Literary articles - William Shakespeare 2024

As You Like It's Political, Critical Animal Allusions

Samantha N. Snively

In June 2017, Oskar Eustis's production of Julius Caesar for New York City's Shakespeare in the Park came under fire. The production depicted a “petulant” Caesar with “blondish hair with orange overtones,” whose wife “even ha[d] a Slavic accent”: clearly, the forty-fifth president.1 Audience members at a preview noted that many of actor Gregg Henry's gestures in the role echoed the president's as well, even down to the “tie, hanging down a couple inches below the belt line.”2 Such visual and gestural similarity was enough for many viewers and news outlets to assert confidently that the Julius Caesar they were seeing was actually a depiction of the president and not merely an allusion onto which they read their own social moment. The discussions surrounding the performance largely glossed over a key question, however: how do audiences know when a political figure is represented onstage, and what are the parameters of recognizeability in a dramatic allusion?

For contemporary audiences and early modern scholars alike, Shakespeare's plays present an ideal opportunity to look for political representation and nuanced critique of social issues. Just as Eustis's production used allusion and representation to ask audiences to consider the consequences of removing corrupt and undemocratic leadership by corrupt and undemocratic means, Shakespeare's plays contain variously oblique representations of and allusions to Queen Elizabeth I that enable audiences to work through questions of female power, succession, and the right use of power.3 In order to consider the intersections of theatrical representation and political critique, early modern scholars have been searching for several decades for representations of Elizabeth in early modern plays. The early modern stage provides a particularly complex example through which to consider questions of the limits of allusion and recognition, as it contended with rigorous censorship over representations and critique of the monarchy. Although Elizabethan dramatic censorship “tended to be a haphazard affair,” as Debora Shuger puts it, the late 1590s witnessed a crackdown on slander and sedition.4 The Bishops' Ban of 1 June 1599 forbade the publication of satirical material.5 Since 1558, it had been treason to create slanderous depictions of Elizabeth.6 So representations of the queen and her Court went underground, became more nebulous, and moved to the terrain of allusion rather than direct, literal representation.7 Since the statutes spoke of matter that slandered the queen “by express words,” images that did not express but alluded to the queen were less likely to be actionable.8 This distancing between image and meaning meant that audiences had to read analogically, employing imagination to connect allusions that did not always form a single composite image.9

A close attentiveness to theatrical representation and an awareness of the political climate of early modern England allows us, as it allowed early modern audiences, to see these shades of meaning and critique in early modern plays. However, our focus has often been exclusively on characters, reading Rosalind, Olivia, or any strong and/or cross-dressing Shakespearean heroine as figures for Elizabeth. As I argue below, considering a broader definition of topical allusion allows me to shift my gaze away from characters and toward a reading of the landscape and nonhuman actors in As You Like It (1599) as topical representations of an aging, childless Elizabeth. My reading asks what we should make of contradictory critical representations, and what is possible when we allow our minds to wander beyond characterological allusion. The implications of these questions extend beyond early modern allusion and perhaps beyond the dramatic; however, I have chosen an early modern case study to demonstrate the advantages of my method.

The tradition of finding covert critiques of Elizabeth in Shakespeare's plays begins in the late 1980s, when Leah S. Marcus “puzzl[es]” out how to understand the political critique lodged in Shakespeare's characters.10 By focusing on topical allusion, a mechanism that both produces and prevents recognition by relying on the audience's speculative capabilities, Marcus makes the case that many of Shakespeare's plays contain veiled representations of Elizabeth that simultaneously praise and censure her, which allowed watching audiences to consider critiques of Elizabeth's subversion of patriarchal hierarchies and complex gender identity.11 Networks of dispersed similarities and vague connections define topical allusion, and this structure allows for contradictory interpretations of a single allusion or network of allusions. Topical allusion, in my analysis, serves as an ideal means to advance relevant political critique while protecting early modern authors from charges of slander and the audience from sedition. Mapping and contextualizing networks of interpretations made possible by topical allusion, therefore, means holding often contradictory messages about praise and censure, presence and absence, and possibility and impossibility simultaneously in one's mind. Tracing topical allusions allows for a far more complex understanding of representation and political critique, and Marcus illustrates this most clearly in her discussion of As You Like It's Rosalind: “We are accustomed to thinking of the Virgin Queen in terms of a set of clearly female identities … She was a Queen of Shepherds, a new Deborah, a Cynthia or Diana, the unreachable object of male desire and worship … [but she also] possessed a set of symbolic male identities which are much less familiar to us.”12 Marcus's readings helps underscore Elizabeth's self-fashioning of a complex and composite sexual and political identity and the range of responses to her identities in her subjects. Representations of Elizabeth, Marcus proposes, could be both/and rather than either/or, and topical allusions were the ideal mechanism to enable audiences to think complexly. In fact, all of Shakespeare's cross-dressing heroines could be read as complex allusions to Elizabeth, Marcus argues: “Shakespeare's comedies helped to validate the queen's anomalous identity by presenting the construct visually [of the androgynous Elizabeth] through witty and attractive characters … linked with disorder but also with images of festival regeneration.”13

In the three decades since Marcus's book, readings of topical allusions have found Elizabeth I haunting many early modern texts, especially Shakespeare's comedies. Julia M. Walker and others explore the dark underbelly of the cult of Elizabeth in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Gloriana (1998). Walker asserts that the positive and negative representations of Elizabeth ought to be considered together, as equal discourses circulating in a culture of “social and political dissent” in which the theater was deeply imbricated.14 Topical readings have proliferated to the extent that it seems as if “Elizabeth is lurking” in every text, as Helen Hackett elegantly notes.15 Is there anything new to be said about her traces, especially in a play as studied and as political as As You Like It?

