SOURCE: Gibbons, Brian. “Amorous Fictions and As You Like It.” In “Fanned and Winnowed Opinions”: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins, edited by John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton, pp. 52-78. London: Methuen, 1987.

[In following essay, Gibbons remarks on the influence of Sidney's Arcadia and Lodge's Rosalynde on Shakespeare's treatment of pastoral in As You Like It.]

The date of As You Like It is usually accepted as 1599, although the play's direct source, Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, had been first published as long ago as 1590 and so too had the finest pastoral romance of all in English, Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Such was their popularity that Rosalynde was reprinted in 1592 and 1596, and Arcadia in 1593, before both of them were again reprinted in 1598. According to some scholars it was a revival of Lyly's pastoral comedies by the children's companies that gave an immediate incentive to Shakespeare and his company, with their new Globe Theatre, to respond to the revived fashion for pastoral comedy.¹ It is my contention that what we know of the circumstances of Shakespeare's company in 1599, and of Shakespeare's work of the time, makes his decision to turn to pastoral more than opportunist.

As You Like It is a self-consciously stylish play, and in this essay I seek to explore its style as a work of theatre, not simply of literature. I do so by comparing and contrasting it with the non-dramatic works of Lodge and Sidney in the hope of identifying Shakespeare's particular use of pastoral on this occasion and of showing the ways he found to translate into the language of theatre, effects achieved in non-dramatic pastoral literature. I take it that the new pressure of intelligence to which Shakespeare subjects the pastoral mode in As You Like It (which represents an advance on his earlier limited use of pastoral elements in his plays) owes more to the example of Sidney than Lodge. I certainly find that to return to The Arcadia with As You Like It in mind sharpens response to Sidney's art.

As You Like It, which was almost certainly completed in 1599, the year after the works of Lodge and Sidney were reprinted, contains like Henry V allusions to the new Globe Theatre. Henry V is also probably of 1599, and although the differences between the two plays are obvious, they have one important thing in common: Henry V, like As You Like It, is strikingly preoccupied with highlighting questions of narrative technique and dramatic and literary form, with theatre's unique expressive resources and, conversely, with its stark limits. It is reasonable to attribute this marked emphasis to the fact of the newly acquired playhouse, but it may also be significant that 1599 is the year of Ben Jonson's first revolutionary experiment with metatheatrical comedy, Every Man Out of His Humour. In this context, Shakespeare's choice of pastoral as one of the modes to translate into theatre at this time seems to me to be an inevitable one.

In the space of two or three years from 1598 Shakespeare produced, in addition to the epic history, Henry V, and the pastoral comedy, As You Like It, two romantic tragi-comedies, Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night, a satiric history, Troilus and Cressida, a farce, The Merry Wives of Windsor (though this yet awaits satisfactory classification), and Hamlet. In a burst of such extraordinary creative activity, in which he seems as a matter of deliberate decision to have chosen sharply contrasting kinds of play and several new modes (something which the old designation ‘middle period’ scarcely emphasizes)—in a phase when, in short, Shakespeare's interest in the expressive resources and limitations of different kinds of theatre seems clearly to have been intense—it is entirely appropriate that he should decide to turn to pastoral, given that mode's particular reputation and particular traditions, its oblique treatment of its narrative subject, its invitation to the artist to reflect on his art, its prompting an audience to recognize his artistry.

So when, in As You Like It, Orlando interrupts a conversation between Jaques and Ganymede by making an exuberant entrance, exclaiming ‘Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind’ (IV.i.28), Jaques reacts immediately to this as an unwelcome tone, lyric, and with it an alien mode, romance, to say nothing of the intolerable sense, simple well-being! He turns on his heel with the retort, ‘Nay then God buy you, and you talk in blank verse!’ In this collision between satire and romance the elaborate prose of the melancholy man is shown up as symptomatic of his vanity, while at the same time the open eager style of the lover, as we are amused to note, finds expression in less than artless metrical form. Here Shakespeare gets excellent comic effect by joining together what Ben Jonson held all men should keep asunder.

At first sight Shakespeare's title for the play, As You Like It, emphasizes style only to disarm critics as they enter the theatre. Here, it seems to say, shall you see only pleasure of a familiar kind in a well-tried style—and the seemingly simple art of the opening scenes may confirm such an impression. Yet pastoral is often mischievous in its manipulation of the audience, and As You Like It is almost studious in its adherence to the conventions of pastoral. We may well, on second thoughts, suspect ambiguity in the play's title, recognizing it to be glancing outwards at the restrictions imposed by audience taste (what you like) and simultaneously glancing inwards at the author's attentiveness to decorum, pastoral being too dominant a genre, and too complete a system of construction, to permit more than variations on old themes. Shakespeare in the event takes the opportunity with both hands, finding in the theory and style of pastoral itself a fertile comic subject, and transforming its themes into dramatic poetry of a kind that honours the shade of Sidney.

If we accept that the Epilogue is an integral element in the play we must find it acting to reinforce this critical view of the audience's taste for mere fiction and false appearances. The boy-actor of Rosalind-Ganymede, still in costume as a woman, steps forward for the Epilogue, half out of (yet still half in) the fictional frame, and asks the audience what they have earlier heard Ganymede ask Oliver in the play: was not this well counterfeited? This is just as piquant the second time, since we still do not have a real girl or real boy but yet another created dramatic part, this time of boy-actor half-impersonating the play's heroine. This no-man's-land, so to speak, the obverse of a Jonsonian induction, this fictional representation of half-created fiction, corresponds to that other no-man's-land where pastoral is situated, between the present representation and the ideal world it strives to recover, to translate.

The play begins by wilfully underlining the fact of its fictionality as Le Beau gives his news: ‘There comes an old man, and his three sons—’ (I.ii.109) and Celia at once reacts to his style: ‘I could match this beginning with an old tale.’ In fact Shakespeare has done exactly that, matching the number of the old man's sons to those of Sir Rowland de Boys, as his source, Lodge, had not. So here As You Like It is even more like an old tale than is the prose narrative of Rosalynde on which it is based. But this is to anticipate. For the moment let it be enough to observe how Shakespeare's teasing Epilogue makes an audience recognize how readily, even at this moment after the play has ended, they would surrender to the counterfeit of art, even when its deceptions are half-exposed.

