As You Like It and the “Warwickshire” of Shakespeare’s Mind

  • Maurice A. Hunt
Chapter

Abstract

Until now, the chapters of this volume have treated certain late Elizabethan topics of interest in As You Like It that possess meanings accessible to a literate playgoer. I have called such generally accessible meanings public, for want of a better term. In this and the following chapter, I describe some private meanings of the play—meanings, that is to say, referring to a hypothesized private life of the late Elizabethan dramatist William Shakespeare and sometimes not accessible to the majority of literate playgoers. Much of this chapter is admittedly speculative, and I hereby give my reader notice of that fact. As You Like It is a pastoral comedy, and pastoral for Shakespeare and his contemporaries had become a literary mode known for the usually veiled depiction of autobiographical events in the author’s life, notably his or her artistic life. Paul Alpers in his definitive What is Pastoral? provides the best account of how this happened, by explaining in depth first the third-century BC Sicilian poet Theocritus’s self-representation in his Idylls, and then Virgil’s in his Eclogues.1

Keywords

Young Brother Native Country Romantic Love Genitive Case Opportune Moment 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Paul Alpers, What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996) 148–53, 158–61.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia UP, 2001) 117. The autobiographical burden of Colin Clout’s role in book 6 of The Faerie Queene is described by Humphrey Tonkin, Spenser’s Courteous Pastoral: Book Six of the Faerie Queene (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1972) 137–39.Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    John Aubrey, Brief Lives (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 1993) 286.Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    Russell Fraser, Young Shakespeare (New York: Columbia UP, 1988) 79–86.Google Scholar
  5. 9.
    See Maurice Hunt, “Old England, Nostalgia, and the ‘Warwickshire’ of Shakespeare’s Mind,” Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 7.2 (1997/98): 159–80.Google Scholar
  6. 10.
    Mark Eccles, “The Shakespeares and the Ardens,” Shakespeare in Warwickshire (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1961) 3–23.Google Scholar
  7. 11.
    Anne Barton, “Parks and Ardens,” Essays Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994) 352–79, esp. 353–54. In a similar vein, see A. Stuart Daley, “Where Are the Woods in As You Like It?” Shakespeare Quarterly 34 (1983): 172–83.Google Scholar
  8. 12.
    Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598) (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1938) 281b–282.Google Scholar
  9. 14.
    Eric Sams, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594 (New York: Yale UP, 1995) 44–48, 206–9.Google Scholar
  10. 15.
    See Jeanne Addison Roberts, Shakespeare’s English Comedy: The Merry Wives of Windsor in Context (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1979) 27–50 passim; and William Green, Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1962) esp. 7–72.Google Scholar
  11. 16.
    William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden, The Oxford Shakespeare, Oxford World’s Classics (1993; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998) 174.Google Scholar
  12. 18.
    David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Holt, 2004) 347. Patrick Cheney, in Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1997) esp. 3–87, 157–74, and 190–220, has also argued that Marlowe modeled his career on Ovid’s, in this case on “the paradoxically oscillating pattern of three fixed genres: amatory poetry, tragedy, and epic” (263).Google Scholar
  13. 24.
    Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Drama of the English Renaissance, I, The Tudor Period, ed. Russell A. Fraser & Norman Rabkin (New York: Macmillan, 1976) 263–93, esp. 266. Charles Nicholl, in The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1992) 72–76, esp. 73–74, finds a third allusion in As You Like It 4.1.86–98 to Marlowe. In Rosalind’s speech about the world being “almost six thousand years old.…[and] [m]en hav[ing] died from time to time…but not for love” (4.1.87, 96–97), Nicholl notes a reference in Shakespeare’s evocation of the subjects of Marlowe’s popular poem, Hero and Leander, to Francis Meres’s claim that Marlowe died fighting over a lewd love (Shakespeare denies the rumor: no man died for love), as well as a reference to Marlowe’s supposed heresy, according to the informant Baines, that the world was 16,000 or more years old rather than the biblical 6,000. This third allusion to Marlowe is also cited by Kay Stanton, “Shakespeare’s Use of Marlowe in As You Like It,” “A Poet and a filthy Play-maker”: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill, and Constance B. Kuriyama (New York: AMS Press, 1988) 23–35, esp. 23, 27–29.Google Scholar
  14. 28.
    Positive traits of William’s character have been described by R. Chris Hassel, Jr., Faith and Folly in Shakespeare’s Romantic Comedies (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1980) 113–14; and by A. Stuart Daley, “The Dispraise of the Country in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 (1985): 300–14, esp. 306.Google Scholar
  15. 31.
    Ann Jennalie Cook, “Shakespeare’s Gentlemen,” Shakespeare Jahrbuch 1985, ed. Werner Habicht, Deutsche Shakespeare Gesellschaft West (Bochum: Ferdinand Kamp, 1985) 9–27, esp. 19.Google Scholar
  16. 32.
    See editor David Bevington’s note on this verse to this effect in The Complete Works of Shakespeare, 5th edition (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2004) 362.Google Scholar
  17. 33.
    C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, The Whole Journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986) 48. Stephen Greenblatt, in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: Norton, 2004), provides a listing of the specific property originally held by Mary Arden that was sold off by debt-ridden John Shakespeare until “[a]ll Will’s mother, Mary, had left of what she brought to the marriage was the Arden name” (61).Google Scholar
  18. 35.
    S[amuel] Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970) 642. Also see Greenblatt, who assumes that Gilbert was a provincial rather than a London haberdasher (66, 78). Mark Eccles claims that the haberdasher Gilbert Shakespeare, who—according to the local register—died in Stratford “adolescens” (unmarried), “lived in both Stratford and London” (107–8).Google Scholar
  19. 36.
    Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from His Life, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2001) 200. Also see Eccles 107.Google Scholar
  20. 39.
    Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (New York: Penguin, 1977) 275–83.Google Scholar
  21. 43.
    Holy Bible 1544. This quotation is the gloss on Luke 12:13: “Then one from the crowd said to Him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.’” The quotation cited in my text also constitutes in the New King James version the referent for understanding Luke 15:12.Google Scholar
  22. 45.
    Ben Jonson, Discoveries 1641, Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden 1619, ed. G. B. Harrison, Elizabethan and Jacobean Quartos (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966) 28.Google Scholar
  23. 49.
    Jonathan Bate, “Deep England,” April 9, 2004; 32nd Annual Meeting, Shakespeare Association of America; The Fairmont Hotel, New Orleans, LA.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Maurice A. Hunt 2008

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  • Maurice A. Hunt

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