Literary articles - William Shakespeare 2024

As You Like It: The Thin Line Between Legitimate Utopia and Compensatory Vacation

Ryan Farrar

Abstract

This essay argues how Utopian thought can serve as a useful method for analyzing the plays of William Shakespeare, using As You Like It as an example. As a pastoral comedy, As You Like It features the Forest of Arden as a setting that is described as fostering values that are associated with the utopian visions of the sixteenth century. However, while characters such as Duke Senior celebrate the culture of Arden's brave new world, the behaviors of his men and the antics of Jacques and Touchstone call the utopian status of the forest into question. In this essay, I examine very carefully how Shakespeare dramatizes the problems facing the utopian imagination during the Elizabethan era through the conflicts of each character's attitude.

keywords: utopia, Shakespeare, Arden, dystopia

1. The Utopian Concept
We dream of new worlds. Such worlds do not yet exist, are only imagined to exist, or will never exist. Many long to catch a glimpse of these worlds becoming or at least the shadow of their possibility. For all our insubstantial dreaming, we come to realize that we also dream of situations that exist in real space and time and are within the scope of human enjoyment. To seek what we know as familiar, common, and desirable signifies how easily the pun shifts between the u- of utopia and the eu-.1 The eutopia, the good place, can be capriciously imagined as the result of one's subjection to experience and desire. With any eutopian construction, the good place is “to be seen as a matter of attitude, as a kind of reaction to an undesirable present and an aspiration to overcome all difficulties by the imagination of possible alternatives.”2 However, the utopia, by nature, is an elusive nonplace. Fredric Jameson avers that “the obligation for Utopia [is] to remain an unrealizable fantasy.”3 The paradox of utopias, then, is that new worlds can never be imagined without first absorbing some features of the one that currently engages us through our physical senses. Indeed, Utopian scholars such as Jameson declare that “even our wildest imaginings are all collages of experience, constructs made up of bits and pieces of the here and now. . . . It suggests at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment.”4 As such, a (e) utopian fantasy does not always neatly line up with a grand, ideal, or magnificent design. Indeed, it is closely knit up in the want for advancement where a person holds close to shaped desires for what he or she may lack. For desire is an amalgamation of the self and the environment.

Eutopia, in this sense, can be an actual place where people want to be— that is, a place wished for that is built upon preexisting wishes. Whether the wish for it comprises a radically different society or one of exceeding familiarity, a place out of reach impresses upon people a desire to change themselves or be changed in hopes to achieve a better lived experience.5 Lyman Tower Sargent attests to the claim, writing: “I do not think it necessary to assume a common ‘human nature' to conclude that the overwhelming majority of people—probably it is even possible to say all—are, at some time dissatisfied and consider how their lives might be improved. If we are hungry, we dream of a full stomach. If we are sexually frustrated, we dream of sexual fulfillment. If we are frustrated by something in our society, we dream of a society in which it is corrected.”6 The absence of fulfillment and satisfaction propels the cogs of human action toward filling the cavity of our wants with an idea or a material that we can call substantial. However, different people devise different dreams, and this process creates discord between the clarity of a subjective vision and those who perceive a vision as heavily opaque.

The danger of both types of places, the nonexistent utopia and the existent utopia, then, rests in desire's potential to lead us into depressive, dystopian entanglements rather than the wished-for liberation toward which desire propels us. While we each form ideas as to how a society should operate, for others and/or ourselves, the realities of social practice, which ultimately diverge from our own fantasies, often compel us to compromise our ideals in order to fit the political landscape. We manipulate the prevailing hierarchical structures for the purpose of cultivating the individual advantage and, in doing so, obstruct the opportunity to entertain alternative societies that could promise a better existence. When the lust for control, power, and advancement increases exponentially, dystopias (i.e., bad places) begin to sprout and cause suffering for characters subject to the whims of oppressive vices.

As a matter of course, Utopia remains a challenging project that can lead people either toward liberation from the prison of the present or into an even more wretched type of enslavement. For individuals, imagining or arranging situations pleasing to the ego can result in personal paradises or personal utopias. With utopias being subjective, their design can place individual or exclusive interests over those of the commonwealth, even if those interests exist only in fantasy. However, fancies of this caliber pivot on the subject's placement and arrangement within the structure determining social value at any given time. These arrangements inherently fall short of an actual utopia and rebuff an acknowledgment of what Jameson has called “the prison-house of language.”7 To resist being imprisoned by the simulacra of utopia, despite its apparent inevitability, critical thought remains the primary method for chiseling away at obstacles separating civilization from the unattainable, if not untenable, utopia. Michael Bristol asserts that “the very notion of criticism demands open-endedness, doubt, and genuine curiosity as fundamental to any real knowledge.”8 Utopian studies, I think, maintain a flexibility allied with the pursuit of progressive ideas about the nature of desire and how to quench it.

In delineating Utopia as a critical approach, it is important to note the different ways Utopia as a term can be used in literary criticism. In this essay, using Utopia with the capital letter denotes an umbrella term that indicates all that is contained in the Utopian literary genre. Using the term in this manner extends its designation to include all its forms: eutopias, utopias, dystopias, and other variations such as heterotopias or cacotopias. In the instances where references to the lowercase term are made, utopia indicates the familiar denotation of good/nonplaces or eutopia. In approaching Utopia from this broadened scope, I defer to the work by scholars such as Lyman Tower Sargent and Tom Moylan positing the definition's dragnet.

Colloquially, people think of utopia as a term that synonymizes its dreamworlds with places of perfection, but to equate the two concepts remains erroneous at best. I have paid witness to this error time and time again when teaching courses on or having everyday conversations about the topic. In discriminating between utopia and perfection, Sargent works to dispel this widespread misconception: “Perfect, perfection, and their variants are freely used by scholars in defining utopias. They should not be. First, there are in fact very few eutopias that present societies that the author believes to be perfect. Perfection is the exception not the norm. Second, opponents of utopianism use the label perfect as a political weapon to justify their opposition. They argue that a perfect society can only be achieved by force; thus, utopianism is said to lead to totalitarianism and the use of force and violence against people.”9 Perfection does not equate with utopia. Instead, ideas regarding utopia describe either better alternatives to a present order or a dialectical operation that intends to work toward such alternatives. To call them “perfect” effectively closes off the possibility for the change and progress that utopias customarily anticipate.

