SOURCE: Willis, Paul J. “‘Tongues in Trees’: The Book of Nature in As You Like It.” Modern Language Studies 18, no. 3 (summer 1988): 65-74.

[In the following essay, Willis surveys the widely varying interpretations of nature expressed by the characters of As You Like It, finding these interpretations parody, but ultimately preserve, the Christian metaphor of the “book of nature.”]

In As You Like It 2.1, Duke Senior assesses the Forest of Arden with a sweet variation on a theological commonplace:

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

(15-17)

These “tongues in trees, books in … brooks,” and “sermons in stones” all presumably do their part—with “the chiding of the winter's wind” (7)—in persuading the Duke what he is. But these lines also seem to initiate a playful test of the received idea of the book of nature.

As I shall argue, characters “read” the Forest of Arden in radically different ways: the Duke sees good, Jaques evil, Touchstone both, Corin neither. And Orlando perverts the book of nature by making it deify Rosalind. Like Orlando, all who comment on the setting seem to impose their own text on the divine text of the forest. Obviously, these self-reflexive readings are a helpful aid to characterization. But they also question the very existence of natural revelation. Finally, I think, As You Like It does not so much debunk this piece of orthodoxy as delight in its limitations.

Before proceeding to the play itself, it will be good to review the background of this doctrine and its currency in the Renaissance. Nature as book is a metaphor found everywhere in the sixteenth century. According to Ernst R. Curtius, the concept of the book of nature “originated in pulpit eloquence, was then adopted by medieval mystico-philosophical speculation, and finally passed into common usage,” where it was “frequently secularized” (321). Roland Frye shows, however, that the book of nature remained important in sixteenth-century Protestant theology (215-16). Apparently it remains important in the fossilized sermons of Shakespeare's Duke. Since nature is book by analogy to the scriptures—usually considered the primary book of divine revelation—we shall first recall some biblical texts that pave the way for sermons in stones. It is from these texts that later writers—including Shakespeare—take their cue.

In Genesis 1, of course, what God creates he labels good, providing, as it were, “good in every thing.” Psalm 19 asserts on this basis that nature reflects the good which is God: the heavens in fact proclaim his glory. Curiously, this is a silent proclamation, with and without words and speech. The Psalmist thus so much as admits that the speech of the elements is metaphoric, but for all that, no less real. Shakespeare, incidentally, seems to have known both Genesis and the Psalms quite well (Noble 42-43).

Jesus himself threatens sermons in stones in Luke's account of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem. When the Pharisees wish to rebuke the crowds for praising God “with a loude voice,” Jesus replies that “if these shulde holde their peace, the stones wolde crye” (19.37, 40).¹ The picture we get is of nature poised on the verge of praise. Shakespeare echoes this passage in describing Bullingbrook's own “triumphal entry” into London: “You would have thought the very windows spake, / … and that all the walls / … had said at once, / ‘Jesu preserve thee! Welcome, Bullingbrook!’” (R2 [Richard II] 5.2.12-17).

Paul of course argues from nature's book in the opening paragraphs of his Epistle to the Romans. The witness of creation is so strong and so clear, in Paul's view, that all who behold it have no excuse for worshiping anything other than God:

Forasmuche as that, which may be knowen of God, is manifest in them: for God hathe shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him, that is, his eternal power and Godhead, are sene by the creation of the worlde, being considered in (his) workes, to the intent that they shulde be without excuse.

(1.19-20)

But Paul's reliance upon this evidence may seem at odds with his equal insistence—in the same epistle—that nature is utterly fallen. The creation, he says, “is subject to vanitie,” in need of deliverance “from the bondage of corruption.” For “everie creature groneth with us also, and travaileth in paine together unto this present” (8.20-22). Can such a creation, thus fallen, still declare the glory of God? Paul never stops to address this difficulty. Apparently, we are still “without excuse.”

Medieval churchmen by and large emphasize this fallenness of creation (Tayler 73). But some of them pay special attention to a residue of created good in nature. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, writes: “Believe me who have experience, you will find much more labouring amongst the woods than you ever will amongst books. Woods and stones will teach you what you can never hear from any master” (Letter 107). Bernard's comments seem rather impulsive, for much of the letter in which they appear is devoted to praising the Gospel texts. But his enthusiasm, however overstated, cannot be denied.

St. Bonaventure writes more cautiously: “The universe is like a book reflecting, representing, and describing its Maker.” Even so, he continues, nature reflects just a “trace” of the Divine, much less than the “image” in persons and the “likeness” in saints (2.12). Bonaventure is careful to recognize the librum scripturae as well: it is God's will that he be known in both books (2.5).

