[In the following essay, Baker examines the relationship between ritual and drama in As You Like It, and observes that Shakespeare's depiction of the characters' psychological and symbolic transformation resembles “a generic rite of passage.”]

Old theories die hard. Old evolutionary theories seem not to die at all, at least in the case of those propounded by the Cambridge classicists more than a half-century ago. The emergence of drama from ritual makes a good story, whether one of civilization's triumphing over primitive irrationality or one of drama's energies arising from its origins in primitive vitality. Perhaps sheer narrative charm keeps such notions alive for critics long after most scholars have discarded them for lack of supporting evidence. A recent essay by Richard F. Hardin summarizes the persistence of evolutionary theories and other problems with uses of the term ritual in literary criticism over the past few decades.¹ In turn, he commends and recommends attention to the work of more up-to-date anthropologists, particularly Victor Turner. And indeed several important Shakespearean studies draw upon Turner's descriptions of rites of passage.² Yet I believe we need to rethink altogether the relationships between ritual and drama, particularly Shakespearean drama.

Even the best instances of literary criticism's borrowings from anthropological theories of ritual continue to risk being burdened by the covert premise that as drama imitates life, critics can explain its representations by reference to studies of “real life” phenomena. The assumption persists that drama is somehow validated by our discoveries that it replicates patterns social scientists have identified empirically. Dramatic criticism is in this way doubly distanced: drama itself is predicated, if you will, on life-as-it-is-lived, and criticism of the drama is thus validated by references to studies of “real life,” as if anthropologists were engaged in an endeavor closer to reality than our own. We are still uncomfortable with our painted chairs.

Now that resemblances between ritual and Shakespearean drama are well-documented, it is time to consider possible explanations for these resemblances. Indeed, it is vital to do so, since any explanatory system invites reification and oversimplification. Only by careful attention to the assumptions implicit in comparing drama with ritual can critics avoid making one subservient, making one a pale imitation of the other. Of course, the evolutionary theories prevalent earlier in this century accounted for resemblances by ascribing origins; let us dispose quickly of the genetic argument.

Ritual and drama are related activities. Both manifest the human ability and need to construct symbolic configurations for ordering and organizing experience. More specifically, both present performed symbol systems: public, communal, enacted. The temptation to derive one from the other is nearly irresistible. But logically and temporally, drama would have to be prior to ritual. Certainly, the first performance of any ritual-to-be must be drama rather than ritual because it cannot be repeating anything, a necessary condition for an activity to be called ritual in any rigorous sense of the term. (It cannot simply be called life or random event either, because a clearly demarcated realm of the non-ordinary, non-workingday, is another necessary condition for ritual.) Only on a second performance does a proto-ritual begin to qualify as ritual. So every ritual turns out to be a repetition of an originating drama. This is to say that the existence of any ritual demonstrates the prior existence of drama as a human possibility. If a ritual imitates an originating drama, it must be less “real” than that drama, a step further removed from whatever reality may be. (Turner, in fact, draws upon his understanding of drama to develop his theories of ritual.) In practice, of course, we can simply acknowledge that ritual and drama often tell the same stories, orchestrate the same sorts of experiences. As analogues, then, ritual and drama are mutually illuminating, aside from any assumptions about origins or priorities. To treat ritual and drama as analogues, however, still assumes some justifying connection between them, and I propose the following relationship.

Victor Turner has continued the work begun by Arnold Van Gennep in demonstrating that rituals, like plays, are complex symbolic structures that can be analyzed as such, and that, again like plays, apparently diverse rituals can be shown to share a generic structure.³ Indeed, certain symbols and symbolic manipulations cluster together in widespread rituals with related purposes, much as certain kinds of symbolic configurations insistently recur in various articulations of any given literary genre. Evidently, particular patterns are logically appropriate to particular purposes or concerns—whether those of ritual or art. Given this inevitable connection between pattern and purpose, the striking correspondences between Shakespeare's characters in Arden and neophytes undergoing a rite of passage suggest that a play such as As You Like It shares an underlying motive (in Kenneth Burke's sense) with initiatory rituals.⁴ Change—in individuals, in their cultures, in their institutions—is a fact of human life. That such change be significant (rather than random) and beneficent (rather than destructive) is surely a deep human desire. Both the fact and the desire are reflected in the symbolic clusters which human beings have developed to commemorate and to facilitate important changes. I suggest that we can posit a “transformative mode” that informs many human activities, including at least some rituals and some works of art—wherever the motive of transformation is central.