To keep change more open, there are descriptive terms closer in relation to perfection that can more appropriately bear associations with the Utopian genre, such as ideal and fairy-tale.10 These terms keep utopias open to change by abstractly presenting a conception of bettering that remains elusive and out of reach but worth pursuing. Situations in plays that correlate with the pursuit of ideals or the fabric of fairy tales portray the utopian pursuit of actualizing desired effects as being reached in lofty and extraordinary ways. Such scenes in literature affect the potential for desired effects to be realized in the audience's life outside the plays' fiction. They reveal the potential that the utopian imagination can have for individuals to achieve happiness as much as they also demonstrate how effects to the contrary can reveal the dystopian potential of competing desires. Utopia, then, remains a versatile concept that keeps its followers panting after its elusive, unobtainable features while also spurring them to beware those who would abuse the vulnerability that results from their imaginings.

In accounting for the abuse, this essay directs an equal amount of time to performing dystopian analyses alongside its utopian ones. The primary meaning of and reliance on dystopia relates to the construction of the word, which literally translates to “bad place.” The traditional genre form of dystopian literature features worlds that “offer a detailed and pessimistic presentation of the very worst of social alternatives,”11 and in my analyses, I demonstrate how the hallmark vices belonging to the genre consistently appear in Shakespeare's art. The plays are discussed as having dystopian qualities where characters use language that speaks contrarily to the reality of their actions, expressing pleasantries in situations that are rife with malicious intent. This also includes situations where nefarious plans are apparent and direct. Dystopia, then, takes on a role as important as utopia in reevaluating and further understanding the aesthetics of the plays.

In order to properly elucidate Utopia's presence in Shakespeare's drama, I discuss Utopia in a broad manner that incorporates the realms of wish fulfillment, desires, dreams, fantasies, and nightmares into the term. Jameson incorporates these terms into his own discussion of utopia in Archaeologies of the Future, and the reasoning for their inclusion remains sound. Wishes, desires, dreams, and the like perform pivotal functions in shaping and reshaping identity within a subject's social system, acting as catalysts for the transformations related to Utopia. In some cases, these realms of thought keep characters hopeful in anticipation of a time when their station may change from a position of discontent to one that provides more social acceptance, security, and pleasure. In fact, these desires are given free rein on occasion in the forms of holidays. Particularly for Sargent, part of utopia's roots belongs to festivals such as Carnival and the Feast of Fools as well as myths involving “golden ages, arcadias, [and] earthly paradises.”12 These associations certainly speak to the power of wishes and fantasies when discussing utopia in Shakespeare since these festivals, myths, and holidays are featured at one time or another in his plays. On the other hand, nightmares and enemies to wishes and desires can put characters on alert as to how they interact with society, as a mistaken action may plunge them further into discontent and eradicate their hope entirely. Whatever perceptions characters act upon, they tend to act in the interest of their own wishes or the interest of others. The material conditions of the characters' society determine how they pursue or temper the wishes and desires that drive them beyond their present situation.

2. Utopian Language Games in Shakespeare's Plays
In turning the pages of William Shakespeare's plays, readers witness utopian wishes in action in the sense that they explore the tension that results from the competing ideals, fantasies, and behaviors of their dramatic characters. In many cases, the plots present characters who are down and out with fortune and are placed in a position to change their status from low to high; otherwise, they are given the opportunity to transform their relationship to society entirely. What remains fascinating today regarding these characters is not so much their motives as it is the tools and means the antagonists and protagonists use to maneuver through the ideological barriers to their desires; it could also be the fact that such desires result in part from the social assembly of an Elizabethan/Jacobean system in the first place. As Stephen Greenblatt points out, “At some level we know perfectly well that the power of the prince is largely a collective invention, the symbolic embodiment of the desire, pleasure, and violence of thousands of subjects, the instrumental expression of complex networks of dependency and fear.”13 The production of desire in this manner echoes the workings of the modern age, except that the power of production belongs to private corporations and media, instead of kingdoms. Desire now springs from the offerings of a global market, and people navigate it in search of items or relations that will improve their quality of living. In Shakespeare's plays, too, the characters manipulate the collective invention of rank and distinction in order to create attitudes in others that will benefit their goal to change their situation or their society.

With collective forces driving the plays, the characters' individual wishes inherently come into conflict with the wishes of other characters, whether socially noble or not, and the resulting tensions lead to cerebral and physical duels. In these contests, the players compete in a game of wits for a chance to enjoy the fruits of a personal or collective utopia. As a result, some utopian visions will overtake others. One common adage in Utopian discourse, which Maria Varsam echoes, is that one person's utopia is another's dystopia.14 Whatever the attitude toward a design, unified societies in the plays become unstable when Shakespeare's characters employ language and arrange situations to satisfy their wishes, with or without regard for the nation's well-being.

To reflect on the importance of language games is to center on the stakes of each individual or collective utopia. In the plays, these utopias are individual, in that singular characters seek to create circumstances that serve their own interests, but also collective, in that these interests result from the construction of an agreed-upon order that operates on the service and compliance of others. To illustrate these social dynamics in the work of Shakespeare, I explore ideas regarding utopia and dystopia as they arise through various motifs and themes that run consistently throughout the plays. These motifs range from carnivalesque inversions of gender and class; to the use of Machiavels, characters who employ immoral stratagems while appearing moral; to the treatment of themes such as love, revenge, isolation, power, and fate.

The contests that Shakespeare's characters participate in rely on language games of double meanings that tie into the problems commonly confronted in Utopian studies. These meanings create an ambiguity r egarding which political attitudes are expressed in the plays. In terms of dystopia, these games tend to detach a character's words from his or her truer actions and dynamically reveal the unceasing conflicts among appearances, intentions, and realities. Equally prominent, though, are games that display the utopian potential of plays that subtly uncover and express unrealized desires, whether for love, equality, or leisure. In effect, the l anguage in the plays functions as a means of either improving a character's situation within the existing hierarchy or achieving a desired object or social arrangement that exists outside of it, thus working toward a utopia for the s cheming character or, unwittingly, a dystopia, depending on the character's social descent or ultimate outcome.15 Through soliloquies and divided scenes, the audience gains an intimate knowledge as to whether characters employ their language for virtuous or ignoble ends. They then observe how the winners of language games ascend in rank or realize a desired situation for themselves and/or their associates, whether temporarily or permanently, while losers may start the play complacently, satisfied with an honorable position or pleasing situation, only to suffer a tragic fall or complete loss of status, which they may need to regain if they have survived the initial displacement. One of the primary language games of the plays, then, involves which personal utopia can be achieved and maintained the longest, how characters decide to shape or mold their social position to the time's expectations in order to achieve their objectives, and at what cost they are willing to actualize their own wishes.

