FOR many of us, the woods are always somewhere ‘away.’ Whether near, or far, most people see a definite line between the wilderness of the forest and wherever they live. The Forest of Arden, Birnam Wood, and the other wildernesses of Shakespeare seem to be liminal spaces, places of freedom, lawlessness, and social fluidity. While this perspective is certainly a tempting view of Shakespeare's forests, it hardly represents the early modern understanding of the forest; at least within early modern literary circles, there seems to be a dominant attitude that the forest was neither liminal nor antithetical to civilization, but interwoven within society, government, and the crown.

Outside of the cities, thousands of citizens lived near or within wooded regions and forests. The Instructions Agreed upon in Parliament for Commissioners for Surveying the Forest, printed by Henry Hills and John Fields in 1657, lists dozens of men across only a handful of forests who were responsible for the management of these spaces. In addition to these rangers and woodsmen, who regularly patrolled the forest, the forests were populated with cottages and highways. As Jeffrey S. Theis puts it, “early modern forests and woodlands are anything but foreign to human settlement.” For many, the forest was not a deserted space but their life and livelihood. For these people, and most of England, it seemed as though “English forests [were] not opposed to culture and civilization.” In fact, the integration of civilization and forest extended in various ways into the cities of England.

Despite our modern sense of cities as antithetical to wilderness, early modern London was very much a wooden space. In Wooden O’s, Vin Nardizzi explains that lumber and timber were used in everything from houses, to stools, to warships. Theatres, with their exposed wood, “emerged as conspicuous fixtures in London’s liberties.” These giant edifices were architectural reminders of the wooded nature of the world— a reminder that the foundations of cities are built on trees. The theatrical space, as I will discuss later, only emphasized this connection. Nardizzi explains that “unlike other structures in “wooden” London, theatres called frequent (but not invariable) attention to themselves as woodlands in performance.”