SOURCE: "Lodge's Rosalind: Decorum in Arden," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 14, No. 2, Spring, 1977, pp. 117-27.

Smirking over an example of feminine cruelty in a love affair, Rosalind, the lovely princess of Bordeaux, calls all women "mad cattle" in affairs of the heart. When she is warned by her girlfriend Alinda not to be too hard on their sex, Rosalind reminds Alinda that it is not, after all, a princess who is making the judgment, but rather Ganymede, the male page that the princess has become for purposes of her journey into exile in the forest of Arden. "'Thus,' quoth Ganymede, 'I keep decorum: I speak now as I am Aliena's page, not as I am Gerismond's daughter; for put me but into a petticoat, and I will stand in defiance to the uttermost that women are courteous, constant, virtuous and what not."'¹

In putting his titular heroine through these particularly theatrical acrobatics, Thomas Lodge is not only bringing to his audience's attention one of the central concepts on which Rosalind turns but is also raising a point of considerable importance to a great deal of Renaissance literature. With this explicit use of the term "decorum," a term that in 1590 had only very recently been brought over into English from Latin,² Lodge introduces the question of the appropriateness of various attitudes and actions to the two sexes and to differing social stations, both in literature and in life. Rosalind's half-joking statement on decorum presents a distillation of what this essay will argue is the underlying set of assumptions in the work as a whole—that decorum is a vital concept for all of the characters in the story and that Lodge's plot is designed to bring about an eventual revelation of this value of decorum to everyone. This process of conceptual definition in the romance is carried out in what at first might appear to be the unlikely pastoral setting of the forest of Arden.³ But, as I will attempt to show, the setting is anything but a bucolic haven of tranquility. All of the social and sexual tensions of the "outside" world of the city of Bordeaux are present in Arden, albeit in sometimes transmuted ways, affording the characters what amounts to an alternative set of circumstances and perspectives for understanding themselves and their places in society. We shall see that it is by means of this new and clearer definition of self that love, social order, and personal contentment come to assert themselves as positive forces.

One implication of such an emphasis on decorum is, logically, an essential conservatism, a desire for stability and for recognition of clear lines of authority. An examination of Rosalind will demonstrate the existence of just such a conservative ethic at work, an ethic which in all likelihood exerted a strong appeal on Rosalind's bourgeois and aristocratic Elizabethan readers. The book can be seen as a kind of guide to literary, social, and sexual decorum, bringing each of them into focus at various points of the story and helping the reader to emerge at the end with a fairly clear notion of what constitutes the most fitting and appropriate course of action for each of the characters.

When W. W. Greg edited Rosalind in 1907, he lamented the fact that Shakespeare's use of the romance as the source for As You Like It had so shaded Lodge's work from critical scrutiny that "little attention has ever been bestowed upon it for its own sake."⁴ The seventy subsequent years have not seen the situation change very much; it is still typical to find criticism on Rosalind subsumed into the admittedly larger cause of As You Like It scholarship.⁵ For various reasons, Rosalind suffers somewhat in the process of comparison. One important factor behind the modern critical preference for As You Like It is the presence of a more astringent satirical strain in Shakespeare's play. Robert B. Pierce typifies this tendency when he faults Lodge for failing to include as diverse a spectrum of characters as does Shakespeare, for failing to introduce a Jaques or a Touchstone into his story for the purpose of criticizing the pastoral world of Arden and praising the society of the city that they have had to leave behind.⁶ The basic point of these observations is undoubtedly true: Shakespeare is willing to call into question virtually every value that he establishes in the play in a way that Lodge is not. The issue can perhaps once again best be seen as one of decorum. Lodge, while not excluding comedy and satire from his work, nevertheless is determined to create and to maintain certain ideals of love, familial loyalty, social aristocracy, and pastoral pleasure without exposing them to the corrosive effects of direct satire. To do otherwise would be to violate literary form and theme as he understands them.

It is worthwhile to consider the place of Rosalind in the pastoral tradition in order that Lodge's conception of his chosen form and what is appropriate to it might be made clearer. Lodge's plot debt to the anonymous fourteenth-century tale of Gamelyn has long been recognized, but his borrowings from this virile story of fraternal enmity and physical combat in no way account for the elements of romantic love that are more central to the theme and tone of Rosalind. Far more significant in this regard is the tradition of the amorous pastoral, a tradition deriving ultimately from Longus but which for purposes of understanding Lodge may more accurately be confined to his sixteenth-century predecessors Sannazaro in Italy, Montemayor in Spain, and Sidney in England.