There is, if we look beyond the human. Despite the sinister, bestial connotations of Hackett's verb “lurks,” most of the topical allusions to Elizabeth in early modern texts that critics have analyzed remain characterological, comparing characters' actions to the queen's behavior: the chaste, regal grace in Diana, Astraea, or Cynthia, or the gender subversion and patriarchal disruption in Shakespeare's cross-dressing ladies. Nearly all of Shakespeare's speaking women can be read as comments on Elizabeth's persona and reign.16 Nonhuman analogs for Elizabeth are almost entirely absent from the critical discussion, although animal imagery was an important component of Elizabeth's own representational strat-egy.17 Discussions of representations of Elizabeth in As You Like It, one of the plays in which she is most commonly found, have yet to look beyond the figure of Rosalind. Although Rosalind-as-Elizabeth is a critical commonplace, interpretations based on it cling to the figures of the young, holiday Rosalind and Elizabeth, semper eadem. Why have the possibilities of animal topical allusions and references to the aging Queen Elizabeth not yet been considered? Juliet Dusinberre, Richard Wilson, James Shapiro, and others have discussed at length the play's relationship to the troubles of primogeniture, enclosure riots, and other social and economic crises of the late 1590s.18 But these studies, although concerned with the politics of the late 1590s and critique in As You Like It, have not considered that the landscape and animals of the politically significant Arden might also incorporate a critique of Elizabeth, particularly the aging Elizabeth. Tobias Menely writes that many animal representations of monarchs revert to syllepsis, “the figure of speech in which a word is given two distinct meanings, one metaphorical or abstract and one literal or concrete.”19 Dual interpretive possibilities in animal representation allow for “a potential confusion of figurative and literal meaning,” and in the case of topical allusions in a highly censored theater, such confusion is a protection.20 Thinking about political critique with and through animals means considering the particular political and intellectual value of representing a human figure as an animal and simultaneously permitting the animal representations to exist and to lend new interpretations to the scene. And indeed, we have started thinking about the animals in As You Like It: Marcus,

Menely, and Laurie Shannon have written about the ways that animals “are not so easily and simply understood as outside of polity or as unpolitical.”21 However, these three authors write only about the deer, the “native burghers” of the “desert city” of Arden.22 Yet there are other animals in the forest, and they also have things to say.

My argument proposes an expanded understanding of topical allusion, one that suggests we ought to be looking beyond the anthropocentric when parsing the representational strategies circulating throughout the early modern theater. In doing so, I explore a new, distributed network of sometimes contradictory topical meaning in As You Like It. In Oliver's encounter with the snake and lioness in act IV, scene iii, Shakespeare transforms a minor episode in Thomas Lodge's 1590 prose romance Rosa-lynde, Euphues Golden Legacie into a scene with considerable allusive possibility: by adding a disruptively penetrative serpent and feminizing both animals, Shakespeare enables audiences to interpret the scene as a commentary on the problems of and solutions to the succession crisis. Read as an allusion to Elizabeth as she was in 1599–1600, this scene allows me to consider the play through the lenses of the anxieties about Elizabeth's aging body, the succession crisis, and the threat of monstrous, barren female power. The serpent and lioness's explicit coding as regal animals make them apt animals with which to think about Elizabeth's body and power.

Where the scene takes place also matters. In a play so concerned with ownership and care for the land, even the ground is political. The aged and barren landscape that frames the encounter with the snake and lioness links these allusions with anxieties about the psychic threat posed by Elizabeth's body. Reading the landscape as an allusion to an aging, nonreproductive Elizabeth reframes the animals' potential meanings as well: the threats in the landscape of a barren, aging sexuality highlight the serpent's dominance through the threat of oral penetration and the lioness's monstrous nonmaternal body that disrupts patriarchal success and succession.

LANDSCAPES OF AGE

Early modern audiences' reading and viewing practices may have allowed them to see Elizabeth figured in human and landscape allusions as well as in the more obvious human analogs. In act IV, scene iii, it is possible to read the political landscape, with all its anxieties about aging sexuality, in the play's landscape. Doing so highlights the threat of age as it relates to reproduction, and the scene allows audiences to consider this threat in relation to ongoing political events. The description of the forest contextualizes the animal threats that Oliver later encounters: the snake and the lioness are monstrous and terrifying precisely because of their location within a barren forest of old trees. Absence and deprivation drive the violence the animals attempt through sexuality, penetration, and consumption.

As the play spirals to its conclusion, Orlando is “pacing through the forest, / Chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy,” thinking about his recent wooing practice with Rosalind/ Ganymede (IV.iii.98–9). He finds his brother “Under an old oak, whose boughs were mossed with age / And high top bald with dry antiquity” (IV.iii.102–3). This setting does not appear in Lodge's text, which places Oliver's counterpart Saladyne in “a little caue by the side of a thicket,” and thus alerts our attention to the “old oak.”23 Shakespeare's language mirrors Lodge's, however, in its adoption of the diction of romance, lending a mythological air to the allusion and casting some doubt on the veracity of Oliver's story. The notable contrast in tone between Oliver's tale and the surrounding dialogue sets the scene apart in a number of ways: it draws the audience's attention to an easily overlooked episode in the play while using the conventions of romance and fable to cast doubt on Oliver's grandiose narration of the tale and on the larger project of symbolic mythbuilding that was one of Elizabeth's chief strategies. According to Chris Fitter, Shakespeare uses conventions of the fable to “press[ ] … [the scene] into the realm of the discreditably incredible,” although I suggest that perhaps this fabular quality is meant not to discredit Oliver absolutely but to defang the potential criticism in the allusion.24 Janet Clare writes that fable and prose romance, especially in cultures of censorship, can be used “to conceal actual intrigues and a network of relation-ships.”25 This scene, like the others, allows the viewer to decide the degree of mythology and therefore credibility to assign to the episode—and by extension, its implications. If this scene functions merely to set Oliver apart from the other denizens of Arden as a courtly caricature, then political allusions can be ignored; if its stylistic language marks it as significant, then the viewer can choose how much significance to assign to the episode, creating as much or as little critique as he or she wishes.

