SOURCE: Fowler, Alastair. Pastoral Instruction in As You Like It, pp. 1-14. London: University of London, 1984.

[In the following essay, a printed version of a lecture delivered at the University of London on February 18, 1984, Fowler discusses As You Like It as a blend of genres with a particular indebtedness to “realistic pastoral.” The critic maintains that the Forest of Arden is not a timeless, static world but rather one in which time must be spent in productive activity, especially in learning the significance of human mortality and the meaning of faithfulness in love.]

If critics of As You Like It agree on one thing, it is that the play is pastoral-romantic by genre. The plot, what there is of it, conforms to ‘the standard dramatic pastoral pattern … of extrusion or exile, recreative sojourn in a natural setting, with ultimate return “homeward” … a return in moral strength reinforced by the country experience’.¹ The action actually introduces the keeping of sheep; which is more than pastoral dramas always do. And life has a natural simplicity in Arden, which from a distance at least seems like life in the Golden Age: there the banished Duke Senior's followers ‘fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world’. Then, many minor pastoral romance motifs are worked in, such as the carving of names on trees;² and many regular pastoral themes are developed such as the contrast of court and country—not only in the conversation of Touchstone and Corin, but implicitly in the alternation of scenes between civil Arden and the cruel court.³ After the usual manner of pastoral romance, court figures appear; but they lose their status through exile or voluntary rustication, or renounce their power (like Frederick), or (like Celia) hide their identity under disguise—‘under the veil’, in Puttenham's phrase, ‘of homely persons’.⁴ Such is Shakespeare's generic tact that one critic has spoken of the play as bearing ‘brilliant witness to its author's capacious comprehension of the whole pastoral tradition’.⁵ Steeply as that is put, I have no wish to disagree. Nevertheless, there are some problematic features of As You Like It, which have been called antipastoral.⁶ And it is some of these that I want to consider now.

What I have in mind is not merely the satiric element—a common enough ingredient of pastoral romance.⁷ Satire was even an acceptable admixture in pastoral eclogue itself. Mantuan and Spenser offered Shakespeare the most authoritative models for the the type of pastoral with moral satire. Within this tradition, for example, Jacques's biography can be located quite precisely. His melancholy satiric attitude is partly motivated by his experience as a traveller—just as Diggon's satire is, in The Shepheardes Calender.⁸ By a convention that went back to Petrarch's Eclogue X, the returning traveller brings news of corruption outside the pastoral world.⁹ Ecclesiastical satire, in particular, was a regular ingredient of medieval and Mantuanian pastoral; as Shakespeare surely knew when he introduced his village parson Sir Oliver Martext. Moral pastoral was so well established, in fact, that Puttenham could regard it as the distinctive modern form: ‘The Eglogues came after to containe and enforme morall discipline, for the amendment of mans behaviour, as be those of Mantuan and other moderne Poets.’¹⁰ But this is not the only way in which pastoral was susceptible to generic blending. Pastoral drama was very often combined with other kinds—romantic, comic, tragic; so that it became a key topic in Renaissance discussions of the theory of genera mista.

