As You Like It
William Shakespeare
Background
The most influential writer in all of
English literature, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 to a successful
middle-class glover in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. Shakespeare attended grammar
school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582 he married an
older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590, he
left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and playwright.
Public and critical acclaim quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became
the most popular playwright in England and part-owner of the Globe Theater.
His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) and James I
(ruled 1603–1625), and he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James
granted Shakespeare’s company the greatest possible compliment by bestowing
upon its members the title of King’s Men. Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare
retired to Stratford and died in 1616 at the age of
fifty-two. At the time of Shakespeare’s death, literary luminaries such as Ben
Jonson hailed his works as timeless.
Shakespeare’s works were collected
and printed in various -editions in the century following his death, and by the
early eighteenth century, his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in
English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his
works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life, but the dearth of
biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s personal
history shrouded in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact and from
Shakespeare’s modest education that Shakespeare’s plays were actually written
by someone else—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular
candidates—but the support for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and
the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.
In the absence of credible evidence
to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the thirty-seven
plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is
immense. A number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the
category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the
course of Western literature and culture ever after.
As You Like It was most likely written around
1598–1600, during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign. The play belongs to the
literary tradition known as pastoral: which has its roots in the
literature of ancient Greece, came into its own in Roman antiquity with
Virgil’s Eclogues, and continued as a vital literary mode through
Shakespeare’s time and long after. Typically, a pastoral story involves exiles
from urban or court life who flee to the refuge of the countryside, where they
often disguise themselves as shepherds in order to converse with other
shepherds on a range of established topics, from the relative merits of life at
court versus life in the country to the relationship between nature and art.
The most fundamental concern of the pastoral mode is comparing the worth of the
natural world, represented by relatively untouched countryside, to the world
built by humans, which contains the joys of art and the city as well as the
injustices of rigid social hierarchies. Pastoral literature, then, has great
potential to serve as a forum for social criticism and can even inspire social
reform.
In general, Shakespeare’s As You Like It develops many of the traditional
features and concerns of the pastoral genre. This comedy examines the cruelties
and corruption of court life and gleefully pokes holes in one of humankind’s
greatest artifices: the conventions of romantic love. The play’s investment in
pastoral traditions leads to an indulgence in rather simple rivalries: court
versus country, realism versus romance, reason versus mindlessness, nature
versus fortune, young versus old, and those who are born into nobility versus
those who acquire their social standing. But rather than settle these scores by
coming down on one side or the other, As You Like It offers up a world
of myriad choices and endless possibilities. In the world of this play, no one
thing need cancel out another. In this way, the play manages to offer both
social critique and social affirmation. It is a play that at all times stresses
the complexity of things, the simultaneous pleasures and pains of being human.
Plot
Sir Rowland de Bois has recently
died, and, according to the custom of primogeniture, the vast majority of his
estate has passed into the possession of his eldest son, Oliver. Although Sir
Rowland has instructed Oliver to take good care of his brother, Orlando, Oliver
refuses to do so. Out of pure spite, he denies Orlando the education, training, and
property befitting a gentleman. Charles, a wrestler from the court of Duke
Frederick, arrives to warn Oliver of a rumor that Orlando will challenge Charles to a fight on
the following day. Fearing censure if he should beat a nobleman, Charles begs
Oliver to intervene, but Oliver convinces the wrestler that Orlando is a dishonorable sportsman who will
take whatever dastardly means necessary to win. Charles vows to pummel Orlando,
which delights Oliver.
Duke Senior has been usurped of his
throne by his brother, Duke Frederick, and has fled to the Forest of Ardenne,
where he lives like Robin Hood with a band of loyal followers. Duke Frederick
allows Senior’s daughter, Rosalind, to remain at court because of her
inseparable friendship with his own daughter, Celia. The day arrives when Orlando is scheduled to fight Charles, and
the women witness Orlando’s defeat of the court wrestler. Orlando and Rosalind
instantly fall in love with one another, though Rosalind keeps this fact a
secret from everyone but Celia. Orlando returns home from the wrestling match,
only to have his faithful servant Adam warn him about Oliver’s plot against
Orlando’s life. Orlando decides to leave for the safety of
Ardenne. Without warning, Duke Frederick has a change of heart regarding
Rosalind and banishes her from court. She, too, decides to flee to the Forest of Ardenne and leaves with Celia, who cannot
bear to be without Rosalind, and Touchstone, the court jester. To ensure the
safety of their journey, Rosalind assumes the dress of a young man and takes
the name Ganymede, while Celia dresses as a common shepherdess and calls
herself Aliena.
