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Representations of Pastoral in As You Like It
and The Winter’s Tale
The pastoral mode was developed in antiquity, in the idylls of Theocritus who
wrote in the Alexandrian court and the eclogues of Virgil; it remained popular in the
Renaissance, used by writers such as Spenser in his Fairie Queen and Sidney in his
Arcadia. Roughly characterised the mode can be said to satirise the frivolities and
mores of court, through the mouths of shepherds, from a perspective of moral
superiority in a bounteous, rural, romantic retreat; an opposition is set up between
court and country. However, it should be remembered that pastoral is primarily a
literary and aesthetic mode of discourse. As such, there can be no simple antithesis
between city/, or court/, and country because the relationship is a much more
symbiotic and complex one than that. Pastoral was created by writers within a court
setting who dreamt up an imagined ideal, alternative society of romance and love
stemming from disillusionment with court. Shakespeare’s exploration of the genre in
As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale makes for a very diverse interplay of voices and
ideas, built around the structure of retreat to a pastoral landscape culminating in an
eventual return to the court.
In As You Like It the banished Duke Senior has set up an alternative court in the
forest of Arden, having been usurped by his brother, the new Duke, Frederick; he and
his cohort make the best of their situation, holding up their court-in-exile as an
example of a regained ‘Golden Age’, living off the bounteous, plentiful supplies of
Nature, in harmony with the land. This is an impression built partly out of song:
Amiens sings that the lords “Live i’th’ sun,/ Seeking the food [they] eat/ And pleased
with what [they] get” finding no enemy but “winter and rough weather” (II.v.35-41);
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and even the “winter wind,/ [is] not so unkind/ As man’s ingratitude” (II.vii.175-8).
The duke, banished from court, is disillusioned with it and finds his woods “more free
from peril than the envious court” of “painted pomp” (II.i.3-4); it is a golden world, a
“desert city” (l.23) where he finds “good in everything” (l.17). Interestingly, the first
relation we get of this paradisiacal realm is from Charles, the wrestler at court,
invoking “the old Robin Hood of England” and “the golden world” (I.i.111-13). It is
true that the court is, indeed, envious – a place of jealousy, intrigue and hatred –
where plotting brothers plan to kill their siblings and the duke is concerned with
betrayal, blood and lineage; Orlando, escaping from his devious brother Oliver, to
Arden, tells his faithful servant Old Adam that he is “not for the fashion of these
times,/ Where none will sweat but for promotion”; the court is set up as a place of
machination over loyalty, to be derided by those “brothers in exile” who have broken
free from its strictures to the forest.
However, the ideal vision of the forest that the banished lords seek to create
(through their carefully wrought songs) is largely a false one, an imposition of the
courtiers and the self-deluding duke who try to impose their pre-conceived ideal of
pastoral, their aesthetic construct, onto a landscape that cannot sustain this burden –
something Jaques is quick to point out. Having been usurped himself the duke
attempts to co-opt the forest, becoming even more of a usurper “than doth [the]
brother that hath banished [him]” (II.i.27-8). The forest is not a “desert city” as the
duke would have us believe, it contains a diverse range of shepherds and farmers;
neither do the lords live in harmony with the natural world, they hunt and kill the deer
(or venison as the duke calls it). A recent production at the RSC demonstrated this
point nicely by having the two sets of lords – at court and in exile – doubling their
roles, simply donning fur-coats to illustrate the switch of setting, collapsing and
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threatening the definition of the two ‘courts’ and creating the impression that the
lords-in-exile were mere impostors, city-slickers posing as rustics to suit a whim.
The harsh economic reality of Arden also does a lot to deflate the idyll as well. The
“working-day world” that Rosalind bemoans (I.iii.12) exists just as much in the
country as it does as court; Arden is not presented as a land of plenty – it has its
starving peasants too. Rosalind, Celia and Touchstone, on arriving in the forest, must
question Corin “if he for gold will give [them] any food” (II.iv.61) and despite his
natural generosity his economic circumstances forbids his good wishes – he is
“shepherd to another man” (l.77) who frowns on such deeds of hospitality. Later,
Orlando and Old Adam have been so long on the beggar’s road in their flight from
court that Adam is starved, quite literally, to death (“O, I die for food” II.vi.1);
Orlando must resort to stealing to relieve his hunger. This would have resonated for
an Elizabethan audience who could call to memory the food riots of Southwark in
1592 that led the Privy Council to close many of the London theatres. As You Like It
quietly reminds the audience of the ruthlessness of the new economy that was
developing in Shakespeare’s day. Similar concerns are voiced in Cymbeline where
Innogen, disguised as a boy on her retreat into a pastoral landscape, must steal food
from the cave of Belarius.
