The Utopian impulses of As You Like It are not of course confined to this play alone within Shakespeare's works; they are a component of all the green-world comedies (parallels with Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream come immediately to mind); they often, as we saw with Othello and Lear, come briefly into view in the tragedies; and they constitute an in-forming dynamic within all the late tragicomedies.

Shakespeare's category of the Utopian possesses that rare quality of self-relexivity, of an understanding of some of its own limits and weaknesses, that makes it particularly congenial in our own post-illusion, Postmodernist era. It also represents, as I suggested earlier, a way beyond those outworn antinomies of recent Shakespearean criticism, subversion and containment: the Utopian is in effect always already both contained and subversive: relegated to the afterlife, the ideal, to myth, art, folklore, entertainment, and holiday for the most part (it is of course one of the prime contents of the carnivalesque), the Utopian seems to coexist with rather than directly challenge the lacks and frustrations the desire for which had helped create it; and yet by giving expression to what has been repressed, the Utopian creates a space for, and sometimes gives a name to, the ideologically unthinkable, transmitting it as a counter-memory within the reproductions of the social life of the subaltern classes—and, as in Shakespeare, within what becomes the culture of the ruling classes as well.⁴² Utopia influences the social at those Messianic moments, like 1989 in Eastern Europe, when the unthinkable becomes for a time thinkable in one of those revolutionary junctures that permanently change the world (though never quite in the ways its agents imagine).

The capacity of the concept of the Utopian to undo the antinomies of containment and subversion depends on the play of desire in the Utopian—and it is precisely desire which Marx and the tradition founded by him tended to neglect in its theories of revolution. It is desire, then, in the place of that mysteriously motivated historical demiurge suspected by so many as the ghost lurking within the machinery of Marxism, that we should posit as a needed Postmodernist supplement to the rhetorical chain in a well-known Marxian metaphor which attempts in its own way to understand the coexistence of containment and subversion in the lifeworld: let us then insert desire as an additional term within Marx's Shakespearean encomium to 'our brave friend, Robin Goodfellow, the old mole that can work in the earth so fast, that worthy pioneer—the Revolution'.⁴³

Notes

¹ The most developed discussion of the parallels I found—Frank McCombie, 'Medium and Message in As You Like It and King Lear', Shakespeare Survey, 33 (1980), 67-80—argues that the two plays each display the limits of the tragic and comic 'filters' Shakespeare utilized in what McCombie posits as a conscious intertextuality, which extends also to Cymbeline and The Tempest. See also David Young, The Heart's Forest: A Study of Shakespeare's Pastoral Plays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 81, for a less developed listing of the large number of parallels, constituting what Young calls a 'curious kinship' between the two plays, so different in mood and tone. Both of these works credit earlier studies of King Lear as a pastoral or anti-pastoral tragedy for explaining something of the parallel, esp. that of Maynard Mack, 'King Lear' in our Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 65-6.

² Richard Wilson, "'Like the Old Robin Hood": As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots', Shakespeare Quarterly, 43 (Spring 1992), 1-19, notes the parallel between the two plays as a way of getting at the political content of As You Like It. The article subsequently appeared as ch. 3 of his Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority (New York: Harvester, 1993), 63-82.

³ Wilson, 'Like the Old Robin Hood', 2.

⁴ Ibid. 19.

⁵As You Like It in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Subsequent citations are from the same edn.

⁶ Of innumerable discussions of the centrality of the public-private dichotomy to literary culture, I recommend particularly Susan Wells, The Dialectics of Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 165-73.

⁷ Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question, in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1967), esp. 227.

⁸ Steven Mullaney discusses the metaphor of the world as a stage, seeing it as evidence for the era's consciousness of the self as socially constructed, in The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 71-2 et passim.

⁹ Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 9-12.

¹⁰ C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (1959; repr. Cleveland, Oh.: Meridian, 1963), 222-39. Characteristically, Barber's emphasis in this Modernist reading is on the 'balance' and 'poise', embodied primarily by Rosalind, between holiday and daily life.

