As You Like It (2 page)

“Under the greenwood tree / Who loves to lie with me,” sings Amiens as the exiled lords come on dressed as foresters, and we are reminded of the rustic communities of Thomas Hardy, who used the opening line of that song as the title for one of his novels. The play has become central to the myth of “deep England,” the idea that English national identity is bound up with milkmaids dancing around the Maypole, tankards of nut-brown ale sipped in thatched taverns, and lengthening shadows on the village green.

In 1987 the British West Indian artist Ingrid Pollard created a series of photographs called “Pastoral Interlude” in which she explored the place of black people in the English countryside. “It’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment,” Pollard wrote. “I thought I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white.” For her, “a visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread.” A feeling, that is to say, that she does not belong in the world that, in shorthand, could be described as Arden. Yet the whole point of Shakespeare’s Arden is that it is an adventure playground for exiles and outsiders. The world we encounter there does not have the homogeneity of an English village. Rather, it is a gloriously multicultural community. Shakespeare loves to mix and match the past and the present, the indigenous and the immigrant, down-to-earth observation from experience and wild fantasia from myth and folktale.

The denizens of the forest include not only Corin, the wise old agricultural laborer whose name is Greco-Roman yet whose nature is English, but also a country clergyman called Sir Oliver Martext, who may well have been imagined as a dangerous Catholic, and a very English peasant of small brainpower called William, who in the original production may well have been acted by a very English countryman of great brainpower called William Shakespeare. Among the exiles are the very French-sounding Amiens, with his musical gifts, and the quintessentially English stand-up comedian Touchstone. On the fringes of the forest, and of the play, is a mysterious “magician,” described but never seen, who converts the drama into a kind of fairy tale (complete with a rather gentle lion) even as it remains grittily true to English environment and climate.

Shortly after the Second World War, the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye published a short essay that inaugurated the modern understanding that Shakespeare’s comedies, for all their lightness and play, are serious works of art, every bit as worthy of close attention as his tragedies. Entitled “The Argument of Comedy,” it proposed that the essential structure of Shakespearean comedy was ultimately derived from the “new comedy” of ancient Greece, which was mediated to the Renaissance via its Roman exponents Plautus and Terence. The “new comedy” pattern, described by Frye as “a comic Oedipus situation,” turned on “the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice.” The girl’s father, or some other authority figure of the older generation, resists the match but is outflanked, often thanks to an ingenious scheme devised by a clever servant, perhaps involving disguise or flight (or both). Frye, writing during Hollywood’s golden age, saw an unbroken line from the classics to Shakespeare to modern romantic comedy: “The average movie of today is a rigidly conventionalized New Comedy proceeding toward an act which, like death in Greek tragedy, takes place offstage, and is symbolized by the final embrace.”

The union of the lovers brings “a renewed sense of social integration,” expressed by some kind of festival at the climax of the play—a marriage, a dance, or a feast. The union often also involves social mobility: it certainly does here, as Orlando, the youngest son of a gentleman, finds himself bound to the daughter of a duke. All right-thinking people come over to the side of the lovers, but there are others “who are in some kind of mental bondage, who are helplessly driven by ruling passions, neurotic compulsions, social rituals, and selfishness.” Malvolio in
Twelfth Night
, Don John in
Much Ado About Nothing
, Shylock in
The Merchant of Venice
: Shakespearean comedy frequently includes a party pooper, a figure who refuses to be assimilated into the harmony. Jaques is of this company.

Frye’s “The Argument of Comedy” pinpoints a pervasive structure: “the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world.” But for Shakespeare, the green world, the forest and its fairies, is no less real than the court. Frye, again, sums it up brilliantly:

Many of Shakespeare’s plays keep up a constant shuttle between symbolically opposed locations—Venice and Belmont, Rome and Egypt, Sicilian court and Bohemian country—but
As You Like It
moves all the major players to Arden as swiftly as possible. Once there, the scenes run together fluently. There is no clock ticking in the forest, no sense of time being marked by the scene breaks. Initially, however, there are two discernible imaginary locations: the farm and the cave, Corin’s world of agricultural labor and the deep forest where the duke and his men play at being Robin Hood. Orlando and Jaques drift between the two, whereas Rosalind/Ganymede and Celia/Aliena are not allowed to penetrate too far into the deep forest. Their reunion with the duke must be withheld for the climax.

Crucially, this play belongs to the girls, who come to Arden because it is a place where they can try on new identities. Celia disguises herself as “Aliena,” suggesting the idea of the immigrant, the resident “alien” who always feels like an outsider. And Rosalind switches gender to become “Ganymede.” Shakespeare’s original audience would have been acutely aware of the connotations of this assumed name. The original Ganymede was a young male abducted by Jove in classical mythology. In Shakespeare’s time, the figure was synonymous with pederastic desire, as explained in a dictionary of the period: “
Ganymede:
the name of a Trojan boy, whom Jupiter so loved (say the poets) as he took him up to Heaven, and made him his Cup-bearer. Hence any boy that is loved for carnal abuse, or is hired to be used contrary to nature to commit the detestable sin of sodomy, is called a Ganymede; an Ingle.” The same dictionary’s definition of “ingle” is “a youth kept or accompanied for sodomy.” The forest is the supremely
natural
place. By locating the playful wooing of Orlando and “Ganymede” in this setting, Shakespeare asks his audience to imagine the possibility that same-sex desire may not, after all, be “contrary to nature.”

