I met a fool in the forest
Pastoral love in As You Like It
The next Shakespeare Book Club is ***Sunday 23rd June, 19.00 UK time***. We will be discussing As You Like It. There will then be a summer break. I update the schedule for Shakespeare here. All Shakespeare posts are here. (These links work better in your browser than in the Substack app… I don’t know why.)
Pastoral doubleness
Shakespeare’s primary mode of thought was opposition: contrasts, doubles, juxtapositions. As You Like It caps the long period of his romantic comedies (Love’s Labour’s Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream) with the classic duality of Elizabethan poetry: the pastoral. Pastoral pairs the country and the city: the country is natural, a place of love, a virtuous scene; the city is artificial, a place of lust, a wretchedly political environment. The country is romance; the city is satire.
Everything in the forest is reversed: there is an alternative Duke, an alternative clown, foresters not courtiers, Ganymede not Rosalind. The contrast is played out directly in the dialogue between Touchstone (city jester) and Corin (forest fool). But think, too, of this play being performed at court: the duality of city and country, court and forest, would be literally true of the courtly audience sitting in front of the wooded stage. One use of pastoral, therefore, is to comment on the city in disguise.
We can see Shakespeare playing with both ideas and genre in this opposition. These are old themes—artifice and nature, corruption and decency, town and city, romance and satire—given very modern Elizabethan resonances. But as Frank Kermode says in Shakespeare’s Language, we should not expect this play to “draw a simple diagram” of these dynamics.
Out in the forest, the shallow artifice of conventional city poetry is shown up as lacklustre and bare. In the city, the highly artificial satires of Jacques and Touchstone are sophisticated and entertaining, but in the pastoral forest truth is valued more than sophistication. In all of these contrasts, Shakespeare is asking us to consider, who is the real fool, the natural simpleton or the overwrought urbanite? When Jacques walks in saying “A fool, a fool, I met a fool in the forest”, we wonder who he means.
And responding to the literary scene of its time, at the heart of As You Like It is the paradox that “the truest poetry is the most feigning.”
Rosalind: anti-cliche.
In his previous comedies, Shakespeare included a lot of sonnets. As You Like It has fewer, and hardly any appear in his plays after this. Some of his private sonnets were published in 1599, without his permission. He seems unwilling to have given any more material to the pirate publishers. But in As You Like It he also heightens his satire of sonneteers. The Petrarchan mode of distant maids with cold hearts and fierce eyes had become stale, repetitive, cliched. Orlando’s poetry is representative of this tired tradition. Phobe mocks it by taking it literally, frustrated and piqued by the empty conventions of love-writing. Reacting to the trope that a woman can kill with a look, she lets fly a poetic stream of invective
Thou tell’st me there is murder in mine eye:
’Tis pretty, sure, and very probable,
That eyes, that are the frail’st and softest things,
Who shut their coward gates on atomies,
Should be call’d tyrants, butchers, murderers!
Now I do frown on thee with all my heart;
And if mine eyes can wound, now let them kill thee:
Now counterfeit to swoon; why now fall down;
Or if thou canst not, O, for shame, for shame,
Lie not, to say mine eyes are murderers!
Kermode finds that so much of the play, being concerned as it is with the literary scene of 1599, has “slipped over the horizon”.
But it persists in popularity because of the indefatigable presence of Rosalind, who has a greater share of the lines than even Cleopatra. One reason for the relative silence about As You Like It in its immediate posterity (no quarto editions, no commentary for at least a century), is, as James Shapiro says in 1599, the fact that Shakespeare created, in Rosalind, a very realistic character. Audiences must have been bemused. This was something quite new. As Proust describes in Within a Budding Grove, truly original art must make its own posterity, educating its audience in its innovations. That is what had to happen here. Once the topicality of the literary debate in the play recedes we are left with Rosalind: witty, inexhaustible in debate, commanding, loveable, pragmatic, argumentative, charming, for who no other character in the play is a match.
That is why, despite the difficulty of understanding all the literary satire, As You Like It retains its popularity today. Rosalind is forever enchanting. Just think what it meant, in 1599, for a boy actor playing a woman (who was in turn disguised as a man, and then pretended to be a woman again) to speak “like a saucy lacky” to Orlando, to lecture him on love and history and morals. And the marriage scene is truly radical. Orlando and Rosalind speak legally binding words—a rare enactment of a sacrament on stage, something which was technically banned.
So Rosalind is the walking embodiment of all that is wrong with Petrarchan poetry. She is nothing like those false, idealised women. She is the anti-cliche. And that still discombobulates us today.
“by lies we flattered be”
The plot is simple: Rosalind sees Orlando at court and they fall in love; she is banished and flees to the forest; he follows; they meet. But Rosalind goes in disguise as a man, Ganymede. She uses that disguise to tutor Orlando in the ways of love, to stop him writing mindless poetry and to see her for who she really is. This enacts the irony of the phrase “the truest poetry is the most feigning”. Rosalind must be disguised for Orlando to know her properly.
The central question of the plot is: why doesn’t Rosalind cast off her disguise as soon as she knows Orlando is in the forest looking for her?