[In the following essay, Milward posits that the locale of Arden may represent Shakespeare's dramatic invention of a pro-Catholic realm free from the religious persecution of the Tudor dynasty.]

It is strange how scant is the attention customarily paid to the precise locality of the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Agnes Latham, in her New Arden edition of the play (1975), expresses the general opinion that it is set in ‘the Ardennes on the border of Belgium and Luxemburg’, while allowing that Shakespeare and many in his audience ‘could identify it easily with those parts of Warwickshire still known as Arden’ (p. 8). This identification may be traced back to Edmond Malone, who identified the forest even more precisely as ‘that in French Flanders, lying near the Meuse and between Charlemont and Rocroy’ (quoted in the New Variorum edition of the play, p. 16). If for the source of these statements we go back to Shakespeare's source, Thomas Lodge's pastoral romance of Rosalynde, we find that the main setting is what he calls (like Shakespeare) ‘the forest of Arden’, but that the forest he has in mind is not so much that to the North-East of France as a vast unidentified forest between ‘the province of Bordeaux’, from which his hero Rosader (Shakespeare's Orlando) sets forth with his old servant, and the city of Lyons, to which they make their way. This is evidently to the South of the royal capital of Paris, where the usurping king Torismond has his court (Shakespeare's duke Frederick).¹

When, however, we turn from Rosalynde to As You Like It, we are given no such clues as in Lodge's romance to the locality of Arden, whether in France or in England. It looks as if the dramatist has deliberately left the matter vague so as to suggest a locality not in France, whether to the South-West or the North-East, but in the English Midlands, where he himself was familiar with another Arden, both as place-name, of the ancient forest in his native Warwickshire to the North of the river Avon and as family-name of his mother and her ancient ancestry. It is indeed a suggestion that has long since been made by the Victorian scholar J. O. Halliwell with reference both to Shakespeare's play and to his friend Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion XIII: ‘The forest of Arden was no forest in far-away France, but was the enchanted ground of their own home’ (quoted in the New Variorum edition, p. 18).

Now on the basis of these generally accepted considerations about the Forest of Arden as the setting of As You Like It, let me go on to explore that setting with reference not only to the meaning of the play but also to the personal involvement of the dramatist implied in his choice of setting. True, it is aptly said of Shakespeare's comedies that they are rarely set in his native England but look for the most part beyond the Narrow Seas to the sunny lands of the South. And so in As You Like It we may be excused for assuming that Shakespeare looks with Lodge beyond the seas to the Ardennes, whether of Belgium or Bordeaux. Yet, in virtue of the greater ambiguity the former puts into his play, he may well have felt free to indulge a desire of injecting into it something of his own childhood background. True, again, we are well advised to avoid an autobiographical interpretation of any play of Shakespeare's, considering how enigmatic he is both as dramatist and as poet. Yet in this play we seem to be faced with something of an exception; and in the religion of Arden we may discern something of Shakespeare's own allegiance among the three religions recognised in his own time (by the Jesuit Robert Persons writing in 1592) as papist, protestant and puritan.²

As for the religion of Shakespeare's family at Stratford, let it suffice to say that a scholarly consensus has been building up over the past century in favour of their Catholicism, or loyalty to ‘the old faith’. From the time of Elizabeth's accession to the throne in 1558 and the establishment of ‘the new religion’ by Act of Parliament the following year, they no doubt temporized in common with many who came to be known as ‘church papists’; but the evidence we have seems to indicate a steady movement towards ‘recusancy’ culminating in the entry of John Shakespeare's name in the recusancy returns for 1592, however much he sought to conceal his religious reason by pleading ‘fear of process for debt’.³ More to the point of this article, however, is his origin in Arden, before settling with his wife Mary Arden in Stratford. Already in the village of Snitterfield to the North of Stratford, his father had been a tenant of Mary Arden's father Robert; and his forbears had evidently come from other villages further to the North, and well within the area of the Forest of Arden, Rowington and Wroxhall. In the latter village in pre-Reformation times there had been a nunnery, Wroxhall Abbey, now a ruin, which the poet may have had in mind in Sonnet 73, lamenting the ‘bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’. From this nunnery the names of two Shakespeares have come down to us, including that of the prioress earlier in the century, whose name Isabella may have suggested Shakespeare's choice of name for the novice heroine of Measure for Measure.