¹¹ See Peter Stallybrass, '"Drunk with the Cup of Liberty": Robin Hood, the Carnivalesque, and the Rhetoric of Violence in Early Modern England', in Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds.), The Violence of Representation: Literature and the History of Violence (London: Routledge, 1989), 45-76, for a fascinating study of the carnivalesque associations of the matter of Robin Hood.

¹² Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; repr. New York: Atheneum, 1968), 182-5.

¹³ Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 103-50, offers a critique of Frye very much in this mode and one which links him to Bloch's idea of the Utopian, to be discussed below.

¹⁴ Perhaps the most apposite of Bloch's major works in this context is the monumental The Principle of Hope, first pub. as Das Prinzie Hoffnung (1954-9); trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986). See also Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988). A very useful introduction with excerpts, to which I am indebted, is Maynard Solomon (ed.), Marxism and Art: Essays Classic and Contemporary (New York: Vintage, 1974), 567-87. A more recent treatment, with excellent bibliographical detail of primary and secondary works and an acute analysis of Bloch's strengths and weaknesses, is Ch. 5 of Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)—a treatment, however, not much interested in Bloch's relevance to cultural criticism.

¹⁵ The Utopian has been a topic in several of Fredric Jameson's works—see his chapter on Bloch in Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 116-59; 'Introduction/Prospectus: To Reconsider the Relationship of Marxism to Utopian Thought', Minnesota Review, 6 (1976), 53-8; 'Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture', Social Text, I (Winter 1979), 130-48; and The Political Unconscious, 281-99. In addition, the concept of the Utopian has been interpreted and further developed in a number of Frankfurt works on the aesthetic; it permeates the work of the like-minded Benjamin, who used his own terminology (like 'Messianic time') to convey concepts closely allied to Bloch's 'utopian'; Horkheimer and Adorno make use of the term and/or concept throughout their work; see particularly the ending of Adorno's Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), 247, and his posthumous Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (Boston: Routledge, 1984).

¹⁶ Hugh Grady, 'Containment, Subversion—and Postmodernism', Textual Practice, 7 (Spring 1993), 31-49.

¹⁷ I make use here of the distinction within Shakespearean comedy between a power-oriented 'first world' and an idealized 'second world' in Elliot Krieger, A Marxist Study of Shakespeare's Comedies (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), but the theory of comedy put forth there is in many ways the opposite of the Bloch-influenced concepts I work with here. Where Bloch would see a Utopian projection with a critical, non-ideological dimension, Krieger sees a specifically aristocratic ideological projection that mystifies the class struggle—although Fredric Jameson would see no inconsistency, arguing that every universalizing ideological viewpoint is necessarily Utopian at the same time; Political Unconscious, 289-92. For Kreiger, however, Shakespeare is only redeemed because, he argues, the processes of idealization are distantiated and put under scrutiny in the various Shakespearean texts.

¹⁸ I am indebted to Jameson's precedent in dialectically linking reification and the Utopian, in 'Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture' and Political Unconscious, 288-99. However, the details and theoretical framework of my own linkage of the two differ somewhat from Jameson's: his treatment emphasizes the collectivizing aspects of the Utopian, whereas I focus on its relation to the specific lacks and wants of determinate socio-historical situations.

¹⁹ Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International, 1963), 15.

²⁰ Karl Marx, letter to Arnold Ruge, May 1843; excerpted and repr. in Solomon (ed.), Marxism and Art, 58.

²¹ Thomas More's Utopia, ironically, is not a good example of Bloch's idea of the Utopian because of its reproduction of so many of the repressions of its social origins. The Blochian Utopian qualities of More's work reside in its cognitive rather than libidinal aspects, and these, in turn, are complex, with anti-utopian dimensions, a quality classically defined in the chapter on More in Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

²² Attention to the pastoral element of the play was the dominant approach to As You Like It in the High Modernist era, and a range of views on Shakespeare's incorporation and critique of the tradition has been defined; see e.g. Young, The Heart's Forest. My own use of the term, as argued below, is influenced by some insightful comments on the pastoral by Lacan.

²³ See Malcolm Evans, Signifying Nothing: Truth's True Contents in Shakespeare's Text (Brighton: Harvester, 1986), 155, and Keir Elam, '"As they Did in the Golden World": Romantic Rapture and Semantic Rupture in As You Like It', Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, 18 (1991), 217-32, for related but somewhat different deconstructive comments on the Duke's speech.

