SOURCE: Daley, A. Stuart. “The Dispraise of the Country in As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly 36, no. 3 (autumn 1985): 300-14.

[In the following essay, Daley argues against the critical opinion that Shakespeare presented a thematic “antithesis between court and country” in As You Like It.]

There is a well-established critical consensus that in As You Like It Shakespeare celebrates the superiority of life in the country to life in the city and the court. Is it possible that this consensus rests on a misunderstanding of the play? Or does the text in fact support the conviction of many critics that the forest of Arden represents a golden world, a restorative greenwood, where men live in the simplicity of nature in harmony and innocence?

“Freedom, of course, is in the hospitable air of Arden,” generalizes Harold Jenkins, “where convenient caves stand ready to receive outlaws, alfresco meals are abundantly provided, with a concert of birds and running brooks, and there is no worse hardship than a salubrious winter wind. This is ‘the golden world’ to which, with the beginning of his second act, Shakespeare at once transports us, such a world as has been the dream of poets since at least the time of Virgil when, wearied with the toilings and wranglings of society, they yearn for the simplicity and innocence of what they choose to think man's natural state.”¹

Critics have long etherealized the Forest as a fantasy world or fairyland or pastoral retreat apart from time. In this vein, Albert Gilman tells us “It is a remote Golden Age of harmony and innocence. The modern time and the corrupt court are its antithesis.”² Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch offers a similar opinion: “Arden having room for all fancy beneath its oaks,” As You Like It cannot be taken seriously. “It is all charming make-believe in the play, with Jaques and Touchstone as correctives or sedatives. To philosophize it is as absurd as to sit down and count out its impossibilities of time, ‘duration of action,’ geography, fauna.”³

The critical premises that concern us here are nicely summarized in an excellent analysis and evaluation, faithful to received opinion, by Michael Jamieson: As You Like It “is a comedy in which Shakespeare has created the dual worlds of Court and Forest, representing Everday and Holiday—a comedy whose structural simplicity and stylization recall folk- or fairy-tales. … Many of the qualities we have already noted in As You Like It, especially the sense of a created ‘golden’ world and the constant antithesis between Court and Country, derive their origin and appeal from the literary-theatrical convention of pastoral.”⁴

What I wish to show in this article is that the text of As You Like It rules out a scheme of “dual worlds.” I aim to demonstrate that the world of As You Like It has the thematic unity a work of art should have and that an antithesis between Court and Country has no relevance to the meaning of that work of art.

I

To begin with, it will help to correct two misreadings attributable to stock responses to the idea of forest. Long after Shakespeare wrote As You Like It, the word forest lost its primary meaning of a mostly untilled tract used mainly for grazing, propagating and preserving game, and, usually, growing some timber (hence a diversified landscape) and in popular usage came to suggest a large extent of fairly densely wooded country. Later readers and players mistakenly thought of the drama as taking place in dappled sunlight and sombre shadow under a leafy canopy. This largely imaginary landscape spawned further misinterpretation.⁵ For example, a common stock response to “forest” evokes birdsong, which traditionally identifies, along with brooks, flowers, and salubrious breezes, the locus amoenus or ideal literary landscape. Not surprisingly, Hartley Coleridge, followed by Quiller-Couch and others, invented the birdsong reported by Harold Jenkins as a “concert of birds.”⁶ The fact is that no bird sings anywhere in the play, partly because it would be unseasonable, but largely, I think, because a concert of birds and a salubrious breeze would be false to the mood of the setting.

Despite his romantic view of As You Like It, Sir Walter Raleigh conceded that “We hear only of the biting cold and the wintry wind.” The wind that bites and blows on Duke Senior is pastoral in the religious sense only; it makes him “shrink with cold” (II.i.9), thereby “feelingly” teaching him to know himself.⁷ When Adam collapses in Arden, Orlando carries him to a spot sheltered from “the bleak air” (II.vi.15). This is no locus amoenus, but the real-world suffering that resulted from Adam's Fall. Happily, not every commentator imagines an idyllic woodland where, in Raleigh's enthusiastic words, the outlaws “fleet the time carelessly in a paradise of gaiety and indolence, and there is summer in their hearts,”⁸ but most do.

The visitors to the Forest of Arden contemplate it without enthusiasm; upon the Duke's restoration they will return to the court with obvious satisfaction. The truth about the Forest, what it stands for in the value-system of the play, is “translated” for us by Duke Senior in a great speech (II.i.1-17) that, echoing Augustine, Boethius, St. Gregory, and, in general, the orthodox Christian tradition, represents the woods as the wilderness of the world wherein one's virtues, one's faith, and one's friends are tested and challenged to endure shrewd days and nights (V.iv.173) of spiritual purgation.⁹ A type of the good prince, the old Duke would have treated with contempt the modern hedonistic argument that he had escaped from reality into a paradise of gaiety and indolent leisure, basely surrendering to “Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, / Ease after warre …,” as Despaire recommends to Redcrosse Knight (The Faerie Queene, I.x.40).

George Lyman Kittredge erred in saying that “The Forest of Arden is not the world,” for in fact it represents an important part of the world of the play, a world based on customary analogies between rulers and states and fathers and families, a favorite dramatic scheme with Shakespeare.¹⁰ In many details this world reflects contemporary circumstances; it is further universalized by the use, almost thirty times, of the word world in its common meanings. One of them, significantly, registers on at least three occasions the concept of Vox populi, vox Dei—that is, a normative consensus on moral judgment by the people (I.i.169, ii.225, 236). Otherwise, the “people” themselves voice four verdicts upholding virtue and pity (I.i.170, ii.280, iii.79-80; II.iii.5).

Mainly, however, the use of world confirms society's need of a moral regeneration. The working-day world is full of briers (I.iii.12), a penalty of Adam. A world that envenoms the comely because others envy their comeliness (II.iii.14-15), it debases the ideals of the “antique world” (II.iii.57-62), and its foul body is miserable and infected (II.vii.13-60) as it now wags (l. 23). This world is full of ill-favor'd children (III.v.53), including of course an unnatural brother (IV.iii.122, 124), and fools enough. And it is, as ever, the arena of blind Fortune, for “Fortune reigns in gifts of the world” (I.ii.41). Consequently, Jaques proposes to Orlando that “we two will rail against our mistress the world and all our misery” (III.ii.278-79), and this in the Forest of Arden. Railing is, however, mere mummery. For as Orlando insinuates, reform must begin with each individual amending his own faults. The point is consistently made in the play. Out of the moral decay dramatized in Act I rise the issues to be resolved in As You Like It. Toward the end of the second scene, Le Beau focuses our attention on the central problem when he assures Orlando that “Hereafter in a better world than this, / I shall desire more love and knowledge of you” (I.ii.284-85). The dramatic and philosophical subject of the play, in other words, is how to recover a better world.