And this too is consistent with the treatment of pastoral as we find it in the non-dramatic writing of Shakespeare's contemporaries, who felt expected to include threads of reflective commentary in the fabric of their narratives, often teasingly playful in drawing the reader's attention to the artifice. Thus Sidney in his Old Arcadia writes out for the reader a song which he says Cleophila sang, and then he remarks, ‘I might entertain you, fair ladies, a great while, if I should make as many interruptions in the repeating as she did in the singing’ (29). Sidney then gives a description of how much her sighing did interrupt the song, and this actually takes twice as long to read as the song itself did. Again, in Bk III, ch. 39 of The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, he begins: ‘But Zelmane, whom I left in the cave hardly bestead … makes me lend her my pen awhile to see with what dexterity she could put by her dangers’ (654). Sidney pretends whimsically to have no control at all over his narrative: he would have us imagine it unfolding in various strands simultaneously in separate places, only one of which can be recorded at any one time. More startling still for its playful and absurd disturbance of the reader who may have succumbed to the charm of the fiction is Sidney's description of one of the disguised princes taking his lady's hand, ‘and with burning kisses setting it close to her lips (as if it should stand there like a hand in the margin of a book to note some saying worthy to be marked) began to speak these words’ (176).

Sidney's humorous but also carefully self-conscious reference to his own act of writing paradoxically serves to win the centre of the stage for the events narrated. The lover's hand is given immediacy by contrast with the mere sign for a hand printed in a book's margin, and this immediacy of the narrated event over the act of describing is stressed when we read on: for as the lover begins poetically to lament love's power to change men's states and torture them, he is interrupted by a rather more urgent instance of inconstant fortune in the form of a real lion and a she-bear, ready to tear him (and his lady) limb from limb on the spot.

Such emphasis on the act of writing serves not only to foreground the events narrated but, more basically, to stress the gap between the verbal process of narration—the narrator's and the reader's time—and the time and place in which the narrated events occur. This is consistent with pastoral exactly because its whole cast is reflective, expressive of a longing for simplicity of life and of art, for simplicity of language to describe forms of life remote from a present preceived as more complex, confused or colourless. Pastoral laments the gap between representation and its imagined subject, and in a sense its subject is this gap. Situated between a fallen present and an imaginary place and time, persistently endeavouring and persistently failing to translate that remote subject into the here and now, pastoral creates its own provisional condition: its presence involves simultaneous awareness of the absent imagined subject, and its nature is hence reflective, its status paradoxical.

This is apparent, for instance, in the song of the young prince Musidorus in Arcadia who, disguised as a shepherd, sings to the chaste princess Pamela ‘to show what kind of shepherd I was’. The kind of shepherd he was, as we see from the song, is a shepherd only in metaphor; he remains a prince, his shepherd's weeds a discardable disguise. In his song, the pastoral metaphors are only that. They can be simply removed to leave the decoded statement. The prince in his own condition is a complex figure, only one aspect of whom is apparent in shepherd's costume. His language here, if shorn of its sheep's clothing, suddenly acquires the complexity of court poetry. The shapely closure of pastoral's decorum offers only illusory containment, as the adjectives ‘fruitless’ and ‘endless’, and the verb ‘upholds’ indicate:

My sheep are thoughts which I both guide and serve,
Their pasture is fair hills of fruitless love:
On barren sweets they feed, and feeding starve:
I wail their lot, but will not other prove.
My sheephook is wanhope, which all upholds:
My weeds, desire, cut out in endless folds.
What wool my sheep shall bear, while thus they live,
In you it is, you must the judgement give.

(232)

To speak of Shakespeare ‘translating’ pastoral romance into a play, as I do, may serve to emphasize the nature and scale of the process, ‘removing from one person, place or condition to another’ and ‘changing into another language while retaining the sense’.² Looking more closely at the idea of translation one sees that there is a qualification to be made to this sort of definition, since there is something ineffaceable in a work of art which will alter the native character of the language into which it is translated, thereby creating something new: there inheres in a translation the shadow of the absent original which makes it a different thing from an independent work of art in either language. In fact Shakespeare seems to have wanted actually to stress the derivative literary model which he translated in As You Like It, and I hope to examine some of the ways in which he makes us aware of it. It is not only As You Like It, but also the preceding non-dramatic narratives Arcadia and Rosalynde, which stress their status as imitations, which call attention to the gap between themselves and antecedents with stronger claims to authenticity, being less veiled by repeated translations. Such purer narratives take the form of romance, an extended action whose configurations correspond to deep emotional patterns and whose process irresistibly absorbs the solitary reader, who finds his secret hopes, desires, and dreams represented there in forms his conscious mind permits him to feed on uninhibitedly.

Sidney's Arcadia is a great work of literary imagination, whose power and wit must have influenced Shakespeare at levels deeper than most of the materials from which he borrowed his plots. To Sidney Shakespeare could look for subtle observation of the play of motive and counter-motive, for openness to the surprising mixtures of elements in intimate relationships developing—this above all—in time. The striking features of Shakespeare's romantic comedies are their depiction of major personal development in the chief protagonists, presented in a context of busy, diverse, humorous contrasts. I would not rule out the notion that The Arcadia was used as a source (in the orthodox sense) in more places than Shakespeare-source-hunters have so far suggested, but here I am concerned with influence at a much more profound level. Sidney sets an example in depicting processes of change, of growth, and capacity for love, without protecting his characters from painful as well as ridiculous revelations about their personal inadequacy, and the mingled yarn from which experience is made; and Sidney continuously alters the degree of sympathy with which the narrative engages the reader, and the angle of vision from which it is recorded, so that his style enacts rather than simply conveys this incessantly dialectical record.

Sidney's narrator, and his characters in The Arcadia, always speak, sing and write within a decorum. In this sense there are no truly internal voices of self-communion. In place of a hesitant, erratic inner voice, Sidney presents one aspect of a character using oratorical means to address himself or herself.

Sidney makes distinct his frequent shifts from one style to another, and this sometimes has an abruptly dramatic effect. The reader, made conscious of the art of a particular style, becomes aware also of what its decorum excludes (this is comically evident in the speech of Miso, for instance). In style, and in the narrative itself also, Sidney makes outlines emphatic, but the eye is consequently drawn also to what lies beyond (or behind) the present subject, implied or as yet unseen or unsaid. This awareness of gap, of vacant space, is a characteristic feature of the pastoral mode: in defining the frame so consciously, Sidney ensures that we think also about what is precisely not said, so keeping us critically alert. In isolating and outlining an attitude or a group of figures, a detachable and summarizable meaning may be indicated, emblemizing the speaking picture, yet this emblemizing process is also resisted by the fluid current of dramatic action and the contrast and comparison of styles involved in it, making our assent to such emblems, when they seem too restricted or static, more than reluctant.