This disruption of the rural economy can perhaps be attributed back to the court; we
know that Duke Frederick seized the estates of the banished lords “whose lands and
revenues enrich [him]” (I.i.98), might the court exploit the country in a similar way?
This is part of wider clash of values we see voiced in the exchange between
Touchstone and Corin; Touchstone pining for the court and scoffing at the country
life as “a very vile life” which he finds “tedious” in “respect [that] it is not the court”
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(III.ii.16-18); Corin counters with a dose of down-to-earth country values, as different
to Touchstone’s as they are simply expressed:
Sir, I am a true labourer: I earn that I get, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no
man’s happiness; glad of other men’s good, content with my harm; and the greatest of
my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.
[III.ii.69-73]
This is a far remove from the “envious court” that Touchstone values for its creature
comforts, the simple life of the country going “much against [his] stomach” (l.20).
The fickle nature of the courtly “convertites” – the lords – Jaques will not allow us to
forget at the play’s end when they forsake their woodland retreat for the newly vacant
court – Jaques would rather remain in their “abandoned cave” (V.iv.191).
If the lords’ posing in the forest has been an intrusion of the court into the country
then the court can also be seen to intrude in other ways too. I spoke of pastoral in the
introduction as being a romantic retreat and we should not forget the romantic context
around which the plot is structured once we arrive in Arden, but the common image of
shepherds in love, languishing for their mistresses, Shakespeare exposes to be just as
false as any imagined conception of a bucolic utopia; it is an equally hollow aesthetic
construct of the court. The exaggerated passions of Phoebe and Silvius (the stock
unrequited lover) are nicely contained in the vessel of verse (would humble shepherds
really speak in iambic pentameter?) and it is Rosalind who must restore a right sense
of proportion, telling Silvius it is not Phoebe’s “glass but [him] that flatters her,/ And
out of [him] she sees herself more proper/ Than any of her lineaments can show her.”
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(III.v.55-7). The elevating aspect that pastoral brings to the concept of romantic love
is something that Rosalind herself must struggle against in the play to avoid slipping
into the over-the-top hyperbole of an arduous young maid. She seems to alternate
between a knowing, worldly-wise pragmatism – when in disguise – and the
temptations of giving in to idealising romantic love when alone with Celia.
She instructs Phoebe to “sell when [she] can. [She] is not for all markets” at line 61
and later curtailing the infatuated Orlando (she is still dressed as Ganymede) that
“Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.”
(IV.i.97-8). Yet, this must be balanced against our knowledge that she is constantly
breaking off for conversations with Celia to be reminded of Orlando’s love; at one
point she vents forth in a torrent of questions to Celia to finish with the comical
climax: “Answer me in one word.” (III.ii.216). Rosalind, too, sometimes gets carried
away.
Key voices in Shakespeare’s managing of tone are again those of Jaques and
Touchstone, whose cynicism on the one hand and bawdy humour on the other prevent
the audience getting carried away with Rosalind’s flights of fancy for too long.
Touchstone is quite open with the audience that he wants to marry Audrey to get his
leg over, after which he will be content to leave her, indeed, he is happy that it is
Oliver Martext performing the ceremony for “he is not like to marry [them] well, and
not being well married, it will be a good excuse for [him] hereafter to leave [his]
wife.”(III.iii.81-84). He shares Jaques’ sentiments on lovers’ poetry, asserting that the
“truest poetry is the most feigning, and lovers are given to poetry; and what they
swear in poetry it may be said, as lovers, they do feign.”(l.16-18). As it is for Troilus,
“the will is infinite and the execution confined; …the desire is boundless and the act a
slave to limit” (III.ii.77-80). Jaques has similar comments for the verses Orlando goes
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around hanging from the trees of the forest, verses which, it must be said, are very
bad. As Touchstone comments on finding a verse: “the tree yields bad fruit”
(III.ii.111), coming up with his own bawdy alternative; Jaques is more concerned with
the damage that Orlando’s carving is doing to the trees (an imposition of Art onto
Nature), he dismisses the lover’s “pretty answers” and invites Orlando to “rail against
[their] mistress the world”, but the two characters are diametrically opposed in this
play: Jaques’ part is Monsieur Melancholy, Orlando’s Signor Love (III.ii.265-285).
The journey to the forest has entailed an exploration of romantic love in Rosalind’s
testing of Orlando, the other characters commenting on and enlarging the debate each
in their own way; Rosalind’s disguise as Ganymede (something I will return to later)
subtly explores and attempts to subvert gender boundaries only to have them restored
in the last act of the act of the play with its culmination and comfortable couching in
marriage going hand in hand with a return to the court. Even the marriages leave us
with a somewhat uncertain feeling though, each lover having supposedly found their
true love, something we can accept for Rosalind and Orlando, at a push for Oliver and
Celia but I think we can well believe Jaques when he dismisses Touchstone and
Audrey’s marriage as being “but for two months’ victualled” (V.iv.187) and Phoebe’s
acceptance of Silvius is certainly under the duress of Rosalind’s contrivance. The
harmony, sanctity and security of marriage are not allowed to be taken for granted,
something we see similarly exploited in The Winter’s Tale. The security of marriage
is the point at which the play begins, the point at which Shakespearian comedy has
usually reached its happy, if sometimes a little ambiguous, resolution and conclusion.