The signs of antiquity in the wood that Oliver describes—the decay of age, baldness, and desiccation or barrenness—could all very well describe Elizabeth in 1599, or at least describe popular conceptions of her. Although she tried valiantly to hide the physical signs, an observer could not avoid noticing the indicators of her age. Depending upon the observer, Elizabeth's appearance had political implications, as is visible in the account of André Hurault, a French ambassador who arrived at Court in 1597 and who described his private audience with the queen: “Her bosom is somewhat wrinkled, as well as [one can see for] the collar that she wears round her neck … As for her face, it is and appears to be very aged. It is long and thin, and her teeth are very yellow and unequal compared with what they were formerly, so they say, and on the left side less than on the right. Many of them are missing so that one cannot understand her easily when she speaks quickly. Her figure is fair and tall and graceful in whatever she does; so far as may be, she keeps her dignity.”26 Here, Hurault's rhetorical choices, in an account that returned to the French Court, make his account less about an accurate description of Elizabeth's appearance and more about the political effectiveness of using her appearance to signify the status of her country: “very aged … compared with what [it was] formerly,” a country falling apart like its queen. Aging and illness in political figures often translates to speculation about the fitness of their judgment and ability to rule. For a female ruler, however, public discussion of appearance and its relationship to the ability to rule inevitably takes on the context of reproductive potential as well. Like a stately oak mossed with age, Elizabeth in Hurault's account mixes regal dignity with the realities of age. The “dry antiquity” of Arden's oak calls to mind Elizabeth's wrinkled skin as well as the barrenness that the lioness suckled dry several lines later evokes. Hurault's description reads something like a description of a landscape—traveling over the peaks and valleys and describing the topography of Elizabeth's face—and builds metonymic links between the queen and the country.

And if it was possible to read Elizabeth's body as a landscape, why not read landscapes as referents for the queen's body? The “desert city” of Arden takes on a gendered dimension when read in light of Hannah Betts's observation that the “paradigmatic image for the blazonic depiction of the female genitalia during the 1590s [was] that of a park or natural landscape.”27 Landscapes, then, have gendered and female connotations, and landscapes that are bald, dry, and antique explicitly pose a threat because they represent a female sexuality that has outlasted its reproductive function—and therefore exists beyond normative patriarchal control. In Elizabeth's case, her lack of an heir could be read as a double rejection of both the uses of the female body and of a monarch's duty to ensure succession to care properly for the literal land. England and its parks, forests, and landscapes all converge on the body of the queen: traced back through this network of associations and allusions, the landscape that houses the serpent and lioness in Arden suggests early modern preoccupations with regal sexuality and its expiration date.

What might it mean, then, to figure the absence of a desired quality—maternity, active sexuality—through a topical allusion? Typically, topical allusions tend to represent an active or present quality and then allow consideration of its moral value. But in this scene, the landscape that contextualizes the rest of the allusion is largely an allusion to something that is no longer present: youth, health, virginity, and the queen's ability to rule. It is that loss, and more particularly the work of envisioning a new way to think about aging female sexuality, that seems to pose the greatest threat.

Landscape as allusion, context, pejorative, and critique: reading the dry forest as an allusion to Elizabeth's physical status and reign means considering a network of references, some of them contradictory. How can a dry bush sexualize Elizabeth while also expressing revulsion at her age? What are we to make of an aging woman at once grotesque and dignified? All these shades are present in the barren forest topos in the play. Reading the landscape as a topical allusion allows us to see the field of possible interpretations and—as discerning audience members—choose which fits our needs, whether to avoid sedition or to flirt with critique.

POLITICAL ANIMALS: SERPENTS AND DANGEROUS WOMEN

Setting the scene for Oliver's encounter with the animals in a landscape of potential critique allows us to read with more clarity the violence latent in the serpent and the lioness. In particular, this landscape of threatening, nonreproductive female sexuality points to the source of the violence that has complex, contradictory origins: thwarted male desire, fantasies of oral rape, and a fear of dominant women and the consequences of that dominance for patriarchal social order. These male responses to female power, sexuality, and nonmaternal choices are common themes in the poetry of the “frustrated young men who peppered [Elizabeth's] court,” to use Kate Maltby's phrase.28 These themes find some of their clearest expression in the poetry of one of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Spenser, whose pastoral cycle The Shepheardes Calender (1579) mixes encomiastic and critical images of Elizabeth with abandon, inviting audiences to see her many facets. Understanding The Shepheardes Calender as a potential part of the network of allusions that As You Like It invokes demonstrates how a text such as Spenser's or Shakespeare's uses networks of contradictory topical allusions to work through political and psychic issues: in this case, the Virgin Queen's sexuality, authority, and refusal to perform normative reproduction.

In As You Like It, Shakespeare's reworking of Lodge's text implies darker meanings in addition to hopeful ones, and the choice of animals allows the scene to be read for such contradictory interpretations. Together, Shakespeare's lioness and serpent suggest another well-known pairing of those animals: the lion and dragon on Elizabeth's coat of arms.29 This glancing allusion to Elizabeth's coat of arms establishes echoes between the animals in Arden and the potentially defamatory topical allusion to the queen, thereby opening the door to political interpretations that imply criticism of Elizabeth but cannot be easily deemed slanderous by viewers or censors.30

Scholars who have considered the serpent and lioness in the Forest of Arden tend to read these figures primarily through psychoanalytic or religious lenses, overlooking possible connections to Elizabeth and the ways the animal imagery raises the specter of monstrous femininity. Louis A. Montrose, for example, notes that the animals in Arden may be read as allegories for the brothers' reconciliation and Orlando's “act of self-mastery and purgation.”31 Editors, when glossing the scene, reinforce this reading of the animals. In the Oxford edition of As You Like It, Alan Brissenden glosses this scene as offering a set of “Christian symbols for the evil sin from which the loving action of Orlando rescues Oliver,” with the Edenic connotations of the serpent contrasting with the lion's connotation of strength or with the heavenly utopia.32 Dusinberre's Arden edition glosses the snake as either an Egyptian symbol of wisdom or a Judaic symbol of evil, and glosses the lion much as the Oxford does: as a biblical symbol of power and royalty; together, snake and lion “give Orlando the status of romance hero and Christian knight.”33 Fitter departs from religious or moralistic readings of the animals in his analysis, instead reiterating his claim that the scene adds to the fabular tone of the brothers' reconciliation and subsequent mass wedding.34 The animals may be symbols, but they also function as crucial nonanthropocentric figures in a network that advances political critique of an aged Elizabeth.