To approach Shakespeare by way of some detailed episodes from Sidney's Arcadia may serve to identify in the non-dramatic, written mode, techniques and effects which Shakespeare translates into pastoral drama in As You Like It; for the process is much more thorough and complex than might be suggested by Duke Senior's speeches, which well merit the implied ironic criticism of his courtier, Amiens, that style alone is not enough:

                                                                      Happy is your Grace,
That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
Into so quiet and so sweet a style.

(II.i.18-20)

In As You Like It Shakespeare employs the circumstances of stage performance to set the written in contrast to the spoken word. Episodes in verse are juxtaposed to prose; the revelation of character through realistic conversation is contrasted to formal emblematic descriptions of people (Jaques and the stricken deer, II.i.25-66; or Ganymede's mock-portrait of the typical lover's ‘careless desolation’, III.ii.359-71). Written poems are brought on stage and pinned up, or read aloud to other characters and to the theatre audience in a critical spirit. Faultless songs are sung to musical accompaniment, creating emotion no mere words, spoken or written, can equal.

In terms of theatre spectacle, the physical charm of Ganymede, the strength and grace of Orlando, the mimic skill of Touchstone, the foulness of Audrey, make a direct impact on the audience's eyes and senses; but surprising emphasis is also placed on what is withheld from the audience's view, though described with literary art and having tantalizingly visual interest: the natural landscape; the weather; Orlando found sleeping under a tree, ‘stretched along like a wounded knight’ (III.ii.236); Oliver asleep and menaced by a green and gold serpent and a lioness; Orlando, bleeding, falling in a faint (only a shadow of this is seen on stage, when Ganymede faints on hearing of his wound).

Shakespeare not only reproduces the ingredients of non-dramatic pastoral as readers like it, he ensures also that the variety of ways of representing experience, which the contrasting styles afford, will constitute an implicit critical debate, to which nonsense and parody make telling contributions. While this is possible in non-dramatic narrative like Sidney's, it is stressed in the extra dimension of theatre in As You Like It, where Shakespeare's necessary concern with movement, and with time, sets against the writer's or painter's belief in the value of pattern the theatrical truth that a tableau is no sooner achieved than it must dissolve.

Sidney's account of the princess Philoclea falling in love with a graceful Amazon (whom she fails to detect as a prince, Pyrocles, in disguise) begins apparently by chance; the narrator has been describing a day's hunting when he suddenly remembers the princess: ‘And alas, sweet Philoclea’, he cries, ‘how hath my pen till now forgot thy passions’ (237). As he turns to tell her story, the day's hunting nevertheless lingers in his mind, yielding the brooding simile, ‘she was like a young fawn who, coming in wind of the hunters, doth not know whether it be a thing or no to be eschewed’ (238). We are told that Philoclea falls for the Amazon at first sight. She behaves exactly like a character in a stage play, miming the conventional signs of infatuation. Sidney presents this as a scene to be acted, and in a style visually reminiscent of the Commedia dell'Arte:

And if Zelmane sighed, she should sigh also; when Zelmane was sad, she deemed it wisdom and therefore she would be sad too. Zelmane's languishing countenance, with crossed arms and sometimes cast up eyes, she thought to have an excellent grace, and therefore she also willingly put on the same countenance, till at the last, poor soul, ere she were aware, she accepted not only the badge but the service, not only the sign but the passion signified.

(239)

Sidney maintains a distance between tenor and vehicle in his own prose even if Philoclea cannot in reality. His own metaphors depict her susceptibility to signs and images; but though Sidney is not unsympathetic to the girl's tender pictorial fancies he makes clinically clear their graduated increase in sexual feeling, as he tells us how she progressed from emblematic frame to emblematic frame: ‘First she would wish that they two might live all their lives together, like two of Diana's nymphs. … Then would she wish that she were her sister. … Then grown bolder, she would wish either herself or Zelmane a man, that there might succeed a blessed marriage betwixt them’ (239). These brittle images disintegrate under pressure from below, where in her dreams Philoclea encounters self-begotten images that frighten her. Her whole personal development is presented in terms of her relation to images. Those of her secure childhood identity are reflected in her mother and sister. They become painfully defamiliarized as she acquires a separate selfhood through love for the Amazon, who at first seems an ideal female image, but very soon becomes disturbingly ambivalent.

Her sister Pamela, who reflects her childish self, repeats her own transformation into melancholy lovesickness. Her mother, who also falls for the Amazon, suddenly appears in the hostile role of sexual rival, presenting an image, distressingly close to Philoclea, of lust and jealousy: adult sexuality at its most rank. So, torn by alienation, burned by desire for she knows not what, she feels as if, while acting a part (as we see she did when imitating the Amazon), the part has taken possession of her, and an alien person acts out a role through her own body: ‘For now indeed love pulled off his mask and showed his face unto her, and told her plainly that she was his prisoner. Then needed she no more paint her face with passions, for passions shone through her face’ (240).

We recognize that, viewed externally, this looks farcical, yet we sympathize with her inner dilemma. Sidney deploys metaphors drawn from the theatre—masks, costumes, disguises, expressive gestures and signs—and these we can see to be psychologically valid (as well as being appropriate to an intrigue plot, in which she finds herself). Philoclea's development proceeds from one imprinting (in the ornithological sense) to another, more appropriate to her maturation: she passes from a state of narcissism to the brink of love for the opposite sex, in the process discovering jealousy at her own mother; and Sidney even intensifies the image of adolescent crisis by making her father also lust for the Amazon, so producing a situation claustrophobic and perverse as much as farcical. Philoclea is not willingly perverse; rather we recognize that she is undergoing a reorientation of the personality which is serious rather than ridiculous. Sidney's use of the analogy of stage comedy achieves, then, a double perspective, making the reader recognize two separate, opposed codes in the narrative: one detached, one sympathetic.

To depict the full onset of sexual love in Philoclea, Sidney creates a set of episodes, constructed in a subtly modified version of exemplary drama, in which setting, action and gesture are endowed with symbolic and emblematic visual meaning. Philoclea, suffering isolation ‘by the smoke of those flames wherewith else she was not only burned but smothered’, seeks comfort in a wood which was a favourite haunt in happier times; now, that familiar tuft of trees ‘with the shade the moon gave through it, it might breed a fearful kind of devotion to look upon it’ (240). In this place is ‘a goodly white marble stone that should seem had been dedicated in ancient time to the Sylvan gods’. Sidney explains that only a short time before she first met the Amazon, Philoclea had taken her pen and written a poem on the white and smooth marble, praying that she might remain chaste. In the poem (which Sidney records for us to read) she makes the marble an emblem of her pure mind.