In the Merchant of Venice, for example, we see Bassanio achieve his marriage to
Portia – their friend Antonio looking on gladly – and the play concludes. In The
Winter’s Tale this is the situation we are faced with from the outset, Leontes and
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Hermione having been married for some length of time, they have a child with
another on the way. It is from this seemingly stable position that Leontes comes to
suspect his wife of cuckolding him with his friend Polixenes; he finds himself haunted
by anxieties that in the normal course of Shakespearian comedy have been laid to rest
– for whatever reason, in Leontes’ case they have not. For him, the golden age is that
which exists in the memory of childhood, the dream of being “boy eternal” as
Polixenes puts it (I.ii.64); Leontes speaks of Polixenes as a “best brother” (l.147), a
relationship (akin to that of Orlando and Oliver or the duke and Frederick) which
cannot be sustained as they pass from the realm of childhood into the adult world of
responsibility and rule; time and the loss of innocence come to claim them and the
golden age of childhood must fade to memory, to be strained at in fleeting glimpses
like the one we catch in Leontes’ order to his son to “play, boy, play” which quickly
modulates into his new suspicion: “thy mother plays,” then broadening out into a
meta-theatrical frame of reference when he talks about the “disgraced part” he must
play in her cuckoldry of him (I.ii.184-5).
The descent into jealousy establishes the Sicilian Court as a place of danger and
violence; Mamillius dies, followed soon after by Hermione, Leontes having
imprisoned her and commanded Antigonus to take his new-born daughter to some
“remote and desert place” (II.iii.175), the implication being she will be left to die. It is
with his journey that we arrive in Bohemia, the pastoral alternative society to the
court, a land of generous shepherds and (not so generous) bears. It is worth noting
here that the pastoral scenes of both As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale are of
ambiguous geographical location: the forest of Arden could be either the French
Ardennes from Lodge’s source story, Rosalynd, or Shakespeare’s native Arden near
Stratford; Bohemia, meanwhile, has no coastline in reality leading some
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commentators to assume a compositor’s error for Bithynia, an idea not widely taken
up but which was accepted by Garrick in his version of the play. The plays, of course,
do not need any fixed location – they can happily exist in our imaginations as all of
these places, or an amalgamation of them; the lack of geographical accuracy stamps
the plays as fables, removed from literal geographical space and time to be set in a
more mystical one, a place where Duke Frederick can be miraculously diverted from
his malign intents simply by entering Arden(nes).
This element of romanticism is retained in the plays, as I have discussed above, but
is balanced by the cruel reality of the natural world which we see also in The Winter’s
Tale. On his arrival in Bohemia Antigonus is promptly eaten by a bear; indeed, the
dark first half of the play, the anti-romance, could be said to climax here, with the
somewhat absurdist stage-direction for Antigonus to “Exit pursued by a bear”
(III.iii.57.1). It has the grim consequence of Antigonus’ death, demonstrating nature
as wild, but it also has an undeniably dark humour to it as well. Perhaps it is because
the thought of a man dressed in a bear-suit running across the stage seems inescapably
funny to modern tastes; as for Shakespeare’s day we do not know whether they would
have used a man in dress and whether this would have seemed comic, or whether they
would have borrowed a particularly tame bear from the nearby Southwark bear-pit for
performances at the Globe. Bear baiting was, of course, a rival to the theatres for
attracting an audience. Nevertheless, the comic element to Antigonus’ death is
certainly borne out by the clown’s relation of it some thirty lines later. It is from this
point on that the locus of the play shifts, from tragedy to romance – albeit somewhat
uncomfortable – something we have been prepared for by Leontes’ repentance in
III.ii, seeing that he has “too much believed [his] own suspicion” (l.149) causing the
gods to be angry and the “heavens themselves/ [to] strike at [his] injustice.” (l.145).
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Unfortunately, the consequences of his caprice are the deaths of a son, wife and
servant, only one of whom is ‘magically’ restored at the end.
