Most
of As You Like It takes place in the Forest
of Arden. But where is that, exactly?
There was once a forest named Arden in Warwickshire, to
the north of Shakespeare’s home town of Stratford-upon-Avon – though most, if
not all, of it had been cut down by the time the playwright was born. (Arden
was also his mother’s maiden name, but it’s hard to see how that might pertain
to the play.) We could regard Shakespeare’s shepherds and shepherdesses,
country vicars and country wenches as evocative of his own rural England – to
say nothing of the explicit comparison he draws between the exiled forest lords
(and ladies) and the legendary Nottinghamshire outlaw Robin Hood.
But
the Arden of As You Like It didn’t originate with
Shakespeare: he borrowed it, along with much of his play’s plot, from Thomas
Lodge’s popular prose romance Rosalynde, published a decade or so
earlier. Rosalynde takes place in France,
which suggests that Lodge’s “Arden” is actually the Ardennes, a forested,
mountainous region that straddles France, Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany.
A
Gallic setting does seem consistent with the names of such characters as
Jaques, Amiens and LeBeau – arguably even Orlando. And the fact that the
wrestler Charles (whose name could also conceivably be French) alludes to “the
old Robin Hood of England” implies that England isn’t where we’re supposed to
be at the moment. But then what about Sir Oliver Martext? Is he an ex-pat
preacher? And, er, Hymen?
In
fact, none of this matters: Shakespeare wasn’t that kind of writer. His Forest
of Arden could be located anywhere – as plausibly in Newfoundland in the 1980s
as at the intersection of France and Germany. With its delightfully eclectic
mix of flora and fauna, it is obviously not a literal environment but an
archetypal vision of a transformative “golden world,” a place where the climate
and the soil seem equally favourable to peascods and palm trees.
David
Prosser is the Stratford Festival’s Literary and Editorial Director.