Shakespeare’s As You Like It

Rescuing the Father from the Forest: Shakespeare’s As You Like It 

It seems inauspicious to begin with a confession, but I’ve never liked As You Like It, and I could never understand why so many critics—particularly critics of a certain age, it seemed—do. Whereas Twelfth Night’s Viola seemed trapped in the Cesario disguise, AYL’s Rosalind seems manipulative. Whereas Hamlet seems thoughtful and searching, Jacques reads like a one-trick pony. And while TN’s Feste tosses out barbed jests (the necessary truths others can’t utter) and tends the precious flame of harmony with his songs, music being the hearth around which societies cohere, Touchstone pursues a selfish agenda of sexual conquest and is divided from song—it’s Amiens who does the singing and provides the jollity in AYL. For me, though, the most objectionable aspect of the play is the forced ending, which relies on three instances of deus ex machina—Orlando’s rescue of his brother Oliver, the appearance of Hymen, and Duke Frederick’s sudden conversion at the cusp of wiping out his brother once and for all. Sure, the contrived coincidence that suddenly allows for the happy ending demanded by comedy is common in Shakespeare, but three such events? It seems like cheating.  However, the three instances of deus ex machine may make dramatic sense if we read the forest and the duke as having a transcendent relationship in which the duke makes himself a creature of the very place his place protects. The forest protects him and his from outside harm until his daughter is able to achieve the restoration of the society depicted in the play.

On the face of it, As You Like It is harmless enough. The play begins with a usurper’s court hemorrhaging nobles. Duke Senior, displaced by his brother Duke Frederick, has fled to the Forest of Arden with a number of his men. Rosalind, the daughter of Duke Senior, along with her cousin Celia and Duke Frederick’s fool, Touchstone, have also fled to the forest, the two young women disguised as sibling shepherds (Rosalind as the male Ganymede and Celia as the female Aliena). Finally, Orlando, persecuted by his older brother Oliver (they are two of the three sons of the deceased Sir Rowland de Boys), flees to the forest with their elderly servant, Adam. Once there, we are treated with the usual hijinks that typically happen when love and costumes come into play, until finally we are left with four couples and the restoration of Duke Senior’s rightful place back in the court.

As in Midsummer’s Night Dream, the forest in As You Like It is seen primarily as a place of refuge, as it had served since the time of William the Conqueror (Harrison 75). After William’s Norman invasion, Anglo-Saxon nobles took to the forest as “outlaws.” Robin Hood, of course, gets mentioned in AYL, but English popular culture also populated the forests with legendary outlaws such as Hereward, Fulk Fitzwarin, Eustace the Monk, Gamelyn and Adam Bell. Robert Pogue Harrison’s point about these outlaws dovetails well with Duke Senior and his men—Robin Hood et al. are not enemies of the law, but of the law’s degradation (79). According to Harrison, “the savagery that once traditionally belonged to the forests now lurks in the hearts of men—civic men. The dangers lie within, not without” (100). In our first glimpse of Duke Senior, he asks “Are not these woods / More free from peril than the envious court?” (2.1.3-4). Civilization itself has become degraded, and the project of civilization—the restoration of the sublunary world to its prelapsarian place in the cosmic harmony represented by the Ptolemaic model of the universe, to mimic Divine Order through the Great Chain of Being—has been abandoned for the discordances of state and fraternal strife. The center cannot hold, and men of good will, dispossessed of their natural rights, have fled for the natural blessings of bush and branch.

Harrison relates the degradation of civic rule to the comedic standard of disguise. “Corrupt sheriffs, bribed judges, arbitrary decrees of law—these are common stock in stories that evoke a world where the apparels of justice all too often merely disguise its opposite. Disguise, then, is first and foremost a scandal of the legal system” (Harrison 79). The forest, with its lack of clear sightlines, its coverts and shadows, its primordial chaos of vegetation, is the natural location of confusion, disguise and masking, mistaken identities, and the kind of social leveling common in comedy. In AYL, we have a number of instances that bear this out—the disguise of social station (nobles as shepherds, Sir Oliver Martext as a legitimate priest), the disguise of gender (Rosalind as Ganymede), the traditional hierarchies leveled to unsure equality. Duke Senior’s first words are “my co-mates and brothers in exile” (2.1.1), certainly not the language of subjects and rulers, and his reaction to Orlando’s attempt at stealing food by force doesn’t betoken a knight’s honor or ruler’s concern with security (2.7.87-104).

Harrison provides a close consideration of John Manwood’s 1592 Treatise of the Forest Laws. According to Manwood’s definition, a “forest is a certain territory of woody grounds and fruitful pastures, privileged for wild beasts and fowls of forest, chase, and warren, to rest and abide there in the safe protection of the king, for his delight and pleasure…” (qtd. in Harrison 72; my emphasis). The forest is widely understood to be a sanctuary, under the king’s protection. Harrison takes this further, claiming that “[the king’s] status as the transcendent sovereign of the land invests the monarch with responsibility for the natural world on which his kingdom is founded” (Harrison 74), that transcendence dependent on natural law. The expression of the king’s “delight and pleasure” is the hunt, a ritual reenactment of the transcendent king’s conquest of the wilderness and a necessary aspect of the ruler’s persona (Harrison 74). The ruler’s identity, then, is tied up with that of the forest, and vice versa. Stripped of his rightful place in the city, then, Duke Senior naturally takes shelter in the forest.