3. Arden's Utopian Space and Its Troubling Substance
Authors who tend to write utopias are often charged with overvaluing escapist fantasies disconnected from reality. Skeptical opponents of utopia tend to view the worlds that the utopist envisions as straying so far into an excess hope for actualizing ideals that anti-utopists may cry out that the new, radical terrains visualized in the genre too much neglect human nature and are thus grossly unrealistic. Utopias in these circumstances are said to amount to no more than pipe dreams or phantasmagoria. In holding such attitudes, the anti-utopists reduce the transformative power belonging to utopia to a worthless, idle exercise that relegates utopian thought to the level of crazed fancies such as Fourier's seas of lemonade.16 Yet the field of Utopia retains more complexity than a simple binary opposition of the ideal versus the real, more complexity than anti-utopists are willing to recognize. Instead, Utopia is a dialectical method for improving upon the problems facing society, as opposed to a method for coercing people into a certain culture through authoritarian methods. Fátima Vieira distinctly details the function of utopia, writing: “Since it is impossible for [humankind] to build an ideal society, then [we] must be committed to the construction of a better one. . . . Utopia is thus to be seen essentially as a strategy. . . . Taking mainly the shape of a process, refusing the label of an ‘impossible dream,' utopia is a programme for change and for a gradual betterment of the present.”17 In line with Vieira, Utopia works as an ongoing conversation that aims at problem solving by positing solutions for social woes, which muddles the traditional attitude that Utopias propose blueprints for ideal societies. If a solution does not suit a situation, an honest utopist keeps an open mind to revising and reconsidering all social and political possibilities.

Perhaps Shakespeare toys with both this dismissive attitude toward utopia and the attitudes of utopia's adherents in titling his Arcadian comedy As You Like It, playing on the sense that Utopia finds its basis on the utopist's subjective attitude. Using the Forest of Arden's utopian space as a canvas, Shakespeare blends its ethereal qualities with the realism of the characters inhabiting it, making for an unstable Arcadia. In constructing the Forest of Arden, Shakespeare paves a space in which a social fantasy uncharacteristic of Elizabethan society can blossom. Duke Senior and his followers view the forest as representing a prelapsarian paradise that proves to be a favorable alternative to courtly life. In spirit, they forgo hierarchical observance and laud egalitarian principles that they see as permeating from the forest. However, the deposed court's practices do not always reflect the principles they praise. In fact, the court's appearance in Arden may exhibit all the gloss of an Arcadian utopia, but its members' continued deferential behavior toward authority, along with the commentary of characters such as Touchstone and Jacques, undercuts the utopian and egalitarian sentiments associated with the space they inhabit. While the Duke's company finds the forest to be a propitious setting in comparison to the stifling city, their inability to dispense with courtly behavior problematizes their utopian enthusiasm. Ultimately, Shakespeare's pastoral comedy challenges conventional expectations as he combines a mode of utopian optimism with a mode of artistic realism, creating a dissonant conflict between the two.

The conflict between the court's attitude and the behavior of its members in As You Like It characterizes utopia as a semiotic operation that is complex and ambiguous in its practice. Not only does Shakespeare comingle the utopian space with both utopia's doubters and believers, he also shuffles characters in and out of the space at the play's end, further accentuating its instability. Regarding the play's ending, audiences experience difficulty in understanding Arden's transformative capacity. First, Duke Senior and his followers appear to deny the Arcadian utopia they wholeheartedly embraced after resolving to take leave of the forest in order to return to the city and their positions of state. For Duke Senior and his followers, then, the space that postures as carrying utopian potential gets reduced to a mere vacation spot. As Cathy Curtis notes, “When the usurping brother Frederick experiences a sudden conversion of character in the forest, turns to religious life and decides to abandon the pompous court, Duke Senior readily takes back the crown and indicates that he will return to his ducal life.”18 Second, while Arden seems more like a holiday space for Duke Senior, Frederick's and Jacques's indefinite stay in Arden may reinforce its utopian status. As much as the utopian space of Arden gets tossed around from one group of characters to the next, the retentive power of Arden to sustain its influence over its inhabitants becomes dubious.

Amid the pastoral nature of the comedy As You Like It, the Forest of Arden offers a utopian sanctuary for Duke Senior and his company, who, after Duke Senior is deposed by his brother Frederick, seek refuge under the forest's canopy. Talking about the Duke in the forest, Charles the wrestler describes Arden's utopic quality as that of a revitalized “golden world,” like that described by Ovid in Metamorphoses and Hesiod in Works and Days (I.i.114). In line with one of Sargent's views of utopia, the forest qualifies as a utopian space because it is “nostalgic in that [it] looks[s] back to an idealized past” while also including themes revolving around “a simpler life and getting a better balance between the city and country.”19 So, what is meant to be a time of despair and loss of status takes a contrary direction as the Duke and his retinue bask in the Edenic atmosphere of the forest.

Nevertheless, what qualifies the idyllic country location as Utopian does not simply result from a direct contrast between it and the dismal city, a common trait of the pastoral genre, but, rather, from the differences marked between the forest's prospective potential for communal order and civilization's mainstream hierarchical order. In his opening dialogue in the play, Duke Senior is enchanted by the forest's verdure and openness as he delights in the absence of the court's pretentious gaudiness and ritual observances while inhabiting the forest. He observes the space's ripeness for fostering a pleasurable alternative to the court:

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile, Hath not old custom made this life more sweet Than that of a painted pomp? Are not these woods More free from peril than the envious court? Here feel we not the penalty of Adam, . . . And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything. (II.i.1–5, 15–17)

The forest is endowed with a spirit that later centuries would identify as Romantic, and the stifling signs of the oppressive court no longer impose on the Duke and his company. Instead, the trees, brooks, and stones have replaced the emblems and banners that signaled the prestige of hierarchy and nobility with the vitality of the natural world wedded to a prelapsarian joy. Rather than being led to a personal hell following usurpation, the men retreat in reverse to a sort of Garden of Eden, with fantasies of repealing Adam and Eve's grievous sin and negating the original cause for all human strife. Harold Bloom, despite some of his misguided positions, rightly shares the company's enthusiasm for the forest, remarking, “I am delighted to observe that the forest of Arden is simply the best place to live, anywhere in Shakespeare.