Duke Frederick is furious at his
daughter’s disappearance. When he learns that the flight of his daughter and
niece coincides with the disappearance of Orlando, the duke orders Oliver to
lead the manhunt, threatening to confiscate Oliver’s lands and property should
he fail. Frederick also decides it is time to destroy
his brother once and for all and begins to raise an army.
Duke Senior lives in the Forest of Ardenne with a band of lords who have gone
into voluntary exile. He praises the simple life among the trees, happy to be
absent from the machinations of court life. Orlando, exhausted by travel and
desperate to find food for his starving companion, Adam, barges in on the
duke’s camp and rudely demands that they not eat until he is given food. Duke
Senior calms Orlando and, when he learns that the young man is the son of his
dear former friend, accepts him into his company. Meanwhile, Rosalind and
Celia, disguised as Ganymede and Aliena, arrive in the forest and meet a
lovesick young shepherd named Silvius who pines away for the disdainful Phoebe.
The two women purchase a modest cottage, and soon enough Rosalind runs into the
equally lovesick Orlando. Taking her to be a young man, Orlando confides in Rosalind that his
affections are overpowering him. Rosalind, as Ganymede, claims to be an expert
in exorcising such emotions and promises to cure Orlando of lovesickness if he agrees to
pretend that Ganymede is Rosalind and promises to come woo her every day.
Orlando agrees, and the love lessons begin.
Meanwhile, Phoebe becomes
increasingly cruel in her rejection of Silvius. When Rosalind intervenes,
disguised as Ganymede, Phoebe falls hopelessly in love with Ganymede. One day, Orlando fails to show up for his tutorial
with Ganymede. Rosalind, reacting to her infatuation with Orlando, is
distraught until Oliver appears. Oliver describes how Orlando stumbled upon him in the forest and
saved him from being devoured by a hungry lioness. Oliver and Celia, still
disguised as the shepherdess Aliena, fall instantly in love and agree to marry.
As time passes, Phoebe becomes increasingly insistent in her pursuit of
Ganymede, and Orlando grows tired of pretending that a boy
is his dear Rosalind. Rosalind decides to end the charade. She promises that
Ganymede will wed Phoebe, if Ganymede will ever marry a woman, and she makes
everyone pledge to meet the next day at the wedding. They all agree.
The day of the wedding arrives, and
Rosalind gathers the various couples: Phoebe and Silvius; Celia and Oliver;
Touchstone and Audrey, a goatherd he intends to marry; and Orlando. The group congregates before Duke
Senior and his men. Rosalind, still disguised as Ganymede, reminds the lovers
of their various vows, then secures a promise from Phoebe that if for some
reason she refuses to marry Ganymede she will marry Silvius, and a promise from
the duke that he would allow his daughter to marry Orlando if she were
available. Rosalind leaves with the disguised Celia, and the two soon return as
themselves, accompanied by Hymen, the god of marriage. Hymen officiates at the
ceremony and marries Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver, Phoebe and
Silvius, and Audrey and Touchstone. The festive wedding celebration is
interrupted by even more festive news: while marching with his army to attack
Duke Senior, Duke Frederick came upon a holy man who convinced him to put aside
his worldly concerns and assume a monastic life. -Frederick changes his ways and returns the
throne to Duke Senior. The guests continue dancing, happy in the knowledge that
they will soon return to the royal court.