Act IV, scene iii first connects the female serpent to the female queen and then uses the animal's qualities to raise the threat of aggressive femininity and sexual dominance. The serpent begins the scene on top of Oliver: “About his neck / A green and gilded snake had wreathed itself, / Who with her head, nimble in threats, approached / The opening of his mouth” (IV.iii.105–8). The dragon or serpent—they were drawn similarly—on Elizabeth's coat of arms also appeared in several contemporary portraits of her. The Hardwick portrait features a serpent among the menagerie on Elizabeth's skirt, and Rob Content reads its presence among the birds and flora as signifying the complete power Elizabeth claimed to possess to “overwhelm any challenge to her author-ity.”35 The Rainbow portrait (ca. 1600) features a bejeweled— “green and gilded,” to use Oliver's words—serpent prominently on Elizabeth's left sleeve and uses it to suggest the queen's power and discernment. Snakes were commonly interpreted as serpents of wisdom, and when appropriated by royalty, they symbolized everything from “prudence, wisdom, and perpetual vigilance on the part of the sovereign” to “the ever-present physical realities of earthly existence,” according to Daniel Fischlin.36 A darker shadow of the serpent of wisdom, however, was the nefarious Edenic serpent. Although the Edenic serpent was male, leading a credulous woman astray, the association serves primarily as a reminder of female susceptibility to temptation—and thus as an argument against female rule, an argument that was based on Eve's disobedience, her often alleged responsibility for the origin of corruption, and her label as the first exemplar of the weaker sex. Elizabeth and those portraying her studiously tried to avoid this particular allusion, but the association remains present and lends to the symbol of the serpent an air of danger and deception intensified by its behavior in Shakespeare's scene.

Shakespeare's addition of the serpent to his source suggests a desire to make the serpent signify. Adding another threatening animal to a scene that already contains one, and choosing to make it female, is an unconventional choice that deliberately constructs female power as a threat. Her danger here appears to be primarily that of sexual penetration and improper male/female power relations. The snake, as Valerie Traub notes, “almost penetrates the vulnerable opening of Oliver's mouth,” nearly mastering him—al-though not, as Richard Rambuss argues, necessarily effeminizing him through penetration.37 The ways in which As You Like It plays with gender, social, and erotic boundaries and hierarchies have already been well analyzed, but here is one instance, neglected by critics, wherein disruption in the sexual hierarchy is neither productive nor restorative. The serpent threatening oral penetration suggests the erotic dynamics of Elizabeth's Court, where the queen was both the object of desire and eternally unattainable because of her position as ruler, which as a result demoted her courtiers to symbolically effeminized roles, frustrating their desires and patriarchal control.38

Throughout Shakespeare's scene, the serpent figures the frustratingly provocative actions of the queen: while she threatens Oliver with penetration, she also hesitates or dallies: “nimble in threats, [she] approached / The opening of his mouth” before finally vanishing at the sight of Orlando (IV.iii.107–8). The serpent suspends her consummation, behavior that echoes Elizabeth's delayed and deflected status as virgin or not, but Shakespeare's serpent retreats from the conquering male, whereas Elizabeth flatly refused to succumb to any man's power. Her virginity signaled, for much of her life, perpetual desirability yet eternally deferred fulfillment for her potential suitors. She dallied with courtiers and engaged in courtly flirtations long after it became apparent that she would never marry, resulting in more than one frustrated lover.39 The image of the queen that emerges here is of a rapacious sexual predator, consuming the men around her—an image at odds with the portrait she painted of herself as Diana, eternal virgin.

As You Like It incorporates these inverted sexual dynamics not only into Oliver's scene but also into the subplot of Silvius and Phoebe, thus allowing the shepherd's plot to comment on courtly sexual hierarchies. Just a few lines before the snake and lioness appear in act IV, scene iii, another snake foreshadows the serpentine penetration Oliver experiences. When Rosalind denounces the pining shepherd Silvius for allowing his love for Phoebe to make him submissive and deferential to her, she asks, “Wilt thou love such a woman? What, to make thee an instrument and play false strains upon thee? Not to be endured! Well, go your way to her, for I see love hath made thee a tame snake” (IV.iii.66–9).40 The phallic “tame snake” and the scorn in Rosalind's epithet suggests to viewers or readers that when a male character performs his desire immoderately, his thrall to women emasculates him. The inverse hierarchy in Silvius and Phoebe's relationship resembles Elizabethan Court hierarchies: subservient males pining after an unattainable, often scornful, female object—instruments for the false strains of performative, unfulfilled love to be played upon. However, this scene, like the others I discuss, reminds the reader or viewer that no single symbol has a univocal significance and each requires a careful teasing out of the puzzle pieces of a topical narrative in which a single piece may have several contradictory functions. Although Phoebe's haughtiness toward Silvius at first places her in a queenly position, her love for the unattainable Rosalind also puts her in the role of Elizabeth's courtiers. The “tame snake” here conjures up the simultaneous images of the woman doing the taming and the men being tamed and makes Phoebe the source of those anxieties.

