In discussing George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie in the context of Elizabethan pastoral discourse, Montrose cites Puttenham's claim that pastoral was developed among ancient poets "not of purpose to counterfait or represent the rusticall manner of loves and communication: but under the vaile of homely persons, and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters, and such as perchance had not bene safe to have beene disclosed in any other sort."³⁶ Puttenham's related concerns with safety and the necessity of dissimulation in a dangerous social environment, the poet's self-awareness as a cultural commentator, and the struggle to make homely fiction serve the higher ends of instruction bring us back to Patterson's contention that Shakespeare's own "material practice" purposely seeks out "safely fictional forms" to achieve its ends. In As You Like It, moreover, Shakespeare's practice turns explicitly to pastoral form, which, we might surmise, is deliberately deployed to "glaunce at greater matters" "cleanly cover[ed]" (as Spenser puts it in the Shepheardes Calender) by a "feyne[d]" story.³⁷

The precise nature of those "matters" and Shakespeare's specific ends may be debated, of course. But it is hard to imagine that they are any less comprehensive than those attributed by Montrose to Puttenham. Puttenham, Montrose writes, conceives "of poetry as a body of changing cultural practices dialectically related to the fundamental processes of social life"; and his "cultural relativism and ethical heterodoxy, his genuinely Machiavellian grasp of policy, are evident . . . in his pervasive concern with the dialectic between poetry and power."³⁸ It comes as some surprise, therefore, when Montrose later revises this estimation and gives us a Puttenham whose writing only serves the ends of personal aggrandizement within the confined circles of the court, whose sense of his culture's complexity is merely the sophistry of a "cunning princepleaser," and whose grasp of the political purposes of poetry never rises above its merely politic ends. And, as Montrose dismisses the narrowness of Puttenham's courtly orientation, so he dismisses pastoral discourse itself, whose power to "glaunce at greater matters" is suddenly reduced to courtliness in another form: thus, the "dominantly aristocratic" perspective of Elizabethan pastoral becomes but a reinscription of "agrarian social relations . . . within an ideology of the country," which is "itself appropriated, transformed, and reinscribed within an ideology of the court."³⁹ Pastoral's "greater matters," it seems, are only the matters of the great for whom the masks of rural encomium serve their own (narrowly defined) hegemonic interests. For Montrose, that is, despite pastoral writers' own recognition that their art form is "intrinsically political in purpose," pastoral's central concern with aristocratic identity only serves to mystify the issues of class standing and social relations it appears to raise.⁴⁰ As he argues, finally, because Renaissance pastoral "inevitably involve[s] a transposition of social categories into metaphysical ones, a sublimation of politics into aesthetics," it necessarily functions as "a weapon against social inferiors."⁴¹

Without denying pastoral's aristocratic orientation, we might note that it is only from the reductively binary perspective of the New Historicist that an "elite community" must be opposed to all "egalitarian ideas," or that its members could have "little discernible interest" in the condition of those who serve them.⁴²As You Like It certainly suggests that such a critical perspective fails to register the possibility of the presence of dissenting voices within the dominant culture. Indeed, if the play is not in full support of the popular voice, it is yet concerned to link an aristocratic crisis of identity to the more vexing problems of the "base." Shakespeare's pastoral world is thus less concerned with celebrating nobles as virtuous than in reexamining the precise nature of aristocratic virtue. And lest we think Shakespeare is the exception that proves the rule, it is instructive to recall the aristocratic Sidney's own brief meditation on pastoral in his Defence of Poesy: "Is the poor pipe disdained, which sometimes out of Meliboeus' mouth can show the misery of people under hard lords and ravening soldiers and again, by Tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest?"⁴³ That "blessedness," moreover, is not presumed to be the reality of his culture but only a symbolic idealization challenging his aristocratic readers to a kind of creative, ethically oriented imitatio.