Analysis of Major
Characters
Rosalind
Rosalind dominates As You Like It. So fully realized is she in the
complexity of her emotions, the subtlety of her thought, and the fullness of
her character that no one else in the play matches up to her. Orlando is
handsome, strong, and an affectionate, if unskilled, poet, yet still we feel
that Rosalind settles for someone slightly less magnificent when she chooses
him as her mate. Similarly, the observations of Touchstone and Jaques, who
might shine more brightly in another play, seem rather dull whenever Rosalind
takes the stage.
The endless appeal of watching
Rosalind has much to do with her success as a knowledgeable and charming critic
of herself and others. But unlike Jaques, who refuses to participate wholly in
life but has much to say about the foolishness of those who surround him,
Rosalind gives herself over fully to circumstance. She chastises Silvius for
his irrational devotion to Phoebe, and she challenges Orlando’s thoughtless equation of Rosalind
with a Platonic ideal, but still she comes undone by her lover’s
inconsequential tardiness and faints at the sight of his blood. That Rosalind
can play both sides of any field makes her identifiable to nearly everyone, and
so, irresistible.
Rosalind is a particular favorite
among feminist critics, who admire her ability to subvert the limitations that
society imposes on her as a woman. With boldness and imagination, she disguises
herself as a young man for the majority of the play in order to woo the man she
loves and instruct him in how to be a more accomplished, attentive lover—a
tutorship that would not be welcome from a woman. There is endless comic appeal
in Rosalind’s lampooning of the conventions of both male and female behavior,
but an Elizabethan audience might have felt a certain amount of anxiety
regarding her behavior. After all, the structure of a male-dominated society
depends upon both men and women acting in their assigned roles. Thus, in the
end, Rosalind dispenses with the charade of her own character. Her emergence as
an actor in the Epilogue assures that theatergoers, like the Ardenne foresters,
are about to exit a somewhat enchanted realm and return to the familiar world
they left behind. But because they leave having learned the same lessons from
Rosalind, they do so with the same potential to make that world a less
punishing place.
Orlando
According to his brother, Oliver,
Orlando is of noble character, unschooled yet somehow learned, full of noble
purposes, and loved by people of all ranks as if he had enchanted them (I.i.141–144). Although this
description comes from the one character who hates Orlando and wishes him harm,
it is an apt and generous picture of the hero of As You Like It. Orlando
has a brave and generous spirit, though he does not possess Rosalind’s wit and
insight. As his love tutorial shows, he relies on commonplace clichés in
matters of love, declaring that without the fair Rosalind, he would die. He
does have a decent wit, however, as he demonstrates when he argues with Jaques,
suggesting that Jaques should seek out a fool who wanders about the forest: “He
is drowned in the brook. Look but in, and you shall see him,” meaning that
Jaques will see a fool in his own reflection (III.ii.262–263). But next to Rosalind, Orlando’s imagination burns a bit less
bright. This upstaging is no fault of Orlando’s, given the fullness of Rosalind’s
character; Shakespeare clearly intends his audience to delight in the match.
Time and again, Orlando performs tasks that reveal his nobility and demonstrate
why he is so well-loved: he travels with the ancient Adam and makes a fool out
of himself to secure the old man food; he risks his life to save the brother
who has plotted against him; he cannot help but violate the many trees of
Ardenne with testaments of his love for Rosalind. In the beginning of the play,
he laments that his brother has denied him the schooling deserved by a
gentleman, but by the end, he has proven himself a gentleman without the
formality of that education.
Jaques
Jaques delights in being sad—a
disparate role in a play that so delights in happiness. Jaques believes that
his melancholy makes him the perfect candidate to be Duke Senior’s fool. Such a
position, he claims, will “Give me leave / To speak my mind,” and the criticism
that flows forth will “Cleanse the foul body of th’infected world” (II.vii.58–60). Duke Senior is
rightly cautious about installing Jaques as the fool, fearing that Jaques would
do little more than excoriate the sins that Jaques himself has committed.