The pastoral scene is set amidst the rural revelry of generous shepherds who are
“not bookish” (III.iii.70) but are most welcoming to strangers. The society is a more
established one than that we see presented in As You Like It, we are even let in on one
of its festive customs – the sheep-shearing and feast. This is something even
“unknown friends to’s welcome” (IV.iv.65) as the Old Shepherd greets the disguised
Polixenes and Camillo, a result of the same ethos and value-code that lead to their
ready acceptance of the abandoned baby Perdita. This provides a sharp contrast to the
Sicilian Court that has been the setting until this point; we now see a culture that
moves to the natural rhythms of country life, in tune with the seasons and the natural
world. However, once again, the court threatens to disrupt and intrude upon this quiet
way of life. The shepherd is almost embarrassed to let the festivities continue, the
“homely foolery” as he terms it (l.327), with the guests present, fearing it wearies
them. The courtiers come and impose their values of distinction, rank, class, birth and
lineage onto a society that has no concern with such things; the marriage of Perdita
and Florizel is forbidden by Polixenes because he mistakenly assumes Perdita to be of
‘low’ birth – the Old Shepherd is even threatened with death for allowing such a near
travesty to pass upon his lands. The anxieties of court come to threaten the country’s
stability and it is only through Camillo’s plans that catastrophe is avoided, yet the
resolution is an uneasy one, the shepherds end the play dressed in courtiers’ clothes,
new made gentlemen who have forsaken their humble origins; for the clown it as if
the putting on of borrowed robes is as good as being born a gentleman: “See you these
clothes? Say you see them not, and think me still no gentleman born.” (V.ii.126-7). In
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wearing a gentleman’s clothes he thinks even his tears become “gentlemanlike”
(l.139).
Throughout both plays clothing has been a significant motif, as it is elsewhere in
Cymbeline and King Lear. The concept of being able to assume an identity merely by
donning a disguise – important in the theatre – is something Shakespeare seems to
have particularly been interested in, it no doubt being close to his heart, having started
his theatrical career as an actor himself. In As You Like It the layering effect of
Rosalind’s multifarious personas can be seen as a challenge to and subversion of the
social order and its accepted gender roles. Theatre audiences would have been
presented with a boy actor playing a female role (Rosalind) who adopts a male
disguise (Ganymede) in which s/he goes on to ‘play’ Rosalind. This is something
familiar to Shakespearian comedy (Viola, Portia, Jessica all adopt male disguises as
does Innogen in Cymbeline) and it is no coincidence: Shakespeare was capitalizing on
a limitation of Elizabethan theatre – the exclusion of women from the stage – to write
parts into his plays that his boy actors would have more easily slotted into; in doing
so, he was also offering up for contemplation the possibility that ‘gender is a role we
put on, a social performance, not a condition inherent in human nature.’1 Meanwhile
in The Winter’s Tale we see Autolycus – a key figure in avoiding an overhasty
idealisation of the Bohemian pastoral setting – attaining higher social class through
the putting on of clothes he steals. Bohemia, too, we are reminded has its thieves and
beggars yet it is Autolycus who comes closest to the pastoral ideal with the ballads
that he peddles, singing of “the sweet birds O how they sing!” (IV.iii.6), not because
he is swept away with a tide of serene glee, but to make money. He comes away from
his conversation with the clown “much better than [he] was” having picked his pocket
1
Jonathan Bate, The Genius of Shakespeare, pp.144
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and, in some performances, taken his clothes as well; significantly he has acted a part
in this exchange, pretending to be a poor beggar robbed by thieves when, in fact, he is
the thief. The ease with which he is able to shin up the social ladder through the
putting on of clothes was perhaps Shakespeare’s wry form of self-reference as actors
in Elizabethan times were much put upon by the City Fathers, marked out as rogues,
for the threats they posed to the society’s structure of class boundaries – ‘low’ born
actors could walk around the city passing themselves off as lords in the fine clothes
they had borrowed from the playhouses, much to their managers’ distress. The wealth
that accrued to the more successful in the profession (Edward Alleyn, Richard
Burbage) meant that they, along with the new merchant, petty bourgeoisie class, could
actually move up in social class in terms of income. And with the arrival of James I
on the English throne, doling out knighthoods at thirty pounds a time, money became
a major determinant of social status. Shakespeare purchased a coat of arms for his
father with the motto ‘Non Sans Droict’ but incurred Jonson’s scorn in the process
who parodied with ‘not without mustard.’
It was perhaps with these thoughts in mind that Shakespeare has the first gentleman
say to the third: “the dignity of this act was worth the audience of kings and princes,
for by such was it acted” (WT, V.ii.78-9) – a witty piece of self-aggrandisement but
keeping a keen eye on the social order as well. This sharp social critique was perhaps
Shakespeare’s maintaining of the pastoral mode’s satiric elements, casting a wry eye
over the fashions and mores of London society from a position of far remove.
Elsewhere he both uses and mocks the mode’s artificiality as I have discussed above.
His satire, however, is the not the fashionable melancholy of Jaques’ bitter railing,
which we see Hamlet fob off Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with, it is much more
measured than that.
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