The Spenserian parallel is a good one, in that The Shepheardes Calender itself has problematic, unpastoral features. Developing Hesiodic elements in the pastoral of Mantuan, it portrays dialect-speaking rustics involved in actual work, as if in a georgic poem. Whether he learnt it from Spenser or from the old pastoral play Sir Clyomon and Clamydes, Shakespeare obviously took up this mode of impure or georgic pastoral, and in some ways carried its mixture of values further still. His Arden—as Dame Helen Gardner and other critics have noticed—is conspicuously unidealized. It threatens hunger, thirst and ‘the seasons' difference’; while its fauna include the lion and snake of the romantic forest. It may be enchanting; but it is also an exhausting ‘desert’ in which Orlando expects to meet with ‘savagery’. And the staffage of this desert landscape offers corresponding realism in an unexpected mixture of pastoral with its opposites. We have a touching sketch of the conventional shepherd in Silvius. But Audrey is a filthy goatherd, and Corin's master churlish and absentee. Old Corin himself, the chief embodiment of pastoral values of simplicity and stoicism, we may regard as one of nature's gentlemen—but of a type foreign to ordinary pastoral. For he is a real shepherd, and knows the practicalities of his occupation—the greasiness of fells—in a distinctly georgic way. And the very putting of virtue on the side of the old, of Corin and Adam, sticks out as extraneous to pastoral.¹¹ I need not say that in all this Shakespeare by no means flouts or satirizes pastoral convention, but merely selects a particular shade of mixed, realistic pastoral, in the interests of a particular strategy. Ordinary pastoral would have contrasted the best in nature with the worst at court. In Shakespeare's heightened contrast, even the worst in the wilderness of Arden makes an effective foil: when Duke Senior shrinks with cold he consoles himself that ‘This is no flattery. These are counsellors / That feelingly persuade me what I am.’ The outside world, it seems, is even worse than pastoral writers have made it.

A similarly complex departure from pastoral is made by the prominent introduction of hunting, not only in the scene introducing Jaques, but also in the short scene with the song ‘What shall he have that killed the deer?’. From Theocritus on, pastoralists had regarded hunting as an alien activity.¹² After the introduction of foresters in Queen Elizabeth's alfresco entertainment however, hunting scenes became a popular if anomalous component in pastoral plays.¹³ But now Shakespeare strikingly reactivates pure pastoral objections, and puts the decorum of hunting again in question. To raise the issue was not an eccentric thing. As Claus Uhlig has shown, Jaques's sentiment relates to a persistent humanistic tradition that represented hunting as mere slaughter—as the pastime of tyrants, an outrage against the original harmony of men and animals.¹⁴ Shakespeare himself, however, can hardly be said to agree altogether with Jaques. For one thing, Duke Senior is somewhat exonerated, in that he feels compunction about hunting. It makes him uncomfortable that ‘the poor dappled fools, / Being native burghers of this desert city’—notice the aristocratic anthropomorphism—‘Should in their own confines with forked heads / Have their round haunches gored.’ True, exculpation is badly needed; for Shakespeare has made it comically evident that the duke still has the eagerness for hunting typical of his rank. When Amiens compliments him on his resignation, on translating ‘the stubbornness of fortune / Into so quiet and so sweet a style’, his brisk response will not strike everyone as exactly sweet; ‘Come, shall we go and kill us venison?’ Still, Duke Senior's hunting will surely seem an innocent response to fortune, if it is compared with, say, Duke Frederick's usurping? Not on Jaques's view. According to First Lord, he grieved at the duke's hunting, and swore ‘you do more usurp / Than doth your brother that hath banished you’. Here Jaques may be said to take up a rigorist pastoral stance. His position is undercut (as all are, in this subtle comedy); since he ignores the fact that the duke's followers hunt to eat—something that even John of Salisbury and Sir Thomas More and the other authorities countenanced. But does the humour of his extremity quite cancel out the pastoral view? Even outside Arden, after all, some men managed to survive without game forests. Shakespeare has readjusted the generic balance in such a way as to disallow the usual pastoral romance mixture, in which romantic aristocrats in their forest easily coexist with pastoral shepherds.

A fundamental characteristic of pastoral was its apparent artlessness: pastoralists went to great lengths to avoid the implication of knowledge in their shepherds.¹⁵ Shakespeare uses this convention to amusing effect when he makes the ultrapastoralist Jaques pretend that he is innocent of even the most ordinary technical terms of poetry (‘Call you 'em stanzos?’). In the mixed pastoral romance, a very limited instructional element entered, in that the temporary shepherds were initiated into the value of stoicism (and the faults of the court), and heard idealistic speeches about love. But in As You Like It the educational element bulks so large as to become the main activity. Many critics have commented on the play's lack of action, which to some has seemed a fault.¹⁶ But once we think of the action as instruction, we see that there is a great deal of it. Indeed, the play's very style suggests the classroom. Its frequent logical debates, catechisms and enumerative schemes belong to that milieu; and Jaques even goes through the form of construing, in his intimidation of William.