Indeed, Jaques lacks the keenness of insight of Shakespeare’s most accomplished
jesters: he is not as penetrating as Twelfth Night’s Feste or King
Lear’s fool. In fact, he is more like an aspiring fool than a professional
one. When Jaques philosophizes on the seven stages of human life, for instance,
his musings strike us as banal. His “All the world’s a stage” speech is famous
today, but the play itself casts doubt on the ideas expressed in this speech
(II.vii.138). No sooner does Jaques insist that
man spends the final stages of his life in “mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans
eyes, sans taste, sans everything” than Orlando’s aged servant, Adam, enters,
bearing with him his loyalty, his incomparable service, and his undiminished
integrity (II.vii.164–165).
Jaques’s own faculties as a critic of
the goings-on around him are considerably diminished in comparison to Rosalind,
who understands so much more and conveys her understanding with superior grace
and charm. Rosalind criticizes in order to transform the world—to make Orlando a more reasonable husband and Phoebe
a less disdainful lover—whereas Jaques is content to stew in his own
melancholy. It is appropriate that Jaques decides not to return to court. While
the other characters merrily revel, Jaques determines that he will follow the
reformed Duke Frederick into the monastery, where he believes the converts have
much to teach him. Jaques’s refusal to resume life in the dukedom not only
confirms our impression of his character, but also resonates with larger issues
in the play. Here, the play makes good on the promise of its title: everyone
gets just what he or she wants. It also betrays a small but inevitable crack in
the community that dances through the forest. In a world as complex and full of
so many competing forces as the one portrayed in As You Like It, the
absolute best one can hope for is consensus, but never complete unanimity.
Themes
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a
literary work.
The Delights of Love
As You Like It spoofs many of the conventions of
poetry and literature dealing with love, such as the idea that love is a
disease that brings suffering and torment to the lover, or the assumption that
the male lover is the slave or servant of his mistress. These ideas are central
features of the courtly love tradition, which greatly influenced European
literature for hundreds of years before Shakespeare’s time. In As You Like
It, characters lament the suffering caused by their love, but these laments
are all unconvincing and ridiculous. While Orlando’s metrically incompetent poems
conform to the notion that he should “live and die [Rosalind’s] slave,” these
sentiments are roundly ridiculed (III.ii.142).
Even Silvius, the untutored shepherd, assumes the role of the tortured lover,
asking his beloved Phoebe to notice “the wounds invisible / That love’s keen
arrows make” (III.v.31–32).
But Silvius’s request for Phoebe’s attention implies that the enslaved lover
can loosen the chains of love and that all romantic wounds can be
healed—otherwise, his request for notice would be pointless. In general, As
You Like It breaks with the courtly love tradition by portraying love as a
force for happiness and fulfillment and ridicules those who revel in their own
suffering.
Celia speaks to the curative powers
of love in her introductory scene with Rosalind, in which she implores her
cousin to allow “the full weight” of her love to push aside Rosalind’s unhappy
thoughts (I.ii.6). As soon as Rosalind takes to
Ardenne, she displays her own copious knowledge of the ways of love. Disguised
as Ganymede, she tutors Orlando in how to be a more attentive and
caring lover, counsels Silvius against prostrating himself for the sake of the
all-too-human Phoebe, and scolds Phoebe for her arrogance in playing the
shepherd’s disdainful love object. When Rosalind famously insists that “[m]en
have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love,” she
argues against the notion that love concerns the perfect, mythic, or
unattainable (IV.i.91–92).
Unlike Jaques and Touchstone, both of whom have keen eyes and biting tongues
trained on the follies of romance, Rosalind does not mean to disparage love. On
the contrary, she seeks to teach a version of love that not only can survive in
the real world, but can bring delight as well. By the end of the play, having
successfully orchestrated four marriages and ensured the happy and peaceful
return of a more just government, Rosalind proves that love is a source of
incomparable delight.
The Malleability of the Human Experience
In Act II, scene vii, Jaques
philosophizes on the stages of human life: man passes from infancy into
boyhood; becomes a lover, a soldier, and a wise civic leader; and then, year by
year, becomes a bit more foolish until he is returned to his “second
childishness and mere oblivion” (II.vii.164).