The Forest of Arden in itself cannot be the better world, then, though it may of course become a part of it. It is certainly not the world Le Beau hopes for, still less that of the deposed prince, or Orlando, or the great ladies for whom the court must be their setting. With the restoration at the end of the play, providently arranged through the ministry of an old religious man, all the major characters return to their divinely appointed places and callings from what has been an unnatural banishment.

II

The first audience surely recognized intimations of their own world in this stage-play world. When Rosalind, who in her aspect as Temperance feels very conscious of time, reminds her pupil Orlando that “The poor world is almost six thousand years old” (IV.i.94-95), she would have confirmed the audience's expectations. Rosalind reckons from the Creation, and we today can determine her “almost” date by consulting “A Perfite Svppvtation of the Yeres and Times from Adam” in the back of the Geneva Bible. Here we read that “this present yere of our Lord God 1560 [is] iust 5534, 6 moneths, and the said odde ten dayes” (sig. LLI.iii^v). If Rosalind (and her creator) had 1599 in mind, the age of the world comes out to 5573 years, 6 months, and 10 days, which is “almost” six thousand right enough.¹¹ The concept of the progressive decay of nature, one both ancient and widespread, could be a sobering thought, especially in the twilight of Elizabeth's reign. Of its meaning Sir Walter Raleigh would write in The History of the World (1614), “and as the Devil our most industrious enemy was ever most diligent: so is he now more laborious than ever: the long day of mankind drawing fast towards an evening, and the world's tragedy and time near at an end.” Taking a somewhat different tack, John Donne comforted his congregation with the thought that “The Sun is not weary with sixe thousand yeares shining; God cannot be weary of doing good.” But even so, he reminded the readers of An Anatomy of the World, The First Anniversarie (1611) that

So did the world from the first hour decay
That evening was beginning of the day,
And now the Springs and Sommers which we see
Like sonnes of women after fifty bee. …

(ll. 201-4)

Rosalind's dating points not to a golden age but to the Elizabethan age and “a miserable world!” (II.vii.13), quite literally “the poor world.”¹²

Being nameless and distanced somewhere in France, the dukedom in As You Like It functions as a neutral model of a commonwealth. Its inhabitants share this generic quality. Thus, for one example, Adam represents the Christian exemplar of faith, hope, and charity and foreshadows the intervention of Providence (cf. II.iii.38-55 and its Scriptural basis). The Forest's inhabitants also represent the classical three estates of the commonwealth, thereby allowing for the play's stress on the individual's obligation to his calling or vocation, which was then esteemed to be indispensable to a person's harmonious life in society and to achievement of the common good. In that connection, it is the vocation of the true laborer that Corin eloquently summarizes for Touchstone and not, as some have taught us, the joys of country life. The Forest's settings also combine the general and the particular to present a landscape both symbolic and natural, a landscape similar to that to be found in Renaissance paintings. They do not contrast the country with the court as exclusive moral entities. Act I introduces two settings, first the country seat of the eminent family of the de Boys (I.i and again in II.iii) and then the placeless and formless court of the tyrant duke (I.ii, iii; II.ii; and III.iii).

The remaining sixteen scenes are located in a large rural parish in the Forest of Arden, a parish of scattered sheep cotes and therefore mostly pasture land, but including a wood or two—features duplicated in historical fact by a number of parishes in Elizabethan Warwickshire. Being thinly populated (III.ii.125-26) with scattered, “so remov'd” (l. 342) dwellings, the district has been provided the customary chapel of ease with a vicar, here a type of the contemporary notorious “mar-text” (III.iii). John Manwood's then new (1598) book on the forest law opens with this definition: “A Forrest is a certen Territorie of wooddy grounds & fruitfull pastures.” The two settings are distinguished in the play, though relatively little is seen of the “wooddy grounds.” Shakespeare allows only four scenes to the “restorative greenwood” much extolled by critics, and three of them are quite brief.¹³

In contrast, not a single scene pictures city life; no one even mentions a street, window, inn, or town square. The hoary analogy in II.i of the beast city aims at picturing the universal human condition; that is, in “the city, court, and country” (l. 59). Later, in the tradition of medieval preaching, Jaques singles out the city woman's costly apparel (II.vii.74-75) to exemplify ostentatious pride and dressing above one's station in defiance of social decorum. A familiar complaint in three-estate literature, the topic also connects with the play's interest in vocation, of which dress was an outward sign. Dress had been a Tudor social issue, leading to attempts to revive the enforcement of sumptuary regulations.¹⁴ We can only conclude that city life has no relevance to the drama.

On the other hand, the dialogue in the country scenes devotes abundant imagery to the perils and hardships experienced there. Caroline F. E. Spurgeon has shown that the images of sickness, disease, and medicine in As You Like It are equaled or exceeded in number only by those in 2 Henry IV, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, and Coriolanus.¹⁵ My study of the imagery reveals also a web of repetitive allusions to cold, hunger, eating and sharing food, hunting and wounds, and the corollary flight and pursuit. Such imagery may even be visualized, as in II.vi and the subsequent succoring of Adam in scene vii. It should not be overlooked that the repeated images of sickness, hunger, hunting, and wounding coalesce and mostly end in the account of Orlando's climactic rescue of his brother, in IV.iii, from the snake and “the suck'd and hungry lioness.” There, for the most part, they are exorcised with the sins they indicate. The last food metaphor condemns the Fool's marriage: “for thy loving voyage / Is but for two months victuall'd” (V.iv.190-91).

Such imagery does not paint a picture of Arcadia. The atmospheric and thematic implications of this kind of imagery make it impossible to pretend that all is charming make-believe in As You Like It. Such imagery expresses the viewpoint of speakers who find the world of the Forest—where, in effect, they have fallen from Fortune's wheel—an unhappy and woeful scene, speakers who will welcome their providential release from it as “the good of our returned fortune” (V.iv.174). Pending their delivery, they can console themselves with the Duke's Boethian observation on the spectacle of the latest fugitives, Orlando and Adam: “Thou seest we are not all alone unhappy: / This wide and universal theatre / Presents more woeful pageants than the scene / Wherein we play in” (II.vii.136-39).