Thomas A. Kempis, unlike Paul, demands a right sort of reader for the book of nature: “If thy heart be straight with God, then every creature shall be to thee a mirror of life and a book of holy doctrine” (2.4). But Raymond of Sabunde is more like Paul in insisting that the librum naturae cannot be misread. Sabunde even claims that the Bible itself is more easily given to willful misinterpretation.²

Sabunde's work, titled Natural Theology, is a piece of late scholasticism. By a quirk of fate it was translated by Montaigne, who apparently undertook the task in order to please his dying father. Once finished, Montaigne proceeded in his Essays to attack the idea that man can read the book of nature. In his view, our knowledge of nature is superimposed on what we see. Whether Montaigne believed that a book of nature existed at all is hard to say. But what cannot be read is not much of a book (Spencer 33-40).

Sixteenth-century Protestant theologians did not share Montaigne's skepticism. For them the book of nature was most readable, though limited in content. Luther calls nature the “mask of God” (qtd. in Santmire 26). And Calvin insists that “upon his individual works he has engraved unmistakable marks of his glory” (1.5.1). Even so, Calvin says—as Bonaventure does—that we gain but “a slight taste of the divine from contemplation of the universe” (1.5.15). Thus “it is needful that another and better help be added to direct us aright to the very Creator” (1.6.1). He goes on to note that Psalm 19 begins by describing the witness of creation but ends by praising the witness of the Word (1.6.4). Hooker concurs that the book of nature is not a sufficient guide to salvation (1.12.3, 1.14.1).

Calvin identifies two limitations of the book of nature: one in the readers, who are fallen; the other in the book itself, which shares our curse. As for the readers, Calvin says, “Althugh the Lord represents both himself and his everlasting Kingdom in the mirror of his works with very great clarity, such is our stupidity that we grow increasingly dull toward so manifest testimonies, and they flow away without profiting us” (1.5.11). And as for the book, “After man's rebellion, our eyes—wherever they turn—encounter God's curse. This curse, while it seizes and envelops innocent creatures through our fault, must overwhelm our souls with despair. For even if God wills to manifest his fatherly favor to us in many ways, yet we cannot by contemplating the universe infer that he is Father” (2.6.1). Most writers and preachers of the sixteenth century emphasized this fallenness of creation (Thomas 64).³

Thomas Browne, however, holds up the book of nature with no misgivings: “Thus there are two bookes from whence I collect my Divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant Nature, that universall and publik Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all.” In fact, Browne alters Paul's argument by scolding Christians for not reading the book of nature as well as pagans have: “Surely the Heathens knew better how to joyne and reade these mystical letters, than wee Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these common Hieroglyphicks, and disdain to suck Divinity from the flowers of nature” (1.16).⁴ I cite Browne to demonstrate that the concept of the book of nature, far from being a medieval anachronism, very much retained its force through Shakespeare's time and beyond.

From this short survey, we see that the concept of nature as book, although a somewhat tired commonplace, is at the same time charged with continuing interest and new debate—of which Shakespeare may have been well aware. In As You Like It 2.1, the trees are telling the glory of God—a pleasant doctrine, mellifluously spoken. But what does it come to mean in the play? How is the book of nature read in the course of our visit to Arden? And when readings differ—as they do—what is implied about this doctrine of natural revelation?

As Touchstone suggests, we shall “let the forest judge” (3.2.122). The Duke no sooner has his say than his lords inform him of Jaques' response to the sobbing deer. They tell how they found him “as he lay along / Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out / Upon the brook that brawls along the wood” (2.1.30-32). Thus we have a tree and a brook—key loci for our theme—as part of a setting that provides Jaques with a melancholy sermon. In the third of his “thousand similes,” Jaques sees the cruelty of the world in the herd which abandons the wounded stag. Then he proceeds to heap invective on

… this our life, swearing that we
Are mere usurpers, tyrants, and what's worse,
To fright the animals and to kill them up
In their assign'd and native dwelling place.

(2.1.60-63)

For the Duke, it is “this our life” which finds good in the forest; for Jaques, it is “this our life” which brings evil to the forest. He reads this evil, emblem-like, in the sobbing deer. It is true that the Duke also regrets the harm done to the beasts in the woods. But that which merely “irks” the Duke reduces Jaques to tears. For the Duke, then, the “good in every thing” yet remains; for Jaques, that good is utterly marred.