Jaques’s speech remains an eloquent commentary on how quickly and thoroughly
human beings can change, and, indeed, do change in As You Like It. Whether physically, emotionally, or
spiritually, those who enter the Forest of Ardenne are often remarkably different when
they leave. The most dramatic and unmistakable change, of course, occurs when
Rosalind assumes the disguise of Ganymede. As a young man, Rosalind
demonstrates how vulnerable to change men and women truly are. Orlando, of
course, is putty in her hands; more impressive, however, is her ability to
manipulate Phoebe’s affections, which move from Ganymede to the once despised
Silvius with amazing speed.
In As You Like It, Shakespeare dispenses with the
time--consuming and often hard-won processes involved in change. The characters
do not struggle to become more pliant—their changes are instantaneous. Oliver,
for instance, learns to love both his brother Orlando and a disguised Celia
within moments of setting foot in the forest. Furthermore, the vengeful and
ambitious Duke Frederick abandons all thoughts of fratricide after a single
conversation with a religious old man. Certainly, these transformations have
much to do with the restorative, almost magical effects of life in the forest,
but the consequences of the changes also matter in the real world: the
government that rules the French duchy, for example, will be more just under
the rightful ruler Duke Senior, while the class structures inherent in court
life promise to be somewhat less rigid after the courtiers sojourn in the
forest. These social reforms are a clear improvement and result from the more
private reforms of the play’s characters. As You Like It not only
insists that people can and do change, but also celebrates their ability to
change for the better.
City Life Versus Country Life
Pastoral literature thrives on the
contrast between life in the city and life in the country. Often, it suggests
that the oppressions of the city can be remedied by a trip into the country’s
therapeutic woods and fields, and that a person’s sense of balance and
rightness can be restored by conversations with uncorrupted shepherds and
shepherdesses. This type of restoration, in turn, enables one to return to the
city a better person, capable of making the most of urban life. Although
Shakespeare tests the bounds of these conventions—his shepherdess Audrey, for
instance, is neither articulate nor pure—he begins As You Like It by establishing the city/country
dichotomy on which the pastoral mood depends. In Act I, scene i, Orlando rails
against the injustices of life with Oliver and complains that he “know[s] no
wise remedy how to avoid it” (I.i.20–21). Later in that scene, as Charles relates the
whereabouts of Duke Senior and his followers, the remedy is clear: “in the forest of Ardenne . . . many young gentlemen . . .
fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world” (I.i.99–103). Indeed, many are healed in the forest—the
lovesick are coupled with their lovers and the usurped duke returns to his
throne—but Shakespeare reminds us that life in Ardenne is a temporary affair.
As the characters prepare to return to life at court, the play does not laud
country over city or vice versa, but instead suggests a delicate and necessary
balance between the two. The simplicity of the forest provides shelter from the
strains of the court, but it also creates the need for urban style and
sophistication: one would not do, or even matter, without the other.
Motifs
Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices
that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Artifice
As Orlando runs through the forest
decorating every tree with love poems for Rosalind, and as Silvius pines for
Phoebe and compares her cruel eyes to a murderer, we cannot help but notice the
importance of artifice to life in Ardenne. Phoebe decries such artificiality
when she laments that her eyes lack the power to do the devoted shepherd any
real harm, and Rosalind similarly puts a stop to Orlando’s romantic fussing
when she reminds him that “[m]en have died from time to time, and worms have
eaten them, but not for love” (IV.i.91–92). Although Rosalind is susceptible to the
contrivances of romantic love, as when her composure crumbles when Orlando is only minutes late for their
appointment, she does her best to move herself and the others toward a more
realistic understanding of love. Knowing that the excitement of the first days
of courtship will flag, she warns Orlando that “[m]aids are May when they are
maids, but the sky changes when they are wives” (IV.i.125–127). Here, Rosalind cautions against any love that
sustains itself on artifice alone. She advocates a love that, while delightful,
can survive in the real world. During the Epilogue, Rosalind returns the
audience to reality by stripping away not only the artifice of Ardenne, but of
her character as well. As the Elizabethan actor stands on the stage and
reflects on this temporary foray into the unreal, the audience’s experience comes
to mirror the experience of the characters. The theater becomes Ardenne, the
artful means of edifying us for our journey into the world in which we live.