The history of pastoral literature in England in the sixteenth century has been told several times, and it need not be dealt with in detail here.⁷ What does need to be emphasized, however, is the fact that Rosalind's appearance in 1590 was not just one more piece of froth in what sometimes has been seen as a wave of Elizabethan pastorals. There may very well have been something on the magnitude of a wave, but it is important to notice that it did not really crest until later in the 1590's. It is true that the most prominent exempla of the mode—Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender and Sidney's Arcadia—came earlier, in 1579 and the early 1580's respectively, but by far the larger number of pastoral plays, stories, and poems post-date Rosalind.⁸ What this means is that in 1590 an ambitious writer such as Lodge could still be genuinely and freshly stimulated by what must have seemed a very vital literary type.

No single predecessor should be emphasized too strongly in a discussion of Rosalind, for it is clear that Lodge, in the invention of his plot of the exiled Rosalind and Alinda and the rural lovers Montanus and Phoebe, is displaying significant originality. There is certainly a bow in the direction of The Shepheardes Calender, where Colin Clout's mistress was named Rosalind, and it is by no means impossible that Lodge read one of the manuscript versions of the Arcadia. The likelihood of the influence of Montemayor's Diana (1559) is, however, somewhat greater than that of the influence of Sidney.⁹ Sidney, to be sure, had read Montemayor, but he makes more radical changes in the atmosphere of the pastoral, especially in the revised Arcadia, than does Lodge. The fact that amors in Arcadia are constantly being interrupted by summonses to heroic virtue distances it somewhat in the geography of the mind from the relatively quieter spaces of Montemayor's Ezla or Lodge's Arden.

Walter R. Davis, the most important of Lodge's modern critics, emphasizes the idyllic tendencies in Lodge's portrayal of Arden. To Davis, Arden is "first and foremost a symbol of an explicit ideal or a desirable state of mind … the world as it was intended to be at the Creation, totally unlike what it has become."¹⁰ As befits actions taking place in such a setting, Davis finds that while they are in Arden characters act out of a magnaminity and human love that they can only approximate in the city of Bordeaux. Davis' interpretation is an appealing one, and I should not wish to disagree with it drastically. But at the same time, a careful reading of the text leads one to the conclusion that Davis has made matters overly-schematic and that it is difficult indeed to see Arden as a kind of prelapsarian paradise. Unquestionably, Arden can be very pleasant, and it does afford the opportunity for Rosalind and Rosader, Alinda and Saladyne to learn some things about themselves and about one another that they could not have learned in the rigid social structuring of Bordeaux. But a rural retreat devoid of error would also be one devoid of drama, and, as we shall soon see, Arden is not without its own variety of stresses and social posturing. All in all, it seems fairer to say that the alternative that Arden presents to the city is more an alternative of style than of substance. Arden functions as a testing ground in Rosalind, a testing ground in which the characters are enabled to perceive the nature of the questions and challenges more clearly than would be possible in the thicker social texture of the city. The delights of the simple joys of forest life exist in the story, but so do the occasions for the education of both characters and audience in the psychology and practice of love and personal loyalty.

The romance does criticize life in Arden, despite the absence of a Jaques or a Touchstone to deliver the criticism. Apparently desiring to stop short of overt attacks on the setting and its inhabitants, Lodge presents his qualifications in such forms as the friendly parody involved in the wooing of Phoebe by Montanus. These two, along with their older mentor Corydon, are the only native residents of Arden who appear in the story. It has often been noted that their "love" affair functions as a negative example of what the other two couples should avoid. Somehow, Phoebe has learned how to play the role of the aloof lady in the courtly tradition, professing nothing but disdain for the very idea of love: "Wert thou, Montanus, as fair as Paris, as hardy as Hector, as constant as Troilus, as loving as Leander, Phoebe could not love because she cannot love at all; and therefore if thou pursue me with Phoebus, I must fly with Daphne" (p. 366). Montanus, for his part, explores the more ridiculous stretches of the Petrarchan tradition for ways of expressing his abject grief at the frustration of being spurned in love. The multilingual poems that he goes about carving on trees are ornate examples of allusive excess. The reader is as interested as Rosalind and Alinda to discover the existence of these two in the forest, and the gentle satire against them begins almost immediately: Phoebe is the occasion for Rosalind-Ganymede's "decorous" equation of women and mad cattle.

