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As You Like It: Learning to Love in Shakespeare's Forest of Arden

As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), written in 1599 and likely first performed that same year. Indeed, it is thought to be the inaugural show performed by Shakespeare's acting company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, at the newly built Globe Theatre. Although its literary merit has been questioned by some scholars, who point to its lack of plot, As You Like It continues to be frequently performed today and features the character of Rosalind, often regarded as one of Shakespeare's greatest heroines.

Background

As You Like It was Shakespeare's attempt at writing a pastoral play, a literary genre that was popular with Elizabethan theatre audiences in the 1580s and early '90s. Largely influenced by Sir Philip Sidney's poem Arcadia, pastorals romanticized country life, specifically that of a shepherd living off the land. A popular example of pastoral poetry is The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, one of the poems of Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), which begins:

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Woods or steepy mountain yields.

It is quite easy to see why pastorals appealed to the literate and theatergoing crowds of London, many of whom likely fantasized about leaving the cramped, filthy, and often dangerous conditions of city life behind. In As You Like It, Shakespeare offers his own version of a pastoral paradise with his Forest of Arden, a magical place where snakes and lions dwell, bands of merry outlaws live off the land and pass the time with song, and young people can learn to fall in love (four couples get married at the end of the play, a large number even for a Shakespearean romantic comedy). The name of Shakespeare's paradise is derived both from his source, which takes place in the French forests of Ardennes, as well as from his personal life, as his mother's name was Mary Arden.

The story itself was adapted from the popular 1590 pastoral poem Rosalynd by Thomas Lodge, which provided Shakespeare with the basic ingredients for his own play – a heroine who disguises herself as a man, and the movement of the characters from city to country. Shakespeare expands the cast, originating the melancholic Jaques and clown Touchstone, and lowers the stakes, removing the more violent resolutions of Lodge's original work. Shakespeare's title also comes from Lodge, who, in the preface to his original Rosalynd, writes: "If you like it, so; and yet I will be yours in duty, if you be mine in favor" (quoted in Shapiro, 210).

Yet even as Shakespeare leans into the pastoral, he does not fail to criticize the genre's tendency to romanticize country life and love itself. The character Orlando, for example, enters the Forest of Arden lovesick for the beautiful Rosalind; indeed, he spends his time writing dreadful love poems and pinning them to trees. A classic Petrarchan lover, Orlando, has put Rosalind on a pedestal, something our heroine knows is an unsustainable form of love. When Orlando says he would die for his love of her, Rosalind – disguised as the shepherd Ganymede – grounds him with the words: "men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love". It is for this reason that scholar James Shapiro argues that the main conflict in As You Like It does not stem from the villainous Duke Frederick, who has usurped the dukedom and banished the protagonists, but rather from Orlando's own immature attitude toward love.

For this eschewing of the traditional pastoral ideals of poets like Sidney and Marlowe – and indeed of the intense kind of love found in Shakespeare's earlier work, Romeo and Juliet – Rosalind comes across as a special type of pastoral heroine, which is why literary scholar Harold Bloom considers her amongst Shakespeare's greatest creations. "I love Falstaff and Hamlet and Cleopatra as dramatic and literary characters," Bloom writes, "but would not want to encounter them in actuality; yet falling in love with Rosalind always makes me wish that she existed in our sub-literary realm…if Rosalind cannot please us, no one in Shakespeare or elsewhere in literature ever will" (204).

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