184 AS YOU LIKE IT
philosophers, and singers. The
pastoral world is an imaginary
golden age or Garden of Eden,
a peaceful and uncorrupted
place where harmony can be
rediscovered away from the strife
and pressures of everyday reality.
Pastoral literature in
Shakespeare’s time was very
highbrow. It was prose and
poetry, full of lovelorn shepherds
and disdainful girls, and characters
with fancy classical names who
were quite clearly courtiers on
vacation rather than real country
folk. Despite its focus on the
simple life, it has nothing much
to do with real nature. In As You
Like It, Shakespeare turns the
pastoral into popular entertainment
for the stage. He continually
subverts the form, letting realism
bleed into its idealized world and
gently satirizing the genre’s
conventions. In one scene, for
instance, Orlando is seen pinning
poems to trees in true poet-
shepherd style; in the very nextscene, the real old shepherd Corin
is talking about his hands filthy
with sheep grease.
The countryside continually
interweaves the ideal and the
real, the classical with the native
England. Even the name of the
forest, Arden, has this ambiguity.
In Shakespeare’s original source,
Thomas Lodge’s novel Rosalynde
(1590), the setting was the
Ardennes, a hilly region bordering
France and Belgium. In some
editions of the play, the Belgian
spelling “Ardenne” is kept—and
Shakespeare retains French
names for characters such as
Jaques and Amiens—but in other
editions the forest is called Arden.
Arden was a real woodland near
Shakespeare’s childhood home in
Warwickshire, and it is also the
family name of his grandmother,
Mary Arden. Aptly, whether by
coincidence or design, the name
“Arden” also echoes both Ar-cadia
and E-den.A shepherd’s life The origins of pastoral literature
date back to writers such as the
Greeks Hesiod (c.750–650 BCE) and
Theocritus (c.270 BCE) and, most
famously, the Roman poet Virgil
(70–19 BCE) in his Eclogues. They
all wrote of golden ages and rural
idylls. The genre was rediscovered
in Europe during the Renaissance,
and in Elizabethan England,
the idea of the pastoral became
popular among intellectuals and
poets. A key work was Edmund
Spenser’s much-imitated The
Shephearde’s Calender, first
published in 1579. Others include
Sir Philip Sidney’s long prose workArcadia and Christopher
Marlowe’s romantic poem The
Passionate Shepherd to His Love,
published in 1599.
Pastoral literature often
contained subversive messages,
and was intended to be held up
as a mirror to the contemporary
world. At the time As You Like It
was written, satire had recently
been banned by the Church.
The play may contain reference
to this ban in Celia’s line: “since
the little wit / that fools have
silenced, the little foolery that /
wise men have makes a great
show” (1.2.84–86).Music is a key part of the pastoral
merriment of As You Like It, as in this
production at the Delacorte Theater, New
York (2012). There are more songs in the
play than any other of Shakespeare’s.