Montrose's Historicism cannot envision this possibility because he denies to Renaissance pastoral writers any critical distance from the courtly aristocracy from which they drew support (including occasional financial support). He goes even further in denying that "the mediation of social boundaries was [even] a conscious motive in the writing of Elizabethan pastorals," let alone that a cultural critique might have been leveled "in terms of a consciously articulated oppositional culture."⁴⁴ Such a dismissal of Renaissance writing as a purposeful, socially engaged activity is typical of New Historicist criticism more generally, which matches a methodological subordination of individual intention to larger "systems" of thought with a tonal condescension toward the capacity of earlier writers to comprehend their own cultural situations. Against this effacement of the subject, I would counter that an interest in the historical conditioning of texts is necessarily concerned with the conditions of their being written and being read, with the social processes by which meaning is formulated and communicated, with acts of knowledge as acts of persuasion, with the "rhetoricity" of texts as the essence of their historicity.⁴⁵ The reduction of historical criticism to the impersonal voice—to what Foucault once called the "it-is-said"⁴⁶—precludes the possibility of understanding how the movement of ideas within discursive systems requires real readers and writers whose very activities help reveal to us the contours of historical existence.

Notes

¹ All references to Shakespeare's plays are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

² Celia's earlier remark to Touchstone—"since the little wit that fools have was silenc'd, the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show" (I.ii.88-90)—obliquely refers to this.

³ Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 4, 24.

⁴ For a concise summary of these changing historical circumstances, see Lawrence Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642 (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 58-117.

⁵ Louis Montrose, "'The Place of a Brother' in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form," SQ 32, 1 (Spring 1981): 28-54.

⁶ Montrose, "The Place of a Brother,'" pp. 34-5. That the exchange between Orlando and Oliver is more than just the struggle between younger and older brothers is emphasized by Orlando's response to Oliver's insulting question: "Know where you are, sir?" Orlando replies: "O sir, very well; here in your orchard" (I.i.40-1). The condition of "gentility" (marked in the mocking uses of "sir") is clearly tied to the question of who actually owns the property.

⁷Richard Wilson, "'Like the old Robin Hood': As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots," SQ 43, 1 (Spring 1992): 1-19, 3-5. For a historical overview of the broader cultural, political, and economic issues conditioning this hostility, see Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

⁸ Wilson, "'Like the old Robin Hood,'" pp. 4, 5, 9; my emphases.

⁹ Wilson's lack of interest in what the text itself does to produce the meanings he finds in it is perhaps not so surprising given his attempt, formulated elsewhere, to theorize the fundamental irrelevance of literature to the forces of history and culture that must always supersede it. See his Introduction to New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, ed. Richard Wilson and Richard Dutton (London: Longman, 1992), pp. 1-18. It should be noted that Wilson considers himself a "Cultural Materialist" rather than a "New Historicist," and in that Introduction he seeks to differentiate the critical assumptions governing their respective practices. But the mode of argumentation employed in his essay on As You Like It does not bear out the differences he alleges.

¹⁰ Alan Liu, "The Power of Formalism: The New Historicism," ELE 56, 4 (Winter 1989): 721-71, 721.

¹¹ Wilson, "'Like the old Robin Hood,'" pp. 4, 6, 9, 10-11, 13, 18.

¹² Wilson, "'Like the old Robin Hood,'" p. 3 and n. 15. Liu remarks that "the limitation of the New Historicism is that in its failure to carve out its own theory by way of a disciplined, high-level study of the evolution of historically situated language, its discoverable theory has been too assimilable to the deconstructive view of rhetoric as an a-, trans-, or uni-historical figurai language" (p. 756). Although his own critical practice employs precisely this kind of formalism, Wilson himself makes much the same complaint about New Historicist critics, whose elision of historical referent in favor of the "textuality of history," he asserts, aligns them with New Critics (New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, pp. 9-10).

¹³ Wilson first uses the phrase, without defining it, on p. 3 of '"Like the old Robin Hood'"; later he cites Foucault's observation that "in every society discourse is controlled and redistributed to avert its dangers and evade its formidable materiality." As an instance of this, Wilson notes that "pastoral discourse . . . will conceal the real revolution in the forest economy" (p. 17; my emphases). (Inexplicably, although in his Introduction to New Historicism and Renaissance Drama Wilson again notes Foucault's claim for the "'formidable materiality' of all discourse" [p. 91, he does so as part of his critique of the overly abstract post-Marxist practice of Foucault and other French intellectuals, especially as this tradition has become the philosophical foundation of American New Historicism.) For discussion of the trope of revelatory "concealment" within post-structuralist criticism, see Richard Levin, "The Poetics and Politics of Bardicide," PMLA 105, 3 (May 1990): 491-504, 493-4.