I hope to demonstrate that this motive adequately accounts for the remarkable parallels between As You Like It and ritual without resorting to attenuated assumptions about Shakespeare's relation to particular rites and without claiming any necessary historical or genetic relationships between drama and ritual. Moreover, I shall argue that the play itself is transforming, that—like a rite of passage—it engenders as well as imitates transformation. Rites of passage exist primarily for their immediate participants; the central enactors of a ritual are those transformed by it. But plays are performed by actors for audiences. To the extent that a ritual and a play incarnate homologous structures, the role or function played singly by a neophyte, say, is divided between the characters in and the audience of a play. One can therefore expect the audience of As You Like It to be transformed by their experience of the play.⁵ My purpose here is to define the precise nature of this “transformation” and the artistic strategies that engender it.

As I have suggested, the broadest term for the motive shared by rites of passage and Shakespeare's green-world comedies is transformation. The ritual and artistic assumption seems to be that when something is transformed into something else, there exists a moment betwixt and between, a moment of formlessness, a brief return to undifferentiated—uncategorized—primordial matter. Liminality and the sojourn in the green world, then, symbolically represent and elaborate this moment, largely through the suspension or blurring of customary boundaries. At a lower level of abstraction, preparation for a new role involves shedding qualities and attitudes appropriate to the old and growing those appropriate to the new, with a moment of spiritual and psychological nakedness in between. In practice, whether ritual or dramatic, this shedding is less than total. One temporarily discards old habits of categorical perception in order to reclaim them, sheared of inappropriate accretions, with a refreshed sense of their validity and significance. The process is one of regeneration rather than replacement.

Turner's work on ritual has been so influential that it will be useful here to foreground those aspects that are pertinent to this essay. As noted earlier, Turner, drawing on Van Gennep, describes a generic structure for rites of passage. Such rites include three movements: separation, margin (limen or threshold), aggregation. Turner has concentrated on the liminal phase—an instance, by the way, where the “marginal” is “central.” According to Turner, liminality is constituted as an anti-structural interlude within a necessarily structured social order, this interval of anti-structure can create a sense of communitas (or flow) and allows for a return to a regenerated society (societas).⁶ His studies provide subtly elaborate descriptions and analyses of both liminality itself and its transforming role in society. One might call Turner the structuralist of anti-structure. For this paper, I will rely on his characterization of liminality as a ritually circumscribed time and place in which a society's customary categories for perceiving and ordering experience are temporarily suspended. Among the boundaries liminality typically denies are those between highborn/lowborn, male/female, human/animal, living/dead.

As numerous critics have noted, the tripartite structure of Shakespeare's green-world plays resembles the generic pattern of rites of passage. The portrayed green world corresponds structurally to ritual's marginal phase, and, indeed, it abounds with instances of blurred distinctions. Both its place and displacing parallel those of liminality. Status reversal, dissolution of hierarchies, (boys playing) girls playing boys (playing girls), mergers of man and beast (most literally in the figure of Bottom), distortions of temporality, even characters who straddle the border between life and death—all are among Shakespeare's favorite images and plot devices. (It is too seldom noted that these and similar categorical disruptions pervade all the plays, not just those with explicit green worlds.) Clearly, liminality—or something very like it—often appears in the plays. I will argue, however, that typically Shakespearean artistic strategies can be called liminal as well; that is, they operate to disrupt the customary categories we bring to the plays and thus create liminal responses in us.

Let us look at As You Like It, a play whose characters obviously undergo liminal experiences. Neophytes undergoing an initiation rite transcend their society's categories, such as those of sex and class. Sex distinctions are blurred so that one may be “treated or symbolically represented as neither or both male and female” (Symbols, p. 98). Consider Rosalind playing Ganymede playing Rosalind. Liminality negates variations in rank and degree; within a group of neophytes, all are equal. In the forest, Duke Senior calls his men “co-mates and brothers in exile” (II. i. 1), and Rosalind—disguised as the shepherd Ganymede—can flippantly tell him that her parentage is as good as his (III. iv. 32-33). (The confusion in I. i., about which girl is the current princess, and about how many princesses there are, may be accidental, but it also foreshadows the casteless society of Arden.) The best emblem of this equality is the litany in Act V:

SILVIUS.
It is to be all made of sighs and tears; And so am I for Phebe.
PHEBE.
And I for Ganymede.
ORLANDO.
And I for Rosalind.
ROSALIND.
And I for no woman.

