This chapter argues that As You Like It draws from early modern and classical educational theory to stage the acquisition of virtues such as courage, justice, and sympathy, which are, in turn, central to the romance’s resolution. The play explores a classroom exercise known as ethopoeia (or “character-making”), which frequently asked students to inhabit, write from, and perform from the subject position of other genders. Inhabiting other genders can prime students’ capacities to sympathize across categories of difference, enlarging prosocial other-orientation by cultivating the sense of justice necessary to understand how hardship affects people differently and the courage to give voice to the feelings of others. The analysis closes by considering the value of ethopoeia in contemporary liberal education.

Analyses the re-animating culture of imperial Greek culture, focusing on sophistic declamations, ethopoetic exercises, ‘close encounter’ descriptions and Homeric performance. Suggests how all these spaces reveal a strong and very textually engaged awareness of the concept of ‘doubleness’ (being and not being the subject of one’s impersonation). By reading these modes alongside depictions of performance from within the Posthomerica (Nestor’s song, the song of the bards and the debate between Ajax and Odysseus) argues for the direct influence that they exerted on Quintus’ composition, providing models for how to expand creatively within the boundaries of a canonical, traditional text.