Most of the main characters are shown learning. With Duke Senior, the chief instructor is nature. Nature in Arden teaches hard facts; but the duke finds edification in affliction nontheless. ‘Sweet are the uses of adversity’, he tells Amiens:

And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Besides his not caring about power and security, it is this contemplativeness that sets Duke Senior off from his usurping brother. (The pattern will be repeated in Prospero and Antonio.) But Duke Senior also learns through disputation, particularly with Jaques: ‘I love to cope him in these sullen fits, / For then he's full of matter.’ Jaques, for his part, professes to avoid Duke Senior; telling Amiens ‘He is too disputable [disputacious] for my company. I think of as many matters as he, but I give heaven thanks and make no boast of them.’ But if Jaques prefers teaching to learning, he nevertheless likes to hear the ‘deep-contemplative’ fool Touchstone moralizing ‘in good terms, / In good set terms’, and laughs to ‘hear / The motley fool thus moral on the time.’ He may well learn from Touchstone, for Touchstone is Shakespeare's most erudite and Latinate fool—one who has in his brain ‘strange places crammed / With observation’. Ever restless for novelty, Jaques is determined to become a fool. And at the end he is still seeking new instruction: he goes to join the reformed Duke Frederick, who has ‘put on a religious life’. ‘Out of these convertites,’ says Jaques, ‘there is much matter to be heard and learned’. Jaques's extremist enthusiasms are a source of comedy throughout. But when he finally stops railing and expresses approbation of Duke Senior, we are encouraged to hope that he may have entered on some deeper process of learning. It is never too late, it seems. Duke Frederick learns about the good life so belatedly that he only just arrives in time to give the political story its hurried flimsy denouement. Critics sometimes say that he is converted supernaturally, by the mere action of entering the forest's magic circle.¹⁷ Certainly Shakespeare makes full use of romantic convention at this point. But Frederick's conversion is in fact explained. On the way to make his state secure by fratricide, he so sooner comes ‘to the skirts of this wild wood’ than he receives instruction. Not until ‘after some question [ie disputation]’ with ‘an old religious man’ is he converted. Others too engage in the georgic but unpastoral activity of teaching and learning. Silvius and Phebe learn about love; Touchstone is instructed about marriage by Jaques; and even Celia, when she pretends to forget the marriage service, is taken through the words by Rosalind-Ganymede.

I have not yet mentioned Orlando; but his instruction may be the most significant of all. The opening scene's very first words are his complaint that Oliver broke faith and deprived him of the formal education promised in Sir Roland's will. And the play's most prominent educational process of all, forming one of the main main connecting strands, is Orlando's instruction by Ganymede—a plot Shakespeare did not find in Lodge's Rosalynde. If Orlando will woo her every day, Ganymede undertakes to cure him of the ‘madness’ of love. (The well-named Orlando has comically demonstrated this madness earlier in the scene, in a brief furioso appearance.) She will pretend to be his mistress—‘proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles … as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour’. This drove a previous patient ‘from his mad humor of love to a living humour of madness … to live in a nook merely monastic’. She promises to daunt Orlando's love: to test its seriousness. Unlike the usual pastoral ‘instruction’ in love—a business of sentimental disquisitions—this is to be practical learning and discipline. Elizabethan audiences would have recognized it as a class in the School of Love: the same school attended by that unruly pupil Astrophil.¹⁸ Ganymede's curriculum seems very little different from what Roslind herself might have taught in her own person. Indeed, she herself attends school too; suffering when Orlando seems light in love, learning patience when he fails to keep appointments. We can choose to regard this as a trivial story. But then we stay with the superficial symbols, instead of moving to the deeper allegory that Shakespeare makes it shadow forth.