The satire here is double-edged, in part literary and in part social. At other points in the narrative, Lodge gives some of his aristocratic characters, notably Rosader, Petrarchan attitudes, and virtually all of the other characters occasionally slip into the modified euphuistic diction that is so typical of Montanus and Phoebe. But Montanus carries both literary fashions to extremes, and in him everyone sees acquired pretense trying to convince itself that it is innate passion. Though Petrarchanism and euphuism were both still tremendously fashionable in 1590, Lodge is nevertheless able to obtain an ironic perspective on them and to indicate here their limitations.

Moreover, the most striking inappropriateness in the Montanus-Phoebe plot is based on the fact that these two would-be cosmopolites are only shepherds and, so far as can be determined, have never left the forest of Arden.¹¹ Only infrequently do they lower their masks and allow their native qualities of unsophisticated charm to emerge (e.g., Phoebe's "Down a down" song on pp. 363-364), preferring most of the time to attempt to act like gentry. In so doing, they succeed only in becoming the cause of head-shaking on the part of the real aristocrats. Old Corydon, who has little use for love in any case, has apparently long recognized the folly of their airs (p. 362) but has been powerless to correct them. The effective reprimand to Phoebe for breach of decorum has to come from Rosalind-Ganymede: "What shepherdess, so fair and so cruel? Disdain beseems not cottages, nor coyness maids" (p. 366).

The clarity with which Phoebe is bounced back into her proper place is indicative of the social certitude in Rosalind. The aristocrats never lose sight of pre-established social relationships, even though they find themselves in a physically different environment from the court. Lodge does nothing to encourage a breakdown of class structure in Arden; indeed, he makes sure that the natives can never do anything quite right. Corydon's holiday finest, which he dons for the wedding of Alinda and Saladyne, turns out to be a motley costume of mismatches.¹² When he enters the festivities with a cup of cider for King Gerismond, the King has difficulty suppressing a laugh, but he patronizingly takes the cup from the old shepherd "very kindly" (p. 385).

The formal ritual of toast drinking that takes place when the cider has been brought in suggests the atmosphere of a court-in-exile that surfaces at other points in the story. Gerismond is obviously still King to all of those who have joined him in Arden, and a social hierarchy is still very much in evidence.¹³ True, there is doubtlessly a more relaxed mood among the King and his crew of "lusty squires" at a woodland feast of venison and wine than would have been possible at court, but there are no signs that social order is being abandoned in favor of a classless society of shepherds. Early in the narrative, Corydon earnestly praises the state of mental content, the classical otium, made possible by the shepherd's life (p. 318), and Alinda and Rosalind do buy "a farm and a flock" and establish themselves as local sheep raisers. Given, however, the structure of the plot with its clear promise of a romance between Rosalind and Rosader, no reader suspects that the princesses will be anything but temporary shepherdesses, and no one else in the story seems to have considered going into agriculture on even a short-term basis.

There is an instinctive, and therefore comfortable, regard for social rank in the life of liberty led by Gerismond and his band (including Rosader, after he has joined them) in the forest. The situation implies that life might also have been like this in the city had it not been for the presence of tyrants who did not respect the natural lines of authority. The two obvious examples of such tyranny are Torismond, who has usurped the throne of France from Gerismond, and Rosader's brother Saladyne, who has deprived Rosader of their father's legacy to his favorite son. Apparent egotists as long as they are in control, neither Torismond nor Saladyne is willing to demonstrate the charity and reciprocity between ruler and ruled that had always been considered necessary to the harmonious functioning of a hierarchical society. Where Gerismond will offer his chair of honor at a feast to the newly-arrived Rosader simply because he sees that the young "gentleman [is] in so bitter a passion" and where Rosader will in turn offer it to his servant Adam Spencer because the old man is weak from hunger, Torismond and Saladyne act as if the concept of noblesse oblige were somehow incomprehensible in the language of Bordeaux.