You cannot have an earthly paradise and still have a stage comedy that works, yet As You Like It comes closest.”20 The space of Arden gets commended as a pastoral paradise for the Duke and his men, and the aura of utopia inhabits Arden as its residents hail a mythical past into the present.

In feeding his utopic fantasy, the Duke describes his company as communing with each other free from the frivolities of rank and distinction. The strongest indication of a utopian absence of hierarchy manifests itself in the first lines (“Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile”) that Duke Senior speaks, in which he addresses his followers as fraternal equals. Commenting on those lines, David Bevington contends that they suggest “a kind of social equality that [Duke Senior] could never know in the cramped formality of his previous official existence.”21 Also, the direct reference to a prelapsarian condition intimates a return to an idle paradise where Nature's beauty serves as a better substitute for the insipidity of the tongues, books, and sermons that belong to the rigor of institutional religious orders. In effect, Arden exists as a place of relaxation apart from the stress of appearances imposed on the court's members. In a metatheatrical fashion, the space of the play in this sense offers the same relaxation as Arden, allowing a holiday for both the noble characters in the play and the audiences attending it.

A complication arises in calling the Duke's experience solely utopian. Arden certainly inspires language characteristic of a utopia. In fact, in the Duke's lines exists a promise for a realm where people can embrace one another's humanity without needing to heed stational dress codes or hereditary privileges. However, in any vision bearing utopian qualities, statements of such radical optimism can easily betray the dream they express by operating as a mere compensation for a loss. For example, once the Duke finishes his jovial reflection, Amiens immediately responds, saying, “Happy is Your Grace / That can translate the stubbornness of fortune / Into so quiet and so sweet a style” (II.i.18–20). In these lines, it is quite possible that Amiens genuinely admires the Duke's appreciation for nature and liberty in the forest. However, depending on how the lines are performed, they can subtly draw attention to the fact that the Duke may express his enthusiasm in order to mask the despair that results from his displacement. As a man of high standing, it is understandable that Duke Senior would not want to show weakness or defeat after being usurped. Whether he is genuinely excited by the forest or compensating for his loss of status remains unclear; in fact, both possibilities are very antinomic in arguing for them.

Reading the Duke's egalitarian sensibility as speaking to a utopian effect on his train also becomes dubious when the Duke's followers at various points contradict the spirit that the Duke senses in the forest. For instance, when the followers address Duke Senior, the court's formalities still persist, in that they never cease addressing him as “my lord” as opposed to using a signifier free from courtly associations. While the newly formed foresters may strike us as utopian, we begin to wonder if the forest really has taken possession of the Duke's and his followers' spirits or vice versa. Maybe the characters carry the utopian qualities and populate Arden with their attitudes. In line with Eagleton's ideas about the play, the scene may show the court as “trac[ing], narcissistically, one's own subjective moods.”22 In fact, despite the “golden world” impression given about the Duke's experience in Arden, not everyone is content. The First Lord informs the Duke that another follower, Jacques, remains unhappy among them, which illustrates how the camaraderie fails as a homogeneous experience. Even Jacques's unhappiness appears to taint the utopia sprouting from the forest because rather than being troubled by his discontent, Duke Senior and his followers merely laugh at him derisively, which demonstrates a lack of the unity and harmony belonging to utopias. There may be truth, though, in Jacques's view of the Duke's and his followers' treatment of the forest animals as horrid and unbecoming of paradise when he calls them “usurpers, tyrants, and what's worse, / To fright the animals and to kill them up / In their assigned and native dwelling place” (II.i.61–63). Jacques's criticism strongly suggests that while the Duke's train stays happy in and infatuated with Arden, the whole pack of them may disrupt and taint the forest's natural order.

If the deposed court's presence encroaches on the residence of natural life, it appears to do so only from the perspective of Jacques, “a social satirist and a mocker of Arden,” whose contemptus mundi worldview seems to skeptically test the amount of goodness that appears to occupy the utopian space.23 Challenging Jacques's criticisms, Bevington draws attention to how the utopian aspects associated with the location may actually reside more in the goodness of the characters themselves. Touching on Orlando, for instance, Bevington claims that “the vision of a regenerative Utopia secretly abides in the heart of this courtly creature,” and this statement applies to other relationships in the play as well.24

In the case of Orlando, there resides a sense of Utopia, in that he craves to correct the dystopian injustice he suffers in Oliver's care by elevating himself to a level of prosperity worthy of his family's name. Oliver tyrannically and jealously denies him an education and makes him eat with the servants while professing brotherly care of him to Charles the wrestler (I.i.146–147). Oliver's hypocritical behavior makes the relationship a dystopian one because he rhetorically postures as a caring brother in public while his private actions force Orlando into a despondent state that moves him to contrast his treatment to that of livestock, which he believes are treated better (I.i.6–24). The abuse of Orlando is clear, in that his older brother cuts off all avenues to him that would permit Orlando to advance socially, like his brother Jacques. Orlando illustrates his condition to Adam, the family's elder servant, in the play's opening scene, in which he portrays a relatable situation for audience members who may endure similar treatment as a result of primogenitary customs or suffer due to being forced to live at a peasant's station while feeling capable of more. After enunciating his discontent, Orlando discloses to Adam a desire to resist his condition and appeals to his lineage, saying, “The spirit of my father, which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against this servitude” (I.i.21–23). The memory-driven threat escalates to violence when, a few lines later, Orlando grasps his oppressive brother by the throat, proving that he will not yield to Oliver's abusive authority. The role of memory in this capacity compares prominently with the various revolutions that resist tyrannical governments in modern dystopian literature such as Jack London's The Iron Heel (1908), Ayn Rand's Anthem (1937), or Kurt Vonnegut's “Harrison Bergeron” (1961). For early modern England, then, Orlando's behavior resembles that of the dystopian protagonist.

