As You Like It - About the text

The Out of Towners - by Bob Papsdorf

William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald wrote for the movies, but with As You Like It, William Shakespeare does them one better and takes a crack at writing his own sitcom—if we can define the genre as a convivial entertainment full of familiar character types and situations, designed to, above all else, amuse the audience.

The TV Guide synopsis of As You Like It might read, “Two noble families escape their troubles by decamping to the forest of Arden, where they interact with the locals and find romance.” Court and forest are the contrasting locales of many Shakespearean comedies, and usually when the forest is featured (as in As You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream), the play will mostly be a happy one. When the court is more prominent (Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice), the story is more serious.(footnote 1)

The court situation at the beginning of As You Like It is more than just serious—it is positively grim, with the younger brother in one family (Duke Frederick) having deposed his brother in a coup, and the elder brother in the other family (Oliver) having refused his younger brother the privileges and entitlements stipulated in their father’s will. What makes these brothers so bad? We don’t know, and they don’t seem to either. They act on whims and humors they cannot explain even to themselves. Maybe it’s something in the water, but for anyone who isn’t in their good graces, a trip to the forest of Arden is definitely the best strategy for staying alive.

Real forests are full of trees, racoons, and assorted endangered species. But the forest of Arden is anything but a real forest. It is, rather, a literary forest, one that Shakespeare seems to be intent on cramming full of every notion, legend, tradition, and convention that pertains to forests. It is hardly surprising, then, that the first mention of Arden makes reference to a famous literary woodsman:

“They say he [Duke Senior, the deposed brother of Duke Frederick] is already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the Robin Hood of England. They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.”

Arden is no more a real forest than Gilligan’s is a real island, and you will learn no more about mixed temperate zone deciduous forests from As You Like It than you will about tropical coral atolls from Gilligan’s Island. But just as Gilligan’s Island plays host to just about every familiar plot variation in the low-brow sitcom plot repertoire (footnote 2), so Arden is a veritable garden of literary conceits. When Orlando has the interesting idea of attaching poems, proclaiming his love for Rosalind, to the trees in Arden, he shows us just what the relationship is between a real forest, which is a collection of trees, and a literary forest, which is a collection of ideas, notions, rhymes, and metaphors.

One of the most hackneyed of literary conceits, even in Shakespeare’s time, was that of the lovelorn shepherd. These fellows were often city-born sophisticates who took to the herds and the hills so as to have time and space to sigh and moan about their unrequited loves. A distinctly pathetic and pointless policy, to modern sensibilities, but well suited to literary landscapes. (Never mind that real shepherds might seek out meadows rather than forests—Shakespeare and his contemporaries weren’t too strict in their sense of land use, any more than they were strict about spelling.) In As You Like It, Rosalind subjects Orlando to a literary test of love by requiring him to conform to every idiotic rule in the amorous shepherd book. Here is her critique of Orlando’s appearance as a lover:

Orlando: I am he that is so love-shak’d, I pray you tell me your remedy.

Rosalind: There is none of my uncle’s marks upon you. He taught me how to know a man in love; in which cage of rushes I am sure you are not prisoner.

Orlando: What were his marks?

Rosalind: A lean cheek, which you have not; a blue eye and sunken, which you have not; an unquestionable spirit, which you have not; a beard neglected, which you have not…

When all the world’s a stage, the implication is that you had better look your part.

Another writer in another country was simultaneously celebrating and mocking such literary conceits as the amorous shepherd, right around the same time that Shakespeare was writing As You Like It. In his novel Dox Quixote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes had the brilliant idea of superimposing the literary world on top of the real one, and reaping the comic benefits. Thus the elderly Don Quixote, after a lifetime spent reading far too many romantic tales of chivalrous knights, sets forth on his quest to prove the worthiness of his love for the unattainable maiden Dulcinea del Toboso, with his faithful squire Sancho Panza in tow. While Don Quixote grapples with giants and dragons in the world of his degranged but exalted imagination, Sancho watches him lunging into windmills and falling over donkeys in the real world. This simple comic formula, with variations, is able to sustain 900-odd pages of quality entertainment, with a great abundance of pathetic shepherds.

Toward the end of As You Like It, the two tyrants who were responsible for driving most of the rest of the cast to the forest of Arden in the first place follow them there. Will the bad brothers able to retain their paranoid, senseless wrath amid the civilizing glades of Arden? See for yourself.

1. Granted, sometimes the forest is an island, as in The Tempest, or a country estate, as in The Merchant of Venice. Critic Anne Barton, in her introduction to As You Like It in the Riverside Shakespeare, suggests that Shakespeare’s comedies are “built upon the idea of two localities, one heightened and more remarkable than the other.”

2. It has been noted that each of the seven castaways encounters a look-alike double of him or herself in at least one episode.