N an essay on As You Like It published in I940, James Smith argued that Celia's remark at end of first act, that Touchstone would go along o'er wide with her,1 might have had importance in an earlier version, but in that which has survived Shakespeare is no more concerned with 1@ Y pi how characters arrive in Arden-whether under Touchstone's convoy or not-than how they are extricated from it.2 More recently, J. L. Halio has clarified distinction between the timelessness of forest and time-ridden preoccupations of court and city in order to stress absolute distinction between two localities.8 Each of these studies, employing markedly different critical methods, lays an obsessive emphasis upon an obvious half-truth: As You Like It contains no mention of journey from Duke Frederick's court to Forest of Arden. Each exemplifies a common critical assumption that in As You Like It Shakespeare created a structure of contrast and juxtaposition in which a bare minimum of causal and sequential development is present. The most lucid presentation of this assumption is that advanced by Harold Jenkins in his analysis of play, but it is implicit in most other studies.4 Thus Harold Toliver's recent discussion of time in Shakespeare's plays, though disagreeing with Halio with respect to nature of time associated with Arden, takes for granted that this nonsequential contrast exists.5 I should like to argue that, to contrary, there is an explicit development in play from urban polity of Duke Frederick's court and Oliver's household to pastoral way of life in forest of Arden, and that this development is marked by determinable transitional states. It is not, as Smith made clear, a geographical progress, but rather a shift in attitudes toward characteristics of public world. The public world may, I think, be equated with polity, while world of Arden, if not precisely private, is condition of several private worlds which, freed from containment, find fulfillment there. Halio, demonstrated that characteristics of public world are predominantly temporal, but he failed to note that difference in attitude between polity and forest was marked by a real shift and not merely a leap. It