III

The characters who express an opinion about the Forest of Arden utter mostly dispraise. William proves the exception. “Wast born i' the forest here?” Touchstone inquires. “Ay, sir, I thank God,” replies William with sturdy local patriotism (V.i.24). William has reason, for he represents the young, upwardly mobile peasant landholding class in Elizabethan Arden. Boeotian William complacently admits to being so-so rich by the ripe age of five-and-twenty!¹⁶ On the other hand, his erstwhile girlfriend, Audrey, would rather “be a woman of the world” (V.iii.4-5).¹⁷

The courtiers in exile agree that Arden leaves much to be desired. It is true that, like Duke Senior, Celia makes a virtue of necessity. Having prudently taken gold into exile, like the Israelite women (Exodus iii.21-22), she has bought a good sheep property where she can willingly waste her time (II.iv.95) with profit on the investment.¹⁸ With the zeal of a reformed sinner, Celia's fiancé resolves to renounce the image of the rich husbandman, Cain, and “live and die a shepherd” (V.ii.12); but his aristocratic calling obviously forbids the abandonment of his lands and great allies to the detriment of the commonweal. As for Orlando and Adam, instead of their lighting “upon some settled low content” (II.iii.68), Fortune brings them to Duke Senior's sylvan camp and royal favor, leading to “A land itself at large, a potent dukedom” (V.iv.169). Arden has no place for a young gentleman fit to become a governor, let alone a prince.

On the whole, Arden appears to the courtiers to be a “desert” literally and figuratively. In deference to the Fool's critical reputation for sound judgment, I shall begin with his opinions. Upon his arrival, Touchstone bluntly says, “Ay, now I am in Arden, the more fool I! / When I was at home I was in a better place” (II.iv.16-17). In his opinion, Arden is not Le Beau's wished-for better world; no, rather, Touchstone's viewpoint anticipates the sentiment reflected in a modern infantry cadence song, “You had a good home and you left it, left it. …” The Fool remains impervious to the magic that commentators credit to the woods of Arden. An upstart courtier, he greets the natives as clods and clowns. When Corin asks him, “And how like you this shepherd's life, Master Touchstone?” he declares it a very vile and tedious life that reduces the shepherd to a parlous state of manners and morals (III.ii.13-19, 35-44). By this point, the place has already inspired in him the thought that from hour to hour we rot and rot (II.vii.27), a sentiment sympathetically reflected in Jaques' Seven Ages diatribe.

Later the Clown punningly compares himself to Ovid among the “Goths” (III.iii.7-9); Ovid was the classic victim of cultural deprivation among a rude people. Meanwhile, we are shown that the local women are vain and foul, the clergyman is an ignorant mar-text, and the backwoods dialect is lacking in grace and beauty. Dialect has been brought in earlier when the princesses have mocked Le Beau's affected suppression of the sound of r, saying “spo't” for “sport.” Ladies and gentlemen should speak clean English. Touchstone returns to the subject with his condescending translations into the vulgar for the benefit of William (V.i.47 ff.). Likewise, Orlando recognizes the speech distinctions that denote class and education. The upper-class accents of the shepherd boy's speech puzzle him, but Ganymede resourcefully credits it to an invented uncle, “who was in his youth an inland man” (III.ii.345), in contrast, that is, to her outlandish neighbors.

In apologizing to the disguised courtiers, Orlando avers, “Yet am I inland bred / And know some nurture” (II.vii.96-97). And, indeed, Orlando displays ample evidence of careful nurturing, probably up to about the time when he would have entered “school,” i.e., a university or an inn of court. His proficiency might have reminded the Queen of her father's when he was sixteen or seventeen.¹⁹ In any case, Orlando has enough nurture to know that the opposite of inland is outland or upland, meaning a region sufficiently remote from centers of civility to have outlandish speech and manners. The forest parish is what Orlando describes it to be, a desert inaccessible, the back of beyond, and he speaks of it in this fashion more than once. In his initial experience of it, Orlando's companion faints with extreme hunger and fatigue. In the next scene, “under the shade of melancholy boughs” where one can “Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time” (II.vii.111-12), Orlando asks Duke Senior, “If ever you have look'd on better days,” and the Duke replies unequivocally, “True is it that we have seen better days” (l. 120). The truth is visibly (and ironically) underscored by the outlaw's costume the Duke is wearing. The Fool, the youngster, and the prince all agree.

High esteem for civility was one of the features of traditional political thinking. Expounding the significance of the Dreamer's flight in John Gower's Vox Clamantis (ca. 1385), John Fisher remarks, “He abandons the city, the symbol of humanity and civilization, and flees to the woods and caves where he lives like a hunted animal (VC, I.1360).” Fisher goes on to note that “Man's relation to nature and his fellow men here is the very opposite to that of the Golden Age. Since sin had destroyed nature's beneficence, man's only hope of security lies in social organization, in reason, order, law, and the king.”²⁰ The forest or wilderness had long been a metaphor for the condition of life in the fallen world.

Apart from forest or wood, Arden is six times called a “desert.” Some notion of the connotations of desert for an Elizabethan may be gathered from these extracts from the extended definition in the popular encyclopedia compiled by Stephen Batman, Batman uppon Bartholome (1582), Chapter 52, under the heading “Of Desart”: Desart is a space of land, and is called Desart: for it is forsaken of manye men to dwell therein, … as Isidore saith: and that happeneth sometime, for the lande is barren, or for the ayre is not temporate. … And so desart is not laboured, & is full of thornes and pricking bushes, and is place of creeping wormes and venimous beasts, and of wilde beasts, and it is the lodges of banished men and of theeues, … lande of misgoing and of erring. For in desarte wayes bee vnknowen, for the downes and pathes be not worne, nor trodden, but they be growen and full of Broome, … and of other lettes that greeue trauailing men. And bee called Desarts, for they be not sowen, as Isidore sayeth. And so places of woodes and mountaines, that bee not sowen be called Desarts. …²¹

IV

We can turn now to Duke Senior's translation of stubborn fortune in his role as the ideal king setting the example for the many exiles in As You Like It. The deposed Duke treats “these woods” in the orthodox way as symbolizing the wilderness of man's life thrashed by the gales of ingratitude and cold adversity.²² He uses traditional images and themes; and as I have noted, the conclusions he reaches and thereby recommends to his followers summarize long-standing teachings of the Church that would have been perfectly familiar to his auditors. In doing so, he defines the moral power by means of which the exiles will stay the course until Providence delivers them. The old Duke both advocates and personifies two great princely virtues, fortitude and patience—the spiritual weapons that arm a good Christian against life's sea of troubles. With these virtues, the prince and his retinue can and will submit to adversity as an expression of the will of God and see it as a providential means of preparing and correcting them. What is required is to endure (I.i.24, 71; III.v.96; V.iv.173) one's tribulation (here also a nation's) with love and faith, seeking to benefit from the sweet uses of adversity, the precious jewel in the head of that ugly and venomous toad (cf. ll. 10-14).