Phoebe's name—an alternate for Diana—and profession further expand the capacity of the allusions to Elizabeth by recalling a series of images of Elizabeth in Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender that once again raise the specter of dangerous female power while praising the queen. Understanding how topical allusions work in these poems brings those same mechanisms in As You Like It into sharper focus, as Spenser's allusions draw on similar references and deal with corresponding political anxieties. Crafting a poem for each month of the year, Spenser wraps his praise of the queen in pastoral imagery—using shepherds and shepherdesses to express images of youth and virginity as well as symbols of Elizabeth's own self-fashioning—to craft an encomiastic portrait of “Elisa, Queene of shepheardes all” with faintly damning undertones.41 In addition to figuring Elizabeth as shepherdess prime, the eclogue compares her to the moon goddesses Phoebe and Cynthia, images that the queen herself appropriated for their relation to Diana, the chaste and powerful goddess. In Spenser's fourth poem, the “Aprill” eclogue, encomiastic references to Elizabeth abound—the “Ermines” of chastity and “the Redde rose medled with the White” make an appearance, and Spenser's gloss on Phoebe draws the moon goddess Diana into the constellation of images in the poem.42 On the surface, the April eclogue serves as yet another relatively benign pastoral image of Elizabeth, one that reinforces her own cadre of approved representational symbols. A handful of scholars have observed the link between Elizabeth, the pastoral tradition, and Spenser's eclogue, but none have examined its contents in further detail. Yet doing so reveals darker and more critical figurations of the queen that consider the political consequences of an extreme emphasis on chastity.43

Halfway through the April eclogue, Spenser turns to a surprising comparison for Elisa: a contest over reproductive capability ending in murder. As Spenser tells it, Niobe “scorned [Latona, the mother of Phoebus], in respect of the noble fruict of her wombe, namely her seuen sonnes, and so many daughters.”44 Latona, angry at being shamed for her few children, commands them to murder Niobe's children. Spenser, through the mouth of the shepherd-poet Hobbinoll, both makes and does not make this allusion by using the rhetorical device occultatio, which allows him to insist “But I will not match her with Latonaes seede, / Such follie great sorow to Niobe did breede” before proceeding to tell her story.45 For a poem “purposely intended to the honor and prayse of our most gracious souereigne, Queene Elizabeth,” the association with bad mothers and maternal inadequacy raises doubts about Elizabeth's own self-styling as mother of her country.46 The reference to a story about competitive fertility also functions as a slippery insult, one that cloaks its potential to critique the barren queen within the plausible deniability of commonplace references to classical myth. Marcus notes that Elizabeth's role of virgin mother to her subjects was used “throughout her reign, but particularly when the matter of the succession reared its ugly head.”47 An allusion to Niobe and Latona in a time of increased anxiety about Elizabeth's successor triggers the fear that perhaps the sovereign mother may be a Latona to the nation, who ruins a productive society with her reproductive insufficiencies. Here, the pastoral genre and rhetorical occlusion protect the politically charged poetry from charges of slander. The pastoral, writes Dusinberre, is an excellent way “of saying one's dangerous piece with relative safety.”48 The potential critique within the story of Latona and Niobe, as well as in the references to spring throughout and the epithet for Elisa, “flowre of Virgins,” may have amused readers aware of Elizabeth's age.49 However, the indeterminate likeness, or unlikeness, of the images to Elizabeth ensured Spenser's safety from punishment just as they invite audiences into as much speculation as they liked.

The social dynamics within the April eclogue provide further context to the landscape of allusions to Elizabeth in The Shep-heardes Calender, linking the pastoral eclogue to As You Like It's shepherd plot. This network of relationships binds together Elizabeth, Rosalind, and the courtly sexual hierarchies that subjugate male poets to powerful women. Although the shepherd Hobbi-noll is the primary speaker, most of the eclogue is actually the young shepherd Colin's composition. Colin finds himself unable to sing, however, because he has fallen in love with a shepherdess who scorns his love and has therefore tamed him. The maid responsible for Colin's poetic impotence and the cause of ruptured homosocial bonds is none other than the “fayre Rosalind,” whom Spenser later tells his readers “is a Gentle woman of no meane house.”50 Critics generally agree that aspects of Rosalind, queen of Shakespeare's strong female characters, “can be read as oblique glances at the cultural presence of Queen Elizabeth I.”51 The Shepheardes Calender portrays its Rosalind as a troubling and destructive presence. Colin has fallen in love above his status and as a result loses his powers of speech and patriarchy: Colin breaks his pipe and rejects the society of male shepherds. His situation mirrors the sexual dynamics of Elizabeth's Court, drawing parallels between Rosalind and Elizabeth and reaffirming the idea that powerful women disrupt the proper workings of society and gender hierarchies.

The Shepheardes Calender circulated widely until well past Elizabeth's death, suggesting that early modern audiences would have been able to make the connection between As You Like It's Phoebe and Rosalind and Spenser's Rosalind and “Queene of shepheardes all.”52 Both the serpent in As You Like It and the allusions in The Shepheardes Calender explore anxieties that women such as Phoebe, the Rosalinds, and Elizabeth have power that endangers established male social bonds and threatens the propagation of pastoral and poetic culture. These slippery, always-potential-but-never-explicit interpretive possibilities in Spenser's eclogue both demonstrate the possibilities of reading a scene topically and reveal the limitations of a critical apparatus of allusion. If we read As You Like It as part of a pastoral network, then Shakespeare's Phoebe becomes another figure for Elizabeth and draws Spenser's comparison of Elizabeth to barren women into the set of allusions circulating within the play. But we could just as easily take the eclogue and the animals in Arden at face value: as classical or Christian references in a harmless or encomiastic work. Any number of interpretive possibilities in between these two extremes is also possible, and it is precisely the ambiguous and intangible nature of the allusions that enables such a complex range of readings.