Though Philoclea does not know, apparently, what Sidney tells the reader about the place's dedication to the Sylvan gods, she does half-notice that the trees resemble a little chapel and that the place is half-concealed from Phoebus and Diana. Her poem may be addressed to chastity, but her attempt to dedicate the marble cannot succeed, cannot efface its more ancient consecration to powers of which her immaturity makes her dangerously ignorant:

Thou purest stone, whose pureness doth present
          My purest mind; whose temper hard doth show
My tempered heart; by thee my promise sent
          Unto myself let after-livers know.

(241)

Now, returning to the marble stone at night in a state of emotional torment, she finds the moonlight will not allow her to read the words, and in any case the ink is now ‘forworn and in many places blotted’. Although Philoclea sees at once how aptly the blotted lines reflect her present shame, she will not see her previous condition as other than pure. She composes new verses lamenting her shame, but this time she has no pen. These ‘words unseen’ thus represent her new discovery of mutability. Though she does not write them down, Sidney does do so. Though for Philoclea the words are ephemeral, as expressing a sense of futility, for Sidney they are to have a durable place in the larger frame of his narrative. Not for him, one sees, is a poetic truth ephemeral. We witness Philoclea's dilemma as tender rather than ridiculous, as the pictorial view by itself might suggest.

As readers, our perspective is via Sidney's text, in which everything is expected to yield to interpretation, rather than having the contingent tendency to randomness of real life, with which Philoclea is shown struggling. For her the clear marble's meaning has changed like the moon, and the sense of obscurity will never quite evaporate. To the reader, that poem written in ink on the marble perfectly defines a state of mind both deluded and ephemeral. In Sidney's text it is preserved, in Arcadia effaced.

When she returns to the lodge she finds her sister Pamela also solitary and distraught, and reads in her appearance ‘the badges of sorrow’. Pamela is discovered silent and motionless, not writing but reading: ‘looking upon a wax candle which burnt before her; in one hand holding a letter, in the other her handkerchief which had lately drunk up the tears of her eyes’ (244). Sidney presents a double image which refracts and clarifies, by subtle contrasts, the differences between two women so close, so very alike in all sorts of ways. We may well think of how often Shakespeare uses pairs of lovers (Hermia/Helena and Rosalind/Celia, for example) in his comedies to present comparable effects. The sisters, lovelorn, console one another in a shared bed ‘with dear though chaste embracements, with sweet though cold kisses’ (245). Sidney makes the reader see in this the pictorial suggestion of Narcissus, but the dramatization gives immediacy to the characters' emotion: for each sister longs for another mate in the phantom embrace here: and in the psychological sense, narcissism is waning. Philoclea's development, though repeatedly depicted in fixed emblematic images which suggest it is frozen, can yet be glimpsed and felt in motion in the underlying narrative current, which draws the reader expectantly beyond the frame of such tableaux. Sidney prompts the thought that the Narcissus story only begins with a mirror-image.

There is tension between the narrative's weaving process and the moments of stillness in which a framed scene is displayed. Sidney's characters are often composed in a scene which for a moment metamorphoses into a set-piece out of Ovid, making them mythological. This is clear in the episode where Philoclea, wandering alone, comes upon the Amazon, whose face is bent over a stream, weeping: ‘one might have thought’, Sidney says, that he ‘began meltingly to be metamorphosed to the under-running river’. The Amazon composes poetry, writing with a willow stick in the sand of the river bank (one degree even more ephemeral than ink on marble) verses which emblemize the stream as mirror of his tearful eyes:

In watery glass my watery eyes I see;
Sorrows ill eas'd, where sorrows painted be.

(326)

The Amazon unknowingly echoes Philoclea's second set of verses about the blotted marble, which (we recall) she did not write down at all. The Amazon's poem declares that the place has an echo, and as the poem ends Philoclea materializes in response to it by stepping into view (so neatly reversing the fate of Echo in Ovid).³ As the lovers begin to talk and the princess Philoclea learns that her Amazon is really a prince, Sidney, with another neat reversal of Ovid, compares her to Pygmalion finding his beloved statue coming to life as a real woman. Sidney then dissolves the mythological tableau in order to foreground the Arcadian narrative once more, taking up a string of recapitulatory metaphors: Philoclea is like a ‘fearful deer’, though now a deer coming to the ‘best feed’ (329); she cannot resist revealing her heart to the prince, yet fears such boldness will provoke him ‘to pull off the visor’; but for her part, she exclaims, ‘Shall I labour to lay marble colours over my ruinous thoughts?’ (330).

It is as if we are observing the aboriginal emergence of fables in the simple archetypal world of pastoral which precedes the codifying of Ovid—and so it is only natural that Ovidian translation of pastoral should fleetingly intervene between the simple story of Arcadia and the reader. In As You Like It the direct physicality of performance gives present tense to the pastoral action, sometimes stilled so that Ovidian allusion may be foregrounded. We see how in Sidney such shifts in narrative register create drama: so, in the episode between Philoclea and the Amazon, the Ovidian configuration is more restricted (as well as more faintly outlined) than the Arcadian frame in which the princesses are described, and the reader is made aware of the ceaseless movement between the text's surface and its remoter vales.

Sidney's writing has a limpid clarity and exactness, his descriptions are focused, and the typically sharply etched outlines make figures and signs stand out distinct and separate from one another. We are aware of margins literally and figuratively. Ultimately indeed it is a fastidious subtlety of mind rather than eye to which his writing appeals, its system of contrasts appealing to our judgement as spectators in a vivid theatre of the mind. Yet, grounded as it is in scenic form, it must give any dramatist reading it food for thought.

By contrast, Thomas Lodge in Rosalynde requires caution. In his opening pages (160-1) he almost falls over his own metatextual conceits. After a formula from oral tradition, disarmingly simple—‘There dwelled adjoyning to the citie of Bourdeaux a Knight of most honorable parentage’—there intervenes a rhetorical pattern: ‘Whom Fortune had graced with manie favours, and Nature honored with sundrie exquisite qualities, so beautified with the excellence of both, as it was question whether Fortune or Nature were more prodigal in deciphering the riches of their bounties.’ These personifications prepare the reader for ever more bookish elements. The knight is rapidly given attributes fitting a writer's hero in an Elizabethan prose fiction, ‘the stroake of his Launce no less forcible, than the sweetnesse of his tongue was perswasive’. Lodge insists on the overwhelming importance of eloquence, as against simple oral narration, because his work invokes the shade of John Lyly in its preface; but this hardly excuses the ridiculous lengths to which the narrative is pushed. The old knight Sir John senses that he has not long to live and resolves to deliver a speech, as well as his written Will, to his three sons. Lodge says that the old man is conscious of, and uses, the possibilities of his aged face as a source of persuasion, since ‘the map of age was figured on his forehead: Honour sat in the furrowes of his face, and many yeares were pourtraied in his wrinkled liniaments, that all men perceive that his glasse was runne.’