Lord Amiens not only publicly assents as the spokesman of the loving lords but also recognizes in the Duke's speech the happy man who is the philosopher prince emancipated from bondage to Fortune. The deposed Duke does include himself among his unhappy band of brothers, but in fact until Act V he appears to be the only person deserving of Lord Amiens' accolade.²³ There the Duke commends them as “this happy number” (V.iv.172). Lord Amiens here makes a solemn commitment which has, in my opinion, been illogically and grievously misinterpreted. His “I would not change it” (II.i.18) does not mean “I am determined to renounce my proper station in life and continue until I die hiding in these woods, living off the land, and shrinking in the winter's cold.” How could he? The self-same virtues and noble vocation that brought him to the unhappy woods to his prince's side would dictate his return if it became possible. The “it” that he promises not to change is loyal and Christian endurance of fate with his prince. He will not defect. When the time comes, he and his co-mates will return with alacrity to their people and their duties. Meanwhile, their experience has feelingly persuaded them what they are (cf. II.i.11); that is, it has given them the precious gift of self-knowledge, a gift especially necessary for a magistrate.²⁴

That As You Like It celebrates the triumph of such patience over evil even Jaques comes to understand by play's end. At this point, on the verge of his own spiritual retreat, Jaques tells the Duke, “You to your former honor I bequeath / Your patience and your virtues well deserves it” (V.iv.186-87). This contrasts markedly with the Jaques of Act II, the saturnine Italianate libertine who maintains that any man would “turn ass” to come to the Forest of Arden, “Leaving his wealth and ease” in order to please a stubborn devotion to his prince or to his principles (II.v.46-53). So much for Adam, loving lords, and Celia when self-indulgence and expediency dictate standards and replace constancy.

V

While to a degree the Duke and his entourage passively endure the Forest of Arden, the emigree princesses deal forthrightly with the social problems they find there. Touching this, it is Rosalind rather than the Forest who provides the beneficial magic—“I say I am a magician”—in Arden. Quite simply, Rosalind possesses that magic of nobility conceded by Shakespeare to the children of royal stock.

Immediately upon their arrival in Arden the two girls are confronted with token cases of two contemporary social issues not found in Rosalynde. Facing their need for relief, Corin reports to the refugees his churlish master's disregard of the moral and social obligation to provide hospitality. Throughout the Tudor period and well after, the “decay of hospitality” excited condemnation. Even in the next reign a moralist could write, “And now may I complain at the decay of hospitality in our land, whereby many poor souls are deprived of that relief which they have had heretofore.” In addition, the circumstance in the play offers a timely topical allusion to the national distress caused by the bitter cold and crop failures of 1596-1598, which affected all parishes in some degree. Undoubtedly, there were members of Shakespeare's audience who had had to cope with refugees suffering like Celia, who is “with travel much oppressed, / And prays for succor” (II.iv.74-75).²⁵ Celia's plight inspires the only eschatological remark in a play built upon religious prescriptions; the reference (ll. 81-82) to Matthew xxv.31 ff. could well have been enhanced by the Biblical associations linking the Stranger, Aliena, with the law of hospitality. Further, while God requires almsgiving of all people of substance, liberality and pity especially distinguish the aristocrat from the churl.

Only a passing remark reveals a related problem, that of regulating the wages of laborers. Arranging to buy the sheep farm, Celia off-handedly promises Corin, “And we will mend thy wages” (II.iv.94). Corin's churlish master represented to the first audience a social type whose venialities were familiar. We should note, of course, that these injustices in the Forest are corrected by the ladies from the court.

In contrast to these allusions, the dramatic possibilities of another social problem earn it two lively episodes, III.v and IV.iii.6-74. The estranged relationship between the fatuous shepherd lover and the “proud disdainful shepherdess” (III.iv.50) provides the occasion. In As You Like It marriage sanctions love, and in Renaissance theory the proper kind of marriage upholds the state.²⁶ A soundly based marriage contributes both to the personal benefit of the spouses and to the social stability of the hierarchy. But Silvius and Phebe have picked up foolish notions from their betters (or possibly Marlowe), with the result that both have succumbed to disabling self-delusions that breed sloth and pride. The vicar being incompetent to tell them what marriage is (III.iii.85-86), Rosalind, characteristically observant of the three almsdeeds, accepts the challenge and duty of correcting these misdoers.²⁷

That there is fool's gold in the “golden world” we need not doubt, but for our purposes the main significance of the systematic disparagement of rustic Phebe in contrast with the royal princess is that it offers yet another striking instance of the play's consistent dispraise of the country. To summarize a complex literary exercise, it may suffice to say that Rosalind, the sweet Rose, has been firmly delineated by III.v as a type of the Neoplatonic and Christian gentlewoman embodying temperance and wisdom (“The best thing in him / Is his complexion” [III.v.115-16]), the virtues effective for healing the love-sick, including those, like Phebe, who are sick of self-love. Assuredly, “Hymen from heaven brought her” (V.iv.112). The conventional imagery of light and white identifies such a figure, as it does Rosalind. The opposite symbolism of darkness and black identifies the moral antitype: “What fellowship hath light with darkness?” (2 Corinthians vi.14). In order to use this economical opposition, Shakespeare deliberately turned Lodge's Phoebe from a blonde maiden as beautiful as Helen of Troy into (in the words of Sonnet 144) “the worser spirit a woman color'd ill,” making the Arden shepherdess both black and foul.²⁸

This should not come as any surprise, however, because the very opening scene of the play rules out any pretense about the moral superiority of the countryside. It opens with Adam, named at once, in the orchard of the country estate where Orlando's evil brother Oliver keeps him rustically at home (I.i.7). This setting harbors such depravity that when we are returned to it in II.i Adam warns the boy that “This is no place, this house is but a butchery,” and urges him to “Abhor it, fear it, do not enter it” (ll. 27-28). These two country scenes make it clear that the usurper's court holds no monopoly on evil.