This association with both Arden and ‘the old faith’ is no less evident in Shakespeare's mother Mary Arden, though her Catholic allegiance appears not so much in herself as in her father Robert's pious will, drawn up in Mary's reign in 1556, bequeathing his soul ‘to Almighty God and to Our Blessed Lady’. Through her Shakespeare was connected at once with the old Saxon nobility of Warwickshire and with most of the Catholic gentry of the neighbourhood, the Catesbys, the Throckmortons, the Winters and the Grants, many of whose younger sons came to be involved in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.⁴ On the other hand, to the East of Arden were the great houses of the upstart family of Dudley: Kenilworth Castle, held by Elizabeth's favourite Robert, Earl of Leicester, and Warwick Castle, held by his elder brother Ambrose, Earl of Warwick. They were in turn assisted by the Puritan magistrate Sir Thomas Lucy, of Charlecote Park, not least in their envy of the older nobility of the Ardens. This envy found a practical outlet in the prosecution of the Somerville Plot of 1583, when the head of the family, Edward Arden of Park Hall near Birmingham, was implicated owing to his relationship with John Somerville (who had married his daughter Mary). Here already we may note a significant parallel between the tragic situation of the English Ardens and that of the exiled duke Senior in As You Like It.

Now let us turn to another village on the outskirts of the forest to the west of Stratford, Temple Grafton. As its name indicates, it was a commandery of the Knights Templars till their suppression in the fourteenth century under the rule of Philip the Fair of France, as it were foreshadowing the rule of Henry VIII of England. Then it passed into the hands of the Knights Hospitallers of St John till they were in turn suppressed by the latter monarch in 1536. It is mentioned in Shakespeare's application for a marriage licence from the diocesan authorities at Worcester during the season of Advent 1582, where his fiancée's name is given (in one of the two entries) as ‘Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton’. Shakespeare's wife, we know, came not from Temple Grafton but from the nearby Shottery; but this association of her name with that village may be an indication of the church at which their wedding was to be held. And it so happens that the parson of that church was an old Catholic priest from Marian times, whose name is known to us as John Frith, from a Puritan survey of Warwickshire included in A Parte of a Register (1593).⁵

From this old Marian priest, with his ‘unsound religion’ (as he is described from the Puritan viewpoint of the survey), in the real Forest of Arden, we may turn to the old religious man (or are they two men?) who makes two interesting appearances in Shakespeare's play. First, there is the old religious uncle of Rosalind who has taught her a remedy of love, which (she claims) has worked so effectively on one patient as to make him ‘forswear the full stream of the world’ and ‘live in a nook merely monastic’ (3.2.404-5). This remedy Rosalind tries out on Orlando to such contrasting effect as to bring them both to a happy marriage. This uncle is subsequently described by Orlando as ‘a great magician’ who is still resident ‘in the circle of this forest’ (5.4.33-4)—as is Temple Grafton in relation to the Forest of Arden. He may also be the ‘old religious man’ mentioned at the end of the play by Orlando's brother Jaques de Boys, as having met the usurping duke on his arrival with an army in the forest and as having converted him both from his enterprise against his exiled brother and even from the world.⁶

Then, we may ask, what about the other priest who turns up in Shakespeare's play to perform the wedding of Touchstone and Audrey? Doesn't Sir Oliver Martext, as has been suggested by certain biographers, correspond more closely to Sir John Frith, as ‘vicar of the next village’, than the above-mentioned religious man? And isn't he requested by Touchstone to officiate at his wedding with Audrey in much the same terms as, we may imagine, John Frith might have been requested by the young Shakespeare to officiate at his wedding with Anne? Well, unlike John Frith, Sir Oliver is repudiated by Touchstone and mocked in much the same way as the curate Sir Nathaniel in Love's Labour's Lost is mocked by the playful lords (5.2).⁷ He is further contrasted by the melancholy Jaques with ‘a good priest that can tell you what marriage is’ (3.3.77-8), which may have been the reason why Shakespeare, if a Catholic, would have preferred the old Marian priest at Temple Grafton to perform his wedding with Anne rather than the Protestant vicar of the Holy Trinity church at Stratford.

