SOURCE: “Myth and Type in As You Like It,” in ELH, Vol. 33, No. 1, March, 1966, pp. 1-22.

[In the following essay, Knowles highlights a number of mythological allusions in As You Like It, specifically studying references to the classical hero Hercules and the Christian mythology associated with him.]

If many a careful scholar still hesitates to accept mythical readings of Shakespeare, it is largely because up to now there have been few studies in the middle range between theoretical interpretations on the one hand and historical fact on the other. One has had to be content with the best of either world but seldom of both. Drawing on anthropological and psychological theories, Northrop Frye makes illuminating, even dazzling analogies between certain archetypal patterns and the structure of the plays and poems, but he offers no full explanation of how such analogous forms got into the Shakespeare canon;¹ Douglas Bush, bringing to bear a thorough historical knowledge of Elizabethan familiarity with Greek and Roman myths, shows the local applicability of Shakespeare's mythological allusions but not their relationship to an overall mythical pattern in play or poem.² On the whole, mythic and ritual interpretations by Knight, Traversi, Tillyard, Barber, and others neglect the specific mythological allusions, while detailed studies of the allusions usually attempt to show the extent of Shakespeare's learning or to read the plays as topical allegory.³ Eugene Waith does bridge the two worlds, but his main interest is a type of character, not a mythical dimension or “meaning.”⁴ Studies which approach Shakespeare's mythmaking through his use of an established mythological tradition, such as Don Cameron Allen's essay on The Tempest,⁵ remain the exception, not the rule.

No one would suggest that only those mythical archetypes specifically alluded to in a literary work are relevant to it; conversely, mythological allusions may be so casual and conventional that they are no important part of a writer's imaginative vision. But after the work of iconographers like Panofsky and Wind, one should not want to neglect mythological references in a Renaissance writer when trying to discover the full significance of his work: they are likely to be at least one kind of base to build on. Such an approach to Shakespeare's As You Like It, a play never yet treated fully in the mythic mode, reveals that the allusions consistently make the literal action reverberate beyond itself, and that they suggest a universal application that accounts for many details in the play not satisfactorily explained by the themes of romantic love or the pastoral life.

Robert K. Root noticed long ago a greater seriousness of mythological allusion in As You Like It than in other Shakespearean comedies, and showed that the influence of Shakespeare's poetic master Ovid, named in III.iii.8, asserts itself strongly in the play.⁶ As might be expected, the greater part of the allusions occur in the play's source, Lodge's Rosalynde;⁷ but whereas in Lodge some seventy mythological names in three times that many references give the effect merely of the profuse embellishment conventional in pastoral romance, Shakespeare's fifteen names in some thirty references, even in a work two-fifths the length of Lodge's, suggest more pointed, meaningful selection.

Although Hercules is mentioned only once, he is, as one other writer has noticed,⁸ the dominant mythological figure in the play. Hercules' hold on Shakespeare's imagination was stronger than even the many allusions to him in the plays would suggest;⁹ Holofernes had even made him one of the Nine Worthies.¹⁰ Because in the Renaissance Hercules was one of the two or three best-known mythological personages, the subject of paintings, tapestries, engravings, drawings, sculptures, plays, poems, learned treatises, emblems, adages, schoolboy essays, and countless incidental allusions, it is likely that Shakespeare, having once firmly established Orlando as a Hercules figure in Act I of As You Like It, did not need to point out the analogy explicitly throughout the play. He did select from Rosader's boisterous and often disreputable actions in Rosalynde only those reminiscent of heroic deeds of Hercules, and the play contains further Herculean reminiscences not in its source. What especially suggests Hercules' importance in the play is that the two most clearly Herculean deeds come precisely at the two watershed moments of the action: the first deed begins the complication and the second brings about the denouement.

The wrestling match at Frederick's court is the catalyst that begins the action proper of As You Like It: Orlando's defeat of Charles arouses the suspicion of Frederick and the jealous wrath of Oliver, and as a result first Orlando and Adam, then Rosalind, Celia, and Touchstone, then Oliver, and finally Frederick are driven to Arden. It is at this moment, just before Orlando goes to meet the court wrestler, that Rosalind cries, “Now Hercules be thy speed, young man!” (I.ii.222). Besides wishing him the strength of the man who once took the place of Atlas, an event often mentioned in Shakespeare¹¹ and depicted on the sign of the new Globe playhouse, she is also making the parallel between Orlando and the great wrestler who had defeated Antaeus, Cacus, Acheloüs, and Death himself (for Alcestis), as well as a series of beasts and monsters.

Shakespeare found the hint for the allusion in Lodge, but the changes he made are significant. In Rosalynde the Norman wrestler (Charles' counterpart) “looked like Hercules when he advaunst himselfe against Acheloüs” because of the amazing “furie of his countenance” (p. 170). In As You Like It the Hercules figure is not the sinister professional wrestler but the noble Orlando. Moreover, the parallel is not with Hercules' defeat of Acheloüs, rival for his wife, since Rosalind's hand is not at stake here; rather, since Charles has already mortally wounded three contenders, the obvious allusion is to Hercules' defeat of the man-killing giant Antaeus.

There is also evidence that the allusion is not only to the classical myth itself, but to a special Renaissance interpretation of it. Charles' challenge to Orlando contains a puzzling indecency not found in Lodge: “Come, where is this young gallant that is so desirous to lie with his mother earth?” (I.ii.212-213). The phrase “lie with his mother earth” obliquely names the distinguishing trait of Antaeus: as the son of Earth (Tellus, or Gaea) he could renew his battle strength by lying full-length on the earth, so that Hercules finally defeated him only by holding him above ground. The details of the story were widely known among the Elizabethans. The most extensive account of Antaeus' birthright could be found in Lucan's Pharsalia (IV.590 ff.), very popular as a schoolbook,¹² though Hyginus (Fabulae XXXI.1) and Ovid (Meta. IX.184) also name Earth as the parent of Antaeus and she is called his “mother” by Arthur Golding and Thomas Underdown in their Ovidian translations.¹³ It is because Renaissance mythographers, following Fulgentius (Mythologiae II.7), moralized the wrestling match as the victory of the rational soul over earthly or sensual appetite that Antaeus' earthly origin and the phrase “mother earth” are repeatedly stressed. Raphael Regius glosses Ovid's parentis as terrae matris, as Natalis Comes has Antaeus touching Terram matrem and Abraham Fraunce, following him, “his mother the earth”; in Jonson's masque “Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue,” Hercules begins an invective against Comus' orgies and against sensual appetite in general by crying “Breeds Earth more Monsters yet? / Antoeus scarce is cold”; and Milton's Antaeus, “receiving from his mother Earth new strength,” continues the commonplace.¹⁴ Thus Charles' jest, at once a challenge and a mocking offer of illicit pleasure that Orlando's “more modest” will wryly declines (I.ii.214), helps to establish his identification with Antaeus, Orlando's with Hercules, and the chaste virtue of the young hero. The allusion is echoed later in Celia's warning of a “fall” if Rosalind does not “wrestle with thy affections” (I.iii.21).