VI

Obviously, then, the development of a traditional contrast between court and country is not intended. Instead, the opening scene develops a dramatic contrast between the old duke and the new duke and their respective courts. So the question that needs to be answered is Ancient Pistol's “Under which king, Besonian?” For the political thesis of As You Like It lies in the traditional antithesis of the tyrant—here the worst kind, being a usurping brother—and the good prince, here deposed yet retaining his people's love. Followers gathered around each represent the system of values, or vices, of their monarch. Consequently, the question in As You Like It is whether the old order of the old duke or the new order of the tyrannical new duke will triumph, and how.

Shakespeare consistently and sometimes subtly belittles the new court. He denies it setting, titled officers, and ceremony. Among the courtiers the usurper's favorite is the knight of the mustard, who swears by the honor that he does not have (I.ii.63 ff.). The same sins of the world and the devil motivate the de Boys manor and the de facto court, and accordingly the two tyrants (I.ii.288), Duke Frederick and Oliver, complement each other in villainy, the one inflicting injustice in the state by force, the other injustice in the family by fraud. Both are linked dramatically through their champion and emblematic alter ego, Charles the bonny prizer. An emblem of brute force applied with guile, the wrestler exemplifies the two tyrants and their evil genius. More generally, however, he can personify the forces of pride, wrath, and blind Fortune with which the heroic Christian must struggle. “For we wrestle not against blood and flesh, but against rule, against power, against worldly rulers, even governors of the darkness of this world, against spiritual craftiness in heavenly things.”²⁹ In praise of Orlando's victory over Charles, Rosalind justly uses a figurative plural, saying that he overcame his enemies (I.ii.225). For the rest, the usurper's court consists of faceless, obsequious time-servers. This in truth is a wicked court. But there is another, legitimate court that will triumph by the sheer force of virtue. And the antithesis between the two is what gives the play its mainspring.

By line 101 Shakespeare reveals in the reference to three or four loving lords the broad concept behind As You Like It. It was for the purpose of illustrating this concept that he ennobled the “bold Yeomen” who attend the exiled monarch in Lodge's Rosalynde. The loving lords in As You Like It suggest ideals associated with the classic and feudal tripartite society that was united by Empedoclean love, a love cementing families, estates, and kingdoms in mutual harmony and justice.³⁰ In terms of this concept, which invites examination of the various aspects of love, the loving lords present a substantial court establishment of pages, huntsmen, gentlemen, and lords, temporarily residing in a forest precinct where the duke's cave serves as Privy Chamber. Attendant gentlemen make music or wait upon the Duke at dinner, a courtly duty which justifies Orlando's separation from Ganymede during the crucial two hours of As You Like It. In II.vii this court assembles with its prince, who, magisterially seated under a tree, dispenses Works of Mercy. Here we behold, ironically garbed as outlaws, the legitimate maison du duc to which the moral magnetism of an ideal prince irresistibly draws the young, the merry, the worthy, the loving, and the enduring—in a word, the true aristocracy.

From them it is necessary to differentiate two characters who are spiritually apart, Touchstone and Jaques. Like the old Vice, they function to disparage and subvert the values honored by the loving lords and royal princesses. They also come under our present subject because of the natural and rural imagery which links them with the countryside. The vicar thinks of them as “fantastical knave[s]” (III.iii.106). Only Touchstone is ever called a courtier, a dubious compliment uttered by Jaques (II.vii.36, V.iv.42). Morally both have more in common with the new court than with the old, for which reason Shakespeare identifies them with brutish appetite (Jaques is the “brutish sting itself” [II.vii.66]) by means of interchangeable fool and beast imagery such as one finds in such lines as “very strange beasts, which in all tongues are call'd fools” (V.iv.37-38). Jaques says this about the Clown and Audrey, while of Jaques the Duke protests, “I think he be transform'd into a beast, / For I can no where find him like a man” (II.vii.1-2). Both knaves see themselves and others, moreover, as beasts. The material fool's wisdom wears a muzzle. Meanwhile, the naturalism of Jaques is vomitus (II.vii.64-69), and his name suggests malodorous and excretory-cloacal images that become explicit in the Clown's allusion to a close-stool cover: Touchstone begs “good Master What-ye-call't” to “pray be cover'd” (III.iii.73, 76-77).

Shakespeare stresses the similarity with Frederick by sequestering Jaques with his humorous counterpart, now a convertite, at the play's end. The beast imagery connects both the Clown and Jaques to man's base natural condition. Far from idealizing, then, such imagery once more dispraises the country and implies the inadequacy of nature as a school of virtue.

All the major dramatic elements agree in denying moral superiority to the countryside. It follows, therefore, that the play cannot be understood in terms of an antithesis between court and country. Taking such an approach disintegrates the action into a series of inconclusive encounters. It runs counter to thematic coherence and relation. If, as the pastoral convention would lead us to expect, Arden is an Eden-world of holiday, why is it, as Dame Helen Gardner asks, “a place which all the exiles, except one, are all too ready to leave at the close”? Anne Barton finds the explanation for their leaving “a better world” in the dictates of a mechanical plot design: “We have learned to notice,” she writes, “as typically Shakespearian the way characters move between two contrasted locales—one of them heightened and more spacious than the other—and we regard that ‘new society’ which makes its way back to the normal world at the end of the play as subtler and more consequential than older critics did.”³¹

Here one must amend Barton's reference to a “new society,” because it is the old society that returns from Arden. The denouement follows on the providential overthrow of the new duke and his new court (I.i.97, 100) by the old religious man (V.iv.160-65), thereby restoring the better world of the old duke and his old order. This is Orlando's antique world, the world of old Adam and his old master, Sir Rowland, the paragon who was the enemy of the new duke.³²

As You Like It addresses the ideals and concerns of an aristocratic and knowledgeable audience, the titular “You.” It is Shakespeare's book of the governor, and it is pervaded with religious precepts and practices common to the genre. Its so-called encounters, amplified with iconographic and stage imagery, illustrate steps in its program of tutelage. I doubt that the Elizabethans considered any of the outcomes it depicts—especially the conversions—as implausible. I find it impossible to imagine, for example, that the Duke's reversal of fortune would have seemed implausible to a Queen whose own delivery from an envious court after notable adversities she had ascribed impromptu to God's providence, quoting the Psalm, “A Domino factum est istud, & est mirabile in oculis nostris.”³³

Notes

1. “As You Like It,” Shakespeare Survey, 8 (1968), 43. This passage is quoted in Richard Knowles, ed., As You Like It, A New Variorum Edition (New York: MLA, 1977), pp. 519-20, hereafter cited as MLA. The Variorum's “Survey of Criticism” by Evelyn Joseph Mattern, ihm, provides a useful guide to the theme of country versus court, pp. 511-27 and passim.