Another reason, relating Sir Oliver rather to the puritans than to the papists, may be found in his surname of ‘Martext’. Here is an obvious puritan connotation with the author of the Marprelate pamphlets of 1588-9, who is probably to be identified with another Warwickshireman and native of Arden. Job Throckmorton.⁸ Just as Shakespeare himself was jeered at as ‘Shakescene’ (by Robert Greene in his Groatsworth of Wit) on his arrival in London, so we find Martin Marprelate derided by his episcopal adversary Thomas Cooper in the latter's Admonition to the People of England (1589) as ‘not only Mar-prelate, but Mar-prince, Mar-state, Mar-law, Mar-magistrate and all together’. A similar Puritan character is glanced at in The Merchant of Venice both by Bassanio, as he reflects at a critical turning-point in the play on how ‘In religion, / What damned error, but some sober brow / Will bless it and approved it with a text’ (3.2.77-9), and by Graziano, who speaks of ‘a sort of men whose visages / Do cream and mantle like a standing pond, / And do a wilful stillness entertain’ (1.1.88-90). Such a wilful stillness is shown by Sir Oliver when, in response to the frivolity of Touchstone, he can only mutter, ‘'Tis no matter. Ne'er a fantastical knave of them all shall flout me out of my calling.’ (3.3.96-8).

In addition to this contrast between the ‘old religious man’ in the forest and ‘the vicar of the next village’, there remains one more religious man to be considered, though he is rarely recognized as such. I refer to the man who goes under the name of Duke Senior (in the stage directions). He is the former duke—not king, as in Lodge's Rosalynde—unjustly banished from the court by his usurping younger brother Frederick, while he himself remains without a name.⁹ He is seen as being, or having been, a secular ruler; but from his first appearance in the Forest of Arden he is introduced as a kind of ‘convertite’, as his usurping brother suddenly becomes at the end of the play. His impressive opening speech on ‘the uses of adversity’ and ‘the good in everything’ oddly echoes passages in the popular Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (one of the best selling books of Shakespeare's time among Catholics and Protestants alike): one from 1.12 on this very theme: ‘It is good for us to encounter troubles and adversities from time to time, for trouble often compels a man to search his own heart. It reminds him that he is an exile here, and he can put his trust in nothing in this world’; and the other from 2.4 on the wings of simplicity and purity: ‘If your heart be right, then every created thing will become a mirror of life and a book of holy teaching. For there is nothing created so small and mean but reflects the goodness of God.’ The same passages may also be heard echoed by Friar Laurence in his opening speech in Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet. Both their speeches are as it were sermons, the one by a duke and the other by a friar; and both look forward to other sermons preached by the duke-turned-friar, Duke Vincentio alias Friar Lodowick, in Measure for Measure.