Orlando's resistance to his brother's dystopian treatment ambivalently appeals to two entirely different audiences. It does so because the invocation of his father performs two separate functions: it instills in him both a resilience to tyranny and an inherent nobility that gives him the power to ascend back to his rightful place. In one sense, the memory can reinforce conservative social expectations since it can justify the preservation of social distinctions through the succession of bloodlines. Orlando as the son of an aristocrat looks to maintain distinction by claiming the privilege due to a man of his pedigree. At the same time, the resistance may also speak to a collective contempt for the unwarranted repression of citizens within Elizabethan society. During the time of the play's performance, this message could certainly speak to the poorer subjects. According to Chris Fitter, “Overseers of the Poor” arbitrated social control, “classifying the poor as deserving or undeserving” and “enjoy[ing] discretionary powers to s upplement—or otherwise—the income of workers paid too little to survive: a brutally substantial number.”25 While highlighting the appeal to the poorer citizenry, Fitter also points out the ambiguity, saying that “Orlando is correspondingly abusive of the lower classes.”26 Orlando's expression of prejudice may serve to appease the higher-ranked audience members as it simultaneously, yet subtly, draws critical attention to their own abuses of laborers. In fact, Fitter himself asserts that Orlando is a contrary figure, in that, “offensive in his whining genteel insistence on the insulting insufficiency of the wealth bequeathed him, comically hapless in his deictic sightlessness, he yet echoes the language of underclass resentment, and embodies the exciting spirit of active resistance.”27 Though Orlando may not desire a complete reformation of the national order, he does desire a radical change in his own treatment, which, according to Bevington's perspective, bears Utopian marks. The desire to perceive an injustice and wish to correct it speaks volumes to the development of utopia. As seen here, though, the perception of justice is far from blind and is instead heavily embroiled with the expectations of a particular class and rank, which may disregard a lower and less privileged group of people.

Indeed, there must be some utopian appeal in Orlando for Adam to so readily forsake his service in Oliver's house and surrender his savings in order to follow Orlando into Arden. The gesture certainly affects Orlando enough for him to declare, “Oh, good old man, how well in thee appears / The constant service of the antique world, / When service sweat for duty, not for meed!” (II.iii.56–58). Echoing the Duke's prelapsarian reference earlier in Act II, Orlando shows a nostalgia for “the antique world” in the form of a servitude based on ideal loyalty rather than serving for profit, which Orlando goes on to critique as a sign of the time's wretchedness. He thereby indicates that Adam's attitude toward service is not widely held, making him an invaluable asset to his exile. Yet, if we accept Fitter's intriguing reading of this scene as robbing the groundlings of carnival pleasure by portraying Adam as a Puritan masochist, a figure worthy of scorn, then the utopian aspect of Adam's service may scandalously carry a conservative message that co-opts the utopian image, making him a dystopian toady.28 Fitter's uncommon reading, though, comes across as counterintuitive to the plot, which goes to great lengths to emphasize the virtuous natures of Orlando and Rosalind. Considering these strains, Adam's service embodies true loyalty and virtue in order to demonstrate how people can construct utopian relations by simply demonstrating genuine care for one another.

While this scene extols Adam and Orlando's camaraderie and cheer, the stark reality of the pair's experience of exile eventually blemishes the utopic portrait of fidelity and harmony that they embody. The forest is a space filled with beauty, but the appearance deceives, as character such as Adam, Orlando, and Oliver are forced to confront the treacherous and harsh reality of the wild. After Orlando wanders in the forest with Adam for a while, his praise of “the antique world” in Adam eventually gets turned inside out when suffering visits them. In Hesiod's Golden Age, from which the golden world derives, “the golden race died a painless death that overtook them unawares, a death presaged neither by illness nor even by aging.”29 Orlando and Adam, far from experiencing this kind of ataraxy, face the very real pain that accompanies a brush with death. After succumbing to hunger and fatigue, Orlando desperately resorts to a caricatured state of primitive hostility as he draws his sword against the Duke and his court, demanding food.

Upon the pair's entry into the forest Adam and Orlando are initially inspired by the image of a golden world, but that quickly dissolves in the face of hunger, and it is not until the pair encounters civilizing forces that they enjoy a paradisiacal experience. Just as quickly as Orlando holds the Duke's company at the point of his blade, he sheathes his sword when they treat him kindly. Ashamed, he tries to excuse his behavior, claiming that “bare distress hath ta'en from me the show / Of smooth civility,” which further e mphasizes how both Utopia and civilization can either merely act as artificial coverings and repressive apparatuses for the more animalistic drives in humans or serve as the very force that attempts to bridle those drives (II.v.95–96). It is at this particular moment that the utopian power found in the virtues of the deposed members supernaturally announces itself. In the face of the court's cheerful civility, Orlando quickly transforms from a rabid, animalistic thief back to his former, good-natured identity. His transformation suggests that in spite of his hardships, an unseen providence is at work and provides chances for civility to recognize itself in others, attesting that such a power is necessary to repress humanity's baser instincts. Rather than explicitly champion a religious transformation, the scene gives proof to Feste's words in Twelfth Night, when he says to Olivia that “anything that's mended is but patched; virtue that transgresses is patched with sin, and sin that amends is but patched with virtue” (I.v.44–47), meaning that virtue can be a disguise for sin or, in reference to As You Like It, civility can mask the baser nature of humans. In quickly and obligingly providing for basic needs such as food, the Duke and his followers give occasion for camaraderie, harmony, and cooperation, which stunt Orlando's desperate violence.

By the time Oliver seeks his brother Orlando out in the forest, the romance aspects of the plot play out in a fairy-tale fashion while also carrying with them very real implications. In nearly being bitten by a green snake, a symbol of Oliver's jealousy of Orlando, and devoured by a ravenous lioness, Oliver awakens, as if by some religious visitation, to Orlando's goodness when his younger brother intervenes and saves the would-be assassin from certain death. His brotherly heroics bear dimensions of both the pastoral romance and the fairy tale since Oliver's conversion from tyrant to comrade happens in a rapid instant as a fissure in his complacency when his life is put at stake and spared. The utopian turn speaks to the powerful theme of forgiveness that pervades the play, especially when Frederick, in another fairy-tale turn, later gives up the dukedom for a religious life, returning the legitimate order to its original bearer, Duke Senior.