MONARCH OF THE FOREST (OF ARDEN)

Closely connected to anxieties about Elizabeth's sexuality and her aging body with its disruptive threat were fears about her failure, and later refusal, to name the heir she could no longer give birth to. Elizabeth's body had, as the dry forest reminds us, become barren, and this physical reality threatened the political stability imparted by patriarchal succession. The lioness that lies in wait for Oliver can be read as another animal allusion to Elizabeth, one that mobilizes concerns about the succession crisis and primogeniture in the face of the nonreproductive female body. Lying in the decaying forest, Oliver encounters

A lioness, with udders all drawn dry

Lay couching, head on ground, with catlike watch When that the sleeping man should stir. For 'tis The royal disposition of that beast

To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead.

(IV.iii.112–6)

Lions' place at the top of the animal hierarchy raises the possibility that the lioness's royal disposition may come from an association with a specific monarch. As a symbol for power, the lion was featured in many monarchs' iconography, including on Elizabeth's coat of arms.53 However, tyrants were also associated with big cats, as Shannon writes: the tyrant is, as John Ponet puts it, a “fearse Lion … publique enimy, and a bloody murtherer.”54 Furthermore, a serpent and lioness that prey on humans represent beasts out of the natural order of things and make it likely that these animals out of place were meant to be read as allegories for human behavior. Elizabeth made use of the regal associations of the lion and was reportedly fond of comparing herself to her father by saying “Although I may not be a lioness … I am a lion's cub, and inherit many of his qualities.”55 Here, she constructs the monarchical succession as a male/male relationship. Shakespeare alters his source to feminize an image that can be both powerful and dan-gerous—or only one of these, depending on the inclination of the viewer. Editions of the play tend to read lionesses as royal symbols or Christian allegories, acknowledging the animals' resonance with existing representational strategies. However, an animal studies approach goes beyond treating these animals as tools for human use or mere symbols. Such an approach considers and welcomes the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in using animals to represent humans. The lioness, then, can be simultaneously an explicit monarchal symbol, an image of a tyrant, and a commentary on the dangers of nonreproductive femininity. What is most threatening and monstrous about the lioness in Arden seems to be her reproductive status and its political connotations. With her “udders all drawn dry,” the lioness is simultaneously barren and hungry. This short phrase both signals her age and calls attention to her lack of the natural and ideal female job, procreation and raising of children. This particular royal beast is childless and unable to care for children, as her body cannot suckle; the description once again combines the discourses of sexuality, the aging female body, and prescribed social hierarchies and roles and associates them with recognizable images of Elizabeth.

But the lioness's “udders all drawn dry” also suggests that she has previously given birth and breastfed. An innocuous reading of this scene figures Elizabeth as metaphorical mother of her country, as she styled herself on many occasions, and construes her barrenness at this point in her life as the result of four decades of maternal devotion to her country.56 But set within a landscape that figures dry—read: aging—female sexuality as a threat to male power, the lioness's commentary on the terrors of maternal power becomes clear. Part of the fascination with Elizabeth's virgin status was the possibility that she might not be one, and no one would know. Henry Hawkins's insinuation had Elizabeth delivering several children by Robert Dudley, while other rumors were still less flattering and more monstrous: the most vicious suggested that she burned several illegitimate children just after giving birth to them.57 Whether virgin or mother, Elizabeth's sexuality extended beyond the reach of male control, and therein lay the fear. Her refusal or inability to perform proper womanhood reflected this failure onto her political role as well: her physical decline was read as a parallel for the country's decline and her unfitness for the position of monarch. The lioness encodes a number of possible references to Elizabeth, not only centering on the threat she posed to the establishment and continuance of the monarchy and the health of the country, but also reaffirming fears about the danger of her nonreproductive, phallic femininity.

BEYOND ANTHROPOCENTRIC TOPICAL ALLUSIONS

The question at the end of my analysis is less “would Elizabeth have recognized the lioness and serpent as mirrors for herself?” than “what are the possible effects of that topicality for readers then and now?” As You Like It is by no means empty of political commentary, as has already been well documented. Wilson, writing about the enclosure riots and famine of the period, suggests that Shakespeare knew he was writing potential treason: “Performed in the season of the silencing of satire in 1599 … this is a text apprehensive that it is playing symbolically with fire.”58 The act IV fable, however, seems to be of a different character than the critiques mobilized by Arden, the Duke Senior's men, or contentious younger sons. Smaller in scope and easily passed over as simply a remnant of Lodge's romance, the lioness and serpent could just as easily be something as nothing—and therein lies precisely their power. As Marcus concludes, when reading topical allusions in this play, “[w]hat needs to be emphasized … is their half-formed, equivocal nature … [since they] do not add up to a similarly uniform statement.”59 In a culture that stringently policed sedition and representations of the queen, Shakespeare's employment of a network of landscape and animal allusions allows a small scene to engender a variety of thoughts in audience members' minds. The mirrors the play holds up never “add up” to a portrait directly correlated to the queen, and the closer one looks at them, the faster they slither away. Instead, by incorporating a number of references that early modern audiences would likely have recognized, the play invites its audience to speculate about current events and flirt with treasonous readings. Early modern audiences and contemporary readers follow the play's title and are invited to recognize as much or as little sedition as we like.

What lends the act IV allusion both potency and deniability is its heavy reliance on the agency of the viewer. Early modern viewers, trained to read evidence on the stage, as Lorna Hutson argues, could assign the lioness and the serpent as much or as little relevance as they wished. And the early moderns' “passion for political-lock picking,” writes Marcus of theatrical topical allusions, makes the method particularly suited to considering critical representations of Elizabeth.60 This ambivalence makes definitive statements about the function and reception of this particular allusion difficult even as it widens the range of interpretations latent in the play.