Nevertheless, to take such a view of one's own features, as adjuncts to one's rhetorical performance (old age as a visual aid, so to speak), though it may possibly be allowable in a narrator, appears ludicrous if not grotesque in a dramatic character himself. The old man, however, Euphuist to the last, ‘Having therefore death in his lookes to moove them to pitie, and teares in his eyes to paint out the depth of his passions’, begins his oration to his three sons. Lodge sets the speech out on the page as an important textual event in its own right, with an upper-case title imitating the layout of a legal document or public proclamation:

Sir John of Bordeaux Legacie He Gave to his Sonnes

We notice, however, that it is supposed to be delivered spontaneously. Generally in Rosalynde stereotyped character and motive are baldly, explicitly accounted for in the authorial narrative. Scenes are staged in emblematic expository style. Action is held up while characters make formal orations for and against the alternative courses of action facing them, and their rhetoric is tediously elaborate, as when Rosader, coming upon his sleeping brother who lies in mortal danger from a lion, analyses the situation with all the restraint of a designer of mazes:

Now Rosader, Fortune that long hath whipt thee with nettles, meanes to salve thee with roses; and having crost thee with manie frownes: now she presents thee with the brightnesse of her favours. Thou that didst count thy self the most distressed of all men, maist accompt thy selfe now the most fortunate amongst men; if fortune can make men happie, or sweete revenge be wrapt in a pleasing content.

(216)

This effusion is prefaced, according to Lodge's custom, with the upper-case, centred title Rosaders Meditation, and it is set out as an oration of (detachable) general interest.

It is interesting, in terms of Lodge's formal rhetorical mode, to examine As You Like It II.vii, where Orlando makes a heroic intrusion upon the courtly exiles as they are about to banquet. He draws his sword, and utters a suitably lofty command in keeping with his role: ‘Forbear, and eat no more.’ To his audience on stage, his pose and style are all too familiar, but stagey, quite disjunct from this occasion. His melodramatic claim ‘I almost die for food, and let me have it’ is answered with the relaxed and polite ‘Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table’, even perhaps with an air of faintly amused condescension. This sophisticated and subtle reaction to Orlando's speech becomes unmistakable in the Duke's mock-solemn repetition, with slight stylistic improvement, of Orlando's formal oration:

If ever you have look'd on better days;
If ever been where bells have knoll'd to church;
If ever sat at any good man's feast;
If ever from your eyelids wip'd a tear. …

(II.vii.113-16)

This, to someone who has recently been reading Lodge, if not Sidney, parodies the typical procedure (and unintended absurdity) of romance, where formal rhetoric is utterly dissynchronized from the situation, time and place of the narrative action. Lodge does not provide Shakespeare with any central informing poetic idea; that of Fortune, which some critics have canvassed, is clumsily superimposed in Lodge and in As You Like It serves as a butt of ridicule, parody and subversion from all sides, particularly from the dramatist himself. But Lodge does give Shakespeare one excellent thing, not to be found in Sidney: a heroine with gaiety and sprightliness.

Critics sometimes describe the mode of As You Like It as if it were anticipatory Chekhov. It may be worth recalling how different it is. Here is an intelligent comment on Chekhov's dramatic style in The Cherry Orchard:

the call of the business to be done behind the scenes is almost more insistent than the call of what is to be enacted by the footlights; the stage is not so much a point or a focus as a passage over which his personages drift or scurry, a chance meeting place where we hear only fragments of their talk and see less important moments of their action.⁴

The same critical view sees much of the dialogue as elliptical, more important for its subtextual content than its overt function as exchange between characters. Compared to this, it is obvious that the structure of As You Like It foregrounds positively competitive encounters between contrasting characters, making dialogue often exciting as debate, in a manner Shaw himself, but for his determined obtuseness towards As You Like It, would have had to find congenial.

Viewed analytically, this play's style is indeed so far from Chekhov that it shows significant affinities with the technique of Shakespeare's last romances, where Shakespeare exploits sudden changes in style and even mode as part of an overall dramatic strategy, awaking surprise, shock and wonder in the audience. In these plays certain episodes are presented with a realism of social and psychological observation which would be congenial to a George Eliot; then suddenly a medieval rhyming Chorus-figure will take over, insisting on the simple primitive folk-tale level of the narrative, or highly self-conscious and mannered allusions to acting, to the technique of spectacular staging, or to the openly acknowledged presence of the audience, will insist that the entrances and exits and dialogue are recognized as artifice. Then, without warning, an irresistibly powerful dramatic illusion will be restored to seize the audience's full imaginative concentration.

In As You Like It many passages of dialogue present an illusion of lifelike spontaneous conversation, even in characters given to oratorical flights or witty repartee; particularly naturalistic are the conversations which, so far from being lively, animated and competitive, reveal one or both speakers to be dull in mood and halting in speech, as when Rosalind confesses she has not one word to throw at a dog (I.iii.3), or Jaques says to Orlando ‘Let's meet as little as we can’ (III.ii.253). Yet such episodes of naturalism are embedded in a plot whose overall shape is determined by the inexplicable and astonishing: at the beginning the sudden and violent malevolence of Duke Frederick; at the very last moment, the sensational news delivered by a messenger who is in himself surprising: he is Jaques de Boys:

Let me have audience for a word or two.
I am the second son of old Sir Rowland
That bring these tidings to this fair assembly.
Duke Frederick hearing how that every day
Men of great worth resorted to this forest,
Address'd a mighty power, which were on foot
In his own conduct, purposely to take
His brother here, and put him to the sword.
And to the skirts of this wild wood he came,
Where, meeting with an old religious man,
After some question with him, was converted
Both from his enterprise and from the world.

(V.iv.150-61)

This announcement generates wonder; there is wonder too for this third de Boys brother, discovering he is just in time for the weddings of both his brothers as well as two other couples; the sending in of this forgotten third brother at the last moment seems deliberately to exaggerate the plot's artifice and the contrived tying up of all loose ends. Its chief effect is comic wonder and explicitly theatrical delight, but it reminds an audience of sensational moments elsewhere in the play: Frederick's anger, Orlando demanding food for his dying old servant at sword point, not to mention the heroine's dead faint, and the epiphany of Hymen, elements which seem clearly to anticipate Cymbeline and The Tempest.