²⁴ I am giving one of several (not necessarily compatible) ramifications of Benjamin's use of this piece of cabbalistic lore. See, for one instance, Walter Benjamin, 'On Language as such and on the Language of Man', in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt, 1978), 314-32, or his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 37-8. This latter work is most relevant in the following passage: 'Adam's action of naming things is so far removed from play or caprice that it actually confirms the state of paradise as a state in which there is as yet no need to struggle with the communicative significance of words. Ideas are displayed, without intention, in the act of naming, and they have to be renewed in philosophical contemplation. In this renewal the primordial mode of apprehending words is restored' (p. 37). The Duke (and Jaques) soon move to a mode of 'philosophical restoration' in the absence of the original Adamic language.

²⁵ See Robert Schwartz, 'Rosalynde among the Familists: As You Like It and an Expanded View of its Sources', Sixteenth Century Fournal, 20 (1989), 69-76, for an argument that the Duke Senior is here expressing central tenets of the antinomian 'Family of Love', which taught a doctrine of a possible spiritual regeneration in nature from the effects of original sin. If this is true, I would argue, Shakespeare is putting this doctrine under the same kind of sceptical interrogation to which he subjected Montaigne on the Brazilian Indians in The Tempest. But fascination with the idea of a freedom of extra-marital sexuality in As You Like It, to be discussed below, may also be associated with this group, which, . . . has been linked with the social egalitarianism of King Lear.

²⁶ Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), book VII, p. 92. The whole of ch. 7, with its discussion of the problem of human happiness and desire, is relevant to this play.

²⁷ Harold Jenkins, 'As You Like It', Shakespeare Survey, 8 (1955), 40-51, and Ann Barton, Introduction to As You Like It, Riverside Shakespeare, 365-8.

²⁸ The cultural significance of Rosalind has been a major topic of feminist and new historicist criticism, engendering numerous disparate interpretations concerning whether she is more proto-feminist or patriarchal. See e.g. Clara Claiborne Park, 'How a Girl can be Smart and still Popular', in Carolyn Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Neely (eds.), The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 100-16; Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1983), 9-33; Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 153-6; Catherine Belsey, 'Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies', in John Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (New York: Methuen, 1985), 166-90; Barbara J. Bono, 'Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare's As You Like It', in Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 189-212; Phyllis Rackin, 'Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage', PMLA 102-/1 (Jan. 1987), 29-41; Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 98-103; Jan Kott, The Gender of Rosalind: Interpretations: Shakespeare, Büchner, Gautier, trans. J. Kosicka and M. Rosenzweig (Evanston: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 11-40; Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), 118-21; and Juliet Dusinberre, 'As Who Liked It?', Shakespeare Survey, 46 (1994), 9-21. For a fuller bibliography on what has become an extensive literature on the multifaceted sexual politics associated with Rosalind and the other cross-dressed Shakespearean heroines, see Ann Thompson, 'Shakespeare and Sexuality', Shakespeare Survey, 46 (1994), 1-8. Interestingly, three central cultural materialist-new historicist discussions of Shakespeare's (and other) cross-dressed heroines—Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66-93; Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 291-306; and Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 52-79—all eschew central discussion of Rosalind in favour of Olivia or Portia; and Louis Adrian Montrose, The Place of a Brother in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form', Shakespeare Quarterly, 32 (Spring 1981), 28-54, shifts the centre of attention in his reading of the play from Rosalind to Orlando. In contrast, for feminist critics Rosalind tends to be central.

²⁹ See Dusinberre, 'As Who Liked It?', on the connections with Ariosto (and his English translator John Harington) of Orlando, whose hanging of poems from trees mimics a popular poem-hanging episode of Orlando Furioso which was also a favourite subject of illustrators.