2. Introduction to As You Like It, in The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, gen. ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), p. 841.

3. As You Like It, New Cambridge Shakespeare, J. Dover Wilson and Arthur T. Quiller-Couch, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1926), pp. xvii, xviii.

4. Shakespeare: As You Like It, Studies in English Literature, No. 25 (London: Edward Arnold, 1965), pp. 16, 17-18. Another scene-by-scene commentary on action and details in As You Like It is in Alfred Harbage, William Shakespeare: A Reader's Guide (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963). Rather like Quiller-Couch, Harbage finds the play mostly fragmented, impromptu, and extemporal (p. 238), with patterns apparently accidental (p. 245). He concludes, “What appears to be a medley, a structure of spontaneous improvisation, cannot be evaluated by objective standards, and … [is] but a pretty play” (p. 245).

5. The settings are distinguished in my “Where Are the Woods in As You Like It?” Shakespeare Quarterly, 34 (1983), 172-80, and related to landscapes of contemporary Warwickshire Arden; I examine specific ecological features in “Observations on the Natural Settings and Flora of the Ardens of Lodge and Shakespeare,” English Language Notes, 22 (1985), 20-29. For another study of the play's basis in reality, see the major article by Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 32 (1981), 28-54, which argues that “as the actions within the play are dialectically related to each other, so the world of Shakespeare's characters is dialectically related to the world of his audience” (p. 54).

6. Hartley Coleridge, MLA, p. 556. For details of the locus amoenus or pleasance setting, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollinger Series xxxvi (1953; rpt. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), 195-202.

7. Citations are to The Riverside Shakespeare, gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). Duke Senior has recalled Adam's penalty (II.i.5). Joshua Sylvester, trans., Bartas, His Devine Weekes and Workes (1605; rpt. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1965), p. 276, conventionally describes prelapsarian Eden as a setting so balmy “That boisterus Adams body did not shrinke / For Northern winds. …” The Arden winds make the Duke's body “shrink with cold” (II.i.9). Cf. Spenser's use of the verb, describing Redcrosse after his ordeal: “all his flesh shronk vp like withered flowres” (Faerie Queene, I.viii.41.9). Raleigh, MLA, p. 557.

8. Raleigh, MLA, p. 557. Critics who think Arden something less than idyllic include H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (London: Methuen, 1938), pp. 278-79, quoted in MLA, p. 558; Helen Gardner, “As You Like It,” 1959, rpt. in Laurence Lerner, Shakespeare's Comedies (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 253-56; and John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies, 2nd ed. (London: Methuen, 1962). On page 149 Brown observes that “Arden is not necessarily or unequivocally the ‘golden world’ of the people's imagination” (the reference is to Charles's gossip); cf. pp. 144-45. A paradaisical climate is deliberately ruled out by “the penalty of Adam, / The seasons' difference” (II.i.5-6). A place of exile and the mutability of April-come-December calls for a postlapsarian landscape; see Derek Pearsall and Elizabeth Salter, Landscapes and Seasons of the Medieval World (London: Paul Elek, 1973), pp. 122-29, 132-34, 197-99, and passim.

9. “The use of a wilderness to describe this world is widespread and ultimately goes back to the Alexandrian interpretation of the Old Testament,” observes Morton W. Bloomfield in The Seven Deadly Sins (1952; rpt. East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1967), p. 151; see George Williams, Wilderness and Paradise in Christian Thought (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1962). In a medieval manuscript quoted by A. Caiger-Smith, English Medieval Mural Paintings (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), p. 43, all, like Duke Senior's co-mates, are brothers in exile. “For hit is so that all mankynde in this warld nis but in exile and wildernesse out of his kyndely contre”—a familiar Boethian idea. This familiar metaphor for man's life was often extended to the commonwealth and was represented by a tree, a garden, or a wilderness in plays and pageants. See David M. Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry 1558-1642 (Columbia Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1971), p. 234, for London itself in 1638; also see pp. 296-97. The forest or desert offers an apt arena for the trials and tribulations of human life, and trust in the sweet uses of adversity was a commonplace of Christian belief.

10. The political importance of the family and its correspondence to political themes of the state are discussed by Robert B. Pierce in Shakespeare's History Plays: The Family and the State (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1971). MLA, p. 542, quotes Kittredge.

11. Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (1942; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 9, takes up the age of the world and, in note 21, the allusion to it in Love's Labor's Lost, V.ii.11. Cf. The Taming of the Shrew, Ind. ii.63, “in this waning age.” By his source, Spencer gives the age of the world at Shakespeare's birth as 5282, which differs from the Geneva Bible's chronology. Thomas Nashe makes it “now 5596”; see Have With You to Saffron Walden (1596), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (London: Bullen, 1910), iii, 28. For Nashe it was no golden age. MLA is silent on Rosalind's age of the world and its implications.

12. Raleigh is quoted by F. P. Wilson in Elizabethan and Jacobean (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945), p. 13. For John Donne, see Sermons on the Psalms and Gospels, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), p. 184, and The Epithalamions, Anniversaries, and Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 26-27, and the line notes for 202-4 on pp. 139-40. Cf. Faerie Queene, IV.viii.31.6-9.

