As a pastoral comedy, As You Like It features the Forest of Arden as a setting that fosters utopian values. While characters such as Duke Senior celebrate the culture of Arden, the behaviors of his men and the antics of Jacques and Touchstone call the utopian status of the forest into question. In his essay “As You Like It: The Thin Line Between Legitimate Utopia and Compensatory Vacation”, Farrar examines how Shakespeare dramatizes the problems facing the utopian imagination through the conflicts of each character’s attitude.
In his opening dialogue in the play, Duke Senior is enchanted by the forest as he delights in the absence of the court’s pretentious gaudiness and ritual observances. However, this egalitarianism is undermined whenever the followers address Duke Senior because they never cease addressing him as “my lord”. Furthermore, Duke Senior and the followers’ mockery of Jacques’ discontent display a lack of the harmony and unity associated with utopias.
In the case of Orlando, he desires to correct the injustice he suffers in Oliver’s care by making himself worthy of his family’s name. The desire to perceive an injustice and wish to correct it speaks volumes to the development of utopia. However, this perception of justice is heavily embroiled with the expectations of a particular class and rank. Still, the utopian appeal in Orlando is strong enough that Adam forsakes his service in Oliver’s house and surrenders his savings in order to follow Orlando into Arden.
While the forest is a space filled with beauty, it is also deceptive as characters such as Adam, Orlando, and Oliver are forced to confront hunger, fatigue, and dangerous animals. Despite this, the forest still retains utopian power. For instance, the cheeriness of the Duke’s court takes its cue from Arden’s verdant surroundings, and only an enchanted space like the forest could explain Hymen’s inexplicable arrival in Act V or Frederick’s sudden conversion to a religious life after entering the forest with an army intent on killing Duke Senior.
For Farrar, 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 or vacation as they return to the normal order from which they were exiled. However, his younger brother Frederick may show that the forest’s utopia can remain accessible if he maintains a spiritual hermitage in the woods, where he may enjoy more permanently what could not last for Duke Senior and his company.
Other problems regarding the play’s utopian status arise when accounting for the roles of Touchstone and Jacques. Considering how everyone else acclimates to the Arcadian culture, Touchstone and Jacques remain relatively aloof, which gives them the agency to criticize the behaviors of other characters. Throughout the play, while the shepherds and nobles live blithely in the forest, Touchstone tries to bring them 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 and showing how all people have a fair share in the world’s baseness.
In contrast, Jacques acts as the obnoxious dissenter who can never be fully satisfied with any social situation. Despite the unpleasantness of Jacques’s ornery personality, 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 that he longs to serve as a fool as he hopes to enact a utopian transformation in the world through the satiric derision of vice, thus obliterating the behaviors depressing him. In the end, while the play presents ideas that speak to anticipations of an ideal livelihood, Farrar also believes it tempers that anticipation with society’s realistic qualities.
Works Cited:
Farrar, Ryan. “As You Like It: The Thin Line Between Legitimate Utopia and Compensatory Vacation.” Utopian Studies 25.2 (2014): 359-83. JSTOR. Web. 29 July 2015.
Image:
Fleay, Frederick Gard. The Forest of Arden. 1889. The Land of Shakespeare, Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare Library. Folger Shakespeare Library. Web. 29 July 2015.