As You Like It: Pastoralism Gone Awry

Abstract

The shifting perspective between actual and ideal that is so integral a part of the pastoral world in Renaissance literature is infused with urbanity, wit, and mild but revealing cynicism in As You Like It.' By the time Shakespeare wrote this delightful comedy the Elizabethan world was already yielding to the melancholy humor which was to predominate in a later age.2 This slight touch of malaise allows Shakespeare to maintain a healthy distance from the overtly sentimental possibilities of the pastoral material. In infusing the play with the romantic and idealistic glow virtually inherent in a pastoral romantic comedy, Shakespeare does not shrink from a simultaneously down-to-earth attitude toward the facts of real life which continuously undercuts the polite fictions of pastoral convention. In effect, he has combined the spirit of Marlowe's Come live with me and be my love with that of Raleigh's sardonic reply, If all the world and love were young, to make the pastoral a necessarily ephemeral but educative experience for the characters of the comedy. By making the Forest of Arden a temporary retreat from the world of the Machiavellian court, Shakespeare suggests the ideal which should be the foundation of the real; but by consistently undercutting the pastoral convention as a convention, he also suggests that the ideal of the pastoral is not an end in itself-which would be unattainable in any case-but the underlying substance of the real, the world of the possible which should inform the actual.