Where are the Woods In As You Like It?

Abstract

AN OLD FAMILIAR OPINION HOLDS THAT Forest of Arden scenes in As You Like It represent a forest in our present-day sense of an extensive, thickly-wooded region. In nineteenth century it inspired stage scenery depicting a leaf-smothered and we still see productions that insist on stage trees, logs, or bushes from Act II to end of play. ' background of action, wrote A. W. Schlegel, is the shady dark-green landscape, and William Hazlitt saw characters happily Within sequestered and romantic glades of Forest of Arden. Hartley Coleridge (1851) expanded romantic fancy to notion that Shakespeare . . . transports imagination to sunny glades and massy shadows of umbrageous Arden, while Edward Dowden (1875) explained that playwright himself sends his imagination into woods to find repose. In this century Oscar James Campbell (1966) said that the play is not . . . set in a never-never land, but in an English woodland, where one might catch faint echoes of Robin Hood's horn and shouts of his Merry Men.2 Exaggerating sylvan settings in As You Like It has made it difficult for us to see play as it was seen by its Elizabethan audience. One of our basic problems is reflected in complaint of Arden editor: The play appears to drift from one part of forest to another part of forest for no particular