The other clear Hercules allusion occurs at the turning point of the action: Orlando's rescue of his sleeping brother Oliver from a snake and a lion. From this act stem Oliver's conversion, his restitutions to Orlando and betrothal to Celia, Orlando's consequent impatience with Ganymede's feigned love, and in turn Rosalind's discovery, her reunion with her father, and the quadruple marriage that ends the play. Orlando's act is romantic story-book heroism to begin with, but the modifications of the source give the act still less realistic, more mythical overtones. In Lodge a “Boare speare” (p. 217) kills the lion, whose dying roar wakes Saladyne (Oliver's counterpart); in the play Orlando, not out hunting but on his way to dally with Ganymede, evidently strangles the lioness in barehanded wrestling whose “hurtling” awakens Oliver (IV.iii.131-132). The event is reported at second hand because even Bottom knew the problems of staging a lion, but the effect is to give a remote, fabulous quality to the event, a tendency to the legendary. Many Elizabethans could recognize here the Herculean labor that Shakespeare had frequently alluded to:¹⁵ the wrestling of the Nemean lion, besides being a favorite topic for moralists, was recalled in every description and picture of Hercules because his dress was its skin.¹⁶ The Hercules allusion is reinforced by the addition to Lodge's account of an unrealistic and apparently unnecessary detail: a “green and gilded snake” wreathed around Oliver's neck also threatens his life but is frightened away by the very sight of Orlando. This equally fabulous event is an added reminder of the Hercules whose cradle game, as Golding has him say,¹⁷ was strangling snakes sent by Hera, and who defeated the Hydra, Acheloüs, and possibly the Typhon.

As with the earlier Hercules allusion, this one may also take part of its meaning from popular Renaissance moralizations of the classical myth. Hercules' many battles with snakes, lions, and other monsters were regarded as the logical consequence of his famous choice at the crossroads between pleasant vice and unpleasant virtue; similarly, Orlando's battle here follows a debate with himself about saving his enemy Oliver. Though the choice of Hercules had come to stand for any difficult moral decision, as Erwin Panofsky has shown for the continent and Hallett Smith for England,¹⁸ the victories over the Nemean lion and the Lernean Hydra (and Hera's snakes in the cradle) were popularly moralized specifically as the defeat of cruel arrogance and malicious envy respectively;¹⁹ Orlando's deed symbolizes his victory over the savage egotism and jealousy that his brother embodies in the play and with which he himself is tempted. The serpent's sting and poison are recurrent metaphors in As You Like It for man's unkindness and envy in general and for Oliver's in particular: in poisoning Charles' mind, Oliver attributes his own moral faults to Orlando, including “practice … by poison” (I.i.155); and when Orlando flees Oliver's murderous envy, Adam bewails a world where “what is comely / Envenoms him that bears it” (II.ii.14-15), probably in allusion to the Hydra's venom in the coat of Nessus that killed Hercules.²⁰ Thus in the tableau Oliver finally paints of Orlando's heroism, a Hercules allusion merges with the common Renaissance device of externalizing a moral conflict or a psychomachy as a fight with beasts or monsters.

One difficulty in tracing the mythopoetic use of allusions is deciding how long after an allusive chord has been struck it continues to reverberate. There are no unmistakable references to Hercules between Orlando's first and last wrestlings, but at best a series of progressively fainter echoes that not everyone will hear. One can therefore only suggest, without insisting on them, a number of hints that Hercules remains Orlando's genius throughout much of the play.

A minute or two after Rosalind identifies Orlando as a type of Hercules, he can greet her modest advances only with tongue-tied silence which is not in Lodge's story. Possibly for Shakespeare and his audience there was a twofold comic parody here. First of all, as Bottom's reference to “Ercles' vein” and “a part to tear a cat in” (Dream I.ii.31, 42) indicate, the customary speech of the stage Hercules was terrific rant.²¹ Shakespeare almost certainly knew²² the familiar Hercules Gallus or Gallicus; always pictured as an older Hercules with golden chains reaching from his tongue to the ears of other men, he signified the rhetorical eloquence of seniority rather than the bodily strength of youth. Here, after several earlier high-flown speeches, the new-found Hercules Orlando is twice unable to manage a single word to Rosalind, let alone rhetorical bombast.²³

Secondly, Orlando unmanned by love is a possible comic parody of Hercules tamed by Omphale (or by Iole in Caxton, Tasso, Spenser, and others).²⁴ Largely because of Ovid's Ninth Heroic Epistle, well known in George Turberville's translation,²⁵ Hercules brought from club to distaff rather than Mars, Samson, or Anthony had become the proverbial example of the power and folly of love, especially in the lyrics of the miscellanies. Previous to As You Like It there had been many light-hearted Shakespearean references to Hercules as a great lover: Armado, for instance, takes comfort that even the mighty Hercules fell to loving, and Berowne asks, “For valor, is not Love a Hercules, / Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?”²⁶ In As You Like It Shakespeare seems to model his hero largely on the Hercules in love whom Sir Philip Sidney had declared an ideal subject for comedy.²⁷