Davis is certainly correct in observing that the transition from Bordeaux to Arden helps "cure" Saladyne of his tyrannical egotism and restore him to what is presumably his more generous "natural" self.¹⁴ Being in Arden does seem to help free Saladyne's spirit, but it is probably not the only factor at work. His own politically-motivated expulsion from Bordeaux and his subsequent near-death from a lion can also explain a loss of haughty arrogance, irrespective of where he eventually ends up geographically. Therefore, it is perhaps carrying matters too far to emphasize, as does Davis, the moral differentiation between the world of Arden and the world of Bordeaux. About all that can be said with accuracy is that while a character may be ethically better in the freedom of the forest the fact of the physical displacement cannot be taken to be the sole efficient cause of the change. Further blurring the distinction is the presence of a tyrant in Arden: Phoebe. Although different in kind, her tyranny over Montanus has effects that seem every bit as emotionally devastating as any worked by Torismond or Saladyne. And, interestingly, her hold over her victim can be broken only by someone from the "outside" world.

Social decorum also conditions the possibilities for falling in love in Rosalind. Perhaps the best example of this is the affair involving Alinda and Saladyne. Pale by comparison to the far more interesting relationship between Rosalind and Rosader, it at times seems to exist chiefly to illustrate the appropriateness of a well-bred girl meeting and marrying a well-bred (if formerly reprobate) boy. Their courtship is not smooth, but this is due less to any inherent mismatch than it is to Alinda's relishing of the idea that as long as circumstances force her to remain in disguise as the shepherdess Aliena she will be unfit to marry the son of a wealthy landowner. Professing to be deeply in love with him, she seems almost to enjoy tormenting herself and him with questions designed to point up their disparity of stations: "Can love consist of contrarieties? … Then, Saladyne, how can I believe thee that love should unite our thoughts when fortune hath set such a difference between our degrees?" (pp. 371-372). Her harping on the point is, of course, specious since the reader knows as well as she that she is not humble by birth. Her fortunes may be reduced, but then so are Saladyne's, and both Rosalind and Gerismond urge virtue rather than money as the basis for her marriage (pp. 360, 384). When in the dénouement, it appears that Saladyne is going to be disappointed after all at the thought of marrying a peasant, the suspense is ended and Alinda is revealed to be a princess "as famous for her perfection as exceeding in proportion" (p. 391). Money and position, then, do matter, which is not to say that all of the earlier praising of virtue was irrelevant but, rather, that a virtuous person should, in the nature of things, also be wealthy in order that the one might complement the other.

This type of social decorum is also maintained, as it turns out, in the marriage of Rosalind and Rosader, but in their case Lodge focusses our attention on what has to be considered a far more significant dimension of decorum. "Sexual decorum" is perhaps as good a term as any to apply to the topic, although even that is rather misleading, suggesting as it does a placing of limitations on sexual energies. In part, this may be included, but more precisely what is being considered here is an exploration of the roles of the two sexes in a love affair, a consideration of which actions and attributes are peculiarly appropriate to the male and which to the female. The subject is epitomized in the figure of Rosalind disguised as Ganymede; by having female become male, Lodge sets free a series of reverberations that educate as they entertain. The idea of placing a romantic, virtuous heroine in such a sexual disguise and exploiting the situation for its comic potential is, so far as can be determined, original with Lodge. Montemayor had created an Amazonian shepherdess named Felismena who disguises herself as a man and who, by killing attacking savages and knights, perforce earns considerable respect from the reader. Sidney, perhaps following Montemayor's example, has his lovely Amazon Zelmane disguise herself as a page in order to be near her lover Pyrocles before finally revealing her identity on her deathbed. It is probable that Lodge remembered these two women when he came to write Rosalind, but it is also evident that he mainly ignored their tragic narratives in developing the principal situation of his story. His reason for using the disguise motif is far different, and among Elizabethan authors only Shakespeare, who begins his dazzling series of disguised heroines with Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona (c. 1594), shows a similar awareness of the situation's potential for thoughtful comedy.

Rosalind, Rosader, and the reader all take advantage of her extended sexual role change to examine the issue of romantic love. In assuming the part of a man, she in a sense actually becomes a man insofar as she is enabled to understand more sympathetically the position of a man during the ritual of courtship and marriage. When Ganymede then takes the disguise one step further and "pretends" to be Rosalind so that Rosader will have someone to woo, she gives him a new perspective on his emotional commitment and tests the sincerity of his avowal of love. Had she not so gone into disguise, another kind of far shallower, far more conventional role playing (perhaps not unlike that of Montanus and Phoebe) might well have controlled their affair.