What is most alien to the theatre of Chekhov here is the use of the style which states nothing obliquely, leaves nothing to be inferred, which employs expository soliloquies or asides, clearly announces entrances and exits, makes spectators expressly aware of the reasons for stage action, formally patterns language so that its structures are brought to the surface, supporting other patterned codes.

In As You Like It strong emphasis is made on this open expository style right at the beginning, when a vigorous, well-spoken young man enters with an old man whose name, repeated for emphasis, is Adam. Adam's name helps suggest Biblical as well as folk-tale resonances. Orlando stresses his plight in physical terms, born gentle but stalled like an ox (I.i.10), denied education while even the horses of his brother are ‘bred better; for besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manage’ (I.i.11-12); nourishment for the mind we take for granted as essential to a hero of literary romance, but it is striking that equal stress is here placed on nourishment for the body. Adam, though aged and virtually worn out in body, is sustained by spiritual vigour. We recognize in this pair youth and age, and an emblem of the interplay of body and spirit. Shakespeare then adds to the group the lonely saturnine figure, Oliver, of whom Orlando has been speaking. Oliver's perfectly stereotyped cold villainy awakes instantly the hot resentment of his younger brother, who seizes him and proves the better wrestler. The tableau which results is a speaking picture: Adam, fatherly spectator, intervenes to prevent the potential fratricide.

From the play's outset, then, such archetypes, directly shown or formally described, secure for the play a deep structure in fable and keep the audience subliminally in touch with the primitive sources of the narrative's power. The basic dramatic structure maintains a naive expository attitude against which the varied display of fashionable literary manners, of wit and nonsense, is set in contrast.⁵ In his consistent change of emphasis from his source, Lodge's Rosalynde, Shakespeare can be seen emphasizing a central theme of transformation through love which is very reminiscent of Sidney, while at the same time calling persistent attention to the effect upon pastoral themes and styles of their translation into dramatic form.

The extensive space and emphasis Lodge gives to the description of fights, roistering and general violence on a larger scale, is reduced in narrative terms and focused in the two violent wrestling bouts performed before the audience's eyes, making a shocking physical impact extremely early in the play. The first bout, between Orlando and Oliver (I.i.52-4) is violent, however short and inconclusive; the second (I.ii.200-3) is violent, complete and very conclusive indeed: Charles the professional having to be carried away speechless.

Once the impact of the violent wrestling bout is made, and the literal meaning of ‘a fall’ in wrestling is demonstrated, the word can become metamorphosed in the dialogue as a term for falling in love, and verbal wrestling, wit combats, many of which are vigorously competitive, can become the prevailing sport for everyone in Arden.

The repercussive shock-waves from the initial physical violence persist throughout the play, mainly below the surface of explicit action but glimpsed in the verbal account of the stricken deer, and again in the entry of the deer-slayers, before making one more direct impact when Rosalind falls unconscious on hearing of Orlando's wound as she looks at the bloody napkin.

The emotional malevolence of the wicked brothers Oliver and Duke Frederick is an indirect expression of violence and persists through the action. It propels the lovers into exile: their journeys are identified with the body and physical hardship, but the ‘desert inaccessible’ (II.vii.110) is soon reached, and is a place full of civilized people, whose hunting, before being a brute necessity for physical survival, is first of all a cultural rite, inspiring poetry and music. In the play hunting has a double value, as reality and as metaphor: in pastoral Arden, hunting is as much an embodiment of literary love imagery and a metaphor for political tyranny as it is the real thing from which metaphors are created. In the same way physical exile is a fact of the narrative but also a metaphor for spiritual freedom. The equal status of thing signified and sign is a feature of pastoral writing; so Shakespeare insists on recognition of the imperatives of the body as an essential precondition for true wit, and insists, remarkably, that the body's irrationality is essential as an informing substance for true style. In translating pastoral he gives pronounced emphasis through the language of the theatre to this literary and dramatic judgement. Self-consciousness in the writer of Elizabethan pastoral is, as we have seen, a constituent feature of the mode; in As You Like It Shakespeare begins to draw the audience's attention to style, in a spirit of playfulness, extremely early on.

In I.i.85-7, Shakespeare gives the villainous Oliver a moment alone on stage so that he can tell the audience directly and simply of his feelings and plots. He calls for Charles the wrestler, to whom he puts a series of abrupt questions, making no comment whatever on the long and rather surprising answers. The overall dramatic style seems to be expository: the questions are not revelatory of Oliver's character or state of mind, they are merely a dramatist's device: ‘What's the new news at the new court? … Can you tell if Rosalind the Duke's daughter be banished with her father? … Where will the old Duke live?’ On the other hand, considering the muscle-bound masculinity presumably to be ascribed to a wrestler, the answers are so unexpectedly polished in their eloquence, and so romantically idealistic in feeling, that the incongruity must surely be deliberate and the audience is invited to savour the effect. Even though Charles, it could be argued, may be supposed to be partly protected by the obvious expository form, his effusions on the tenderness of feminine affection, or on the merry men who flock to Arden where they fleet time carelessly as they did in the golden world, seem altogether too improbable to explain away, and furthermore invite us to make an ironic reassessment of Orlando himself, who speaks uncommonly well for one who has been, as he claims to have been, starved of education. A moment or two later the two young ladies offer some excellently witty word-play, and show a quick sensitivity to other people's styles, so reinforcing the impression that Shakespeare wishes to alert his audience to the absurdities in pastoral and romance convention.

Soon after, in staging which has a hint of allegorical stiffness, young Orlando enters in exile accompanied by the faithful servant Adam, and the two young ladies take as their companion Folly, in the shape of Touchstone. They are all received by a Duke in exile presiding over a no-Court in which everybody habitually translates their surroundings, Nature and the elements, into consciously elaborated metaphor and allegory. (For the audience this is more complex, since the natural world they inhabit can also be recognized as having pastoral, literary-fictional status). The ‘moralizing’ of the natural world produces a bizarre reversal: courtiers in Arden, supposedly a ‘desert’, read it as allegory of civilization, finding ‘books in the running brooks’ (II.i.16) exactly like characters in The Arcadia.

Such details amount cumulatively to a thorough-going stylistic subversion which Shakespeare seems wilfully to encourage, and later this has become quite explicit, when in an exchange which is Shakespeare's invention, Orlando tells Ganymede that he finds it surprising Ganymede should speak so well: ‘Your accent is something finer than you could purchase in so removed a dwelling’ (III.ii.333-4). To the audience (including Celia, an on-stage spectator) who are here enjoying Rosalind's first moments in the riskily improvized part of ‘saucy lackey’, Ganymede's momentary embarrassment at this question is comic, but so also is Orlando for asking it, in a pastoral. Such a matter-of-fact attitude looks even more ridiculous, too, when he swallows Ganymede's explanation, which is as highly improbable as the purest traditions of pastoral fiction allow.