What does Ganymede, the mysterious androgyne, actually teach? The topic appears in her very first speech to Orlando in the forest—‘What is't o'clock?’ Much of her instruction, similarly, seems to concern time rather than love. Indeed, the main vicissitudes in the story arise from Orlando's failure to keep the appointments that test his constancy. When he is late, Rosalind weeps, and feels Orlando to be as false as Judas. When he turns up ‘within an hour of [his] promise’, she lectures him on punctuality, as Ganymede, in a way that she might only have longed to, in her own person. He cannot be in love if he is not punctual. ‘Nay, and you be so tardy, come no more in my sight. I had as lief be wooed of a snail.’ The denouement of their story comes with another broken appointment—this time, however, occasioned by wounds incurred during the compassionate rescue of Oliver. Now Orlando can leave school, for he has disciplined his irresponsibility. He has been tested and found acceptable—a ‘gentleman of good conceit’ as Ganymede now calls him.

And the subject of time comes up elsewhere. Ganymede's first lesson is in the form of a catechism about it. Orlando asks in turn who Time trots, ambles, gallops and stays still withal; and Ganymede makes witty answers proving that ‘Time travels in diverse paces with divers persons.’ On Jaques's first meeting with Rosalind's companion Touchstone, the moralizing similarly concerns Time's pace. Touchstone draws out a pocket sundial, and

Says, very wisely, ‘It is ten o'clock …
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so from hour to hour, we ripe, and ripe,
And then from hour to hour, we rot, and rot …’

At these bawdy puns Jaques, always immoderate, laughs for an hour's measure of his own rotting. But Shakespeare's audience may also have noticed that time and clocks were being made much of.—Or, indeed, that they were mentioned at all. Did not pastoral normally unfold its green thought within a timeless stasis? Here, again, the parallel with The Shepheardes Calender may help; for Spenser's most remarkable innovation was to add the seasonal structure that gives his work its name. Drawing attention to this, Alexander Pope wrote ‘The addition he has made of a Calendar to his Eclogues is very beautiful.’¹⁹ But that is a little too bland; making the timeless pastoral world seasonal was no mere addition, but a profound departure from classical values.²⁰ Spenser's audacious innovation not only put pastoral into confrontation with the opposing georgic mode and its contrasting topics of seasons and their labours, but also implied the Christian calendar with its consequent associations.²¹ Shakespeare, I believe, saw the dramatic possibilities of a similar generic mixture.

There is no need to argue that Shakespeare introduces time into his pastoral world, for several critics have already done so—Rosalie Colie, for example: ‘we are endlessly made aware, both in earnest and in jest, of the passage of time: in the confrontation of generations (Silvius and Corin, dukes and daughters, Sir Rowland's sons and his aged servant Adam)’;²² in Orlando's unpunctuality and Jaques's oration about the ages of man. She concludes: ‘In other words, this forest is at once ideal and real.’ It is less widely recognized, however, that besides the idea of time Shakespeare introduces time's various measures. Moreover, he does so far more often than he need have, merely to establish Arden's reality. It is not just that the mentions of time indicate a georgic admixture, but that time pertains to the substance of the georgic instruction.

Besides the subjective paces of time, As You Like It contains many references to its objective measures. The numerous mentions of hours and times of day arise naturally from the action, but are remarkable for their frequency in a pastoral play. More striking are the references to Ages of the World. Charles speaks of Duke Senior's followers' fleeting the time ‘as they did in the golden world’; and Duke Senior himself refers to the Christian version of this golden age, and to the age of Adam, when he mentions ‘The penalty of Adam, / The seasons' difference.’ A later age, the age of the Giants, is implied when Celia says ‘You must borrow me Gargantua's mouth first. ‘'Tis a word too great for any mouth of this age's size.’ Then, Jaques likens the lovers' pairing off to that of the animals ‘coming to the ark’—in the age, that is, of the Flood. And Rosalind thinks along the same lines when she says ‘The poor world is almost six thousand years old.’ It was commonly believed that the six Augustinian Ages of the World would be completed in no more than six thousand years (less, if human sin was sufficiently outrageous); so that Rosalind's speech has an apocalyptic overtone.²³ Together, these references to Ages of the World work to establish the scale of existence and the world-scheme of redemptive history. They are anti-pastoral, but not specially calculated to evoke a realistic world.

