[Between 2006 and 2016 I wrote a number of short articles for the magazine of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, Around the Globe; I’ve begun to deposit them on this blog under the category ‘Globe Essays’. This is the third, and the topic seems appropriate for LGBTQI+ month here in the UK.]
As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s magical plays. Like A Midsummer Night’s Dream the bulk of its action takes place in a forest; and like Prsopero’s island in The Tempest the forest can be what you will, assuming a different shape for each mortal that stumbles into it. The forest of the play, then, mimics the stage. It can suddenly shift location, becoming the English forest of Arden or the Belgian forest of Ardenne, freely mingling Mediterranean palms and olive trees with northern blackthorn and bramble, populating itself with European stags and Asiatic lionesses, English shepherds and Greek shepherdesses. In the forest you can dress as you like: girls as boys, Dukes as outlaws, courtiers as farmers, and everyone as a lover, however foolish, ugly, wicked, old, or cynical. The forest, then, is less like the world as it is than the world as it never can be. But it invokes too the desire to ‘Cleanse the foul body of the infected world’ beyond the limits of its magic circle, and for this reason this comedy has seemed to many commentators to be something much more substantial than a theatrical firework display or a sylvan love-feast.
The play begins in a land ruled by a tyrant, Duke Frederick, who has usurped the throne of his elder brother, and lives in paranoid fear of falling victim to a similar betrayal. In his dukedom free speech is impossible, as it sometimes was in the England of Elizabeth I: in 1599, for instance, when As You Like It was being written, the Bishops of the Church of England burned a number of offensive books in central London, including satires and erotic poems by Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe. Banishing Rosalind, the daughter of his elder brother, Duke Frederick tells his own daughter Celia not to ‘open […] thy lips’ to defend her, despite their friendship. In the previous scene one of his courtiers warns young Orlando that the Duke has taken an equally unreasonable dislike to him, but that the courtier dare not say so openly: ‘What he is indeed / More suits you to conceive than I to speak of’. Yet even in this oppressive atmosphere the Duke’s subjects dream of a ‘better world than this’, as the courtier puts it. Celia and Rosalind preserve their friendship despite the bad blood between their fathers; and everyone knows that the old Duke lives in the nearby forest ‘like the old Robin Hood of England’, where he ‘fleets the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world’. So it’s to the forest that Celia and Rosalind flee with the jester Touchstone after Rosalind’s banishment; and Orlando flees there too with his servant Adam, as if in a bid to find some sort of Eden in Arden, a place where the hand of tyranny cannot touch them.
What they find in the forest is free speech, and a measure of egalitarianism. Exile has made the old Duke philosophical, and everyone in his vicinity may speak their minds, even the trees (he sees ‘tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything’). Unlike Duke Frederick, Duke Senior encourages anti-authoritarian satire; he even has a pet satirist, the traveller Jaques, who tells him off for every act that smacks of despotism. Later the Duke takes equal pleasure in the impudent banter of a boy named Ganymede, who tells him he is as well-born as he is (which is true, since Ganymede is really Duke Senior’s runaway daughter Rosalind in disguise). He is equally disposed to like the jester Touchstone, whose patchwork costume or ‘motley’ grants him liberty to mock whom he pleases, regardless of rank. And these are only three of the free-speakers who populate the woods where the old Duke dwells. The shepherd Corin can hold his own against any courtier in defence of his profession; the shepherdess Audrey, the shepherd William and the hedge-priest Oliver Martext each possesses their dignity, despite the mockery of the ruling classes; and the shepherd Silvius is enlisted in the final act as spokesman for all the lovers in the play, whatever their station.
But the most remarkable free speaker in the forest is the boy-girl Rosalind/Ganymede, who meets her lover Orlando, finds that he does not recognise her as the woman he dotes on, and initiates a game which changes the direction of the play. Since Orlando misses Rosalind, Ganymede ‘pretends’ to be her, seeking to disabuse him of the absurd fantasies about women that were common currency among Elizabethan males. The charm and wit with which he does so seems to spread the benign infection of love throughout the forest. The shepherdess Phoebe promptly falls for Ganymede, Celia for Orlando’s brother Oliver, and Touchstone for the bashful Audrey, while Silvius takes his old love for Phoebe to giddy new heights. As this happens, satire gives way to love as the dominant mode of the comedy. Love-songs take over from songs of betrayal and exile, and lovers become the most eloquent of the foresters, sweeping aside all social inequalities in their willingness to serve one another, and finally rendering the satirist Jaques redundant.
At the end of the play, Ganymede turns magician. Using a spell he learned from an imaginary wizard uncle – invented by Rosalind as a background for her male persona – he finds a way to join the play’s lovers together in a quadruple wedding by changing himself from boy to girl, from Ganymede to Rosalind, with the help of the great god Hymen. As he casts his spell, Duke Frederick wanders into the forest and sloughs off his tyranny like a serpent shedding its skin. Love conquers all, then, in this play, with an efficiency that satirists can only dream of. And at the end of the play, the newly feminized Rosalind turns to the audience and invites them to join the magic circle of love by applauding the actors’ efforts, spurred on by their liking for this boy-girl who has made herself attractive to all genders. It would be a hardened cynic indeed who did not respond to her invitation, and discover in the process that the free-speakers of Arden had subtly changed his/her/their outlook.