Thus side by side in the same scene are two different “readings” of the Forest of Arden, one quite hopeful, another pessimistic. What can we make of this? To begin with Jaques, it is easy to see that he reads himself into the landscape. Jaques is moved by his own perceived situation, flattering himself he is “left and abandoned of his velvet [i.e. courtier] friends” (2.1.50). But he is the one who abandons them, proudly setting himself apart as superior in his melancholy (Kronenfeld 458). A hart by a brook—the subject of Jaques' meditation—is an emblem for the soul that longs for God in the manner of Psalm 42.1 (Schleiner 175). But Jaques ignores this traditional reading. As Judy Kronenfeld puts it, he goes to the woods “not to contemplate God, but to contemplate and glorify his own ego as reflected by an environment empty of everything but his own emotions” (453). Thus, the weeping stag and the weeping man are joined in the mirror of the brook. Orlando hits on Jaques' method when he tells Jaques that the fool which he seeks “is drown'd in the brook; look but in, and you shall see him” (3.2.287-88).

But what of the Duke? Does he also read the forest in a self-reflexive way? On reflection, it seems quite likely. I would not agree with Bernard Shaw that the Duke's first speech is mere “pious twaddle” (qtd. in Latham 1xxxviii). At the same time, it is hard to escape the impression that the Duke discovers good in the forest mainly because he seeks it; he seizes a positive frame of mind to soften his exile, and the forest gives it back to him on a platter. Jaques may be able to suck melancholy from a song as a weasel sucks eggs, but the Duke is able to suck contentment from even a winter wind. In short, we above all sense his determination to locate good in the forest—we are less sure of its actual presence. For the Duke as well as for Jaques, perhaps, nature may be more mirror than lamp.

Touchstone seems to suggest as much when he plays their perspectives one against the other. Lord Amiens celebrates Duke Senior's preference for forest life in his two woodland songs, “Under the greenwood tree” (2.5) and “Blow, blow thou winter wind” (2.7), and Jaques shows his contempt for Arden in his parody of the first. But Touchstone's opinion of life in the forest is a comic riot of equivocation:

… in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now in respect it is in the fields, it pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life, look you, it fits my humour well; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach.

(3.2.13-21)

Touchstone, as his name implies, in part exists to reveal the nature of others in the play—he in himself is a sort of mirror (Palmer 35). So when asked to judge exactly that which others disagree upon, he crystallizes their disagreement. His double reading of the Forest of Arden serves to make both Jaques and the Duke look just a little silly. In addition, Touchstone's reading points up his own equivocal nature: we know him for a chameleon. “Ay,” he says upon entering the forest, “now am I in Arden, the more fool I” (2.4.16). He is more of a fool, more of an equivocator, in what seems to be an equivocal setting. The forest mirrors Touchstone too.

We may note also the episode in which Touchstone tells Audrey, by way of apology, that “here we have no temple but the wood” (3.3.49-50). It is the sort of thing the Duke might say in earnest. But here the context is quite ironic—Touchstone is merely hastening a patched-up marriage with the object of his lust. In Jaques' predictably jaundiced view, Touchstone is more like to “be married under a bush like a beggar” (3.3.84). Touchstone's tongues in trees are merely tongue in cheek.

Thus far we are reminded of Spenser's shepherd, Melibee, who says, “It is the mynd, that maketh good or ill” (FQ [Faerie Queen] 6.9.30.1). The mind of Shakespeare's shepherd, Corin, however, seems determined to make neither good nor ill of its environs. “Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?” asks Touchstone. Corin replies, “No more but that … the property of rain is to wet and fire to burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep; and that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun” (3.2.21-28). Corin sees what is physically there—rain and fire and grass and night—and makes nothing of them. The sermons in his stones are dumb. Let others speak of tongues, if they will, but trees are trees. And in being no more, they aptly mirror the practical bent of Corin's mind. Though he does not treat the forest as an emblem, the forest remains an emblem of himself.

To sum up, thus far we have encountered four different readings of the Forest of Arden: the Duke sees good, Jaques sees evil, Touchstone sees both, and Corin sees neither. It is not what the forest says, then, but what the characters hear, which seems to propel the drama. And what the characters hear are echoes of themselves: the trees are not tongues, they are sounding boards. The only natural revelation is the revelation of self.