Rosalind easily turns the young Herculean wrestler into “a quintain, a mere lifeless block” (I.ii.263), and he soon cries, “O poor Orlando, thou art overthrown! / Or Charles or something weaker masters thee” (I.ii.271-272). Thereafter he forgets wrestling altogether and becomes “Signior Love” (III.ii.310), shaken with the “quotidian of love” (III.ii.384), writing love-sonnets on trees, and subjecting himself to Ganymede's mockery. From time to time Rosalind herself seems to think of Orlando as a young Hercules. When Celia reports finding him under a tree “like a dropped acorn” (III.ii.248), Rosalind, knowing that the oak was sacred to Jove, answers, “It may well be called Jove's tree when it drops forth such fruit” (III.ii.250-251). What she may mean is that Jove's tree ought to produce a man like Hercules, who was in fact the “scion of the seed of Jove.”²⁸ In this scene she herself has been associated with Diana (III.ii.4), and behind her remark at Orlando's hunter's furnishings—“Oh, ominous! He comes to kill my heart” (III.ii.260)—may be a punning allusion to Hercules' third labor, the capture in Arcadia of Diana's sacred stag. Later, after the battle with the lion, she may be referring to Hercules' weakness before love when she says to Orlando about Oliver and Celia, “Clubs cannot part 'em.”²⁹

The other mythological names in the play have less comprehensive implications, though the allusions are significantly more apt and consistent than in Lodge. The four references to Cupid³⁰ are merely conventional, indicating the mischievous force of love. Rosalind is associated with Helen and Atalanta (III.ii.153-156), Diana (III.ii.2-4; IV.i.154), Juno (I.iii.77; V.iv.147), and Ganymede (I.iii.126-127 et passim); all of these personages were notable for their beauty and (except for Helen) chastity. There-is no such consistency in Lodge, where Rosalind is compared in addition with Apollo, Aurora, Daphne, the Graces, Phaeton, the Phoenix, and Venus. W. Schrickx has noticed a continuous association of Celia with Jupiter;³¹ since all but one of Rosalind's uses of the names Jupiter and Jove may be spoken directly to Celia, they are probably at least a playful pretense that Celia must be the father of the gods if Rosalind is Ganymede, Jove's cupbearer.

Some of the classical allusions in As You Like It are serious, some playful or mock-heroic, some are more far-reaching than others, and all of them indicate analogies between details of the play and the universals embodied in older stories. Like all allusions they are a kind of incidental decoration, displaying the author's inventiveness with conventional stock-in-trade and designed to delight and flatter an audience able to recognize their aptness; and even when used humorously, they operate as a kind of hyperbole, lending an aura of the bigger-than-life, an added romantic glamor. We shall not, however, see the full importance of the mythological references until we see their connection with another order altogether of allusive reference in the play.

The many allusions in As You Like It to religion have often been noticed. Besides the considerable number of precise Biblical echoes identified by Richmond Noble,³² more than three score of specifically religious terms appear, often repeatedly. Since Lodge has very little religious language in Rosalynde, such a wealth of it in As You Like It would seem important to the meaning of the play. Yet even Edward A. Armstrong, who treats of it more fully than anyone else, is interested in it mainly as it reveals the psychology of the poetic imagination,³³ and a few other critics mention it only in passing as an incidental excrescence echoing the religion of courtly love.³⁴ Part of such language in As You Like It, like the little of it there is in Rosalynde, is indeed playful hyperbole about love, but most of it cannot be explained as a surviving convention of romance. Rather, the Biblical references and religious language spoken by most of the main characters seem designed to suggest evanescent, half-playful parallels between this world of romantic comedy and a more serious country of the religious mind, and so to make the play's action vibrate with more than comic energy. To say, as C. L. Barber rightly does, that “the folly of going to Arden has something about it of Christian humility, brotherliness, and unworldliness”³⁵ is not to exhaust the subject.

Critics ever since Gervinus have recognized an association between Arden and Adam's paradise, and Donald Stauffer's essay on As You Like It is actually entitled “The Garden of Eden.”³⁶ Since Arden is patently not an Eden, the usual conclusion is that the only Eden in the play is the one within, created by love in the liberty of the forest. If life in Arden is not prelapsarian, however, it is close to it, and the echoes of Eden are explicit and numerous. Charles compares Arden to the “golden world,” a phrase used by Golding, Googe, and others for the golden age of Saturn's reign;³⁷ the golden age was commonly taken as the gentile corruption of the Genesis story of paradise.³⁸ The play opens with a character named simply Adam, not Adam Spencer, and Orlando soon associates this “good old man” with “the antique world, / When service sweat for duty, not for meed” (II.iii.57-58). Although Adam is apparently a steward, as in Lodge, Orlando speaks metaphorically of him as a gardener, husbanding and pruning trees (II.iii.63-65); one will recall many other Shakespearean references to the medieval tradition of Adam hortulans.³⁹ Duke Senior finds Arden an Eden except for “the penalty of Adam, / The seasons' difference.”⁴⁰ Details of setting and imagery suggest the fruitfulness implied by the Septuagint's word paradise: from Lodge's unrealistic pastoral setting Shakespeare has kept, besides the oak of Jove and England, only those trees with strong Biblical significance, the palm and olive, and the thoughts of people in Arden are rife with images of animals both familiar and exotic. Though the play's many references to time⁴¹ remind us that the timeless world of Eden is not here, yet Arden approaches Eden even in respect to time: there Senior and his men “fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world” (I.i.124-125) and “lose and neglect the creeping hours of time” (II.vii.112); and Celia says, “I like this place, / And willingly could waste my time in it” (II.iv.94-95).

Armstrong also finds a series of reminiscences of the Tree of Life, the Tree of Knowledge, and Adam and Eve.⁴² Probably more certain allusions than those he offers are the repeated images of snake and lion. In Arden the serpent does not destroy the sinner under Jove's tree, but in the fallen world adversity is “ugly and venomous” (II.i.13), “what is comely / Envenoms him that bears it” (II.iii.14-15), and Adam's penalty of winter weather, like man's unkindness, has a keen tooth and a sharp sting (II.i.8; II.vii.177, 185, 188). The lion commonly symbolized many things besides the devil, but the addition of the snake makes the meaning unmistakable, especially since both symbols for evil have frequent Biblical sanction; “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder; the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet (Psa. 91:13).⁴³