I have already suggested a comparison between this exiled duke, suffering at the hands of his usurping brother, and the rightful ruler of the real Arden, Edward Arden of Park Hall, suffering at the hands of the upstart Earl of Leicester. Now I would like to suggest a further comparison between him in his religious character and another, spiritual ruler living in exile in the region of the other Ardennes beyond the sea. I refer to William Allen, ruler or president of the English College (or seminary) located from the time of its foundation in 1568 at Douai in the French Ardennes, but from 1578 onwards at Rheims (of which, it may be noted, explicit mention is made in The Taming of the Shrew 2.1, where Lucentio masquerades as a ‘young scholar that has been long studying at Rheims’). For example, in the opening scene of As You Like It, where the elder duke is first mentioned by Charles the wrestler as having been banished to the Forest of Arden and joined there by ‘three or four loving lords’, it is added that ‘many young gentlemen flock to him every day’. Similarly, Allen was joined in his venture not only by several former colleagues from Oxford University, who formed the teaching body of his college, but also by a steadily growing number of young men, many of them from the gentry who could afford the expense, for their Catholic and priestly education. Such was a classmate of Shakespeare's, Robert Debdale, who left Stratford for Douai in 1575 in company with his and Shakespeare's master Simon Hunt, the latter going on to Rome where he entered the Society of Jesus. Such, too, was a distant cousin of Shakespeare's (on his mother's side), Edward Throckmorton, who also went on, like Hunt, to Rome and entered the Society of Jesus. All of them were from the Forest of Arden.¹⁰

Further, when Rosalind is in her turn banished from the court by her uncle, her protests are coldly answered: ‘Thus do all traitors. / If their purgation did consist in words / They are as innocent as grace itself.’ (1.3.51-3) His words interestingly echo those of the arch-persecutor of English Catholics, Lord Burghley, who in his pamphlet The Execution of Justice in England (1583)—itself written in response to Allen's Apologie for the two English colleges at Rheims and Rome (1581)—declares: ‘It hath been in all ages and in all countries a common usage of all offenders for the most part, great and small, to make defence of their lewd and unlawful facts by untruths and by colouring and covering their deeds (were they never so vile) with pretences of some other causes of contrary operations or effects.’ To this Allen responded with his famous Defence of English Catholics in 1584, maintaining that his students, so far from being the scum of the land, were most of them sons of Catholic gentlemen having chosen the path of exile for the sake of religion.

As for Allen himself, before founding his college at Douai, he had gone into exile with other Catholic scholars on the accession of Elizabeth and settled in the university city of Louvain, partly for the purpose of controversy with the Protestants. On account of ill health, however, he was recommended by his doctors to return home for a time to have the benefit of his native air. There, while recuperating in Lancashire and his home at Rossall, he did much to confirm the Catholic gentry and people in that region in their resolution to refuse all cooperation with the new state church. At that time, the gentleman who gave him most whole-hearted and financial support was the great landowner of the area, Thomas Hoghton, who was then engaged in the building of a stately mansion named Hoghton Tower (still to be seen there today). When he had to leave Lancashire, Allen spent some of his time at Oxford, where he had been principal of St Mary's Hall (subsequently absorbed into Oriel College), and also in the neighbourhood of Stratford, before moving into Norfolk and so back to Douai for the founding of his college.¹¹ It was in the following year, on the failure of the rising of the Northern earls in 1569, that Thomas Hoghton decided to go likewise into exile and to assist Allen in his new foundation.¹²

Hoghton's large estates in Lancashire were now entrusted partly to his younger brother Alexander, who resided at Lea Hall on the farther side of Preston, partly to his more reliable half-brother Richard, of Park Hall at Charnock Richard to the South. Meanwhile, two neighbours of theirs from the village of Dilworth, Thomas and John Cottam, were studying at Oxford University. Thomas went on to Douai and Rome to study for the priesthood; while John was later appointed schoolmaster at Stratford in 1579. (Thomas returned to England as a seminary priest in 1580 about the same time as the Jesuit Edmund Campion, but he was arrested soon after his arrival in London. He was arraigned with Campion and entered the Society of Jesus in prison while awaiting his execution in 1582.) It may have been on John Cottam's recommendation that the young William Shakespeare left Stratford to become, according to an old tradition emanating from his future colleague Christopher Beeston, ‘a schoolmaster in the country’, now identified as the county of Lancashire near Preston, in the household of Alexander Hoghton of Lea Hall. Here at least, according to a theory that has been gaining ground among Shakespeare scholars since the time it was broached by Oliver Baker in his book In Shakespeare's Warwickshire (1937) and seconded by Sir Edmund Chambers in his Shakespearean Gleanings (1944), we find a ‘William Shakeshafte’ mentioned in Hoghton's will, which was drawn up in August 1581 only to be followed by the death of the testator shortly afterwards, significantly in the immediate aftermath of the news of Campion's arrest towards the end of July and his torture in the Tower of London.¹³