We now turn to Orlando's part in the pattern. He flees to Arden from his murderous brother and arrives distraught. Accordingly, he labels the place “this uncouth forest,” likely to “yield anything savage” (2.6.6). The Duke and his men soon change his mind about the forest inhabitants, and Orlando pardons himself by saying, “I thought all things had been savage here” (2.7.107). But he still regards the forest itself as a “desert inaccessible,” whose inhabitants live “under the shade of melancholy boughs” (2.7.110-11). Thus far he takes Jaques' view: the word “melancholy” assures this identification. To a man like Orlando down on his luck, the forest is no good place. Once established in Arden, however, Orlando abandons himself to his infatuation with Rosalind. Tellingly, the erstwhile “melancholy boughs” he now deems as “fairest boughs” (3.2.133). In his new mood he would readily agree that there is “good in every thing.” Like Touchstone, then, Orlando equivocates.

But Orlando does not merely talk about the forest—he makes it literally bear his tidings:

O Rosalind! these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I'll character,
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere.
Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she.

(3.2.5-10)

In this business of writing love poems on trees, Shakespeare is following Lodge in particular and the conventions of pastoral romance in general (Latham xxxi-xxxii).⁵ Shakespeare goes beyond pastoral convention, however, by verbally linking Orlando's plans with the Duke's exact recipe for natural revelation. “These trees shall be my books,” says Orlando. And later, “Tongues I'll hang on every tree” (3.2.124). With knife and pen, Orlando makes obvious what others in the play have done all along: he imposes his own text on the supposedly divine text of the forest. He presumes to write the book of nature.

Orlando surpasses the others, however, in perverting the function of natural revelation. Creation is supposed to be a mute witness to the glory of God. But Orlando would have every tree witness the “virtue” of Rosalind, “the unexpressive she.” In Petrarch and Sannazaro, to take two examples, the pastoral lover often detects his beloved in the landscape. Shakespeare allows this pastoral tradition to collide head-on with traditional theology. As Rosalind puts it, “There is a man haunts the forest that abuses our young plants with carving ‘Rosalind’ on their barks, … deifying the name Rosalind” (3.2.350-54). Theologically, this deification is an abuse, the exact sort that Paul condemns in his discussion of natural revelation in Romans 1. “Mar no more trees,” says Jaques to Orlando (3.2.255), and the next scene presents us with a village vicar by the name of Mar-Text—a name that might more aptly apply to Orlando himself. In marring the trees he mars their text by imposing one of his own. Compared to the Duke's “sermons in stones,” his are a “tedious homily” (3.2.152).

In the end, what do all of these wildly variant and sometimes willfully perverse readings of the book of nature amount to? It is not enough merely to say that the woods vary according to the characters within them (e.g. Brown 149; Draper 11; Young 50). In the forests of Titus Andronicus, Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest, perception of setting exposes character. While the Forest of Arden likewise provides a helpful aid to characterization, Shakespeare reminds us it also may have a theological function.

Montaigne, we recall, is skeptical of our human ability to read the book of nature at all. For him, in effect, there is no book; the divine text is missing. Is wisdom at this entrance quite shut out in As You Like It as well? I think not. The genial atmosphere of the play seems to suggest that Shakespeare is more in the mood to love what he chastises. As C. L. Barber reminds us:

When the forms for serious meaning are inevitable, received from accepted tradition, the comic reapplication of them need not be threatening. People so situated can afford to turn sanctities upside-down; since they will surely come back rightside-up.

(83)

It does not seem likely that Shakespeare invites us to deny the doctrine altogether. Rather, I think he invites us to doubt our ability to perceive clearly the exact tidings of the book of nature. He presents us with an array of characters so self-preoccupied that they only see themselves. And, similar creatures that we are, none of us can hope to do much better. It is as if Shakespeare tests the Pauline doctrine of natural revelation and finds it wanting for very Pauline reasons: the fallenness—at least the self-interestedness—of humanity. The divine text may be willing, but the human readers are weak. This, we recall, is Calvin's opinion: “… such is our stupidity that we grow increasingly dull toward so manifest testimonies, and they flow away without profiting us.”

A similar situation obtains in The Merchant of Venice on that starry night when Jessica and Lorenzo are admiring the heavens. It seems to them they can almost detect the music of the spheres, but because of their own “bondage of corruption,” they are barred from truly hearing: “Such harmony is in immortal souls, / But whilst this muddy vesture of decay / Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it” (5.1.63-65). Anne Barton aptly comments that “while the music of the spheres … exists and may even be sensed on clear nights as an influence, it remains fundamentally inaudible” (253). The same might be said of tongues in trees, unheard in part because our hearing is impaired.