13. A Treatise and discourse of the lawes of the forrest (London: T. Wight and B. Norton, 1598), fol. 1. On the four woodland scenes see p. 179 of my “Where Are the Woods in As You Like It?” Years ago, George P. Baker, ed. As You Like It, The Renaissance Shakespeare (1907), p. xxv (quoted, MLA, p. 557) commented, “But really for the Elizabethans, as for the reader today, the effect [of the play's atmosphere of the woods and outdoor life] is produced by four scenes only.” Apparently the play distinguishes between the virtue of human beings and the physical phenomena of Arden. In Church doctrine the latter partakes of good; presumably it lacks the malice of fallen human nature. Hence the winter's wind is not so unkind as man's ingratitude (II.vii.176), though, of course, it may suitably symbolize it, as explained, for example, in The Boke of Wysdome, trans. J[ohn] Larke (London: Thomas Colwell, 1565), folio 26: “the sinne of ingratitude is lyke the wynde, whyche dryeth vp the water of the fountaines of pytie [cf. II.vii.117, 123], the dewe and water of grace, and goodnesse of mercye.” This passage is quoted in the notes on p. 164, Christine de Pisan, The Epistle of Othea, trans. Stephen Scrope, ed. Curt F. Bühler, eets No. 264 (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970).

14. The evils of extravagant dress were a popular subject taken up by such Tudor authors as Roger Ascham, William Camden, William Harrison, Philip Stubbes, and Thomas Nashe. On the frequent Tudor proclamations forbidding “excess of apparel” see Karl J. Holzknecht, The Backgrounds of Shakespeare's Plays (New York: American Book Co., 1950), pp. 43-45. There had been such a proclamation as recently as 6 July 1597. On the decorum of dress see Sir Thomas Elyot, The Book named The Governor, ed. S. E. Lehmberg (London: Dent, 1962), pp. 102-3.

15. Shakespeare's Imagery (1935; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1965), Chart vii.

16. For details on the increasing wealth of the landed peasantry in five parishes in Arden above Stratford in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, see Victor H. T. Skipp, Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case Study of the Forest of Arden (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 68-79 and passim; he concludes, p. 70, “From the point of view of the peasant, all this simply meant miraculously rising living standards.” MLA is silent on the probable topical allusion here.

17. Audrey wrongly hopes that “it is no dishonest desire to desire to be a woman of the world” (V.iii.4-5), for she is by calling a goat-girl and should know herself accordingly. Audrey's desire to be a worldly woman (an evil desire) would be held dishonest and ludicrous. The answer is that she should do her duty in that state of life unto which it pleased God to call her: see The Book of Common Prayer 1559, ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1976), pp. viii, 286, 315. In this respect foul Audrey's ambition contrasts with Corin's content in his calling. The play in general reflects the social and religious doctrine of vocation. Orlando's problem, for example, is how to prepare himself to follow his father's calling, to which he is born. This topic is not recognized in MLA, but it inheres in the play's classical-Christian model of society. The same concept lies behind Jaques' speech on the idea of “All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players.” See Don Cameron Allen, Image and Meaning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 144-46. On the doctrine, see Ruth Mohl, The Three Estates in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1933), Chap. vii, Sect. 12, “The Folly of Changing One's Estate,” pp. 332 ff.

18. In “Social Rank and the Pastoral Ideals of As You Like It,” SQ, 29 (1978), 339, Judy Z. Kronenfeld belittles Celia for taking into exile gifts of the world, “our jewels and our wealth” (I.iii.134), complaining that “Putting jewels in one's purse contrasts strongly with giving up one's purse, which, of course, is what the servant Adam does before departing for Arden.” But Celia and Adam share identical intentions, and Celia herself is the true treasure (II.ii.7). Celia's foresight here proves her prudence, a virtue associated with older heads but conspicuously lacking in fools, such as—and this is the actual dramatic contrast—her father, Touchstone, and Jaques. Kronenfeld's thesis forces her to classify Celia's friendship as a pastoral virtue, ignoring the Book of Ruth, Aristotle's Ethics, the Romance of the Rose, and not a little courtly literature. As on other points in the play, Sir Thomas Elyot's The Governor provides excellent commentary; he treats the aristocratic ideal of friendship in Book ii, Sections 11 and 12. The proper setting for Celia's aristocratic gesture is a court, not a pasture.

19. Henry had achieved prowess as a shooter, a jouster, and a wrestler in his teens. Like Orlando, he was never schooled and yet was learned and, of course, enchantingly beloved. Cf. A. F. Pollard, Henry VIII (1902; rpt. London: Longmans, Green, 1951), pp. 15-20, 30-33. Orlando clearly has the breeding he asserts, including acquaintance with metrics, with the courtesy of nations, with classical myths, and with the “civil sayings” (III.ii.128) that prompt Jaques' jibe, “You are full of pretty answers.” Orlando can handle the sword and bow, and has had excellent coaching in wrestling. Training in these martial arts was begun early; Orlando's education appears to have been suspended when he was about fifteen or sixteen.

20. John Gower (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1964), p. 174. W. Gordon Zeeveld discusses the concept of civility in The Temper of Shakespeare's Thought (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 186-91.

21. Batman vppon Bartholome, his booke De Proprietatibus Rerum (London: Thomas East, 1582), folio 211. The dangers of travel in “deserts” or forests were well known in Shakespeare's Warwickshire; see Zeeveld, p. 201. The precautions taken by Celia and Rosalind, and Orlando's reaction to happening on a band of outlaws, would have seemed entirely sensible. Orlando's allusion to younger sons being driven to make a living by highway robbery (II.iii.31-35), like Robin Hood, touches on a well-known problem and connects directly to the need to educate young gentlemen in a calling. A post-facto case is that of young Robert Throckmorton, from near Stratford, who turned to highway robbery and was executed in 1608; see Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries, new ed. (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1907), p. 148. The play rejects the Robin Hood model. A book was published about the affair in 1608 (stc 24035, another issue, 24053.5).

22. Wind traditionally symbolized, with Biblical equations, adversity, death, the Devil, the storms of life, and the winds of fortune. “What though the tempest of an [a]dverse winde / Hath blowne thy fortune downe, ruind thy state?” writes R. C., Gent., The Times' Whistle, ed. J. M. Cowper, (London: N. Trübner, 1871), p. 101.3202-3. Spenser uses the north wind as the agent of evil, especially pride (e.g., Faerie Queene, III.i.9-12). This is close to As You Like It's comparison of the winter's wind with man's ingratitude, an expression of pride. Cf. Elyot, p. 152. Donne reminds us that “stormes and tempests … are not onely in Gods Armories, but they are in his treasuries,” and explains why (Sermons, p. 61).