(V.ii.79-83)

And so on. Here the individuality of the characters is masked by the similarity of their speeches. Moreover, liminality also denies the boundaries of life and death; neophytes are symbolically represented as neither living nor dead, or both living and dead. Even this most extreme blurring of categories is echoed in As You Like It: several of the characters exist, as it were, on the border between life and death, since they are under sentence of death should they return to the court. Moreover, Rosalind tells Orlando to “die by attorney” (IV.i.85), which would be both to die and not to die.

Turner points out that “people can ‘be themselves,’ it is often said, when they are not acting institutionalized roles” (Symbols, p. 107). So, too, the merging and blurring of categories in Arden, the suspension of society's fixed and rigid roles, can be seen as propaedeutic to the self-discovery that takes place there, especially for Rosalind. But, at least in some primitive societies that perform elaborate initiation rites, the “arcane knowledge or gnosis obtained in the liminal period is felt to change the inmost nature of the neophyte. … It is not a mere acquisition of knowledge, but a change in being” (Symbols, p. 102). Such a profound change occurs in both Duke Frederick and Oliver when they come into the green world, and Oliver can say of the man rescued by Orlando, “'Twas I; but 'tis not I” (IV.iii.136). The sojourn in Arden does function as an initiation for the courtly characters. When they leave Arden, their lives in “this working-day world” will begin again, but their social roles will be new ones. So it is not surprising to find the playwright creating patterns similar to those which otherwise diverse cultures use in their rites of passage. The play, after all, culminates in multiple marriages: Rosalind and Orlando's chances for a sane and joyful married life have been enhanced by what they have experienced in the Forest; Oliver's conversion has made him worthy of Celia; Touchstone has chosen a sacramentally sanctioned wedding with Audrey, who will change her social as well as her marital status (though one may wonder whether she has been adequately prepared for her new role). Duke Senior resumes rather than assumes the role of ruler, and in the final scene he steps out from the crowd of spectators to certify the other characters' futures and authorize the beginning of the marriage ceremony. Although there is no reason to doubt that he (unlike Prospero) was a good ruler before his exile, there exists a suggestion that his stay with his “co-mates” in Arden, with its “sermons in stone,” has taught him something of what Lear learns in anguish on the storm-beaten heath.

As a mythic and metaphoric rendering of a psychological process, the green world is a realm isolated from a surrounding “working-day world,” in which a person may sojourn for a limited time, freed from many constraints of his usual environment. The green world has its own trials (more often tests than hardships), but they function to provide an examination, a clarification, and sometimes an alteration of qualities so as to prepare one for return to the everyday world. The psychological matrix of the green world can be called liminal, partly because of its marginal and transitional status, but more importantly because it operates through dislocation, disorientation, and disruption of customary structures to create refreshed, revitalized, and regenerated perceptions of reality.

As manifestations of the human propensity for symbolic activity, ritual and drama share motives and symbols appropriate to those motives. But ritual and drama differ in their primary targets. The neophyte is the object of a rite of passage, the one whose transformation is its immediate purpose.⁷ Although As You Like It portrays characters undergoing a ritually educational transformation, the play exists not for them but for the audience. I have outlined the ways As You Like It presents characters whose experience resembles ritual in structure; I would now like to turn to the related issue of how the play's strategies create a similar experience for its audience.

In As You Like It, Shakespeare both presents and represents liminal experience. We are separated from our everyday lives when we enter the theater (whether the actual one of performance or the imaginative one of reading a play), and we return to those lives when the play is finished. For the audience, then, the entire play can be a liminal occasion. Responding to As You Like It, we share vicariously the characters' experiences; their liminality becomes ours. Equally important, however, the play's strategies—including its details of language, its treatment of metaphoric conventions, and its attitude toward its own genre—work to interrupt the audience's unconsidered categorical habits. In this sense, one can appropriately call Shakespeare's strategies and the play's effects liminal.