But what of the other part—the nature of the book itself? What, in short, of the fallenness of creation? For Calvin, this is another reason that the book of nature is hard to read. Shakespeare, I think, takes the curse into account.

Consider, for example, Orlando's rescue of Oliver from the lioness. The scene is set

Under an old oak, whose boughs were moss'd with age
And high top bald with dry antiquity:
A wretched ragged man, o'ergrown with hair,
Lay sleeping on his back; about his neck
A green and gilded snake had wreath'd itself,
Who with her head nimble in threats approach'd
The opening of his mouth.

(4.3.104-10)

Tree and man and snake comprise an obvious allusion to the fall. And insofar as Oliver's oak is a tree from the garden, it is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—a mysteriously equivocal title in itself (Roberts 121; Scoufos 223).⁶ Such a tree can only speak with forked tongue. It is the emblem of a fallen forest.

Throughout the play are other reminders of a fallen creation. Although the Duke claims not to feel “the penalty of Adam,” he still knows the painful cold of “the season's difference” (2.1.5, 6). The loss of perpetual Edenic spring was portrayed by many—Milton included—as a result of the fall (PL [Paradise Lost] 10.651ff). Touchstone invokes the world's decay in his reminder that “from hour to hour, we rot, and rot” (2.7.165-66). And this is the state of the “dead shepherd,” Christopher Marlowe, who hovers behind the Forest of Arden (3.5.81).⁷

Even Jaques' sobbing deer, that “wretched animal” that “heav'd forth such groans” (2.1.36), may serve to remind us, in Paul's words, “that everie creature groneth with us.” Certainly Jaques is much like Calvin in lamenting a curse that “seizes and envelops innocent creatures through our fault.” Likewise, he at least affects to believe with Calvin that this “must overwhelm our souls with despair.” Jaques is not all humbug. And neither, of course, is the Duke. For there is good in everything. But, there is evil in everything too. Nature is the good creation, but nature partakes of the fall. This in itself may justify a strange variety in the book of nature.

This dualism in the natural world receives classic expression in Romeo and Juliet, written as little as three years prior to As You Like It. It is Friar Lawrence—the Franciscan Friar Lawrence—who addresses the issue in his first soliloquy:

O mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In plants, herbs, stones, and their true qualities;
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give;
Nor aught so good but, strain'd from that fair use,
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse.

(2.3.15-20)

As Roland Frye observes, “It is difficult to find a more succinct, accurate, and memorable summary of the Christian theology of nature” (219).

To put my conclusions into perspective, we may note the often recurring comment that As You Like It mocks at pastoral without losing its pastoral quality, just as Rosalind mocks at love without losing her status as a lover (e.g. Young 70). In the same way, I think, Shakespeare mocks at the lofty ideal of the book of nature without tossing it aside. Rather, he exposes the complexity beneath the cliché. From the same flower in the Friar's garden come poison and medicine. From the same trees in the Forest of Arden come good and evil. The divine text is marred, and we are faulty readers to boot. The result in this rich comedy is the book of nature as you like it, a forest that exposes both God and man.

Notes

1. All New Testament quotations are from the Geneva Bible, New Testament Octapla.

2. “Scripturas sacras facile impia interpretatione subruere potest, sed nemo est tam execrandi dogmatis hereticus, qui naturae librum falsificare possit” (qtd. in Curtius 320).

3. A possible exception may be one eccentric London curate in the reign of Edward VI: he forsook his pulpit in St. Katherine Cree to preach his sermons from an elm tree in the churchyard—providing a most graphic instance of “tongues in trees” (Thomas 215).

4. In the same passage, Browne outdoes the Duke by refusing to regard a toad as misshapen: “I cannot tell by what Logick we call a Toad, a Beare, or an Elephant ugly.”

5. E.g. Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, and Lyly's Love's Metamorphosis. Curtius notes classical precedents in Callimachus and Propertius (337).

6. Orlando alludes to this tree at the Duke's banquet: “He dies that touches any of this fruit” (2.7.98). Scoufos notes that a similarly tall, dry, sere oak appears in the post-lapsarian Eden atop the Mount of Purgatory in Dante, where it is plainly identified as the Tree of Knowledge (216). For a discussion of oaks in classical and biblical context, see Fortin 574-77.

7. Harry Morris sees Touchstone's “Ay, now am I in Arden” (2.4.16) as an echo of “Et in Arcadia ego,” the tombstone inscription of the dead shepherd in Guercino's later painting. He speculates that the emblem was current in Shakespeare's day as a memento-mori icon (270).

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