An expanded definition of topical allusion that extends to voices of the landscape and of animals, such as I have proposed above, widens the possibilities for vehicles of encomium and critique and highlights the complex relationships among actions, words, and objects that allowed early modern playwrights to work within and around systems of censorship. My approach animates the concept of topos: as an allusion to Elizabeth, the Forest of Arden and its inhabitants become and embody topos. Unlike the snake and lioness, which represent figures of Elizabeth, the barren forest alludes to her absence, and this type of allusion proposes intriguing possibilities for our reading practice. What, if anything, distinguishes an allusion to an absence from an allusion to a presence, and what is the effect on the resulting critique? How might landscapes and animal communities of topical allusions be used for political critique, and what can be said through the land or through an animal that might not be possible through characterological representations? An animated topos reminds us that in a theater that runs on image and representation, we must look beyond anthropocentric meanings. What else becomes thinkable in other texts, beyond Shakespeare and beyond plays even, when we allow our minds to wander through nonhuman allusive possibilities? What about static or aural topical allusions—could props or the soundscape of a play engage similar critical spectatorship in audiences? When it comes to Elizabethan political critique and topical allusion, there may, after all, be tongues in the trees.

NOTES

I am grateful to Margaret Ferguson and Frances Dolan for their careful readings and constructive feedback on early and late drafts of this article. I would also like to thank Lee Emrich, Elizabeth Crachiolo, and Dyani Johns Taff for their insightful comments on this piece.

1 Travis M. Andrews, “Trump-like ‘Julius Caesar' Assassinated in New York Play. Delta, Bank of America Pull Funding,” Washington Post, 12 June 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/ wp/2017/06/12/trump-like-julius-caesar-assassinated-in-new-york-play-delta-bank-of-america-pull-funding/.

2 Andrews.

3 See Rebecca Mead, “In Defense of the Trumpian Julius Caesar,” New Yorker, 12 June 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-com-ment/in-defense-of-the-trumpian-julius-caesar.

4 Debora Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in Tudor-Stuart England (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), p. 2.

5 Lynda E. Boose argues that the content of the banned works signaled a new type of sexually and politically aggressive critique (see “The 1599 Bishops' Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualization of the Jacobean Stage,” in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Richard Burt and John Michael Archer [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994], pp. 185–200).

6 See Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility, p. 73. Even As You Like It was stayed before its licensing. Michael Hattaway finds that the entry in the Stationers' Register gives no clue as to the cause of the stay. The record is found “anomalously on a flyleaf of the Register and lacking a record of payment … It is uncertain whether this designates a desire to prevent surreptitious publication by establishing a right to the text … or whether the phrase means that the license lacked ecclesiastical authorization” (“Dating As You Like It, Epilogues and Prayers, and the Problems of ‘As the Dial Hand Tells O'er,'” SQ 60, 2 [Summer 2009]: 154–67, 155n4).

7 See Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: Univ. of Wiscon

sin Press, 1984); Janet Clare, “Censorship of English Renaissance Drama: Negotiating the Boundaries,” AnglisticaP 3, 2 (December 2006): 11–25; and Shuger, “‘Paper Bullets': Texts, Lies, and Censorship in Early Modern England,” in Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance, ed. Dennis Kezar (Notre Dame IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 163–96.

8 “An Acte against Sedicious Wordes and Rumors Uttered againste the Queenes Moste Excellent Majestie,” 1581, 23 Eliz., c. 2, in vol. 4, pt. 1 of The Statutes of the Realm, 9 vols. (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1819), pp. 659–61, 659, qtd. in Shuger, Censorship and Cultural Sensibility, p. 74.

9 I borrow Richard Dutton's definition of analogical reading and note its dependence on Leah S. Marcus's analogical reading of Elizabethan allusions (see Dutton, Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern England [New York: Palgrave, 2000], p. xi).

10 See Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988).

11 For more on representations of Elizabeth inspired by Marcus's work, see Hannah Betts, “‘The Image of This Queene so Quaynt': The Pornographic Blazon, 1588–1603,” in Dissing Elizabeth: Negative Representations of Glori-ana, ed. Julia M. Walker (Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 153–84; Rob Content, “Fair is Fowle: Interpreting Anti-Elizabethan Composite Portraiture,” in Dissing Elizabeth, pp. 229–51; Katherine Eggert, Showing Like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2009); M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997); Carole Levin, “‘We Shall Never Have a Merry World While the Queene Lyveth': Gender, Monarchy, and the Power of Seditious Words,” in Dissing Elizabeth, pp. 77–95; Louis A. Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2006); Montrose, “Idols of the Queen: Policy, Gender, and the Picturing of Elizabeth I,” Representations 68 (Autumn 1999): 108–61; Montrose, “‘Shaping Fantasies': Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” in Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1945–2000, ed. Russ McDonald (Malden MA: Blackwell, 2011), pp. 481–510; and Frances Teague, “Queen Elizabeth in Her Speeches,” in Gloriana's Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 63–78.

12 Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, p. 53.

13 Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, pp. 101–2.

14 Walker, “Introduction: The Dark Side of the Cult of Elizabeth,” in Dissing Elizabeth, pp. 1–6, 6.

15 Hackett, p. 5.

16 Montrose's reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595) sees in Titania's humiliation a dream of the return of sexual and political power to men, away from female rule (See “‘Shaping Fantasies,'” p. 485). 1 Henry VI's Joan La Pucelle serves for Marcus as a topical allusion to Elizabeth's appearance at Tilbury as an androgynous political figure (see Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, p. 53). See also Marie Axton, The Queen's Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Swift Printers, 1977); and Frances A.

Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975).

17 Marcus recently discussed one aspect of the animal/human connection in As You Like It through the proto- and anticolonialist posturing of Jaques, who at times positions himself as a colonialist over—or as a mouthpiece for—the deer of Arden (see “Anti-Conquest and As You Like It,” ShakespeareS 42 [2014]: 170–95).

18 See Juliet Dusinberre, introduction to As You Like It, by Shakespeare, ed. Dusinberre, Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), pp. 1–142. See also James Shapiro, “[The Play in 1599],” in As You Like It: Authoritative Text, Sources and Contexts, Criticism, by Shakespeare, ed. Marcus, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2012), pp. 361–9; Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother' in As You Like It,” in As You Like It, ed. Marcus, pp. 281–313; Richard Wilson, “‘Like the Old Robin Hood': As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots,” in As You Like It, ed. Marcus, pp. 314–36; and Chris Fitter, Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 174–244.