The minimal signifying unit of a Shakespearean script is the single word, so it is logical enough to begin this discussion of categorical disruption by examining Shakespeare's treatment of specific words. Words, of course, designate categories of phenomena, and thus to disrupt connection between signifier and signified is to suspend a word's categorical force, to frustrate its referentiality. As Sigurd Burckhardt argues, “the nature and primary function of the most important poetic devices—especially rhyme, meter, and metaphor—is the release of words in some measure from their bondage to meaning.”⁸ This divestive process can be seen as a movement away from a conceptual, intellectual response and toward a more physiological perception of sound as sonic, recurrent and rhythmic. For example, a single word repeated again and again—keep, keep, keep, keep, keep, keep, keep, keep—loses its referential meaning, and becomes only a collection of phonemes. (Psychologists have called this referential stripping by repetition the “banana effect.”) This estrangement of words from their ordinary, prosaic signifying function leads us to surrender—temporarily—our customary attachments to thematically foregrounded words. Brief examples from As You Like It should suffice to confirm Shakespeare's divestive or liminal use of poetic techniques.

In the opening scene, Orlando continually plays on words, yet this wordplay is not very funny. Rather, his punning responses reveal his obsession:

My brother Jaques he keeps at school, and report speaks goldenly of his profit. For my part, he keeps me rustically at home or, to speak more properly, stays me here at home unkept: for call you that keeping for a gentleman of my birth that differs not from the stalling of an ox?⁹

(I. i. 4-9)

Each additional inflection of the word keep moves toward increasingly precise definition; but at the same time, the forms of keep begin to lose their particular meanings as they become primarily vehicles for Orlando's anger and frustration. The obverse of this process can be seen when Oliver asks Orlando, “Now, sir, what make you here?” (a sentence in which the individual words carry about as much content as those in our “How do you do?”). Orlando replies, “Nothing. I am not taught to make anything” (I. i. 26-27). Here, Orlando jolts the formulaic make into a concrete meaning relevant to his unhappy situation. Although these two strategies of punning might seem to work in opposite directions—one divesting meaning, the other investing it—both serve to increase our awareness of words qua words, to remind us how fragile the link between signifier and signified can be. No longer secure in categorical referentiality, we must attend to the categorizing medium itself.¹⁰

If punning is the characteristic dissociative device of the first scene, repetition predominates in the second. For example:

ROSALIND.
Nay, now thou goest from Fortune's office to Nature's. Fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of Nature.
Enter [Touchstone] the Clown.
CELIA.
No; when Nature hath made a fair creature, may she not by Fortune fall into the fire? Though Nature hath given us wit to flout at Fortune, hath not Fortune sent in this fool to cut off the argument?
ROSALIND:
Indeed, there is Fortune too hard for Nature when Fortune makes Nature's natural the cutter-off of Nature's wit.
CELIA.
Peradventure this is not Fortune's work neither, but Nature's, who perceiveth our natural wits too dull to reason of such goddesses and hath sent this natural for our whetstone of the wits.

(I. ii. 38-52; italics mine)

This dizzying repartee, as it rings a series of changes on Fortune and Nature, is a sophisticated version of the banana effect; by the time Touchstone interrupts, we have become (not quite consciously) detached from our immediate associations with these two key words. This temporary stripping of meaning from Fortune and Nature would seem to free us to absorb the delicate calibrations these terms undergo through the play. They will not remain referentially empty for long, but as the phonemes again attract significance in our minds, we are likely to be alert to the intractable complexity of the conceptual bundles they strive to subsume under two categorical names.

While pertinent to the play's themes, many of the memorable scenes in As You Like It are irrelevant to the plot. The recurrent pattern is to show the characters confronting incongruities in customary modes of structuring and categorizing experience. (Much of the play's lighthearted humor derives from the audience's being alerted to these incongruities, but the cumulative effect may be called liminal.) Sometimes the inadequacies of conventional categories or structures are addressed directly, as in Touchstone's and Corin's exchange on the relative merits of court and country (III. ii. 11-81) or in Rosalind's disquisition on the relativity of perceptions of time (III. ii. 293-316). Sometimes a customary structure is persuasively outlined, only to be undercut; numerous critics have noted this technique when Jaques' speech cataloging the seven ages of man is followed by the entrance of Orlando bearing Adam on his back. And sometimes sheer exaggeration points up a confusion in categories: when Jaques anthropomorphizes imaginary deer or Touchstone accuses Corin of playing bawd to his sheep, they blur our habitual boundary between animal and human as categories of being.

While these and similar incidents participate in the play's determined juggling of customary categories, more central are the episodes in which the characters confront and expose conventional modes of thinking and talking about romantic love—the sojourn in Arden is, after all, a prelude to the several marriages. Not surprisingly in this consciously artful play, the scrutinized attitudes toward romantic love are those represented by literary metaphors, and Shakespeare makes us consider the nature of those metaphors.