Before that series of tragic events took place, there is good reason to suppose a meeting between the young Shakespeare and the Jesuit. Campion had not only come from Rome, where he must have met Simon Hunt, another English Jesuit resident there, but also entered England about the same time, the summer of 1580, as John Cottam's brother. He had, moreover, journeyed into the Midlands, staying (as we know from notes of his ‘confessions’ taken by Lord Burghley) with Sir William Catesby presumably at Lapworth, where Shakespeare with his father may well have gone to meet him. Then, after staying at several Catholic houses in Yorkshire during the winter of 1580-1, he had gone on to stay at other Catholic houses in Lancashire, including (as we also know from the above-mentioned notes) that of Richard Hoghton at Park Hall—and that at the very time William Shakespeare was probably in the household of Alexander Hoghton. It is indeed fascinating to speculate on what may have passed between the Jesuit, himself an expert in dramatic production from his five years at the College of Prague, and the future dramatist. May not Shakespeare have received his first lessons in dramaturgy from Campion, not to mention the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, which it was a principal aim of Jesuits like Campion to introduce to promising young men like Shakespeare?¹⁴

Everything, however, must have changed for the young Shakespeare with the arrest of Campion in July and the news of his prolonged torture in the Tower (for the sake of eliciting from him the names of those at whose houses he had stayed on his journey),¹⁵ and then the death of his patron Alexander Hoghton so soon after making his will. Campion was executed as a traitor in the December of 1581, and he was followed by Thomas Cottam to Tyburn some six months later. The situation must have made it dangerous for Shakespeare to remain in Lancashire; and so we find him returning to Stratford, wooing Anne Hathaway and maybe celebrating a quiet wedding at Temple Grafton, leaving their application for a wedding licence at Worcester till it became plain that Anne was with child. Then followed the births of Susanna in May 1583 and the twins Hamnet and Judith, named after their Catholic godparents Hamnet and Judith Sadler, in January 1585. Then arose the pressing problems of how to support this growing family, with the hopeful solution of a continued career, not so much as a schoolmaster with intervals of dramatic production but rather as a player and playwright in a more professional capacity. In his will of 1581 Alexander Hoghton had commended William Shakeshafte to the care of a recusant neighbour Sir Thomas Hesketh, who kept players for his entertainment; and Hesketh was well known to the Earl of Derby, whose son Lord Strange kept a larger and more professional group of players. So when Hesketh died in 1588, Shakespeare might well have been taken on by Strange's Men, in whose company he appears in London with the first recorded performance of Titus Andronicus in early 1594. In this play, I might add, there is a unique mention (among all Shakespeare's plays) of the epithet ‘popish’ in connection with ‘conscience’, as if echoing a poem written by Thomas Hoghton before his death in 1580 on the repeated theme of keeping his conscience. Thus, instead of proceeding (as Campion may have hoped) from Lancashire to Douai and the continental Ardennes, the young Shakespeare had to return to his native Arden and so evidently to London, with all the tests imposed by his new career on his loyalty to ‘the old faith’ and his resolve to ‘keep his conscience’.