³⁰ See e.g. Dusinberre, 'As Who Liked It?', who, in a complex argument, finds a body-affirming Rabelaisian discourse in dialogue with a heroic one derived from Ariosto, both strands associated with Ariosto's English translator, and author of a treatise on the water-closet, Sir John Harington. Rosalind is overdetermined, but one of the carriers of the Rabelaisian: 'In As You Like It, Shakespeare acknowledges . . . the realities of passion as evasive of self-discipline. Passion is dangerous; it thrives not on liberty but on repression. . . . The energy of the play derives from a constant oscillation, centered mainly in Rosalind herself, between repression and expression, from which powerful fantasies of sexual desire are generated, and circulate through the entire theater, revitalizing both players and audience' (p. 19).

³¹ See Elaine Hobby, '"My Affection hath an Unknown Bottom": Homosexuality and the Teaching of As You Like If, in Lesley Aers and Nigel Wheale (eds.), Shakespeare in the Changing Curriculum (London: Routledge, 1991), 125-42, for a discussion of this and other sexual equivocations, often ignored in traditional annotations of these lines. Similarly, the title comes from another such often ignored double entendre, this time one in which 'bottom', according to Hobby, could refer to both penis and posterior.

³² Wilson, 'Like the Old Robin Hood', 13.

³³ See Schwartz, 'Rosalynde among the Familists'.

³⁴ Montrose, 'The Place of a Brother in As You Like If, 49-50, saw the horn in its phallic mode as involved in constructing male solidarity out of sexual anxiety. Similarly Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare 's Dramas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 15-38, sees the phallic horn as primarily affirming male solidarity in the service of patriarchy while Marilyn Williamson, The Patriarchy of Shakespeare's Comedies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986), 41-53, sees the cuckoldry references of the play as intrinsically misogynist (although she notes that Rosalind gets in some feminist points). None of these critics entertains the possibility of Utopian readings of the motifs.

³⁵ e.g. Valerie Traub, 'Desire and the Differences it Makes', in Valerie Wayne (ed.), The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 81-114, and Philip Tracy, 'As You Like It: Homosexuality in Shakespeare's Play', College Language Association Journal, 25 (1981), 91-105.

³⁶ Hobby writes: 'For a lesbian and feminist reader/teacher such as me, however, the central focus of the play's concern with order is found in the character of Rosalind. . . . In Rosalind, we are presented with two interwoven challenges to the stability of gender. This is achieved through a juxtaposition of Rosalind's characteristics as young woman with her behaviour when playing the part of a young man; and through a series of jokes about the actual gender identity of the actor playing Rosalind/Ganymede's part'; 'My Affection hath an Unknown Bottom', 134.

³⁷ Traub, 'Desire and the Differences it Makes', 106.

³⁸ See Ejner J. Jensen, Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), for a cogent argument critical of the tendency of 20th-cent. criticism of Shakespearean comedy to privilege the conclusion of plays over the dissonances and contradictions of the works' 'performative comedy'. He particularly faults Barber and Frye for this tendency. I would add that this procedure seems to me a consequence of the Modernist 'spatialization' of the work, which requires an array of its elements frozen in a single instance of time, an instance which has almost always been the work's ending (see Hugh Grady, The Modernist Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), 92-112). Jensen, however, calls for a return to an older paradigm based on immediate theatrical effects—an approach reminiscent in my view of Å. Å. Stoll's iconoclastic but pre-Modernist criticism—rather than developing what seem to me the Postmodernist implications of his argument: that the ending is always already deconstructed by the textuality of the work.

³⁹ See particularly Kott, The Gender of Rosalind, and Belsey, 'Disrupting Sexual Difference', 180-5.

⁴⁰ Jensen, Shakespeare and the Ends of Comedy, discusses both Hymen and the epilogue of the play as instances of complex events difficult to 'fix' into a determinate teleological ending, citing the contradictory readings of 20th-cent. critics in support of this view; see pp. 75-8.

⁴¹ Evans, Signifying Nothing, 145-90.

⁴² Raymond Williams showed many years ago that 'culture' can never be neatly assigned as the exclusive property of a single class; see his Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1958; repr. New York: Harper, 1966).

⁴³ Karl Marx, 'Speech at the Anniversary of the People's Paper', in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: Norton, 1972), 428.

Source: "Reification and Utopia in As You Like It: Desire and Textuality in the Green World," in Shakespeare's Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modern Reification, Clarendon Press, 1996, pp. 181-212.