23. Amiens speaks with authority. The ancients and the medievalists largely agree that virtue and happiness are reciprocal, and the Duke's speech amply demonstrates his possession of both. At the end even Jaques recognizes and attests to the triumph of the Duke's patience and virtues. Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Plutarch, and others teach that virtue is the cause of happiness, and that the proof of virtue is one's superiority to adversity. Thomas Lodge sums up this notion in the foreword to his translation of Seneca, saying “that to be truely virtuous is to be happy, to subdue passion is to be truly a man, to foresee and unmaske miseries is to lessen them, to love well is to be vertuous.” Quoted by Hiram Haydn in The Counter-Renaissance (1950; rpt. New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 490. And cf. the great exemplar, Job v.17 (Geneva), “Beholde, blessed is the man whome God correcteth.”

24. Elyot, Book III, Chapter 3, on the topic of justice, argues that the magistrate must know himself to be capable of it. For Erasmus, self-knowledge was the means to the attainment of virtue. It was an old and pervasive idea; see E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1948), p. 66. Rolf Soellner, Shakespeare's Patterns of Self-knowledge (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1972), p. xiv, mentions only one instance in As You Like It. Rosalind says to Phebe, “But, mistress know yourself” (III.v.57). But a character's self-knowledge or lack thereof is germane to perhaps a dozen situations in the play.

25. Quotation from L. C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 114, in a passage on the decay of hospitality, where Knights cites Green, Dekker, and Barnabe Rich; see also pp. 152-54. Uncharitableness connects with the extravagance of such as Jaques' city-woman (II.vii.75-76). A Proclamation Against Inordinate Apparal, 6 July 1597, asserts that “In the present time of difficulty the decay and lack of hospitality appears in the better part of all counties.” The plight of the princesses here has striking topicality, since the poor of Warwickshire had suffered grievously in early 1597 and again a year later “for the extreame want and scarsity of graine in that countie, and specially at Stratford uppon Avon, Alcester and other places thereaboutes”; see Acts of the Privy Council of England, ns Vol. xxviii (a.d. 1597-98), ed. John Roche Dasent (London: hmso, 1904), 315. During this “Great Famine” refugees may have sought relief in the Forest of Arden; cf. Skipp, pp. 18-19, 33-37, 53, 93, and passim.

26. Accepted doctrine held that the family is the foundation, and microcosm, of the state; see Pierce for documentation. Sir Philip Sidney elegantly states the idea in The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. Jean Robertson (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), p. 383: “marriage being the most holy conjunction that falls to mankind, out of which all families, and so consequently all societies, do proceed, which not only by community of goods but community of children is to knit the minds in a most perfect union which whoso breaks dissolves all humanity. …”

27. Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, The Book of Husbandry, edn. of 1534, ed. Walter W. Skeat (1882; rpt. Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1965), instructs his readers about the almsdeeds, pp. 118-23, of which the “fyrste maner” is the relief of the needy, the second manner (p. 120) is to forgive them that have trespassed, and the third (p. 121) is to “To correcke a misdoer, and to bring hym into the waye of ryghte.” The play enacts all three as contributing to a better world; but the third, as here, motivates the liveliest encounters. Of the several issues of Fitzherbert, one appeared in 1598. Rosalind judges the offenses of Silvius to be so serious that “He deserves no pity” (IV.iii.66); briefly, Silvius has violated decorum and fallen into lover's sloth.

28. See Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde, in Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. II (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), where, pp. 227-28, “Phoebe sate, (the fairest Shepheardesse in all Arden) … and to shrowde her from the Sunne, [wore] a chaplet of roses: from under which appeared a face full of Nature's excellence, and two such eyes as might have amated a greater man than Montanus” (more than one market there!). A beautiful Phoebe, pp. 231-33, her charms dazzle the King, pp. 251, 252.

29. The Book of Common Prayer 1559, p. 207, The Epistle [Eph. vi].

30. Mohl, pp. 370 ff., treats the doctrine of love as a social factor, citing contemporary writing including the sixteenth-century literature of estates, pp. 373 ff. In a broad sense, the wished-for better world, “When earthly things made even / Atone together” (V.iv.109-10), is effected by that love eulogized by Philosophy at the end of Book ii of Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, between the discourses on adversity and happiness. The stability of the realm rests on the love of the king for his people and of his people for him. “For the beneuolente mynde of a gouernour,” writes Elyot, “not onely byndeth the hartes of the people unto hym with the chayne of loue, more stronger than any material bondes, but also gardeth more saufely his persone than any toure or garison” (p. 127). On this principle, Elyot, like Erasmus, concurs with Isocrates, Xenophon, Pliny, and others, classical and medieval; see Introduction, Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Lester K. Born (1936; rpt. New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), passim.

31. “As You Like It,” Laurence Lerner, ed., Shakespeare's Comedies (1959; rpt. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1967), pp. 256-57, and Anne Barton, “‘As You Like It’ and ‘Twelfth Night,’” in Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14: Shakespearian Comedy (London: Edward Arnold, 1972), p. 161. Both try to explain the play as showing the superiority of the country life to the court.

32. The memory of Sir Rowland de Boys, repeatedly cited and invoked, gives As You Like It its moral touchstone, because the nobles are quickly distinguished as virtuous or vicious according to their favorable or unfavorable response to the chivalric ideals that that memory signifies. Sir Rowland represents the beau ideal of the aristocratic spirit and calling that is treated in the play; but he also poses related questions, such as the aristocrat's inheritance of virtue in the blood. The name had connections with Warwickshire. Incidentally, Shakespeare himself had recently (1596) been recognized as a gentleman of that county. The very different functions of Sir Rowland and Sir John of Bordeaux in Rosalynde illuminate the differences between the romance and the play.

33. Sir Robert Naunton, Fragmenta Regalia (1641; rpt. London: Edward Arber, 1870), p. 16, adds “which [verse] we find to this day on the stamp of her gold [coins].” See the plates illustrating gold coins in Shakespeare's England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917), facing p. 326 and p. 338. The Queen would have been an ideal spectator for As You Like It in several ways. When Princess and, like Rosalind, more than common tall, notably her father's daughter, and loved by the people, Elizabeth had been in grave peril for suspicion of treason. At times Woodstock and Hatfield were her refuges from the envious court. Like Duke Senior, she perfectly understood the uses of adversity and the answering patience, for, as Naunton says, “her destiny had decreed to set her an Apprentice in the School of Affliction” so that, by her twenty-sixth year (and accession), she was “grown ripe, and seasoned with adversity, and in the exercise of her Vertue” (pp. 14-15).