The ability to think metaphorically is humanly useful as well as pleasurable. To reify metaphors, however, to invest them with an independent ontological status, is always limiting, and sometimes dangerously stultifying. As Rosalie Colie has shown, artists can reawaken us to the metaphorical nature of a given figure or convention by creating personae who treat it literally. This technique, which Colie calls unmetaphoring, “makes us reconsider the function of figurative language, of the idioms developed to answer to needs of communication, of attempts to contain and to transcend different categories of experience.”¹¹ Clearly, the process of unmetaphoring in art resembles that of disrupting categories in liminality. Both categories and metaphors link entities that share one or more qualities but differ in others. Both mental constructs emphasize similarities, but processes like unmetaphoring in art and categorical disruption in liminality create an awareness of difference, of those points where correspondence ceases. Thus, when we reaffirm likenesses in a return to metaphor and category—we cannot live sanely without them—it is with a refreshed sense of resemblances. (Sometimes, of course, such significant dissimilarities are exposed that a customary association must be discarded or redefined.) Both these processes potentially modify, clarify, and regenerate modes of thinking.

A typical unmetaphoring occurs when Rosalind deliberately misinterprets Phebe's painfully conventional letter to Ganymede, taking it literally and thus exposing the folly of treating the highly stylized Petrarchan idiom as if it were a literal model for lovers rather than a very elaborate, very conventional sequence of metaphors. Similarly, Rosalind treats Petrarchan conventions quite literally when she pretends to disbelieve Orlando. She claims he bears none of the marks which distinguish one in love:

Then your hose should be ungartered, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation. But you are no such man; you are rather point-device in your accouterments, as loving yourself than seeming the lover of any other.

(III. ii. 357-62)

Rosalind's playful exercise in measuring Orlando's love according to traditional attributes leads her to assert that he is not in love. Since we (and Rosalind) know that Orlando does indeed love her, the conventions which lead to a denial that his love exists are called into question. Even by Ganymede's standards, however, Rosalind's feigned disbelief is unfair to Orlando. He may not look like a Petrarchan lover, but he does his best to act like one. In fact, we believe that Orlando is in love largely because Shakespeare has him behave in ways conventional to the category of literary or stage lover: Orlando is tongue-tied around Rosalind, but talks obsessively about her with Ganymede; he writes inept sentimental poems and hangs them on trees; in his own way he pines for Rosalind, feeling bittersweet about his reformed brother's happiness in love because it intensifies his own disappointment. The playwright on one hand is using the artistic shorthand of conventions to denote Orlando's love to the audience, while on the other he is forcing us to question and reconsider a whole set of these same conventions. This complex mingling of perspectives finally encourages us not to reject the traditional languages of love, but rather to perceive their status as metaphors. In this quite typical instance, the attempt to define one-who-loves according to appearance fails, but in recognizing this inadequacy we are reawakened to the metaphoric process by which disorder in dress comes to represent the unsettling, disorienting, disordering effects of love. The worn-out metaphor is only temporarily disclaimed so that it can take on a new vitality. It is not so much Petrarchism that is subverted here, but rather our thoughtless response to it.

Petrarchism represents only one set of conventional poses challenged in As You Like It. Rosalind's “die by attorney” speech depends upon Ganymede's treatment of myths—metaphoric embodiments of psychological states—as if they provided naturalistic tales of “real” people. The effect of “Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (IV. i. 96-98) is much less cynical in context than one might expect. Ganymede responds from a realistic point of view to the stories of Troilus and Leander, but the literal-minded insistence that men do not die for love surely reminds us that these old stories are mythic and metaphoric. Only a powerful force demands so extravagant a metaphor as this.

Touchstone, too, sounds cynical, and indeed his reminiscences of Jane Smile effectively deflate Silvius' overblown love rhetoric (II. iv. 20-51). But the clown's condescension toward Audrey is as exaggerated as the hero's idolizing of Rosalind; a deliberate degrading of one's love and one's beloved involves as conventional a pose as the exaltation of them. Touchstone's repeated equations of men and beasts evoke thoroughly traditional metaphors for the physical side of love. Moreover, his statements about love and marriage are belied by his actions—he enters a binding marriage with Audrey even though she apparently would settle for a few words from the hedge priest. Clearly, this fact undercuts the attitudes the clown expresses. Touchstone's metaphors are no more, and no less, valid than Orlando's. And both are subject to liminal suspension.