When the ladies begin their first scene Rosalind idly proposes, as a sport, falling in love. Given the self-conscious dramatic style Shakespeare creates here, the prompt appearance of the Fool is partly a comment on her flippancy. A moment or two later there is another interruption, this time the sophisticated courtier Le Beau (presumably he is supposed to live up to his name in dress and manner). This event the ladies treat as a frankly artificial bit of theatre, and Le Beau is to be put out of his part with mockery. Indeed the ladies' attitude does invite us to question such stagecraft, sending in this courtier, so conventional a stage type, in this perfunctory way, in order to get the story going.

Le Beau begins his tale with a sentence startlingly incongruous for a sophisticate: ‘There comes an old man, and his three sons’ (I.ii.109). Is this conscious parody? Celia is amused by its predictable and childish quality and mocks it (purely from the point of view of style) with flippant indecency: ‘I could match this beginning with an old tale.’ All the same, Le Beau's words might well serve to begin a non-dramatic version of As You Like It itself, and a moment later the ladies, despite themselves, do in fact become gripped by the tale when they realize that while they have been exchanging melancholy and silly remarks three young men have fallen to Charles the wrestler and now lie with little hope of life. The words Le Beau uses give way to the physical reality they describe: in confronting that, Rosalind can say no more than ‘Alas’. Words fail her on the first of three memorable occasions in the play.⁶ Presumably the number is not a coincidence.

For the climax of physical action Shakespeare shows tension building up for Rosalind (IV.iii), although he does not build it up in the same degree for the audience. Rosalind notes Orlando's lateness with evidently real impatience. When someone enters it is not he but only Silvius. Then, when the next person enters, it is his brother Oliver, whom neither lady has ever before seen. Oliver, taking his time, delivers his fabulous report of having just been saved from two mortal dangers, a golden-and-green serpent as well as a nursing lioness (Lodge could only manage a lion). This speech, climaxing in the announcement that the bloody napkin which he brandishes is ‘Dy'd’ in Orlando's blood, has two simultaneous effects: it makes Celia fall in love, and Rosalind fall in a dead faint. In telling his tale Oliver demonstrates with his own body the physical wound Orlando suffered, to positively gruesome effect:

                                        and here upon his arm
The lioness had torn some flesh away,
Which all this while had bled; and now he fainted.

(IV.iii.146-8)

This whole on-stage episode is Shakespeare's invention; Lodge offers no parallel to the meeting, the direct report, the falling in love at first sight of Celia, or the dead faint of Rosalind/Ganymede. Shakespeare gives pronounced visual and physical emphasis to this reception on stage of off-stage events, the romantic nature of which Shakespeare makes even more fantastic as he takes them over from Lodge. The pronounced extravagance of Oliver's tale is made evident to the audience by the sharp contrast of the matter-of-fact style in which it is delivered, by the very unexpected absence of witty raillery by the ladies, and by their completely unquestioning acceptance of it: indeed Rosalind's anxious impatience to hear what the bloody napkin has to do with Orlando makes her oblivious to everything except that one thing. The existential fact of the bloody cloth before her eyes blinds her to the tale's blatant romantic incredibility. Certainly, we can say that Love triumphs literally in her fall, but the literalness is not without absurdity, as she half-acknowledges when she revives: the cloth, a sign for passion, has exposed the actual passion she was concealing under the sign of a boy. To put it another way, Oliver's role as messenger is obvious to the audience, and the highly artificial tale he tells endows the napkin with a degree of unreality, as a stock stage property, to be recognized as a literary motif in the same breath as the literary lion and literary serpent, whose actual presentation on stage would be an absurdity too heavily distracting from Shakespeare's chief purpose here. The normally witty Rosalind's reaction exposes the gap between the pastoral fiction in which Ganymede figures and the dramatic present of As You Like It where Rosalind is to be found.

Our response to her faint is sympathetic, but also amused. Her reaction of fainting betrays intense emotion, acute vulnerability, and gives the lie to Ganymede's mockery of love's ideals, thereby honouring the shades of Ovid and of Marlowe, the ‘dead shepherd’. Anticipating Orlando Rosalind here finds she ‘can live no longer by thinking’ (V.ii.50), cannot suppress or disguise her serious emotion. Yet at the same time the self-conscious theatricality of the episode's style is given almost as much prominence, for the audience: Oliver's matter-of-fact tone contrasts with the extraordinary story he relates in a manner so extreme as to appear absurd. The audience finds comedy in his assumption, when he addresses Ganymede, that he is talking to a fellow male and so perhaps should emphasize his stiff-upper-lip attitude. His brisk thrusting forward of the bloody napkin is, again, as the audience see, bound to give Ganymede an unintended violent shock.

All these details help to give comic momentum to his speech and to his splendidly unimpressed (and wonderfully incurious) comment on Ganymede's dead faint: ‘Many will swoon when they do look on blood’ (IV.iii.158). The further reflection an audience may make, that the attractive presence of Celia acts as a stimulus to Oliver's boastfully manly attitude, adds an even more Sidneian complexity to a complex comedy of mistaken identity, already reminiscent of Sidney in the sense that it is precisely through this mode that Shakespeare expresses the profounder theme, of self-discovery in love for another.

The pleasures and perils of eloquence are given pronounced critical attention in this play, as they are in Much Ado and Twelfth Night, but unhesitating eloquence as a value in itself appears suspect. Many forms of utterance, copious, curt, artless, elaborate, fantastic, curmudgeonly, formally oratorical or nonsensical, are displayed for their delightfulness and variety, but each is subjected to the process of contrast and comparison which informs Shakespeare's whole idea of theatre in As You Like It.

Sidney, it will be remembered, juxtaposes, as stuff for low comedy and caricature, the unselfconscious human animal in Miso, Mopsa and Dametas, against those who have the breeding and education to set their erected wit against their infected will. In III.iii.14-15, Audrey's remark to Touchstone, ‘I do not know what “poetical” is. Is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing?’ summons unwittingly the shade of Sidney in An Apologie of Poetrie, where the relation between decorum of behaviour and decorum of speech is affirmed, and their status as arts is basic to the discussion. That Touchstone, doughty defender of the claims of the body, should be provoked to some of his greatest exertions of wit by the basic Audrey and the plain Corin, is characteristic of the play's faux-naive working; indeed Corin's simplicities—for example ‘I know the more one sickens the worse at ease he is; and that he that wants money, means, and content is without three good friends’ (III.ii.23-5)—are so accurate as criticism of Touchstone's situation as to seem like urbane irony, or even flat parody of one of the Fool's habits of wit, as when he responds to Rosalind's ‘O Jupiter, how weary are my spirits!’ with the remark, ‘I care not for my spirits, if my legs were not weary’ (II.iv.1-2).