19 Tobias Menely, “Sovereign Violence and the Figure of the Animal, from Leviathan to Windsor-Forest,” BJECS 33, 4 (December 2010): 567–82, 570.

20 Menely, “Sovereign Violence,” p. 570.

21 Laurie Shannon, The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013), p. 81. See also Marcus, “Anti-Conquest and As You Like It”; and Menely, The Animal Claim: Sensibility and the Creaturely Voice (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 91.

22 Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Marcus, II.i.23. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent references to As You Like It are from this Norton edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line number.

23 Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie, in The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, ed. Edmund W. Gosse, 4 vols. (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 1:1–66, 38.

24 Fitter, p. 231.

25 Clare, p. 12.

26 André Hurault, Sierre de Maisse, “A Private Audience with Elizabeth (December 18, 1597),” in Elizabeth I and Her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary, and Criticism, ed. Donald Stump and Susan M. Felch (New York: Norton, 2009), pp. 483–5, 484.

27 Betts, p. 158. Framing female genitalia as parks to be managed or idealized contributes to an ongoing early modern debate over the proper use of parkland. The Forest of Arden was already an overdetermined landscape and served as the central metaphor in debates about enclosure, land management, and political power. See also Victor Skipp, Crisis and Development: An Ecological Case Study of the Forest of Arden, 1570–1674 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 42–6.

28 Kate Maltby, “Why is Elizabeth I, the Most Powerful Woman in Our History, Always Depicted as a Grotesque?,” Guardian, 25 May 2015, http:// www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/25/armada-documenta-ry-ageing-woman-body-queen-elizabeth.

29 Dragons and serpents were often conflated in early modern England, as illustrated in Edward Topsell's 1608 anthology The History of Serpents: Or,

the Second Book of Living Creatures, wherein a wingless, legless version of a dragon resembles a nearby drawing of a viper (see The History of Serpents: Or, the Second Book of Living Creatures, in The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents, ed. J[ohn] R[owland] [London: E. Cotes, 1658], pp. 587–818, 701 and 799; EEBO Wing G624).

30 See Lorna Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), pp. 64–103.

31 Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother,'” p. 302.

32 Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden, Oxford World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2008), p. 203n109–15.

33 Dusinberre, p. 310n113.

34 See Fitter, p. 230.

35 Content, p. 246.

36 Daniel Fischlin, “Political Allegory, Absolutist Ideology, and the ‘Rainbow Portrait' of Queen Elizabeth I,” RQ 50, 1 (Spring 1997): 175–206, 202.

37 Valerie Traub, “The Homoerotics of As You Like It,” in As You Like It, ed. Marcus, pp. 380–7, 386. See also Richard Rambuss, “After Male Sex,” SAQ 106, 3 (Summer 2007): 567–8.

38 Valerie Billing argues that stature, in addition to being a marker of height, can also indicate relative social rank, as in the case of a male of lower social rank than his female partner (see “Female Spectators and the Erotics of the Diminutive in Epicoene and The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” RenD 42, 1 [Spring 2014]: 1–28, 4–6). For more on Elizabeth's relationship to her courtiers, see Stump and Felch, “Historical Background,” in Elizabeth I and Her Age, pp. 313–6.

39 See Betts, pp. 155–6.

40 Dusinberre asserts that “[t]he epithet prepares the ear for the ‘green and gilded snake' at 107” (p. 306n69).

41 Spenser, “Aprill,” in The Shepheardes Calender, Conteyning twelve Aeglogues proportionable to the twelve monethes (London: Printed by Hugh Singleton, 1579), 11v–6r; EEBO STC (2d edn.) 23089. See also Alison A. Chapman, “The Politics of Time in Edmund Spenser's English Calendar,” SEL 42, 1 (Winter 2002): 1–24, 11.

42 Spenser, 12v.

43 In her edition of As You Like It, Dusinberre notes the link between Elizabeth, the pastoral, and Spenser's “Aprill” eclogue, observing that Colin's love is named Rosalind, but she does not further examine the eclogue's figurations of Elizabeth (pp. 5–6).

44 Spenser, 15v.

45 Spenser, 13r. Betts defines occultatio as “emphasis by means of apparent avoidance” and notes its usage particularly in Spenser's description of Belphoebe's genitalia in The Faerie Queene (p. 161).

46 Spenser, 11v.

47 Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, p. 60.

48 Dusinberre, p. 103.

49 Spenser, 12v.

50 Spenser, 12r and 14v.

51 Peter Erickson, Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991), p. 24, qtd. in Hackett, p. 145.

52 EEBO lists editions of The Shepheardes Calender at regular intervals from 1611 until 1679.

53 See Katie Chenoweth, “The Beast, the Sovereign, and the Letter: Vernacular Posthumanism,” Symploke¯ 23, 1–2 (2015): 41–56; and Menely, “Sovereign Violence,” p. 568.

54 John Ponet, A Short Treatise of Politike Power (Strasbourg Germany: W. Köpfel, 1556), Giiir, qtd. in Shannon, p. 29.

55 Qtd. in Alison Weir, The Life of Elizabeth I (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 222.

56 See Tara L. Lyons, “Male Birth Fantasies and Maternal Monarchs: The Queen's Men and The Troublesome Raigne of King John,” in Locating the Queen's Men, 1583–1603: Material Practices and Conditions of Playing, ed. Helen Ostovich, Holger Schott Syme, and Andrew Griffin (Burlington VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 183–97, 195–6.

57 See Levin, “Royal Wanton and Whore,” in Elizabeth I and Her Age, pp. 816–38, 821–2.

58 Wilson, p. 329.

59 Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, p. 83.

60 Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, p. 98.