Homoeroticism
Like many of Shakespeare’s plays and
poems, As You Like It explores different kinds of love between members
of the same sex. Celia and Rosalind, for instance, is extremely close
friends—almost sisters—and the profound intimacy of their relationship seem at
times more intense than that of ordinary friends. Indeed, Celia’s words in Act
I, scenes ii and iii echo the protestations of lovers. But to assume that Celia
or Rosalind possesses a sexual identity as clearly defined as our modern
understandings of heterosexual or homosexual would be to work
against the play’s celebration of a range of intimacies and sexual
possibilities.
The other kind of homoeroticism
within the play arises from Rosalind’s cross-dressing. Everybody, male and
female, seems to love Ganymede, the beautiful boy who looks like a woman
because he is really Rosalind in disguise. The name Rosalind chooses for her
alter ego, Ganymede, traditionally belonged to a beautiful boy who became one
of Jove’s lovers, and the name carries strong homosexual connotations. Even
though Orlando is supposed to be in love with Rosalind, he seems to enjoy the
idea of acting out his romance with the beautiful, young boy Ganymede—almost as
if a boy who looks like the woman he loves is even more appealing than the
woman herself. Phoebe, too, is more attracted to the feminine Ganymede than to
the real male, Silvius.
In drawing on the motif of
homoeroticism, As You Like It is influenced by the pastoral tradition,
which typically contains elements of same-sex love. In the Forest of Ardenne, as in pastoral literature,
homoerotic relationships are not necessarily antithetical to heterosexual
couplings, as modern readers tend to assume. Instead, homosexual and
heterosexual love exist on a continuum across which, as the title of the play
suggests, one can move as one likes.
Exile
As You Like It abounds in banishment. Some
characters have been forcibly removed or threatened from their homes, such as
Duke Senior, Rosalind, and Orlando. Some have voluntarily abandoned their
positions out of a sense of rightness, such as Senior’s loyal band of lords,
Celia, and the noble servant Adam. It is, then, rather remarkable that the play
ends with four marriages—a ceremony that unites individuals into couples and
ushers these couples into the community. The community that sings and dances
its way through Ardenne at the close of Act V, scene iv, is the same community
that will return to the dukedom in order to rule and be ruled. This event,
where the poor dance in the company of royalty, suggests a utopian world in
which wrongs can be righted and hurts healed. The sense of restoration with
which the play ends depends upon the formation of a community of exiles in
politics and love coming together to soothe their various wounds.
Symbols
Symbols
are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or
concepts.
Orlando’s Poems
The poems that Orlando nails to the trees of Ardenne are a
testament to his love for Rosalind. In comparing her to the romantic heroines
of classical literature—Helen, Cleopatra, Lucretia—Orlando takes his place among a long line of
poets who regard the love object as a bit of earthbound perfection. Much to the
amusement of Rosalind, Celia, and Touchstone, Orlando’s efforts are far less
accomplished than, say, Ovid’s, and so bring into sharp focus the silliness of
which all lovers are guilty. Orlando’s “tedious homil[ies] of love” stand
as a reminder of the wide gap that exists between the fancies of literature and
the kind of love that exists in the real world (III.ii.143).
The Slain Deer
In Act IV, scene ii, Jaques and other
lords in Duke Senior’s party kill a deer. Jaques proposes to “set the deer’s
horns upon [the hunter’s] head for a branch of victory” (IV.ii.4–5). To an Elizabethan
audience, however, the slain deer would have signaled more than just an
accomplished archer. As the song that follows the lord’s return to camp makes
clear, the deer placed atop the hunter’s head is a symbol of cuckoldry,
commonly represented by a man with horns atop his head. Allusions to the
cuckolded man run throughout the play, betraying one of the dominant anxieties
of the age—that women are sexually uncontrollable—and pointing out the schism
between ideal and imperfect love.
Ganymede
Rosalind’s choice of alternative
identities is significant. Ganymede is the cupbearer and beloved of Jove and is
a standard symbol of homosexual love. In the context of the play, her choice of
an alter ego contributes to a continuum of sexual possibilities.
© &acknowledgement: Mabillard, Amanda. UK
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