Davis has argued at some length as to the necessity for all of the characters in the romance to don consciously a mask and to pretend to be someone else while they are finding their own personalities.¹⁵ Obviously the notion of role playing is one of the most interesting features of Rosalind, but it may legitimately be questioned whether Davis is not once again being overly-schematic in suggesting that it is everyone's taking-on of a role that enables them to move in a parallel way toward a comic resolution. In fact, the only role adopted consciously and eagerly is Rosalind's as Ganymede, and she does seem to have clear goals in mind throughout. If the other characters in the story are also caught up in histrionics, it is largely in an involuntary way (as in the case of Alinda, whose motives in changing her name are never made very clear) and the results are not always favorable. There is little doubt, for example, that the masks that Phoebe and Montanus choose are unbeneficial for them. The social conditioning that causes them to style themselves as courtiers (how this conditioning was exerted is left obscure) inhibits rather than releases their natural personalities. So too, both Alinda and Rosader enter into what amounts to unthinking sexual role playing, relying far too heavily on stereotypic views of their positions as man and woman. When Alinda falls suddenly in love with Saladyne, she immediately decides that the whole matter is beyond her control: "Women must love or they must cease to live, and therefore did nature frame them fair that they might be subjects to fancy" (p. 358). Rosader, for his part, is quick to upbraid Saladyne for being overcome with emotion at the memory of his past errors: "… cease from such feminine follies, as should drop out of a woman's eye to deceive, not out of a gentleman's look to discover his thoughts" (p. 351). Neither speech is contradicted in the story and both do present attitudes that were solid Elizabethan orthodoxy. In the context of the entire work, however, it is evident that such characters lack the breadth of sexual outlook and the sophisticated wit of a Rosalind, of someone who can suggest to Rosader that he put on petticoats to find out if men can be as lovely as women.

Rosalind obviously savors the liberty granted to her by her disguise, a liberty not shared by any of the others. She enjoys not only the idea of keeping her identity a secret but also this private humor that she (and sometimes Alinda) is able to find in her conversations with Rosader. At the same time, however, it is also true that she endures moments of private distress when she reflects on the fact that she really does love Rosader and that her machinations are leading her farther into Venus' labyrinth (p. 335). This simultaneous freedom and progressive involvement, unsettling though it may momentarily be for Rosalind, is the greatest strength of Lodge's depiction of her. Her sexual ambivalence, exposing her as it does to a diversity of points of view, becomes the guarantee of success in her own love affair.

Judged from one perspective, Rosalind's disguise is the clearest violation of decorum in the story. Although teasingly protesting that she is keeping decorum in her role as a boy, she at the same time may be lessening her chances of ever being taken seriously by anyone as an attractive potential bride. This danger, however, never materializes. Rather, she finds her way to a new sense of self and to a more enlightened type of decorum by ignoring the older notion of what it means to be a princess. As Merritt Lawlis has observed, her ideal of feminity emphasizes not only chastity but also an emancipation from medieval mores and a willingness to meet her lover half way in courtship.¹⁶ With her fine sense of psychological tact, any social rule can be broken without fear of disaster.

Yet, there is no social or sexual revolution in Rosalind because it seems that Lodge's instincts in these areas are finally conservative and that once having pointedly drawn our attention to the existence of traditions he is content to accept them and to let them continue. The comic ending of the work is brought about by everyone's restoration to what in some ways is a very conventional set of social proprieties. But important changes have taken place in the attitudes of several of the characters, and there is a general sense of refreshment. Social convention has been aerated, and audience and characters alike have new views of themselves as social beings.

The final effect of Rosalind does much to discourage role playing. One important histrionic event—Rosalind's disguise—had to take place, but once she has taken over control of the dynamics of the plot everyone else is encouraged to slough off non-essential aspects of their personalities and to concentrate on a recognition and acceptance of innate, positive qualities. By being true to one's own nature, and acting in a way appropriate to that nature, one will not be tempted to indulge in egocentric whimsy.