It is also possible that an Elizabethan audience might have noticed, glimmering through the action, incidental reminiscences of other Biblical subjects which had for centuries been among the most familiar and important in religious instruction and literature, ecclesiastical art, and the mystery cycles. It might have recognized, as Jaques does,⁴⁴ the parallel between Duke Senior and Moses in the wilderness; and it might have seen Cain in the fratricidal and later vagabond Oliver, and Pharoah or Herod in the raging, murderously jealous Duke Frederick. Also, several names in the play, besides Adam's, suggest religious overtones. Shakespeare changed Rosader to Orlando, the name of a great Christian champion, and Alinda to Celia, or “heaven.” The name of Juno's other swan Rosalind, though Germanic in origin, had by similarity with the Spanish rosa linda come to mean what Celia calls Rosalind: “My sweet Rose, my dear Rose” (I.ii.24). The centuries-old associations of the rose with heaven and paradise seem to be repeatedly evoked in the play: Orlando calls her “heavenly Rosalind” (I.ii.301) and associates her with heaven and a heavenly synod four more times (III.ii.148 ff.), and in the final masque the god Hymen says to Duke Senior, “Good Duke, receive thy daughter. / Hymen from Heaven brought her” (V.iv.117-118).

The climactic scene of As You Like It, however, contains the most striking of the Biblical reminiscences, an epitome of the central mystery of Christianity. Orlando is presented with the situation that all who would imitate Christ must face: whether to take “revenge” on one's sinful brother and enemy when there is “just occasion” for it (IV.iii.129-130) or to take the more difficult and dangerous course of “kindness.” Orlando might with justice consign his would-be murderer to perdition, for Oliver has only himself to blame that he is in the power, actual and symbolic, of the serpent and lion; like Iago, Oliver becomes demonic when he assumes the role of slanderer or false accuser indicated by the very name of Satan (see Wives V.v.163). Yet after being tempted three times to abandon the sinner, Orlando decides to be his brother's keeper and thus, by exercising mercy rather than justice, wins a victory over Satan both for Oliver and for himself.

This allusion is hinted at in Lodge: at one point old Adam offers to save Rosader's life by giving him his blood to drink, and Orlando explains after rescuing Oliver, “I counted it the hart of a resolute man to purchase a strangers reliefe, though with the losse of his owne bloud” (pp. 195, 218). Moreover, a number of Shakespeare's details differ subtly but significantly from the original. In Lodge the lion gives Rosader “a sore pinch” (p. 217) that is quickly forgotten among the lengthy speeches that follow; Orlando's wound causes him to faint away—to suffer a ritual death, in Northrop Frye's phrase⁴⁵—and to retire for a while to Duke Senior's cave while the heavenly Rosalind swoons in sympathy. Lodge's Saladyne repents of his evil in prison before coming to the forest, whereas the very turning point of As You Like It is Oliver's conversion from sinfulness through Orlando's sacrifice. The religious overtones of the event are amplified by several suggestive details: Oliver receives “fresh array” from the patriarchal Duke, alters his whole personality, bears as a token of his savior's sacrifice a napkin dyed with his blood, and falls immediately in love with a girl named Celia.

The spectacular finale of the play has especially troubled critics. They often attribute the so-called Masque of Hymen, like the similar Masque of Jupiter in Cymbeline, to a hand other than Shakespeare's; and the defense of romantic comedy as a ritual wish-fulfillment is apparently not enough, even in a play entitled As You Like It, to justify that final lapse from versimilitude, Duke Frederick's conversion. Yet when seen as the culmination of a series of religious references, the action ending the play, including the Duke's conversion, seems designed to evince the providential guidance foretold by Adam (II.iii.43-45); and the stylized masque form, in itself suitable for the wedding ceremonial (as in Jonson's Hymenaei), becomes the medium for a merger of ritualistic and more or less realistic drama. A form of god appears on the stage and to the sound of “still music” ensures “mirth in Heaven” by making “earthly things … / Atone together.” He unites the New Adam to the heavenly Rose, promising that henceforth “no cross”⁴⁶ shall part them; immediately the redeemed sinner is married to Celia and all are united with each other and with the Duke to the music of a hymeneal “hymn.” “Tidings” are then brought that the play's other demonic oppressor has been miraculously converted by “an old religious man.” Bequeathing to his brother the earthly kingdom he had usurped, as the other redeemed brother had already done with his father's estate, he restores the long-awaited promised land and ends the old Duke's wanderings in the wilderness. The play ends as it began, with a testament, when Jaques bequeaths, as he has said wordlings do (II.i.47-49), his blessings on the already joyful. The god invites all present to seek to understand “these most strange events” as all join in the image of heavenly harmony, a dance.

Far from being a piece of theatrical hack-work, this is a remarkably rich and complex scene; like several others towards the end of the play (esp. III.ii, IV.i, IV.iii), it is simultaneously full of both classical and Christian allusion. Shakespeare was typical of his age in that his imagination moved as easily in either frame of reference and often merged the two. Orlando, in a “tedious homily,” declares that a “heavenly synod” gave Rosalind the graces of Helen and Atalanta; Ganymede-Rosalind compares herself with Diana, exhorts Orlando to keep his promise “with religion” lest he be thought “of the gross band of the unfaithful,” and then rails at “that … wicked bastard of Venus”; a Christian marriage and heavenly atonement is presided over by Hymen, who sings a hymn to Juno; Fortune's wheel spins a providential web. Allusions as easily and lightly intermixed as these are familiar in Elizabethan literature; yet when throughout a play a hero is recurrently linked with both the myth of Hercules and the story of Christian redemption, a modern reader needs assurance that such a transaction would not have surprised or troubled Shakespeare's contemporaries. The evidence is to be found in Elizabethan commonplaces about Hercules.