Shakespeare's intention in assembling the measures of time comes out clearly in Jaques's famous oration on the ages of man—yet another measure of time—

                                                                      All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

The last line gave a great deal of trouble to Warburton and Malone, who actually conducted a search for plays with seven acts. But by now we can see that Jaques is merely being pastoral again, and pretending to be simple about technical terms. Just as he was not sure about ‘stanzos’, so now he does not know about acts and scenes. (‘His scenes being seven ages’ would have lost a pun, but would otherwise have fitted in well—not least with the number of the scene Jaques is speaking in.) His oration gains effectiveness from its visible context: the entrance of Orlando bowed under the weight of Old Adam. Here Orlando enacts an emblem of the physical decline that Jaques describes; but in his Aeneas-like pietas he also compassionately takes up the burden of the first Adam's penalty of mortal nature, in a way that transforms it.²⁴ Jaques's speech may not exactly be refuted.²⁵ Nevertheless, the contrast is forcible: Jaques rails at man's frailty; Orlando cares for it. The full dramatic context of the speech only emerges, however, when its ‘painted cloth’ commonplace is examined more closely.

Jaques begins by following the Ptolemaic variant of the Ages of Man scheme, with each age showing the expected planetary influence, except that his cynical emphasis has the moistly Lunar infant ‘mewling and puking’, while his ‘schoolboy’, engaged as a child of Mercury in education, creeps ‘like snail / Unwillingly to school’, imperfectly influenced by the fastest of the planets.²⁶ (The audience may recall this when Orlando is late for the school of love, and Rosalind compares him to a snail.) In age three, Jaques's lover duly expresses the influence of Venus, next in Ptolemaic order. But what is this? Where is the fourth, Solar age, the prime of life, the best of all the seven ages? Jaques omits it altogether; replacing it, at the end, by a second Saturnian age of ultimate decrepitude, ‘sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything’. This dark view of life is obviously distorted. But we can scarcely see how distorted Shakespeare means it to be, until we reflect that, out of all the deities, Jaques has chosen to omit the declarator temporum, the indicator of time, the centre and heart of the planetary cosmos, Sol himself. Melancholy was endemic in British pastoral.²⁷ But in Shakespeare the melancholy of Jaques meets with decisive rejection. ‘Monsieur Melancholy’ is shown to play false when he exaggerates the domain of the melancholy god. At the centre of his life Jaques has enthroned, instead of the sun, Mars and enthusiasm and anger. His conception of life is hollow and disorientated: no wonder he is a restless figure who ‘in his time plays many parts’. Lacking a centre, and lacking the Solar gift of steadfastness,²⁸ he moves on changeably from libertine to outlaw, outlaw to recluse, recluse to fool—and from fool, perhaps, to religious. In As You Like It, it seems, attitudes to time may offer a useful index to character.

Other measures of time are also prominent. The theme of the ‘seasons' difference’ is developed both by Duke Senior and in the play's many songs. These not only serve practically to mark the passage of time, but also interiorize its measure. By a very ancient tradition (and one followed in the popular non-fictional Kalender of Shepherdes), seasons were correlated with Ages of Man—this time the Four Ages.²⁹ Thus, in ‘Under the greenwood tree’ the enemy is winter, the season that feeds Jaques's humour: ‘It will make you melancholy’, Amiens warns. ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’ links the same season with man's ingratitude. And the pages' song is of ‘spring-time, the only pretty ring-time’. Lovers naturally ‘love the spring’, because it correlates with Age I, youth and the sanguine humour.