This loyalty and resolve of the dramatist we may find implied throughout the play of As You Like It—at least once we are aware of all this personal background that has gone into the making of it. We may think, for example, not only of the above-mentioned characters of the old religious man (or men) and the elder duke, but also of the feeling of nostalgia for the good old days that pervades the play.¹⁶ It is what appears from the outset in the memory of ‘the old Robin Hood of England’ with his ‘many merry men’, as if connecting the Forest of Arden with that of Sherwood. It is what appears in Orlando's praise of the ‘good old man’ Adam—whose part is said by William Oldys to have been played by the dramatist himself—for his fidelity to ‘the constant service of the antique world’, in contrast to ‘the fashion of these times’ (2.3 58 and 60). It is what appears in the same Orlando's appeal to ‘better days’ when ‘bells have knolled to church’ (2.7.113-14), in contrast to the present days viewed by Shakespeare himself in Sonnet 67 as ‘these last so bad’. Surely, we may well conclude, from the depths of his heart Shakespeare looks fondly back to the time before the far-reaching religious changes had been inaugurated by Henry VIII and ratified by his daughter Elizabeth, a time that had been realized in the old Forest of Arden near Stratford and was still present in the Ardennes overseas.

Notes

1. Cf. D. Beecher's edition of Lodge's Rosalind (Barnaby Riche Society Publications 7, Ottawa, 1997), p. 141.

2. R. Persons, Elizabethae Angliae Reginae Haeresim Calvinianam Propugnantis saevissimum in Catholicos sui Regni edictum … Cum responsione (1592), had five editions in Latin, with translations into German and French, but none into English.

3. The Catholic theory of Shakespeare's antecedents has been defended by H. S. Bowden, The Religion of Shakespeare (1899), based on notes left by the Victorian scholar R. Simpson; by J. H. De Groot, The Shakespeares and ‘The Old Faith’ (1946), though himself a Presbyterian; by H. Mutschmann and K. Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism (1952), particularly valuable for its careful investigation into the poet's family and friends; and my own Shakespeare's Religious Background (1973), with more emphasis on the evidence of the plays.

4. Cf. Genealogical table given by Mutschmann and Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism, p. 422.

5. The evidence for the wedding of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway at Temple Grafton is given at length by Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (London, 1998), pp. 81-5.

6. This strangely sudden conversion of the usurping duke is unique to Shakespeare, in contrast to Lodge's usurping king Torismond who is killed in battle.

7. The three parsons, Sir Oliver Martext in As You Like It, Sir Nathaniel in Love's Labour's Lost, and Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor, stand in interesting contrast to the three friars, Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet, Friar Francis in Much Ado About Nothing and Friar Lodowick in Measure for Measure, in that the former are mocked, the latter respected by those around them.

8. The identification of Martin Marprelate as Job Throckmorton has been authoritatively made by Leland H. Carlson in his writings on the Puritan authors of the sixteenth century.

9. In much the same way Edgar, in The Tragedy of King Lear 2.3, loses his identity on resorting to disguise: ‘Edgar I nothing am.’

10. For Edward Throckmorton, who grew up at Coughton Court in the Forest of Arden and died as a Jesuit in Rome in 1582, see C. Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell (London, 1958).

11. There is an excellent article on William Allen in the Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 1 pp. 314-21.

12. On Thomas Hoghton, who went into exile in 1569 and died in 1580, see B. Camm, Forgotten Shrines (London, 1910), pp. 183-6, with his poem, ‘The Blessed Conscience’, on pp. 185-6.

13. Other eminent proponents of this theory have been L. Hotson, Shakespeare's Sonnets Dated (1949), A. Keen and R. Lubbock, The Annotator (1954), R. Stevenson, Shakespeare's Religious Frontier (1958), and more recently E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’ (1985), where he successfully vindicates the theory against the criticism of S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1977).

14. I have presented my own research into Shakespeare's Stratford schoolmasters, culminating in his probable meeting with Campion in Lancashire, in an article for The Month April, 2000 (261, 1588), entitled ‘Shakespeare in Lancashire’.

15. Cf. Burghley papers, Lansdowne MS 30 British Library, including the record of Campion's confessions under torture in the Tower: he stayed at the house of Sir William Catesby in the summer of 1580; he was in Lancashire between Easter and Whitsuntide 1581, staying (among others) with Bartholomew Hesketh and Richard Hoghton.

16. I give a fuller treatment of Shakespeare's ‘nostalgia’ in Shakespeare's Religious Background, pp. 180-1.