The causes for Oliver's benevolent turn also carry realistic dimensions that throw a crux into the neat interpretation of these moments as fairy-tale redemptions. For instance, do Orlando's actions really transform Oliver's attitude in an instant, or is the change gradual? In relating his story of the lioness attack to Rosalind and Celia, Oliver describes his appearance resting under the tree as that of “a wretched, ragged man, o'ergrown with hair,” suggesting that he too has suffered from hunger on a par with that which Orlando and Adam endured (IV.iii.107). Furthermore, the repentance could partly result from Oliver suffering tyranny firsthand, recognizing its overbearing nature when Duke Frederick abruptly seizes his lands and turns him out to the forest to find Orlando (III.i). In other Shakespeare plays, such as Measure for Measure, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Winter's Tale, and especially King Lear, characters holding higher positions are commonly brought to lower standings in order for a lesson to be realized that functions to amend a flaw they possess. This dynamic certainly applies to Oliver, who now lacks the tools to continue his tyranny. Thus, he must either change genuinely or, as Orlando says, put on “the show / Of smooth civility” and adapt to new values if he is to survive in Arden and receive welcome in Duke Senior's company.

While the ethos of characters such as Duke Senior, Orlando, and Rosalind perhaps carries more of the utopian spirit than the Forest of Arden, this does not entirely deprive the forest of its utopian power. Besides, the cheeriness of the Duke's court takes its cue from Arden's verdant surroundings, and only an enchanted space like the forest created through dramatic illusion could explain Hymen's inexplicable arrival in Act V. Also, Frederick's sudden conversion to a religious life after entering the forest with an army intent on killing Duke Senior could only result from the wood's bewitching influence, producing the seeming divine intervention of a religious old man who persuades Frederick to abandon his unlawful station.

The manner in which these conflicts resolve keeps the nature of utopia in the play ambiguous. Duke Senior and his attendant lords may revel in the freedom away from the court, but the utopia they enjoy dissolves as rapidly as a carnivalesque occasion as they return to the normal order from which they were exiled. In fact, Kristian Smidt points out that there is a disparity between the renewal of status at the end and the various devotions of the Duke, his followers, Celia, and Oliver to the pastoral way of life.30 The dissolution threatens to undo the utopian dimension by reducing it to a restorative vacation for Duke Senior rather than a radical change in social relations. For conservative nobles attending the play, this would certainly be a satisfying conclusion since the Duke's rightful privilege is restored and the radical order is extinguished. However, like many of Shakespeare's plays, the conclusion leaves the utopian potential that does surface in the play both open and closed to the characters. It is closed to Duke Senior, but his younger brother Frederick may show that the forest's utopia can remain accessible if his being “converted / Both from his enterprise and from the world” means a spiritual hermitage in the woods, where he may enjoy more permanently what could not last for Duke Senior and his company. Yet the utopian potential of the forest for Duke Senior also remains artistically available. As in Twelfth Night, when Viola is not seen to return to her maiden weeds, at the end of As You Like It we never see Duke Senior and his company leave Arden's boundaries, impressing his existence there in the collective memory of the audience (V.iv.160–161).

Other problems regarding the play's utopian status arise when accounting for the roles of the play's fool, Touchstone, and malcontent, Jacques. While the popularization of a utopia with a changeable, open government was not explicitly outlined until H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905), the outside positions of Jacques and Touchstone offer the chance for a premodern, satirical critique of Arcadian virtue and those supposed to practice it. While this is more the case with Jacques, Touchstone also serves a similar role as a realistic taint on the forest's dreamlike qualities. Robert Bell asserts that “both are intruders in Arden,” and Bevington agrees, adding that “[Touchstone] and Jacques are not touched by the play's regenerative magic.”31 Considering how the majority of characters acclimate to the Arcadian culture, Touchstone and Jacques remain relatively aloof, which gives them the agency to criticize the behaviors of other characters, because they believe, however mistakenly, that their perspectives are not compromised by vice or folly. They manipulate the forest's culture in a courtly way that caters to their desires.

While the court may take respite in their newfound refuge in Arden, Touchstone relies on his courtly learning to undercut the utopian foundations of the forest's rustic “clowns.” Yet this does not limit Touchstone from also mocking the customary practices of the court he serves as he slyly deconstructs the boundaries between the country's and the city's manners, creating a paradox of contradiction and noncontradiction in his conversation with Corin the shepherd. Eagleton agrees, stating that in As You Like It “Shakespeare deconstructs this binary opposition [between Nature and culture; or in this case, city and country] showing how each term inheres in the other.”32 Discussing the preferability of the court to the country with the shepherd, Touchstone offers a series of deft contradictions that undercut Corin's own appreciation for the country by evaluating certain qualities within the context of each respective locality. The contradictions explain why Touchstone can claim that bucolic solitude offers pleasure for an individual desiring contemplation away from city crowds at the same time that city crowds offer diversions away from the madness of a lonely mind (III.ii.11–21).

From such paradoxical logic, Touchstone jestingly chides Corin's idyllic lifestyle, saying that he risks damnation by not having ever attended court to learn good manners. Corin adroitly defends his lack of city manners as a utopian way of living and describes the country and the court as separate realms adhering to different codes:

Those that are good manners at the court are as ridiculous in the country as the behavior of the country is most mockable at the court. (III.ii.43–46)

Potentially subversive, Corin's sentiment suggests that the court's practiced rituals do not outweigh the country bumpkins' uncouth conduct in worth but, instead, that the two operate as equally independent ideological fields, which, in a utopian way, undermines the nobility's belief that it serves as a paragon for all human behavior. This is merely one interpretation, though. Corin's lines can also be seen as rigorously conservative, betraying the seemingly utopian discourse by reinforcing the need for segregated social spheres between nobles and commoners, which denies social permeability. This interpretation would definitely align with the attitudes coded by Elizabethan sumptuary laws that protected the boundary between high and low ranks, and it can serve as a potent example of utopia being co-opted to maintain the status quo.