Why should Shakespeare have assembled so many measures of time in As You Like It? Doubtless he partly means to offset the pastoral elements. The play's finest critic, Harold Jenkins, has seen in it a pervasive effort to bring characters and positions into encounter with their opposites, leaving none unadjusted.³⁰ No doubt the generic contradictions are in part instances of this. Unpastoral features function as ironic comment on the pastoral; just as unromantic features—Rosalind's matter-of-factness or impatience to marry—provide a counterstatement to the romantic. But the georgic admixture, the temporal element, is too elaborate and coherent to be accounted for as a balancing adjustment, still less as realistic shading. It seems rather to amount to thematic content. This content is of course mediated dramatically—and sometimes heavily disguised, as in Jaques's Ages of Man oration. Yet its implications are not wholly undercut or counterpointed. Shakespeare himself, in fact, seems to imply the view that life is comprehensively subject to mutability, yet divinely ordered. Orlando's bad poem implies a similar view: ‘how brief the life of man / Runs his erring pilgrimage’. And so do various passages introducing the idea of measure in the ordering of experience—particularly the enumerative schemes based on the mutable seven, such as Touchstone's set piece on the protocol of quarrelling. Shakespeare makes it clear enough that this mutability and mortality should not lead to Jaques's melancholy. Indeed, Jaques is in a way answered as well as replaced by his studious namesake Jaques de Boys, when the latter brings news about mankind as good as Jaques's was bad.

Even Touchstone's view is wiser, in its foolishness, than Jaques's. For Touchstone, time measures, hour by hour, human ripening and rotting—a view neatly confirmed by the application elsewhere of the epithet ‘ripe’ to Ganymede and William, and ‘rotten’ to Touchstone himself. To this mortality Touchstone makes the base but not life-denying response of lechery. He ‘speak'st wiser than [he] is ware of’ and can tell that ‘as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly’. On the scale of human life, it behoves us to remember ‘that a life [is] but a flower’—whether this leads us to seize the ring-time, or to prepare like Duke Frederick for eternity.

One normal response to human mortality was supposed to lie in generation; so that the main denouement of the play aptly takes the form of a masque of Hymen, a piece of romantic magic that resolves the emotional tangles by transcending them. The masque, like the immediately preceding compact, has a highly formalized pattern of repeated speeches in the Lylyan rhetorical manner. Here, at last, the measure is not a temporal one. As Hymen draws to our notice—‘Here's eight that must take hands’—it is based on the number of eternity, the number that goes beyond the seven of mutability, and symbolizes repentance, harmony and justice.³¹ In this as in every way the masque makes an almost shocking contrast with Touchstone's preceding exposition of the literature of quarrelling. The seven stages of giving the lie, and the eight plighting their troth; the masque's magic liturgy of reconciliation, and the books that set out civil arrangements for murder.

The number eight was apt not only because it signified the eternal. It also carried an ancient symbolism, often alluded to in Elizabethan wedding masques, whereby the mystery of Juno, the goddess of marriage, was unfolded into eight subordinate powers, one of them Hymen.³² Moreover, Juno herself was associated with the dyad or first even number; so that the marriage union (unio) under her auspices could foreshadow the Christian idea of marriage as a mustery of two in one flesh. Thus, in As You Like It, Hymen sings ‘Then is there mirth in heaven, / When earthly things made even / Atone together.’ Rosalind herself, who arranges the masque, thereby assumes the role of Juno. Of this mythological involvement we have had anticipatory hints in her earlier invocations of Jupiter, in her assumed name Ganymede (‘no worse a name than Jove's own page’) and in her connection of Orlando with Jupiter (when Celia reports finding him under an oak, Rosalind says ‘It may well be called Jove's tree, when it drops such fruit.’). Yet the emancipated Rosalind also plays the part of a priest of Jupiter, Providence the giver of all good things,³³ when she distributes destinies:

I have promised to make all this matter even.
Keep you your word, O Duke, to give your daughter,
You yours, Orlando, to receive his daughter;
Keep you your word Phebe, that you'll marry me,
Or else refusing me to wed this shepherd …
                                                                                                              from hence I go
To make these doubts all even.