In the Renaissance Hercules' physical power came to symbolize any other kind of heroic strength, whether moral, religious, or intellectual. This wide range of symbolic meanings had grown within the medieval tradition of allegorical commentary on pagan myths that culminated in the encyclopedic Ovide Moralisé and Pierre Bersuire's Ovidius Moralizatus. In the Renaissance, Ovidian commentaries by Raphael Regius and Georgius Sabinus, mythographical compendia by Alexander ab Alexandro, Lilio Giraldo, Natalis Comes, Vincenzo Cartari, and Cesare Ripa, and treatises like Coluccio Salutati's De Laboribus Herculis and Giraldo's Herculis Vita, not to mention the countless artistic treatments that these helped engender,⁴⁷ represented Hercules as the supreme exemplar of moral fortitude, as epitomized in the Choice of Hercules, and of virtuous works, as typified by his twelve or more Labors. As the vir perfectissimus, the embodiment of ideal Renaissance virtú, Hercules Furens became also the symbol of intellectual strength and wise prudence, fit to replace John the Baptist in the seal of Florence and to be the namesake of members of the d'Este family and the emblem of famous Italian academies.⁴⁸

Throughout the period, however, a much older interpretation of Hercules as a type of Christ or of the Christian man persisted and often merged with the more strictly moral allegories. Recently Marcel Simon in his Hercule et le Christianisme⁴⁹ has traced throughout the whole history of Christian thought the intimate, complicated ways in which the figures of Hercules and Christ have helped to enrich each other and has shown how Renaissance artists like Zelotti and Michelangelo merged the two figures. The Christian interpretation of Hercules was kept alive into the seventeenth century by such works as the often-reprinted Metamorphosis Ovidiana moraliter … explanata (1509 et seqq.) (a corruption of Bersuire's Ovidius Moralizatus), Jacobus Bonus' De Vita & Gestis Christi … atque Herculis Laboris & Gesta in Christi Figuram (1526), Ronsard's “Hercule Chrestien” (1556), and Théodore d'Aubigné's “L' Hercule Chrestien” (1630).⁵⁰

Hercules never became so popular with English as with continental writers and artists, and although Zwingli expected to see Hercules in heaven near God,⁵¹ the Christian interpretation of Hercules remained a Catholic rather than a Protestant exercise. Yet in spite of Luther's attack on the allegorical method in general, echoed by many English Puritans, Elizabethans continued to go to the classical myths for moral if not usually religious allegory,⁵² and in such moralizations the analogy between Hercules and Christ was often tacitly suggested. Ever since Virgil's Evander had called him “our greatest avenger” (Aeneid VIII.201), Hercules had been regarded as a champion against tyranny, and as such he appeared at length in Lydgate's Troy Book, Caxton's Recuyell, and its descendant, William Warner's Albion's England, as well as in frequent references.⁵³ As such a half-divine, self-sacrificing benefactor of men he often became an analogue of Christ. At the death of Diomedes in Warner's history, the Thracians “thinke some God had left the Heavens, to succour men on earth,” and earlier Pluto's kingdom, a “Hell” complete with “damned Soules” and “Diuels,” “did giue a figure plaine,” after Hercules' descent, of a “harrowed Hell.”⁵⁴ The speaker in Chapman's “Hymnus in Noctem” (1594) says, “Fall Hercules from heaven in tempestes hurld, / And cleanse this beastly stable of the world.”⁵⁵

Similarly, as a human being who had worked on the whole for virtue and who, “his terrestriall body being purged and purified, himselfe was afterward deified and crowned with immortality,”⁵⁶ Hercules could stand as a model for all Christians. Palingenius stressed his general beneficence:

To profit many men, and ayde, with all his power the same:
This way to heauen onely leades, by this obtayned the game
Great Hercules, and many more, whose
worthy fames remayne
As yet wyth us, whome neuer age can cause to die agayne:
The gentle and the liberall man is lyke to God aboue.(57)

To others, more specific traits were instructive. Erasmus, who sometimes satirized the allegorical method and treated Hercules euhemeristically, said in his manual for Christians that “the labors of Hercules [may] show you that you achieve heaven by honest effort,” and elsewhere recommended as a theme topic for schoolboys, “Hercules gained immortality by destroying monsters”—i. e., human vices and passions.⁵⁸ In The Faerie Queene the Christian hero Artegall is compared with Hercules, who “monstrous tyrants with his club subdewed; / The club of Justice dread,” and who got thereby, like all such heroes, “place deserved with the gods on hy.”⁵⁹ In A Booke of Christian Ethics (1587), William Fulbecke gave Christians the choice of Hercules at the crossroads, between Virtue and Venus.⁶⁰ Whereas Abraham Fraunce and Stephen Batman, like their masters Comes and Cartari, make Hercules symbolize the strength to subdue vices and voluptuous desires, Thomas Wilson makes the analogous connection with Christianity explicit: “What other thing are the wonderfull labours of Hercules, but that reason should withstand affection, and the spirit for euer should fight against the flesh? Wee Christians had like Fables heretofore of ioyly felowes [i.e., St. Christopher and St. George], the Images whereof were set up (in Gods name) euen in our Churches.”⁶¹

At the turn of the century in England one could still treat the Hercules story, as all pagan myths, either as a strange version of an original Bible story or as an antetype supporting God's revelation. One finds the first idea in the early pages of Ralegh's History of the World, begun in 1604: “The fiction of those golden apples kept by a dragon [was] taken from the serpent which tempted Evah: so was paradise itself transported out of Asia into Africa, and made the garden of the Hesperides: the prophecies, that Christ should break the serpent's head, and conquer the power of hell, occasioned the fables of Hercules killing the serpent of the Hesperides, and descending into hell, and captivating Cerberus.”⁶² The typological view one finds in Donne's Biathanatos (c. 1608): Samson, says Donne, was “a man so exemplar, that not onely the times before him had him in Prophecy … and the times after him more consummately in Christ, of whom he was a Figure, but even in his own time, other nations may seem to have had some type, or Copy of him, in Hercules.”⁶³ Milton's several identifications of Christ and Hercules are famous and indicate how long the tradition survived.⁶⁴

In view of these continuing associations of Christ and Hercules both on the continent and in England, in literature both scholarly and popular, didactic and imaginative, religious and secular, it seems unlikely that any Elizabethan would have been surprised or troubled to recognize comparisons of Orlando with both Hercules and Christ. As Holofernes says, “The allusion holds in the exchange” (L. L. L. IV.ii.42). The play implies two familiar “mythical” patterns in a familiar combination; since they did not conflict with each other outside the play, neither would they within it. If anything they reinforce one another: the allusion to one story is a kind of supporting (though not sufficient) evidence that its complement is also alluded to.

