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Theatrical Fiction and the Reality of Love in As You Like It

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Kent Talbot Van Den Berg
Kent Talbot Van Den Berg*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis
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Abstract

The relationship between the two worlds of As You Like It becomes a metaphor of love, defined by conspicuous narrative and theatrical artifice. The expository opening scenes have a storybook flatness which becomes a metaphor of a world that limits self-realization while the liberating sojourn in the forest, a festive world of disguise and imagination, parallels the spectators’ experience in the playhouse as a withdrawal from everyday life. The pattern of withdrawal and return also objectifies the psychological development of love: the courtship of Rosalind and Orlando progresses from impulsive love at first sight at court, through subjective and imaginative responses to desire in the forest, to fulfillment in marriage. The play concludes by placing subjective freedom, expressed metaphorically through theatrical artifice, in the larger setting of forces beyond the self, established metaphorically in narrative artifice.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 90 , Issue 5 , October 1975 , pp. 885 - 893
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975

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References

Notes

1 Of the numerous interpretations in this mode, the following are the most important: Leslie A. Fiedler, “The Defense of the Illusion and the Creation of Myth,” English Institute Essays, 1948, ed. D. A. Robertson, Jr. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1949), pp. 74–94; Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London: Chatto & Windus, 1962); Lionel Abel, Metatheatre: A New View of Dramatic Form (New York: Hill, 1963); James L. Calder-wood, Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971); Jackson I. Cope, The Theater and the Dream: From Metaphor to Form in Renaissance Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973).

2 The Heart's Forest: A Study of Shakespeare's Pastoral Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 31–32, 42.

3 All quotations of Shakespeare's plays are from The Riverside Shakespeare, textual ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton, 1974).

4 “As You Like It: Pastoralism Gone Awry,” ELH, 38 (1971), 19–39.

5 Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, ii (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958, 182–83).

6 Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), p. 81.

7 “Tree Properties and Tree Scenes in Elizabethan Theater,” Renaissance Drama, NS 4 (1971), 75.

8 This hypothesis is supported by George F. Reynolds, in “ ‘Trees’ on the Stage of Shakespeare,” Modern Philology, 5 (1907), 153–68, and in The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater, 1605–1625 (New York: MLA, 1940), pp. 70–75. See also Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages: 1300–1660, ii, Pt. I (London: Routledge, and New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), 314–20; and Habicht, p. 91. Edmund K. Chambers, to the contrary, believed that “at need, trees ascended and descended through traps” (The Elizabethan Stage, Oxford: Clarendon, 1923, iii, 89).

9 Such relationships are explored at length by D. J. Palmer in “Art and Nature in As You Like It,” Philological Quarterly, 49 (1970), 30–40. Palmer notes the relation of the internal reflections to the play itself as a mirror of love held up to the audience (p. 30). See also Young, pp. 50–55.

10 Spenser's Fowre Hymnes are quoted throughout from Spenser's Minor Poems, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (1910; corr. ed., Oxford: Clarendon, 1960). I owe some valuable suggestions about the Hymnes to Harry Berger, Jr., “A Secret Discipline: 77;e Faerie Queene, Book vi,” in Form and Convention in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. William Nelson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 52–53.

11 The Folio spelling may suggest the pun in Touchstone's speech : “the truest poetrie is the most faining, and Louers … do feigne.” But, given the imprecision of the Folio's orthography, the suggestion is probably accidental. In li.vii, the Folio renders a line from Amiens' song, “Most frendship, is fayning; most Louing, meere folly,” where “feigning” is clearly meant: the song contrasts winter's harshness with man's unkindness. Shakespeare, writing for spectators, not readers, had to rely on the context of Touchstone's speech to support the pun: “lovers” suggests fain, while “poetry” and “not honest” suggest feign.

12 See Thomas Kelly, “Shakespeare's Romantic Heroes: Orlando Reconsidered,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 24 (1973), 12–24.

13 “The marching figure … may as well be called the clyming figure, for Clymax is as much to say as a ladder” (The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1936, p. 208).

14 See also George K. Hunter's interpretation of the final scene in John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 344–45.

15 Rosalind's epilogue offers a Shakespearean equivalent of Ernst H. Gombrich's observation: “All artistic discoveries are discoveries not of likenesses but of equivalences which enable us to see reality in terms of an image and an image in terms of reality. And this equivalence never rests on the likeness of elements so much as on the identity of responses to certain relationships” (Art and Illusion, 2nd ed. rev., New York: Pantheon, 1961, p. 345).