Notice how the reiterated promise of an even (just) outcome is made to depend on other promises: specifically, on the keeping of faith. If promises are kept, hopes will be fulfilled—if in rather unexpected ways. That, in a sense, is the theme of As You Like It.

And this is where time comes in. One might have looked to the pastoral stasis for a symbol of time transcended and hopes fulfilled. And indeed Orlando raises a suggestion that time in Arden is somehow clockless and different. But the possibility is broached only to be summarily dismissed. When Orlando says ‘there's no clock in the forest,’ Rosalind firmly replies ‘Then there is no true lover in the forest, else sighing every minute and groaning every hour would detect the lazy foot of Time.’ Time here is not so much a mutability, to be escaped if possible, as an opportunity for faithfulness and love, to be seized by the forelock. When Orlando arrives late for an appointment and rather casually says he comes ‘within an hour of [his] promise’, Rosalind tells him that no one can be in love if he ‘divide a minute into a thousand parts, and break but a part of the thousand part of a minute [of his promise] in the affairs of love.’ A far cry, this, from the heedlessness of pastoralists, who ‘Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time.’—Or from the lawyers, insensitive to time's scale, who ‘sleep between term and term, and … perceive not how Time moves.’ Rosalind comes a good deal closer, in fact, to the Christian view of time as something to be redeemed by zealous activity, than to ancient pastoral's ideal of a static otium. She teaches, in a word, the urgency of love. Time, for her, is a brief opportunity to keep faith.

Even by comparison with the other non-naturalistic comedies, As You Like It stands out as a consistently moral play; although its morality is treated with conspicuous lightness. Again and again it teaches, in its mocking way, that time moves on; that opportunities to keep faith should be grasped; that only the faithful truly love. In short, it enjoins zealous faith. Now, this is so simple a Christian message that some may call it none at all. That is as you like it.

Certainly the play would not be Christian, if that meant division of its characters into elect and reprobate. Shakespeare is remorseless in exempting no one from criticism. Even Rosalind may not preach without the suggestion that her sense of urgency is partly inspired by the foolishness of love—a maid's sense that Time's pace is hard. But then, all are foolish in one way or another. And Shakespeare never allows us to doubt that it is better to be foolish in love like Rosalind, or to be called a fool for faithfulness, as Celia is by Frederick. Ultimately, such as they seem foolish only to undiscerning Greeks—‘the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him’. The presence of this spiritual content, simple as it is, has a complex bearing on much of the play, articulating and informing its details. It validates, for example, the belated conversions of Frederick and Oliver. These crises are not convincingly realized in such a way as to encourage us to take them seriously for their own sake. But on the view I have tried to advance, the play has a persistent allegory concerned with keeping faith; and allegorically it makes quite good sense to have a Frederick or an Oliver receive a heavenly reward he does not deserve—and that he has not striven for through convincing emotional ordeals.

In such symbolic terms, As You Like It makes a coherent appeal for a society based, both privately and publicly, on love. We have only to be faithful to our professions and love our enemies, it seems to say, for society to be restored. But alas, that ‘only’! It has not often happened in six thousand years, and is not likely to happen in the years to come. Part of the play's poignancy comes from this: from the very sketchiness of its optimistic conclusion. How sadly improbable the ending seems.

Notes

1. Rosalie L. Colie Shakespeare's ‘Living Art’ (Princeton 1974) 245.

2. See Rensselaer W. Lee Names on Trees: Ariosto into Art (Princeton 1977) 5-7 et pass.

3. See Harold Jenkins ‘As You Like It’ in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism ed. Leonard F. Dean (New York 1957) 111.

4. George Puttenham The Art of English Poesie ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge 1936) 38.

5. Eamon Grennan ‘Telling the Trees from the Wood: Some Details of As You Like It Reexamined’, ELR [English Literary Renaissance] vii.2 (1977) 206.