Corin's utopian lines may also admit a kind of ignorance that places him in a dystopian situation since they do not take into account the reality of the nobility's presence in the forest. Despite Corin's appreciation of the separateness of social spheres, the noble ranks, embodied by Duke Senior and Frederick, are implicitly encroaching on the lands that Corin and the other peasants inhabit, effectively shrinking the boundaries of the country's sphere. The nobility's presence reveals the possibility that Corin's words may be ironically dystopian. While he enjoys the simplicity of rustic living, he fails to understand the court's ambition to control resources and is too passive to try to understand it. As You Like It, in this sense, may quietly dramatize the results of land enclosures over the past century that some intellectuals, including Sir Thomas More, had suggested were a major source of social strife.33 Where the rustic population lacked ground to protest against the nobles, the nobles could smoothly acquire lands to which they lacked an inherent right.

In fact, in his exchange with Corin, Touchstone appears as a dystopian emissary of the court who tries to reorient Corin's values and inadvertently devalues the court's superiority. He argues that Corin should adopt the court's manners for his own betterment, which in itself subliminally functions to satirize the court's pompous vogue as being just as mean and dirty as the countryman's way of life. Through a range of comparisons, Touchstone directs Corin into seeing the similarities between country dirtiness and courtly dirtiness. In one example, he says that sheep grease is as “wholesome” as human sweat and that tar from sheep surgery is less base than civet perfume since civet derives from a cat's anal pouch (III.ii.52–53, 63–65). While these accusations obviously needle Corin, they show how noblemen can be on a par with countrymen in terms of grotesque baseness. Nobles cannot cease to sweat, and their finer perfume of civet literally comes from feline extremities.

While nobles regard themselves as highly placed in the great chain of being, their practices and bodies continue to speak to human grossness, which undercuts their elevated sense of worth and illuminates the economic disparity that results from their prejudice.

Proceeding with similar jests, Touchstone, acting as a voice of realism, further underscores the animalistic side of humanity as the basis of humor in his discussion with Corin. In their dialogue, he perverts the honesty of Corin's utopic expression about enjoying his pastoral lifestyle by pointing out the double meanings of the shepherd's words. In the exchange, Corin says:

Sir, I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, 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.71–75)

This rustic passivity certainly expresses a pastoral peace of mind to Corin, even if the instability of this living space escapes Corin's detection. For humor, though, Touchstone tries to undercut his contentedness by accusing Corin of pimping out his livestock for his living, which purports to put him on a par with an unscrupulous flesh-peddler. Throughout the play, while shepherds and nobles live blithely in the forest, Touchstone tries to bring their chimerical perspectives back to solid ground. To do so, he resorts to bawdy jokes, acting as the antithesis to the idealism of the pastoral romance and Petrarchan love. Ultimately, he associates with the filthy loam as opposed to the celestial skies, and like the gravediggers and the melancholic prince in Hamlet, he demonstrates how all people have a fair share in the world's baseness.

Jacques, similar to Touchstone, has an attitude that departs from the utopian optimism and idealism of those inhabiting Arden, in that he posits a vision that is pessimistically utopian. In some instances, he serves as a depressive stock character, a sort of precursor for characters such as Marvin, the Paranoid Android, in Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1978). As the one to put a damper on others' good times, Jacques acts as the obnoxious dissenter who can never be fully satisfied with any social situation. As any extreme school of social thought usually seems absurd and potentially dangerous to others, so does Jacques's pessimistic utopianism meet with derision from his cohorts. Indeed, Rosalind, in a caustic repartee, asserts that “those that are the extremity of either [melancholy or l aughter] are abominable fellows and betray themselves to every modern censure worse than drunkards” (IV.i.4–6). She is saying that his extreme melancholy effectively becomes odious as the annoyance it produces characterizes him as pretentiously self-righteous. The First Lord's report to Duke Senior introduces Jacques as a character by describing his pathetic identification with a hunted-down stag, which would seem to present Jacques as a kind of equivalent for a modern-day, preachy vegan attending a barbecue whose purposes seem self-serving.

In the play, Jacques's behavior hinges on a sense of what he feels to be his overlooked genius. In a manner similar to Touchstone exposing humanity's animalistic impulses for humor, Jacques uses the killed stag as a dystopian analogy for himself. On the surface, he suggests that Duke Senior's usurpation of the forest outweighs Duke Frederick's vileness in usurping the dukedom. However, not really so condemnatory of the Duke, Jacques actually uses the incident to transmutate the stag into a metaphor for a discarded outsider, in this case himself, forgotten by the “flux of company” (II.i.52). The lack of recognition saddens him, a view that Rosalind later mocks in an anecdote, quipping, “I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men's. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands” (IV.i.20–22). He even tries to persuade Rosalind that his brand of melancholy does not fit into the current social order, using various negative references to common occupations (IV.i.9–19). Thus, from the Utopian perspective of Jameson, Jacques is the maniac or oddball, in that he is “a deformation readily enough explained by the fallen societies in which [he] had to fulfill [his] vocation,” who, being misunderstood, is ridiculed.34

However unpleasant Jacques's ornery personality is for everyone else, it may make him the most genuinely Utopian character. In his exchange with Duke Senior concerning satire, for instance, Jacques lays out a hope for a better world achieved through satiric criticism. Showing his kinship to Touchstone, Jacques confesses, perhaps jocularly, that he longs to serve as a fool, proclaiming that “motley's the only wear” (II.vii.34). He goes on to claim that he would have fantastical abilities if he could regularly act as a fool, stating:

Give me leave

To speak my mind, and I will through and through

Cleanse the foul body of th'infected world,

If they will patiently receive my medicine. (II.vii.58–61)

Considering the theatrical privilege of jesters during the early modern period as the wisest of characters (“The fellow is wise enough to play the fool” [Twelfth Night III.i.59]), Jacques hopes to enact a utopian transformation in the world through the satiric derision of vice in order to obliterate the behaviors depressing him. In playing the fool, Jacques desires the immunity granted to courtly fools to freely criticize immoral behavior, and, like a salesman, he claims that he can deliver to others a utopian remedy for everyday vices if he were assigned such a role. In Jacques's apology for satire, he suggests that his type of witticism can cause no ill for good people since it will only strike the nerve of those who bear guilt for committing the vices he ridicules. In claiming this, he moralizes to Duke Senior about the shape moral behavior can take when widely prescribed, taking advantage of Arden's alternative space to offer his own alternative ways of living.