Moreover, the double allusions extend beyond Orlando to other characters and details. Arden approaches both the golden world and Eden; the snake is reminiscent both of the serpent in the garden of the Hesperides and of Eve's tempter. Arthur Golding makes the common identification of the classical golden age with “Adams tyme in Paradyse” (p. 10). When Rosalind takes the name of Jove's page Ganymede, she associates herself not only with a child of peerless beauty, as Spenser and Palingenius knew, but also, in the view of Comes, Fraunce, Chapman, and Giles Fletcher, with the platonically ideal beauty of the mind that God desires to bring to heaven, or with the heaven-bound soul itself.⁶⁵ Such significations are fitting for the heavenly bride of a New Adam, and they are reinforced by Rosalind's associations with Diana, who from Fulgentinus to Lyly, Drayton, and Chapman represented “celestiall contemplation” ravishing the soul of man.⁶⁶ Even Celia's associations with Jove, though always comic, are suitable for the girl named “heaven” whom the redeemed Oliver weds.

Before one can accept these many allusions as evidence that the archetypal imagination is at work in As You Like It, however, one serious objection needs to be answered: that to look for near-divine adumbrations in a pleasant stage entertainment is indeed to try to put Jove in a thatched house. Such an objection, insofar as it does not rest on the assumption that anything serious must be sober, is both natural and in part valid. To argue that an allegory or symbolic vision is the main informing pattern of a Shakespearean or almost any other play is to do it an injustice; a play, especially a comedy or romance, is play, an elaborate game of as-if, and its main focus is human action in its particular enactment on the stage, not an abstract idea or occult region of experience. The real question that analogical criticism poses is not whether comedies and romances may be serious but, as Philip Edwards says, how one can define “the manner in which they may be said to be serious.”⁶⁷

Obviously As You Like It is not a symbolic or allegorical play, nor can its many allusions be made to sustain an allegorical pattern or “meaning.” The series of allusions is not comprehensive or even continuous enough to base an interpretation of the play upon; the references have to do at most with a half dozen of the characters and are entirely unrelated to several of the story lines or subplots, and they occur intermittently, not in the continuous sequence one expects from allegory. Moreover, to use Philip Wheelwright's terms, the “assertorial tone” of the allusive links is not “heavy” enough for allegory;⁶⁸ one would never say that Orlando “signifies” or “stands for” Hercules or Christ as Artegall stands for Justice or Gloriana for Elizabeth; the connections are much more subtle and delicate, and anything like E. K.'s gloss to The Shepheardes Calendar is unthinkable.

What is needed is a critical term to name the kind of tentative, intellectually playful kind of identification and association found in As You Like It and in many Renaissance works; symbolism, allegory, even iconology all imply too fixed and definite a relationship between sign and referent. William Arrowsmith has coined the useful term conversion for the transformation or “transfiguration” of the received reality of the world of the play into higher reality “intended, under the pressure of poetry, to become incarnate in the secular terms of the play.” Such a conversion or transfiguration, “teasing, unanchored, suggestive of the mystery it is meant to record,” only glimpsed “on the fringes of our emotional field,”⁶⁹ occurs momentarily in parts of As You Like It as a result of serio-comic classical and Biblical reminiscences.

If by design or by instinct Shakespeare was attempting to surround As You Like It with an aura of mythical reference, then many divergences from his source are explained and many details cease to be troublesome; but what literary interest is added to the play by its extra dimension? There is first of all the increased esthetic, or qualitative, interest of a greater density of texture, the appeal of complexity under control. Secondly, the mythic enlarging of the characters increases the play's practical, or moral, interest. We tend to take more seriously characters who are like the gods even in half-comic ways; people involved in deeds of recognizably universal interest make greater claims on our hopes and expectations than do ordinary comic foils, and our increased commitment changes the quality of our laughter. Similarly, the theme of the play is enlarged and with it the play's intellectual interest. Everyone in As You Like It is trying in his own way to accommodate his love and his intelligence, or his wit and his will, to each other, and that activity constitutes the central theme of the play. The bawdy Touchstone, unpoetical Audrey, and self-loving Frederick and Oliver represent the less ideal thematic extremes, and the rest of the characters suggest a wide range of human possibilities. The education in love and self-knowledge that Orlando sought at the beginning of the play and has been receiving from Duke Senior and Rosalind is finally completed with his Herculean defeat of self-love (arrogance and envy) and his charitable rescue of his sinful brother. The tissue of allusions surrounding him keeps reminding us that his action, as indeed the movement of the play as a whole, has a divine tendency, and that his final achievement, like Duke Senior's optimism and charitableness, points to the other extreme, the harmony of love and wisdom that “exceeds man's might, that dwells with gods above” (Troi. III.ii.163-164).

It is also at least possible that our comic pleasure is increased because the system of allusions has helped implicate into the play a time-tested pattern of life as we would like it—because we instinctively react to stage after stage of the collective fantasy of heroic success. In effect if not by intent the figures of Christ and Hercules are intermediary between Orlando and an archetype of heroic struggle; the merging of the deeds of Orlando with similar events from both the Bible and classical myth implies a still more general or archetypal pattern fairly consistent with those outlined by Rank, Raglan, Campbell, and others; one finds here the birth of a hero to a distinguished parent, his own early distinction, sibling rivalry and danger to his life, exile from the fallen paradise and search for a new one, the aid of a lowly old man, meeting with the female promise of paradise, the education in mysteries, the slaying of monsters, and the leading of men back to a paradisal state.⁷⁰ It is no denial of preconscious archetypal “thought-forms” to suggest that the mythic pattern may have arrived and taken shape in this particular play because the poet's metaphoric imagination recognized and then exploited analogies between his basic story, familiar myths, and their traditional interpretations.

Quite apart from the possibility of a purely archetypal-ritual reading, however, the allusions in As You Like It help to determine the quality of our comic apprehension of the play by widening our perspective. In “this wide and universal theater” (II.vii.137) we see ludicrous events surprisingly intermixed with others tending, as the allusions remind us, to the heroic and divine; as we listen to the comic aria on stage center we are every so often aware of distant, more profound harmonies of the music of heaven and earth atoning together. We are kept aware of the whole wide human province between the dog-ape and Hercules, between a Barbary cock-pigeon and Juno's swans. Insofar as the people in the play flounder and fall short of the ideal, they are the more laughable for our awareness of it; but our amusement is the more sympathetic because some of these human beings are able to approach that ideal for a fleeting instant, during a brief stay in Arden.

Notes

1. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), passim.

2. Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis, 1932), pp. 139-155; “Classical Myth in Shakespeare's Plays,” Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson, ed. Herbert Davis and Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1959), pp. 65-85.

3. On Shakespeare's mythical learning see, e. g., Robert K. Root, Classical Mythology in Shakespeare, Yale Studies in English, No. 19 (New York, 1903) and Thomas W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, 1944); for examples of personal allegory, Eva T. Clark, Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare's Plays: A Study of the Oxford Theory (New York, 1931) and W. Schrickx, Shakespeare's Early Contemporaries: The Background of the Harvey-Nashe Polemic and Love's Labour's Lost (Antwerp, 1956).

4. The Herculean Hero in Marlowe, Chapman, Shakespeare and Dryden (London, 1962).

5. “The Tempest,” Image and Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry (Baltimore, 1960), pp. 42-66.

6. Root, p. 125. Citations from Shakespeare, unless otherwise noted, are to The Complete Works, ed. G. B. Harrison (New York, 1952).

7. Citations from Rosalynde are to Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Vol. II: The Comedies, 1597-1603 (New York, 1958)—hereafter cited in the text by page only.

8. F. N. Lees, “Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Won,” TLS, March 28, 1958, p. 169; April 10, 1959, p. 209.

9. See F. S. Boas, “Aspects of Classical Legend and History in Shakespeare,” Proc. Brit. Acad., XXIX (1943), 114-115; Waith, pp. 112-143 passim.

10. L. L. L. V.ii.592 ff. See John H. Roberts, “The Nine Worthies,” MP, XIX (1922), 297-305.

11. L. L. L. IV.iii.340; Hamlet II.ii.378-379; Cor. IV.vi.99; Per. I.i.27.

12. Baldwin, II, 549-551, et passim.

13. Shakespeare's Ovid: Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, ed. W. H. D. Rouse (London, 1904), p. 186; Underdown, Ouid his inuectiue against Ibis (London, 1569), sig. H3^r.

14. P. Ouidii Metamorphosin cum luculentissimis Raphaelis Regii enarrationibus (Venice, 1509), fol. xcvi^r; Natalis Comitis Mythologiae, sive Explicationis Fabularum (Frankfurt, 1596), p. 691 (Bk. VII, Ch. 1); Fraunce, The Third part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch. Entitled Amintas Dale (London, 1592), fol. 47^r; Jonson, Works, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1925-52), VII (1941), 484; Paradise Regained, The Minor Poems and Samson Agonistes, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Garden City, N. Y., 1937), pp. 531-532 (P. R. IV.562-568).

15. L. L. L. IV.i.90; Dream I.ii.31; John II.i.141-144; perhaps Hamlet I.iv.83.

16. Or so many Renaissance writers believed. See Spencer, Muiopotmos, lines 71-72, and F. Q. VII.vii.36. In classical accounts, the skin is of the Thespian lion.

17. Shakespeare's Ovid, p. 183.

18. Panofsky, Herkules am Scheidewege, Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, XVIII (Leipzig-Berlin, 1930); Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp. 293 ff.

19. Fraunce, identifying the lion with wrath, pride, and cruelty (fol. 46^v), echoes Comes' “superbia & ira & arrogantia & furor animi … qui leo est Nemeaeus, & in sylva incitiae nostri animi pascitur, omnesque virtutes populatur” (p. 709); Hera's snakes signify to Comes “aemulationem virtutis alienae” (p. 708); to Fraunce the Hydra is “Envy.” Cf. Andreae Alciati V. C. Emblemata: cum Claudii Minois Diuionensis ad eadem commentariis (Leyden, 1591), p. 507; Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, “L'Hercule Chrestien,” Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Eugene Réaume and F. Caussade (Paris, 1873-92), II, 227-228. The symbolism, of course, is more general than the Hercules myth: for arrogance as a lion and envy as a snake, see, e.g., 2 H.VI III.i.6-20, III.ii.259-267, 309-326; 3 H. VI I.iv.12-17; Guy de Tervarent, Attributs et Symboles dans l'Art Profane, 1450-1600 (Geneva, 1959), s. v. “Lion,” “Serpent,” and “Vipère.”

20. Root, p. 73.

21. See Waith, p. 208, n. 47.

22. If only because he is described s. v. “Hercules Gallus” in Thomas Cooper's Thesaurus, which Shakespeare apparently drew on for his knowledge of Hercules. See DeWitt T. Starnes and Ernest W. Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries (Chapel Hill, 1955), pp. 113-114. But other descriptions are common: e. g., George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge, Eng., 1936), p. 142; Fraunce, fol. 47^r; and, translated from Vincenzo Cartari's Le Imagini, Richard Linche, The fountaine of ancient fiction (London, 1599), sigs. R4^v-S^r.

23. Orlando's cry, “What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue?” (I.ii.269) after Rosalind hangs a chain on him (rather than sending a jewel, as in Lodge) may hint the Gallic Hercules, though the evidence is too slight to be conclusive.

24. The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, ed. Oskar Sommer (London, 1894), II, 491; Gerusalemme Liberata, XVI.3; F. Q. V.v.24, V.viii.2. See also Cooper, s. v. “Omphale”; Florios Second Frvtes (London, 1591), p. 167; Fraunce, fol. 47^r.

25. The Heroycall Epistles of the Learned Poet Publius Ouidius Naso (London, 1567).

26. L. L. L. I.ii.67-70, IV.iii.340; see also Merch., III.ii.85-87; Much II.i.260-266, III.iii.145-147.

27. The Defense of Poesie, in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge, 1962 [1912]), III, 40.

28. Nicholas Grimald's translation (London, 1553) of Cicero, De Officiis, I.xxxii.118. Cf. Aeneid VIII.301. Spenser (F. Q. II.v.31) makes the oak the tree of both Jove and his son. For a different reading of Rosalind's line, see Mary E. Rickey, “Rosalind's Gentle Jupiter,” SQ, XIII (1962), 365-366.