Given all that I have said so far, it should not be surprising that the sharpest challenge in the play is to its own generic base. The outlines of As You Like It's interrogation of pastoral are too well-known to need reiteration here, but a brief sketch of the play's self-reflexive pastoralism will be useful in considering what happens when the audience is urged to attend consciously to this complex of conventions.¹² As the play unmetaphors pastoral and blurs the boundaries between orders of experience, the effect on the audience is liminal.

First of all, the opening scene of the play immediately prepares the audience for a fairy tale; Shakespeare certifies and reinforces this reaction by having Celia echo the audience's feelings: “I could match this beginning with an old tale” (I. ii. 107). We know at once that this play will present a second world that will not even pretend to be a naturalistic imitation. The dramatist can begin to call our attention to the metaphoric nature of poetic traditions simply by placing before us characters who, played by flesh and blood actors, become literal embodiments of conventional figures carrying out conventional roles. (Think of Silvius and Phebe, for example.) By presenting an enacted world of the court juxtaposed against an enacted world of the forest, the dramatist can “set the stage” for challenging pastoral conventions. Moreover, editors since the eighteenth century, cued by the play's words, have set the first scene of As You Like It in an orchard or garden and the second outdoors on the palace grounds. The entire second world that is this play can be seen as a green world; here, what Frye would call the “red and white world of history” is itself set within a fairy-tale green world.

Within the play's second world (i.e., Arden) Shakespeare juxtaposes several kinds of rustics. The courtly figures are visitors in the Forest of Arden; their actions and reactions call various pastoral assumptions into question. For example, the Duke's awareness that he and his men are essentially intruders who kill the native deer points up the anthropocentric obsession of most pastoral inflections, as does Touchstone's foolery about Corin's playing bawd to his sheep. Jaques' anthropomorphizing of the weeping deer is especially amusing if we recall the tradition of the pastoral elegy. When Corin asks Touchstone how he likes a shepherd's life, the clown's answer specifically encourages the audience to question the usual valuations assigned court and country in pastoral:

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 humor well; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach.

(III. ii. 11-20)

This passage humorously points to the double-edged nature of the idealized pastoral sojourn. And the play forestalls any easy conclusions about the pastoral world by presenting multiple kinds of shepherds: Rosalind and Celia, who pretend to be a shepherd and his sister; Silvius and Phebe, who are entirely artificial, literary pastoral lovers; Corin, who has been described as “the only shepherd who knows anything about sheep”¹³ and as the traditional wise shepherd of the moral eclogue.¹⁴ Corin does seem a “realistic” counterpoint to Silvius—but only until we see William. Poor dull William must be the most “realistic” character in the play; his answers to Touchstone are roughly as interesting as most everyday conversations would be if reproduced on stage. And they reveal Corin for what he is—a convincing dramatic representation of a shepherd. Indeed, the juxtaposition of Corin and William enlivens our perceptions of the moral eclogue's conventional nature much as Silvius and Phebe alert us to the metaphorical status of the love eclogue.

While I have sketched only a brief outline of the devices by which Shakespeare sharpens his audience's perceptions of pastoral conventions, it should be sufficient to indicate the degree to which the play calls attention to its fictive status and disrupts our conventional perceptions of its conventions. All of Shakespeare's plays contain self-reflexive moments, but in experiencing As You Like It (and other green world plays), we are continually moved not just between fictive and actual worlds, but among multiple fictive worlds as well. The effect of this giddy disorienting is essentially liminal in that it disrupts our customary perceptions of the boundaries between categories of existence, encourages us to reconsider these perceptions, boundaries, and categories, and finally reaffirms them in Rosalind's epilogue which expels us from the green world and situates us firmly as theatergoers. We return to the working-day world, taking with us a refreshed sense of the reality of art.

My argument, then, is that As You Like It resembles a generic rite of passage because both are informed by the motive of transformation. The play's shape is analogous to that of all rites of passage, moving its characters into and out of a liminal-like green world. Moreover, the play becomes such a green world for its audience, which shares the experiences of the characters and undergoes distinct but analogous experiences of its own.

