As You Like It by William Shakespeare Page A

anglicized the name of the Ardennes forest to Arden. Perhaps this is what made the story so attractive to Shakespeare, who was born and raised close to the forest from which his mother, Mary Arden, took her family name. The play accordingly removes the action farther from France: though some French names, such as “Le Beau,” are retained, the location of the court is not specified. The deceased gentleman with three sons—the oldest who treats the youngest like a mere servant, the middle away at university and invisible until the closing twist—is Sir John of Bordeaux in Lodge but the more symbolically named Sir Rowland de Bois in Shakespeare. De Bois means “of the woods,” and Sir Rowland is a name suggestive of a lost world of chivalry and romance, as in
The Song of Roland
. Orlando, the Italianized form of Rowland, is chosen by Shakespeare for his hero as a way of indicating that the youngest son has a special bond with his dead father, a duty to preserve his good name. To more educated members of the Elizabethan theater audience, it would also have conjured up the eponymous hero of
Orlando Furioso
, an epic poem by Ariosto that was the sixteenth century’s great exemplar of chivalric romance. It is typical of Shakespeare’s skeptical, ironic temperament that the Orlando who wanders around the forest defacing trees with second-rate love poems, and who needs to take lessons in courtship from a supposed teenage boy, does not quite live up to his heroic name—not, at least, until the play moves into the true mode of romance when he rescues his brother from a lion and a snake.
IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN
    The first we hear of the exiled duke is that, “like the old Robin Hood of England,” he is in the forest with a group of “merry men.” Ostensibly the qualifier “of England” is an indication that the action is supposed to take place in France, but the deeper effect is to identify Arden with Sherwood. About a year before the play was written, rival acting company the Admiral’s Men had played a two-part drama on the subject of Robin Hood called
Robert Earl of Huntingdon
—the first work in the long history of the legend to turn Robin into a disguised aristocrat as opposed to a genuinely subversive outlaw. The Arden scenes of
As You Like It
begin with the exiled duke contrasting the natural order of the forest to the flattery and envy of the court. As in the Robin Hood story, the wished-for conclusion is the restoration of the right ruler.
    Yet the play ironizes as well as idealizes. The most prominent figure in the duke’s forest circle is not a merry man but a melancholy man, the satirical Jaques. Often wrongly described as one of the duke’s courtiers, he is a gentleman who has sold his lands in order to become a “traveler,” a wry, detached observer of manners and morals. The forest order is dependent on hunting, leading Jaques to sympathize with the wounded stag and suggest that the good duke usurps the place of the deer every bit as much as the bad duke has usurped power back at court. Jaques and Touchstone—the two key characters invented by Shakespeare without precedent in Lodge—spar with each other because the satire of the former and the witty foolery of the latter are rival modes of mocking courtly pretensions such as Orlando’s highly romanticized language of love-service.
    Arden is also compared to the mythological “golden age,” and the play duly has its complement of classically named shepherds, signaling the influence of the ancient tradition of pastoral verse. The golden age was the imagined infancy of humankind, another Eden, a playground in which Nature offered up her fruits and the winter wind never blew. But Shakespeare complicates the picture. The duke’s very first speech sees Arden as a place less to “fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world” than to draw moral lessons from the natural world. This is no Arcadia of perpetual summer: the seasons do change;