6. See, e.g., Colie 261, 266; Grennan 197. For a good attempt to treat the the play as more or less pure pastoral romance, see Charles W. Hieatt ‘The Quality of Pastoral in As You Like It’, Genre vii.2 (1974) 164-82.

7. See Eugene M. Waith The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven 1952) 85.

8. See Grennan 200.

9. In Virgil Ecl. i and Mantuan Ecl. ix, the traveller is told about the city by a better informed local shepherd.

10. Puttenham 38-9.

11. See Thomas G. Rosenmeyer The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1969) 58; also Index s.v. Hesiodic Tradition.

12. Ibid. 135-6

13. As You Like It ed. Agnes Latham (1975) 102n.

14. ‘“The Sobbing Deer”: As You Like It, II.i.21-66 and the Historical Context’, Ren. Drama [Renaissance Drama] n.s. iii (1970) 79-109.

15. See Rosenmeyer 54-5.

16. See Jenkins 109, Latham lxxx.

17. See Latham lxx.

18. See Astrophil and Stella Sonnets xix, xlii, xlvi, lvi, lxxiii, lxxix, etc. On discipline for purification of love as a Renaissance mystery, see Edgar Wind Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (rev. edn. 1958) 145-7.

19. The Prose Works of Alexander Pope … 1711-1720 ed. Norman Ault (Oxford 1936) 301.

20. It was not without partial anticipation in the vernacular, however: on the Kalendrier des Bergeres tradition, see Helen Cooper Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance (Ipswich and Totowa, N.J. 1977) 78.

21. See Robert Allen Durr ‘Spenser's Calendar of Christian Time’, xxiv (1957) 269-95 and Maren-Sofie Røstvig ‘The Shepheardes Calender—a Structural Analysis’, Ren. and Mod. Studies [Renaissance and Modern Studies] xiii (1969) 49-75.

22. Colie 258; cf. Jay L. Halio ‘“No Clock in the Forest”: Time in As You Like It’, SEL [Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900] ii (1962) 197-207; Frederick Turner Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Oxford 1971) 28-44.

23. See C. A. Patrides Milton and the Christian Tradition (Oxford 1966) 271 and chs. viii and ix pass.

24. For the pietas emblem, see Nancy R. Lindheim, cit. Colie 258; for the theological allegory, see Alastair Fowler ‘The Image of Mortality: Faerie Queene II.i-ii’ in Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser ed. A.C. Hamilton (Hamden, Conn. 1972), esp. 147.

25. See Jenkins 124: ‘Shakespeare seeks no cheap antithesis’.

26. On the scheme associating planetary deities and ages of man, see F. Boll ‘Die Lebensalter’, in Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum xvi (1913) 117ff. and Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl Saturn and Melancholy (1964) 149n. Boll loses his way in the Shakespearean passage; Klibansky et al. detect Jaques's omission of Sol but fail to grasp its reason, suggesting implausibly that ‘the age corresponding to the sun is omitted as too similar to the “jovial”’.

27. See Rosenmeyer 227.

28. On fortitude as the central gift of the Holy Spirit, see Rosemond Tuve Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and their Posterity (Princeton 1966) 96 and Index s.v. Fortitude; on the correlation of planets and gifts, see Klibansky et al. 166n.

29. See Cooper 78; Klibansky et al. 291-6 et pass.

30. Jenkins 124-5; cf. Latham lxxxiv.

31. On these meanings, see Alastair Fowler Spenser and the Numbers of Time (1964) 35n., 53f., 285. All were standard: they occurred in authorities such as Macrobius and St Augustine, as well as in handbooks such as Pietro Bongo Mysticae numerorum significationis liber (Bergamo 1585).

32. Sometimes, too, the dancers were made to number eight. See D. J. Gordon ‘Hymenaei: Ben Jonson's Masque of Union’ in The Renaissance Imagination ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley etc. 1975) 157-84; Alastair Fowler Triumphal Forms (Cambridge 1970) 151-4.

33. For Jupiter as Providence and dator omnium bonorum, see Natale Conti Mythologiae I.viii and II.i.