While the play's strategies are illuminated by this comparison with rites of passage, it is vital to remember that As You Like It is drama; it is neither ritual nor derived from ritual. So it seems appropriate to conclude by identifying some crucial differences between ritual and dramatic articulations of the transformative mode. During the liminal phase of a rite of passage, the neophyte's customary categories for perceiving reality are disrupted, clarified, and reclaimed. Shakespeare's characters undergo an analogous process in Arden, and indeed their conventional perceptions of romantic love are challenged and reaffirmed. Shakespeare's audience, however, while experiencing vicariously the transformation of the characters, experiences in addition a disruption and ultimate sharpening of its perceptions about the nature of art's metaphoric relationship to experience. Moreover, for neophytes the most important rituals are obligatory, one-time occurrences; they need not understand a ritual's significance for it to effect its primary purpose of marking transition. So too with Shakespeare's characters in As You Like It: they learn by going where they have to go; the transformed characters must leave Arden; Audrey will be as officially married as Rosalind. Shakespeare's audience, however, must choose to experience the play, may choose to return to it time and again, and will discover with each increase in understanding a corresponding increase in enjoyment. Unlike a tribal neophyte or a fictive character, we can invoke this green world at will; its power to transform us is never exhausted, but rather is enhanced each time that we surrender to it.

Notes

1. PMLA, 98 (1983), 846-62.

2. C. L. Barber suggests that “Shakespeare's mature plays show people in passage from one stage of life to another, succeeding in comedies, failing in tragedies.” “The Family in Shakespeare's Development,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, Murray M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn, eds., (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), p. 197. Three major studies draw directly on Turner. In Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London and New York: Methuen, 1981), Marjorie Garber details the presentation of characters at moments of passage. Edward Berry relates the prevalence of such moments in Shakespeare's plays to family practices in Renaissance England, Shakespeare's Comic Rites (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984). And David Bevington stresses the disruption of hierarchy during liminality, Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare's Language of Gesture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984).

3. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1967); hereafter, citations will be given in the text. I find Turner's early work on the symbology of ritual more directly relevant to literature than his later work which emphasizes effects of ritual on the community. That is, I am more interested in the parallel ways ritual and drama manipulate symbols than in the ways drama can imitate ritual-like experience.

4. I am using motive in Burke's sense, where it implies a complete symbolic situation (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose) assumed to be recognizable in a literary work, although not necessarily consciously active in the artist's creation of that work. See the introduction to Burke's A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), pp. xv-xxiii, and his “Poetics in Particular, Language in General,” in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 25-43.

5. For a discussion of literature as therapeutic, as literally altering personality, see Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., and Mark Bracher, “Literature, Psychoanalysis, and the Re-Formation of the Self: A New Direction for Reader-Response Theory,” PMLA, 100 (1985) 342-54.

6. See for example, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1969).

7. This assertion perhaps oversimplifies an audience's role in ritual. Certainly, an initiation rite demands participants other than the neophyte, and they can be perceived as altered by the ritual—at the very least in their relationship to the neophyte. But in no sense does a play exist for the sake of its characters, so the distinction made here is necessary.

8. “The Poet as Fool and Priest,” ELH, 23 (1956), 380.

9. References are to As You Like It, Ralph M. Sargent, ed., in the Pelican edition, Alfred Harbage, general ed., William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969). Hereafter, citations will be given in the text.

10. Adena Rosmarin draws upon E. H. Gombrich to make a similar point, “Hermeneutics versus Erotics: Shakespeare's Sonnets and Interpretive History,” PMLA, 100 (1985), 29-30.

11. “My Echoing Song”: Andrew Marvell's Poetry of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), p. 173. Clearly, “unmetaphoring” resembles that effect of art the Russian Formalists call “defamiliarization,” or, as it is more elegantly translated, “estrangement.” As I understand the terms, however, “defamiliarization” generally relates directly to reality, “unmetaphoring” to metaphoric representations of reality.

12. Some of the most interesting work on As You Like It emphasizes this self-reflexive quality of the play. See for example, Albert R. Cirillo, “As You Like It: Pastoralism Gone Awry,” ELH, 90 (1975), 885-93. In an effort to minimize duplication, I have sketched only the outline of Shakespeare's treatment of pastoral necessary to my central concern.

13. Harold Jenkins, “As You Like It,” Shakespeare Survey, 8 (1955), 47.

14. Helen Gardener, “As You Like It,” in More Talking of Shakespeare, John Garrett, ed. (London: Longmans, Green and Company, Ltd., 1959), p. 17.