The place of “banishment” turns out to be the home of “liberty”—free from the constraints of court hierarchy and customary deference, Arden is where you can play at being someone different and find out who you really are. It’s where you learn to live alongside people who come from very different backgrounds from your own. And where, in the end, you all come together for a big party in celebration of multiple mixed marriages that cut across the traditional social order.

As You Like It
is Shakespeare’s most elegant play. At its climax Rosalind calls the cast into a circle, the figure of perfection, and resolves the plot with the assistance of Hymen, god of marriage. Whereas most of the other comedies are shadowed by death, this one offers four weddings and no funeral. The part of Rosalind is the longest and most joyous female role in the complete works. It would have been extraordinarily demanding for the boy actor who first performed it, though made a little easier by the fact that Rosalind spends so much of the time dressed as a boy.

Shakespeare moves quickly from the multiple marriages to the closing dance. He introduces the magical “conversion” of bad Frederick in place of the battle between the forces of good and evil that occurs at the end of Lodge’s story, and he focuses on the realization of erotic desire rather than the questions of social advancement that preoccupied Lodge. The play omits the apportioning of rewards with which
Rosalynd
ended. In the novel, the figure who corresponds to Silvius becomes “lord over all the forest of Arden,” Corin is made master of the Celia-figure’s flock, and loyal retainer Adam improbably becomes captain of the king’s guard.

There is a curious stage direction when the women first arrive in Arden: “
Enter Rosalind for Ganymede, Celia for Aliena, and Clown alias Touchstone
” (Act 2 Scene 4). Does
alias
mean that Touchstone has also taken on a disguised identity? It has been suggested that he would have begun the play in the long plain coat of the “natural” (simpleton), then exchanged this for the “motley” of the professional fool when he escapes from the court with the women. But there is no sense of his verbal style changing or of disguise being a means of self-discovery, as it is so profoundly for Rosalind when she plays the role of Ganymede; Touchstone appears always to have been a touchstone, a master of retort that reveals other people’s foolishness. The question of Touchstone being recognized as the court fool, and thus blowing the disguise of Rosalind and Celia, is avoided by the device of keeping all three of them apart from the duke and his courtiers until the final scene. That is why Jaques cannot be a courtier: he must encounter Touchstone as a stranger and delight in him as a fellow outsider, albeit with a different linguistic style and a different end to his irony. Jaques offers “invective” and formal discourses (most famously his anatomy of the “seven ages” of human life) to Touchstone’s one-line quips and riffs of extended word-mongering (most dazzlingly his explication of the seven stages of a quarrel).

Wherever the word “natural” is found in the play, whether associated with Touchstone, Corin, or the forest itself, it is possible to see happiness and a kind of innocence; the voice of Jaques is that of “experience” bringing world-weary melancholy. Rosalind has no doubt which she prefers, observing to Jaques that “your experience makes you sad: I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad.”

As in Lodge’s
Rosalynd
, the plot of the play sometimes seems little more than a pretext for the setting up of debates and meditations. The heart of the play is to be found in the set-piece dialogues. Before their departure from court, Rosalind and Celia debate the relative importance of “nature” and “fortune”; in Arden, there are dialogues between the melancholy man and the fool, the cynic and the lover, the court fool and the “natural” shepherd (who wins the debate by virtue of his recognition that social customs vary from place to place). With brilliant counterpoint, a prose wooing scene is played against a verse one. Reversing dramatic convention, it is the courtly characters who speak prose and the shepherds who court in verse.

Above all, there is the encounter between Orlando and Rosalind-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalind. With the added layer of the boy actor for whom Shakespeare was writing—of which we are reminded by means of a joke in the epilogue—here a boy plays a girl playing a boy playing a girl. Whereas in the shepherd plot it is Phoebe who has romantic notions about love that make her natural partner Silvius a disappointment to her, in the main plot disguise enables the woman to offer the man down-to-earth “counsel” as preparation for marriage. Through the illusions of cross-dressing and role-play, Rosalind exposes the illusions of romantic desire: “The patterns of love” (Troilus, Leander) are not to be imitated, since the old stories about them are “all lies.” “[M]en have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” So much for men.

As for women, the key to keeping them is not to restrain them. Rosalind-Ganymede’s lesson is the opposite of that of
The Taming of the Shrew
: a desirable woman is not a tame one but a “wayward” one, whose energies (verbal, emotional, and sexual) are incorrigible. “Make the doors upon a woman’s wit and it will out at the casement. Shut that and ’twill out at the key-hole. Stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.” In her poise and her playfulness, her knowledge of what makes people tick and her capacity for strong feeling, whether joyful, fearful, or simply amazed (“O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded”), Rosalind is Shakespeare’s most complete woman.

Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).