Love occupies an important place in this new dispensation of clarity at the story's end. The triple marriage of the final scene in Arden, should not be viewed as a reward for the irrationality that some of the lovers have displayed all along, but rather as a uniting of young people who now have far greater insight into their situations than they ever had before and who genuinely deserve their future happiness. Passion in love is certainly not denied, but provision is made to be sure that it is correctly guided.

When, in the last two pages of Rosalind, the action moves suddenly from Arden to Bordeaux as Gerismond seizes a chance to lead a successful countercoup against Torismond, we are presented with a reinstating of all possible proprieties. Indeed, there is an enhancement of social position for all of the men, including Corydon who is appointed by Gerismond to be master of Alinda's now-mistressless flocks. Each is rewarded according to his merits and rank in a fashion that recalls Lodge's statement in his dedicatory preface to Lord Hunsdon, soliciting his patronage: "Such as sacrifice to Pallas present her with bays as she is wise and with armor as she is valiant, observing herein that excellent ôó ðñåoí which dedicateth honors according to the perfection of the person." The tone of the preface is typically fulsome, but there is little doubt that Lodge's commitment to the essentials of his proposition is sincere. The Greek form of "decorum" can be said to be the first mention of an idea that will explicitly or implicitly control much of the story. Rosader fears at one point that "my desires [for Rosalind] have mounted above my degree" (p. 332). In fact, they have not, and much of his—and the others'—lesson in Arden consists of learning to judge what honors, and what responsibilities, are appropriate to "the perfection of the person."

Notes

¹Rosalind in Merritt Lawlis, ed., Elizabethan Prose Fiction (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1967), p. 311. Although the spelling of this edition has been conservatively modernized, it is the most accurate edition available, and it will therefore be the basis for all future quotation in this essay.

² The OED indicates no use of "decorum" in this sense prior to 1589.

³ In designating Rosalind a "romance," I am using the term in the sense in which Northrop Frye defines it in The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 303 ff: a form of prose fiction emphasizing stylized characters and plot.

⁴ Greg, ed., Lodge's "Rosalynde" being The Original of Shakespeare's "As You Like It" (1907; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1931), p. ix.

⁵ See, inter alia, Marco Mincoff, "What Shakespeare Did to Rosalynde," Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, 96 (1960), 78-89, and Robert B. Pierce, "The Moral Languages of Rosalynde and As You Like It," Studies in Philology, 68 (1971), 167-176.

⁶ Pierce, p. 168.

⁷ An old, but thorough, study is that of W. W. Greg, Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (1905; rpt. New York: Russell & Russell, 1959). Among important modern reconsiderations of the subject, see Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 1-63, and Judith M. Kennedy, ed., A Critical Edition of Yong's Translation of George of Montemayor's Diana (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), pp. xxxi-lvii.

⁸ Two notable exceptions are by Lodge's sometime collaborator, Robert Greene: Pandosto (1588) and Menaphon (1589).

⁹ Rather than supposing that Lodge had access to a manuscript of Bartholomew Yong's famous translation of Diana (finished by Yong in 1583, although not published until 1598), it is much more plausible to suppose that he, like Sidney, read Montemayor in Spanish.

¹⁰ Davis, "Masking in Arden: The Histrionics of Lodge's Rosalynde, " Studies in English Literature, 5 (1965), 153, 159. This essay also appears, in a somewhat abridged form, in Davis' Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 80-93.

¹¹ Some would no doubt argue that Montanus and Phoebe are only taking their places in a tradition of sophisticated, stylized shepherds of Renaissance literature (cf. Montemayor's passionate shepherd, also named Montanus) and that, as such, they are actually keeping a form of decorum. But there is a great difference between Lodge's treatment of them and Montemayor's attitude toward his country folk or Tasso's handling of his shepherds in Aminta (1581), to name another pastoral work that Lodge probably knew. Earlier elegant shepherds had never been made the object of the satiric comments of urbane outsiders.

¹² The comic nature of his garb has been commented on by Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, p. 17n, and Merritt Lawlis, Elizabethan Prose Fiction, pp. 281-282.

¹³ On this point, I must differ from Pierce who, I think, overstates the case for freedom in Arden in saying that "in this pastoral environment, characters are released from courtly decorum" (p. 170).

¹⁴ Davis, p. 159.

¹⁵ Davis, p. 163.

¹⁶ Lawlis, p. 282.