The utopian spirit seems to inhabit “the golden world” culture of the Duke's court at Arden, but how much their utopia fails to measure up to its ideals remains unknown. The ideals of negating pride and pomp mostly spring from the commentaries of the borderline anti-utopian Touchstone and the radically Utopian Jacques. If we could categorize Touchstone under any Utopian mode, it would be a body utopia like that of the licentious land of Cockaigne due to his promiscuous desire for the rustic Audrey. For Jacques to remain in the forest appears to suit his radical disposition. I like to imagine him remaining on the margins of his society, preaching all the more about humanity's ills, constantly meditating on the ways to develop a panacea for all of them, even if they are misguided.

With regard to how the treatment of station affects the audience, the ending of As You Like It, like many of Shakespeare's plays, remains both tidy and subversive. From the conservative stance, the play echoes Elizabeth I's doctrine of passive obedience, which basically objects to a rebellion against an established order by equating usurpation with treason, delegating consequences to the transgressors in accordance with the ruling monarch's will. This doctrine gave divine sanction to the queen to condemn her opponents as treasonous and deem the British status quo as God-appointed and better than any social alternative. The weddings at the end appear quite conservative and characteristic of a traditional happy ending where good cheer for the newlyweds is meant to bestow joy to the audience as well while removing any dissembling disguises or ill will. Also, the theme of forgiveness appears to reverse the effects of the Duke's overthrow and Orlando's maltreatment as Oliver and Frederick receive amnesty from a kind of grace that pardons them through repentance. Conservatively, the reconciliation allows the legitimized order of the Duke to return to his place, and Orlando appears to receive the respect due to a man of his breeding. However, grinding against the reinforcement of conservative conventions, a new order appears to be brewing in the forest with Jacques and Frederick. In this sense, then, the play appeals to early modern audiences of both high and low stature, in that the dual messages in the ending aim to satisfy their respective fantasies, as they like it, affirming both an order that rewards privilege and one that redefines it. Thus, the play presents ideas that speak to anticipations of an ideal livelihood at the same time as it tempers that anticipation with society's realistic qualities.

Notes

1. For one of the most widely cited sources regarding the definition of utopia, eutopia, dystopia, and other related terms, see Lyman Tower Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” Utopian Studies: Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies 5 (1994): 1–37.

2. Fátima Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” in The Cambridge Companion to Utopia Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 7.

3. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), 227.

4. Ibid., xiii.

5. Ibid., 7: “Yet a third way in which individual and collective time come to be identified with each other is in the very experience of everyday life, according to Roland Barthes the quintessential sign of utopian representation: ‘la marquee de l'Utopie, c'est le quotidien.'”

6. Sargent, “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” 4.

7. Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).

8. Michael Bristol, “‘Funeral Bak'd Meats': Carnival and the Carnivalesque in Hamlet,” in Hamlet, ed. Susanne L. Wofford (New York: Bedford, 1994), 349.

9. Sargent, “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” 9.

10. For Sargent's comprehensive outline of what associations Utopia has, see ibid., 11–12.

11. Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), 147.

12. Sargent, “Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited,” 10.

13. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 4.

14. I adapt the idea from Maria Varsam, “Concrete Dystopia: Slavery and Its Others,” in Dark Horizons, ed. Tom Moylan and Raffealla Baccolini (New York: Routledge, 2003), 204–5: “Because of the range of visions, one writer's eutopia is another writer's dystopia, an issue that remains problematic in the history of interpretation of texts ranging from Plato's The Republic to modern-day works.” Varsam is not alone in this perception. See Gregory Claeys, “The Origins of Dystopia: Wells, Huxley, and Orwell,” in The Cambridge Companion to Utopia Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 108: “There is of course something in the argument that, just as one person's terrorist is another's freedom-fighter, so is one person's utopia another's dystopia.”

15. Utopias in general are sometimes erroneously assumed to feature classless, antihierarchical societies. While the feature certainly belongs to many utopian designs, an abolishment of hierarchy and class is not a prerequisite trait of utopia. The longstanding tradition of Utopian literature consistently contradicts the assumption. Examples include, but are not limited to, Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1627), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905), B. F. Skinner's Walden Two (1948), and Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974).

16. Charles Fourier, The Theory of the Four Movements, ed. Gareth Stedman Jones and Ian Patterson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 50.

17. Vieira, “Concept of Utopia,” 17, 23.

18. Cathy Curtis, “The Active and Contemplative Lives in Shakespeare's Plays,” in Shakespeare and Early Modern Political Thought, ed. David Armitage, Conal Condren, and Andrew Fitzmaurice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 44.

19. Lyman Tower Sargent, Utopianism. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 21–22.

20. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1998), 205. I call Bloom's perspective misguided at times because his interpretation of Shakespeare's plays tends to arbitrarily close off alternative ways of reading the artwork. He is an essentialist with a narrow perspective regarding how to understand the playwright. Even as he advocates certain readings, he makes simple, irresponsible mistakes that should embarrass him, such as confusing Trinculo with Stephano when he analyzes The Tempest. The pair may be interchangeable on a humorous level, but the distinction between the characters should not escape scholarly attention.

21. David Bevington, introduction to As You Like It, by William Shakespeare, in Necessary Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 2nd ed. (New York: Pearson, 2005), 150.

22. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 90–91.

23. Bloom, Shakespeare, 212.

24. Bevington, introduction to As You Like It, 152.

25. Chris Fitter, “Reading Orlando Historically: Vagrancy, Forest, and Vestry Values in Shakespeare's As You Like It,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism, and Reviews 23 (2010): 118.

26. Ibid., 120.

27. Ibid., 122.

28. Ibid., 123–24.

29. Robert Bartlett, “An Introduction to Hesiod's Works and Days,” Review of Politics 68, no. 2 (2006): 187.

30. Kristian Smidt, Uncomforties in Shakespeare's Later Comedies (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993), 47.

31. Robert Bell, “Motley to the View: The Shakespearean Performance of Folly,” Southwest Review 95 (2010): 53; and Bevington, introduction to As You Like It, 153.

32. Eagleton, William Shakespeare, 90.

33. From Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson, ed. Wayne Rebhorn (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005), 29: “Therefore, that one covetous and insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country may compass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by covin and fraud or by violent oppression, they be put besides it, or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied that they be compelled to sell all.”

34. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 10.