen day in the city requires a pastoral escape from the decrepit self into the queer haven of shakespeare’s semi-fictional woodland, where gender is stripped to its frivolous seams and romance reimagines the lovers’ role beyond the performance of patriarchy. all these big words intend to veil the slowness of my reading pace, substantially marred by the size of charotte brontë’s behemoth magnum opus, which i’ve been stuck on since october.
the formula in shakespeare remains the same: live fast, love hard, die furiously (though the latter remains a metaphorical death of the social performer). in a mere 90 pages, shakespeare proffers fratricide (a popular favourite), generational dissection of identification processes per social capita, roots for virginia woolf’s equally mesmerising ‘orlando’, a gene kelly-esque whirlwind number exposing the stratifications of performance in theatre and gender, and many more gripping concepts i can merely phrase in loose formulae, at the risk of falling into patterned reviews.
as though it weren’t obvious enough, i feast in the vivisection of linguistic stratifications and identity processes. my bard is barthes, though the great bard sets the stepping stones for the penultimate murder (phenomenalised death) of the author.
such musings occur to me in the aftermath of unscrewing another nameless bottle of cheap (and physically taxing) wine perched atop a wobbly chair in a skyscraper’s coveted greenhouse. believe not my ravings, indulge in the phantasmagoric fancies of midsummer night’s dream’s companion piece.
another sullen day in the city requires a pastoral escape from the decrepit self into the queer haven of shakespeare’s semi-fictional woodland, where gender is stripped to its frivolous seams and romance reimagines the lovers’ role beyond the performance of patriarchy. all these big words intend to veil the slowness of my reading pace, substantially marred by the size of charotte brontë’s behemoth magnum opus, which i’ve been stuck on since october.
the formula in shakespeare remains the same: live fast, love hard, die furiously (though the latter remains a metaphorical death of the social performer). in a mere 90 pages, shakespeare proffers fratricide (a popular favourite), generational dissection of identification processes per social capita, roots for virginia woolf’s equally mesmerising ‘orlando’, a gene kelly-esque whirlwind number exposing the stratifications of performance in theatre and gender, and many more gripping concepts i can merely phrase in loose formulae, at the risk of falling into patterned reviews.
as though it weren’t obvious enough, i feast in the vivisection of linguistic stratifications and identity processes. my bard is barthes, though the great bard sets the stepping stones for the penultimate murder (phenomenalised death) of the author.
such musings occur to me in the aftermath of unscrewing another nameless bottle of cheap (and physically taxing) wine perched atop a wobbly chair in a skyscraper’s coveted greenhouse. believe not my ravings, indulge in the phantasmagoric fancies of midsummer night’s dream’s companion piece.