It is true that in Rosalind/Ganymede Shakespeare presents speech which might be thought to approach an ideal of artifice fused with spontaneity, but this is rather a reader's than a playgoer's judgement. It is certainly true that Rosalind's key qualities of nerve, of risk-taking and vitality, springing from acute, quick response to the moment, live in her eloquent speech; but in a performance of the play it is when she shows herself ready in her double self to immerse in nonsense, self-contradiction, parody, incoherence, and, climactically, speechlessness, that the play's and her most important moments come.

So Shakespeare stresses the practical physical hardship, the physical risk, and the physical pleasures which a real journey, real countryside, and real sexual feeling, must involve, and he has of course real physical actors to perform the play. Nevertheless, and wholly consistent with pastoral's ambiguity, he keeps this sense of practical experience in tension with artifice and reflection. His basic style in As You Like It is by no means to be described as realism.

At the centre of As You Like It Rosalind, in the guise of Ganymede, watched by a usually silent Celia, performs a translation of herself as she projects for Orlando a delicious dream-courtship, controlled and devised according to the rules of romance. Neither Orlando nor Ganymede makes love in his own person, exactly; that is deferred by the rules of the game. In the contemplation of this ‘fiction’ Celia too is silently transformed in unconscious preparation for meeting the transformed Oliver, Orlando's brother. The persona of Ganymede is an uncertain entity, insisting that all things are provisional, including the fiction in which he himself exists, a pretty youth in a paysage moralisé which is realized only by the play's language and which, on the Elizabethan stage, can only be distinguished (if at all) from the Court, or from nowhere (an unlocalized playing space) by at most a few token property trees.

Rosalind appears ‘in her own person’ again at the end of the play, but here she is translated anew, being no longer the Rosalind of the beginning of the play but now a Rosalind in whom the shadow of the absent Ganymede remains, making her now different from either the one or the other. She introduces a classical deity: Hymen is a mythological, if not a magical, figure, and in his actual appearance on stage a new kind of theatre supervenes. In Lodge there is a real priest who conducts a real marriage service. Elizabethan law forbade the presentation of a marriage service in a play, thus posing an obvious technical problem for the Globe playwright. Shakespeare's solution is to bring on stage this mythological deity to stand beside the play's familiar human characters, effecting a transformation of the dramatic decorum. The theatrical artifice of the episode is qualified by the highly ritualized staging and music, which translate initial disbelief among the characters on stage into wonder, while leaving the audience still partly conscious of an element of trickery.

Hymen has several simultaneous meanings. He is pure theatrical surprise, a ‘happening’ inducing wonder. He is an evident metaphor for Christian marriage, devised to evade Elizabethan censorship. He is a fashionable Renaissance theatre figure, from the Court Masque. Finally, he is literally and simply the ancient god of marriage, truly at home in Arden and the remote world of pastoral. Through Rosalind the equivocal relation of trickery to magic, of theatrical to spiritual wonder, is evoked, and through Jaques, with his disenchanted realistic voice and presence, a double view of this ending is indicated, bringing an audience to a new sense of ending and unending. Hymen exists in the true dimension of pastoral, between here and there, dialectically: a place of the mind, and of the theatre, in Shakespeare's translation.

Notes

1. Agnes Latham, ed., As You Like It (London, 1975), p. xxvi. Quotations from Lodge's Rosalynde are from Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol.2 (London and New York, 1968). Quotations from Sidney are from: (a) Jean Robertson, ed., The Old Arcadia (Oxford, 1973). This work was not published in Shakespeare's lifetime; (b) the version known as The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (London, 1977). The episodes discussed in the present essay appeared in the 1590 edition and subsequent editions. The 1590 edition consisted of Sidney's revised version of The Old Arcadia: Bks I, II and part of III, ending in mid-fight and mid-sentence.

2. These definitions of ‘translate’ are from the Oxford English Dictionary (I,i and II,2). For a searching discussion of the idea of translation see Hans-Jost Frey's article in Colloquium Helveticum, no. 3, Bern, 1986.

3. Metamorphoses, Bk III; Echo, a nymph vainly in love with Narcissus, pines away for grief to nothing but her voice.

4. George Calderon, writing in 1911, quoted by Jan McDonald, ‘Productions of Chekhov's plays in Britain before 1914’, Theatre Notebook, 44 (1980), 33.

5. By changing Lodge's story so that the usurper Duke becomes brother of the exiled Duke, and by excluding the third de Boys brother, Shakespeare contrives a highly symmetrical pattern whose function is expository, in which the characters are paired, bound either by close kinship or by love. Shakespeare adds a bond of love between the exiled Duke and Orlando's dead father, which completes the pattern of strong ties between all the main characters. In reducing the vague supporting cast of Rosalynde, he gives each Duke one leading courtier: Le Beau is discreetly disloyal to Frederick, Amiens is discreetly ironic in flattering Senior's stylish pose of literary stoicism. If these courtiers are instances of equivocal service, then Shakespeare's important new characters Touchstone and Jaques present, as marginal figures, more detached questioning of the pastoral and social ties between human beings. Even the wrestler Charles is shown to be honourable (accepting no bribes as in Lodge), despising Orlando only after being made to believe him ‘a secret and villainous contriver’ against his elder brother. Shakespeare drastically abbreviates, reduces and concentrates Lodge's story to give central emphasis to love's power, and he juxtaposes clearly contrasted groups, in highly symmetrical patterns of twos and threes, to generate a visual, and then a more general, dialectic of contrast and comparison. The prolonged bad relations between the brothers in Lodge are telescoped by Shakespeare and simplified, so that Orlando goes directly into exile, with Rosalind fresh in his mind. When she arrives in Arden, with a Celia who has come with her out of pure love (not as in Lodge banished like Rosalind), the poems they find on trees and shrubs are by Orlando himself, not, as in Lodge, by a minor character, Montanus. Arriving in Arden, Orlando interrupts the Ducal banquet with sword drawn and heroic martial challenge, although in Lodge Rosader shows only polite civility.

6. I.ii.123; I.iii.1-3; IV.iii.156.