In Harrison’s esteem, the forest is the “shadow of civilization.” It is ahistorical, secretive, mysterious, the locus of possibilities, good and bad, positive and negative. By Shakespeare’s time, the forest is already a symbol, a place of nostalgia. Most of the large animal predators had been killed, and the trees had been harvested for navies (Harrison 71, 100). There is danger in the forest, though, even for a ruler. As anyone who has done much wilderness hiking can attest, the forest disorients place, station and time, three concepts which prop up civilization; the forest eats time and exists in only a constant now. Early on in AYL, the wrestler Charles informs Oliver that the court gossips “say many young men flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world” (1.1.109-13)—the “golden world,” before the fall, before time. Rosalind, trying desperately to civilize Orlando’s love, obsesses over his loose regard for time. More importantly, Duke Senior seems to be losing his very self. He never makes mention of seeking to win back his throne or return to the city; in fact, he seems pretty content with his fate in the forest. He also resists his natural prerogative (even responsibility) to the hunt, stating that “it irks me” (2.1.22). The forest protects Duke Senior, but it also subsumes him. Rosalind’s exile becomes a rescue mission, but one that cannot be consummated until the symbolic harmony of the octave (the four matrimonial couples) is achieved. Once the cosmic order is mirrored by the coupling of the eight lovers, civic order can follow with the restoration of the rightful Duke.

All of which brings back us back to the three instances of deus ex machina. The first occurs with Oliver’s sudden appearance and his conversion story. Oliver is set upon by a lion and a snake as he slept, and despite his unjust treatment of Orlando, his younger brother rescues him from both (4.3.97-154). This marks the only mention of dangerous animals in the forest, and it seems obvious to read them as manifestations of Oliver’s nature (i.e., Oliver brings them into the forest). Orlando proves to be his brother’s keeper, his virtues overcoming the vices that have made Oliver their prey. Oliver is duly converted, expresses his repentance, and falls in love with Celia (a coupling that has the further effect of freeing Celia’s heart from its solitary devotion to her cousin).

The second instance of deus ex machina concerns Hymen, the god of marriage (5.4.106-44). Hymen is conjured by Rosalind in order to bless the marriages, though it seems that Hymen’s presence has much wider implications than the wedding blessing. Hymen’s emphasis is on harmony and song:

• “Then is there mirth in heaven / When earthly things made even / Atone together “
• “Here’s eight that must take hands / To join in Hymen’s bands” (i.e., the octave)
• “a wedlock hymn we sing” (perhaps a reference to cosmic harmony)

In Hymen’s presence, households, the most local expression of the cosmic order and Chain of Being, are restored—Rosalind gives herself as a daughter back to her father and as a wife to Orlando; Rosalind gives Phebe to Sylvius; and the three sons of Sir Rowland de Boys are restored as brothers. Furthermore, through marriage, time (which collapses in the forest) is restored—the names, titles, and land of the ancestors (i.e., the past) are propelled forward through the promise of children (i.e., the future).

News of the third instance of deus ex machina is brought by that third son of Sir Rowland, the until-this-point-unseen (and little mentioned) Jacques de Boys. Duke Frederick had set out with “a mighty power” to hunt down and kill his brother, but was stopped at the edge of the forest by “an old religious man” who converts him to retirement from the world (5.4.149-64). Duke Senior’s inactivity, then, has forced Duke Frederick to seek his brother in the shadows; however, the natural world seems to recognize its natural ruler, and Duke Frederick can only get to the “skirts of this wild wood.” There is some debate as to how to interpret the “religious man,” but I read him as a hermit, someone who has given himself up to seek God in the wilderness, someone who has become part of the forest itself. As Harrison and Manwood have it, the forest itself is a sanctuary, a place of protection for the creatures that belong to it. To reverse an earlier statement, the forest may subsume the rightful duke, but it also protects him. Duke Frederick, as a usurper, lacks the prerogative to enter the forest and hunt. In the end, the usurper abdicates to the abdicator, and all is restored.

Comedy is inherently conservative; it seeks restoration and revitalization, a renewal of society. As You Like It is no different. At the end of AYL, Duke Senior and his men can resume their natural places in court, so the state is restored. Duke Senior has his daughter back, and the three sons of Sir Rowland are reunited as brothers, so households are restored. Finally, we have marriage, the sacrament by which we sanctify and legalize sexual relations and the generational transfer of titles and property. Four couples are newly wedded, so the future is restored, at least for one more generation.

One final question might concern the name of the forest, Arden, which might have struck a particular nerve with Shakespeare since Arden was a forest near Stratford-upon-Avon as well as his mother’s maiden name. Mary Arden was of a family both prominent and old, and the marriage must have been promising for John Shakespeare, a man who was ambitious and, for a while, successful. One can easily imagine the pressing disappointment John Shakespeare felt as his fortunes fell—instead of raising himself up to his wife’s family’s status, he was dragging her down to his. If I am correct in assuming that Rosalind needed to rescue her father from becoming lost in the wilderness of Arden, a biographical reading would suggest that William Shakespeare (a man whose own profession involves disguise and instruction) is analogizing his own need to rescue his father from being subsumed by his failure to live up to the expectations of his wife’s lineage. As You Like It was written towards the end of John Shakespeare’s life, just a few years after William successfully revived his father’s attempt to obtain a coat of arms (an attempt he abandoned years before his son became a playwright), raising his farmer’s son of a father to the rank of gentleman. It comes from the same period in Shakespeare’s catalogue that gives us Julius Caesar, Hamlet, and Henry V, other plays whose central tension focuses on characters haunted by their fathers or father-figures.  Reading Rosalind’s rescue of her father as analogous to Shakespeare’s psychological need to symbolically rescue his own is merely conjecture, of course, and impossible to establish, suggestive as it may be. However, reading As You Like It through the evolution of the idea of forests as explored by Harrison suggests a thematic unity to its resolution that is much more satisfying than the idea the Shakespeare just painted himself into too many corners.

Works Cited

Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P,      1992.  Print.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Ed. Frances E. Dolan. The Pelican Shakespeare. New York:          Penguin, 2000. Print.