¹⁴ One example: Touchstone's quip to the bumpkin, William, concerning their rival claims on Audrey—"to have, is to have" (V.i.40)—means, we are told, that a new concept of property ownership is now superseding traditional agrarian rights based on the notion of collective possession (Wilson, p. 18).

¹⁵ Patterson, p. 14.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ See Preface to Volpone, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-52), 5:18-9. Having been jailed again in 1604, along with Chapman and Marston, for the anti-Scottish sentiments of Eastward Ho!, Jonson used the Preface to chastise readers for their propensity for assigning topical meanings to his plays: by substituting local for more general meanings, Jonson thought, his readers would necessarily fail to appreciate the moral lessons of his writing and so not see how his meanings were to be used for their own edification and improvement.

¹⁸ Leah Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), pp. 26, 41.

¹⁹ For discussion, see Louis Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: The Politics of Elizabethan Pastoral Form," ELH 50, 3 (Fall 1983): 415-59, esp. 425, 433.

²⁰ Wayne A. Rebhorn, "The Crisis of the Aristocracy in Julius Caesar," RenQ 43, 1 (Spring 1990): 75-111, 81.

²¹ For discussion, see Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 198-236.

²² For discussion, see Patterson, pp. 71-92.

²³ Hampton, pp. 210-4; Patterson, pp. 83-90.

²⁴ Montrose, "'The Place of a Brother,'" p. 46.

²⁵ On the importance of the noble manor to the aristocratic ethical ideal, see Don E. Wayne, Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1984).

²⁶ Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds," p. 432.

²⁷ Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds," p. 427.

²⁸ Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds," pp. 428-32; Patterson, pp. 39-46.

²⁹ Patterson, p. 41.

³⁰ For discussion of the cultural importance of the meal as a marker of "serviceable" authority in the Renaissance, see Michael Schoenfeldt, "'The Mysteries of Manners, Armes, and Arts': 'Inviting a Friend to Supper' and 'To Penshurst,'" in "The Muses Common-Weale": Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1988), pp. 62-79.

³¹ Stone, pp. 68, 72, 84.

³² The promise of increased wages for Corin recalls the 500 crowns Adam has saved under Sir Rowland (II.iii.38). Although Orlando goes on to extol Adam's virtue as "the constant service of the antique world, / When service sweat for duty, not for meed!" (lines 57-8), we see that dutiful service rightfully expects proper compensation.

³³ Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde, in As You Like It (A New Variorum Edition), ed. Howard H. Furness (Philadelphia, 1890), p. 338; spelling slightly modernized.

³⁴ Judy Z. Kronenfeld, "Social Rank and the Pastoral Ideals of As You Like It," SQ 29, 3 (Summer 1978): 333-48, 344.

³⁵ Kronenfeld, pp. 345, 344.

³⁶ Quoted in Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds," p. 435.

³⁷ Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, "September" (lines 137-9), in Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 453.

³⁸ Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds," pp. 435-6.

³⁹ Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds," pp. 438-44, 426, 431.

⁴⁰Montrose first makes this point in '"Eliza, Queene of shepheardes,' and the Pastoral of Power," ELR 10, 2 (Spring 1980): 153-82, 154.

⁴¹ Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds," pp. 446-7.

⁴² Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds," p. 427; for broader discussion, see Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas in Early Stuart England (London: Pinter, 1989), esp. chaps. 1-2, 6, 10.

⁴³ Quoted in Kronenfeld, p. 334.

⁴⁴ Montrose, "Of Gentlemen and Shepherds," pp. 427, 432; my emphases.

⁴⁵ For discussion of the promise of this kind of "rhetorical" criticism, see Liu, p. 756.

⁴⁶ Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 122.

Source: "The Political Conscious of Shakespeare's As You Like It," in Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 373-95.