it is just that “the penalty of Adam”—being forced to labor for subsistence—seems less harsh than the vicissitudes of the court. The myth of the golden age made Utopia into the state that society had fallen from rather than that which it aspired to: a place where everybody was happy and there was no such thing as property. The old shepherd Corin is a voice of happiness, but he has no illusions about the need for labor and his dependence on property that he does not own. He is shepherd to another man’s flock and keeps his job only because Celia buys the farm.
“Under the greenwood tree / Who loves to lie with me,” sings Amiens as the exiled lords come on dressed as foresters, and we are reminded of the rustic communities of Thomas Hardy, who used the opening line of that song as the title for one of his novels. The play has become central to the myth of “deep England,” the idea that English national identity is bound up with milkmaids dancing around the Maypole, tankards of nut-brown ale sipped in thatched taverns, and lengthening shadows on the village green.
In 1987 the British West Indian artist Ingrid Pollard created a series of photographs called “Pastoral Interlude” in which she explored the place of black people in the English countryside. “It’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment,” Pollard wrote. “I thought I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white.” For her, “a visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread.” A feeling, that is to say, that she does not belong in the world that, in shorthand, could be described as Arden. Yet the whole point of Shakespeare’s Arden is that it is an adventure playground for exiles and outsiders. The world we encounter there does not have the homogeneity of an English village. Rather, it is a gloriously multicultural community. Shakespeare loves to mix and match the past and the present, the indigenous and the immigrant, down-to-earth observation from experience and wild fantasia from myth and folktale.
The denizens of the forest include not only Corin, the wise old agricultural laborer whose name is Greco-Roman yet whose nature is English, but also a country clergyman called Sir Oliver Martext, who may well have been imagined as a dangerous Catholic, and a very English peasant of small brainpower called William, who in the original production may well have been acted by a very English countryman of great brainpower called William Shakespeare. Among the exiles are the very French-sounding Amiens, with his musical gifts, and the quintessentially English stand-up comedian Touchstone. On the fringes of the forest, and of the play, is a mysterious “magician,” described but never seen, who converts the drama into a kind of fairy tale (complete with a rather gentle lion) even as it remains grittily true to English environment and climate.
THE FESTIVE RESOLUTION
Shortly after the Second World War, the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye published a short essay that inaugurated the modern understanding that Shakespeare’s comedies, for all their lightness and play, are serious works of art, every bit as worthy of close attention as his tragedies. Entitled “The Argument of Comedy,” it proposed that the essential structure of Shakespearean comedy was ultimately derived from the “new comedy” of ancient Greece, which was mediated to the Renaissance via its Roman exponents Plautus and Terence. The “new comedy” pattern, described by Frye as “a comic Oedipus situation,” turned on “the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice.” The girl’s father, or some other authority figure of the older generation, resists the match but is outflanked, often thanks to an ingenious scheme devised by a clever servant, perhaps involving disguise or flight (or both). Frye, writing during Hollywood’s
“Under the greenwood tree / Who loves to lie with me,” sings Amiens as the exiled lords come on dressed as foresters, and we are reminded of the rustic communities of Thomas Hardy, who used the opening line of that song as the title for one of his novels. The play has become central to the myth of “deep England,” the idea that English national identity is bound up with milkmaids dancing around the Maypole, tankards of nut-brown ale sipped in thatched taverns, and lengthening shadows on the village green.
In 1987 the British West Indian artist Ingrid Pollard created a series of photographs called “Pastoral Interlude” in which she explored the place of black people in the English countryside. “It’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment,” Pollard wrote. “I thought I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white.” For her, “a visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, dread.” A feeling, that is to say, that she does not belong in the world that, in shorthand, could be described as Arden. Yet the whole point of Shakespeare’s Arden is that it is an adventure playground for exiles and outsiders. The world we encounter there does not have the homogeneity of an English village. Rather, it is a gloriously multicultural community. Shakespeare loves to mix and match the past and the present, the indigenous and the immigrant, down-to-earth observation from experience and wild fantasia from myth and folktale.
The denizens of the forest include not only Corin, the wise old agricultural laborer whose name is Greco-Roman yet whose nature is English, but also a country clergyman called Sir Oliver Martext, who may well have been imagined as a dangerous Catholic, and a very English peasant of small brainpower called William, who in the original production may well have been acted by a very English countryman of great brainpower called William Shakespeare. Among the exiles are the very French-sounding Amiens, with his musical gifts, and the quintessentially English stand-up comedian Touchstone. On the fringes of the forest, and of the play, is a mysterious “magician,” described but never seen, who converts the drama into a kind of fairy tale (complete with a rather gentle lion) even as it remains grittily true to English environment and climate.
THE FESTIVE RESOLUTION
Shortly after the Second World War, the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye published a short essay that inaugurated the modern understanding that Shakespeare’s comedies, for all their lightness and play, are serious works of art, every bit as worthy of close attention as his tragedies. Entitled “The Argument of Comedy,” it proposed that the essential structure of Shakespearean comedy was ultimately derived from the “new comedy” of ancient Greece, which was mediated to the Renaissance via its Roman exponents Plautus and Terence. The “new comedy” pattern, described by Frye as “a comic Oedipus situation,” turned on “the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice.” The girl’s father, or some other authority figure of the older generation, resists the match but is outflanked, often thanks to an ingenious scheme devised by a clever servant, perhaps involving disguise or flight (or both). Frye, writing during Hollywood’s
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