29. V.ii.45. Cf. L. L. L. I.ii.180-181: “Cupid's butt shaft is too hard for Hercules' club.”

30. I.iii.1; III.v.31; IV.i.48, 216.

31. Schrickx, pp. 72-73. See I.ii.226-227; I.iii.126; II.iv.1, 61; III.ii.163, 249. There is no need for Spedding's improvement of the Folios' “Jupiter” to “pulpiter” (III.ii.163); see As You Like It, ed. Horace H. Furness, vol. VIII of A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare (Philadelphia, 1890), p. 153, n. 154; Charles Jasper Sisson, New Readings in Shakespeare (Cambridge, Eng., 1956), I, 152; Rickey, p. 365.

32. Shakespeare's Biblical Knowledge and Use of the Book of Common Prayer (London, 1935), pp. 191-194.

33. Shakespeare's Imagination: A Study of the Psychology of Association and Inspiration (London, 1946), pp. 112-114.

34. See Karl F. Thompson, “Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies,” PMLA, LXVII (1952), 1080; Helen Gardner, “As You Like It,” More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John Garrett (London, 1959), pp. 31-32.

35. Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959), p. 227.

36. Shakespeare's World of Images (New York, 1949), pp. 67-109.

37. Shakespeare's Ovid, p. 10; Marcellus Palingenius, The Zodiake of Life, tr. Barnabe Googe, ed. Rosemond Tuve (New York, 1947), p. 30.

38. See Golding, p. 10; Ralegh, infra, p. 17.

39. E. g., 2 H. VI IV.ii.142; R. II III.iv.73; Hamlet V.i.35.

40. II.i.5-6. Depending on how one reads a textual crux, “the seasons' difference” is either the extent of the Duke's troubles or no trouble at all. See George L. Kittredge, ed., Sixteen Plays of Shakespeare (Boston, 1939), p. 312; Sisson, I, 148-149.

41. I.iii.90, 137; II.iii.56-57; II.vii.20-33, 139-166, 174-190; III.i.7; III.ii.317 ff.; III.iv.21; III.v.60; IV.i.39 ff., 183 ff.; IV.iii.1-2; V.iii.31-34, 39.

42. Armstrong, pp. 113-114.

43. Cf. Tervarent, loc. cit.; Thomas Taylor, Christs combate and conquest; or, the lyon of the Tribe of Judah, vanquishing the roaring lyon (1618) and Christs victorie over the dragon: or Satans downfall (1633).

44. See II.v.62-63; Noble, pp. 265-266.

45. Anatomy of Criticism, p. 179.

46. The serio-comic pun would seem unlikely had there not already been a similar pun on cross in II.iv.12.

47. For a general discussion of the mythological tradition, see Jean Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, tr. Barbara F. Sessions (New York, 1953). For bibliographical information about works named above, Starnes and Talbert may be used to supplement Seznec; neither book, however, cites Alexander ab Alexandro, Genialum dierum (Frankfurt, 1591); Salutati, De Laboribus Herculis, ed. B. L. Ullman (Zürich, 1951); Giraldo, Herculis Vita, in Opera Omnia (Leyden, 1696), I, 571-598.

48. Seznec, p. 20; Hughes, ed., Paradise Regained, p. 408.

49. Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l'Université de Strasbourg (Paris, 1955), esp. p. 184.

50. Ronsard, Oeuvres Complètes, ed. Paul Laumonier (Paris, 1914-59), VIII (1935), 207-223; Aubigné, loc. cit.

51. Simon, p. 180.

52. Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition, pp. 31-32, 69 ff.; Simon, p. 185.

53. Smith (Elizabethan Poetry, pp. 296, 297, 299-300) cites passages from Petrarch, William Harrison, Thomas Fenne, and Spenser; cf. Georgius Sabinus, Fabularum Ovidii Interpretatio (Cambridge, 1584), p. 351.

54. Warner, pp. 18, 20, 51.

55. The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett (New York, 1941), p. 25, lines 255-256.

56. Fraunce, fol. 47^r.

57. Zodiake, p. 56.

58. The Enchiridion of Erasmus, tr. Raymond Himelick (Bloomington, 1963), p. 106; Opera Omnia, ed. Johannes Clericus (Leyden, 1703-6), I, 525—cited in Starnes and Talbert, p. 24. On Erasmus' ambivalence towards myth, see Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition, p. 68, and an apparently euhemeristic reference to Hercules in De Copia (London, 1573), foll. 153^v-154^r.

59. F. Q. V.i.2, V.ii.1.

60. (London, 1587), sig. D8^v.

61. Fraunce, fol. 47^r; Batman, The Golden Booke of the Leaden Goddes (London, 1577), foll. 12^r-v; Wilson's Arte of Rhetorique, 1560, ed. G. H. Mair (Oxford, 1909), p. 196.

62. The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh (Oxford, 1829), II, 167. Cf. Guillaume Budé, De asse et partibus eius (Paris, 1532), fol. clxxii: “Hercules Alexicacus dictus est malorum depulsor quasique generis humani protector. quo nomine Christus proprie significatur.” Cf. foll. cxci. cxcvi.

63. Biathanatos, ed. J. William Hebel (New York, 1930), p. 199 (III.v.4).

64. See Hughes, ed., Paradise Regained, p. 408.

65. F. Q. III.xii.7; Zodiake, pp. 15, 42; cf. Iliad XX.232-235. Comes, pp. 1005-6 (Bk. IX, Ch. 13); Fraunce, fol. 33^r; Chapman, “Hymnus in Cynthiam” (1594), in Poems, p. 41, lines 466-467; The Poetical Works of Giles Fletcher and Phineas Fletcher, ed. Frederick S. Boas (Cambridge, Eng., 1908), I, 78.

66. Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition, p. 157; Fraunce, fol. 43^v; Lyly, Endymion, passim; Drayton, “Endimion and Phoebe,” The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford, 1931-41), I, 142, 146-148 (lines 505-522, 681-734); Chapman, loc. cit., Poems, p. 34, lines 154-155.

67. “Shakespeare's Romances; 1900-1957,” Shakespeare Survey, XI (1958), 12, 17.

68. The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism (Bloomington, 1954), pp. 66-68.

69. “The Comedy of T. S. Eliot,” English Stage Comedy, ed. William K. Wimsatt, English Institute Essays, 1954 (New York, 1955), pp. 152, 157-158.

70. See Clyde Kluckhohn, “Recurrent Themes in Myths and Mythmaking,” Myth and Mythmaking, ed. Henry A. Murray (New York, 1960), pp. 56-57.