Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone
In As You Like It, Rosalind mentions Ireland twice in critiquing Orlando’s incessant overtures of love. These two references use England’s discomfort towards Ireland to emphasize the abstract quality of Orlando’s language that Rosalind sees as problematic.
The two passages compare Orlando to the beasts and magic men of Ireland as similarly abstract and, consequently, undesirable. This makes sense given England’s relationship with Ireland at the time. Although King Henry VII claimed Ireland for the throne of England in 1541, even by the turn of the century, England had not yet solidified its control over the entire region. Shakespeare likely wrote As You Like It in 1599—right in the middle of the Nine Years War, an uprising against English authority led by Hugh O’Neill, an Irish Lord. Because of England’s inability to fully control Ireland would have demonstrated uncertainty in England’s colonial control. Ireland, in the eyes of the colonial English society, remained a mysterious and thus dangerous place.
In Act V, Rosalind cries out against Orlando, who directs his love to the ‘non-present’ Rosalind:
Orlando: To her that is not here, nor doth not hear
Rosalind: Pray you no more of this; ‘tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon. (5.3.103-5)
Rosalind balks at Orlando’s attempt to love a woman, who (to him) is not present. She suggests that Orlando’s object of expressed passion is as unattainable or non-present as the wolf’s distant moon. The designation of the wolves as “Irish,” suggests that not only is the howling useless, but that it is also mysterious and thus barbaric.
Earlier in the play, Rosalind makes a more complex reference to Ireland. Finding the countless love poems that Orlando posts in the forest of Arden in Act III, Rosalind compares her situation to that of an “Irish rat”: “I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras’ time that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember” (3.2.172-4). This passage is somewhat difficult because it makes two separate allusions. The basic jist of it is that Rosalind claims to have been a rat in a previous life who underwent torture and execution by Irish sorcerers. English folklore suggested that Irish sorcerers could kill both animals and humans by reciting magical rhymes upon them, with the rat as their favorite victim. The reference to Pythagoras is an allusion to Pythagoras’ theory of metempsychosis, or, the transmigration of the soul from animal to animal. But how do these two references work together? Couldn’t Rosalind have just said that Orlando makes her feel like an Irish rat, rather than claiming to have actually been one in a previous life?
The connection between Irish druids and metempsychosis has historical foundation in Julius Caesar’s de Bello Gallico:
“They [the druids] wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valor, the fear of death being disregarded.” (http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.6.6.html)
The same Irish sorcerers that could ‘rhyme a rat to death’ also believed in the reincarnation and transmigration of the soul. Thus, by saying that she actually was a rat in a previous life, Rosalind puts herself under the the magic of Ireland, suggesting a metaphorical invasion of Irish culture into English courtly society, with all the underlying tensions and anxieties that that implies.
Rosalind references Ireland to critique the abstract quality of Orlando’s wooing because she believes that love should remain founded in the concrete. That she uses Irish animals to describe what is fundamentally difficult to understand reveals the underlying anxiety that England had at the time at their lack of physical control over Irish land. This makes sense given the play’s promotion of a controlled pastoral society. The idealized relationship of the shepherd to his pasture is one of mutual dependence, but ultimate control (just as England is to its colonies). Ireland, however, exists outside the realm of England’s control, and thus signifies an undesirable relationship between man and beast. In this way, Ireland is used to negatively critique the overly intangible quality of Orlando’s conception of love.
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. The Complete Pelican Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Orgel and A.R. Braunmuller. London: Penguin Books, 2002. 407-437. Print.
Caesar, Julius. “Book VI.” The Gallic Wars. The Internet Classics Archive. The Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar. Web. 28 July 2015. <http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.6.6.html>.