LOVE-STRUCK SHEPHERDS.

LOVE-STRUCK SHEPHERDS. AS YOU LIKE IT has always seemed to me somewhat abstract, and Marjorie Garber gives the explanation. The play makes fun of the conventions of pastoral poetry with sighing shepherds and shepherdesses who write poetry. I don’t know enough about pastoral poetry to appreciate this. Garber makes the analogy that the conventions of the Western movie are as familiar to us as pastoral was to Elizabethans. It occurs to me another analogy is that what Shakespeare does with pastoral is something like what Stephen Sondheim does with nursery tales in INTO THE WOODS.