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Page 41

As if in final declaration of intent, the edition’s frontispiece offers a portrait, not of Shakespeare, but of Michael Drayton, “whose description of the Forest of Arden in Polyolbion XIII has many points of resemblance to Shakespeare’s Arden in this play” (Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson 1926:v). One is left at last with a peculiar sense that, for Q, the Forest of Arden in As You Like It finally and mysteriously merges with the vanished England of his youth, and of Liberalism’s Victorian heyday. It proved a durable and sustaining conceit. Writing, at the end of his long life, of memories of his home town of Fowey, he recalls a

run of remarkable summers and the general security of life in and around Queen Victoria’s first Jubilee to weave the spell within which we “fleeted the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world”: with tennis and cricket, impromptu dances and (best of all) water parties, supper picnics beside the river…

(Quiller-Couch 1944:90)

V Lore and order

If Q’s Arden stands as a kind of immemorial, sunlit Liberal Valhalla, a pre-1914 tennis-strewn, cricket-flecked and picnic-studded paradise, a notion of Free Trade appropriately prevails there whose principles guarantee even the play’s rather “huddled up” ending (Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson 1926:xvii). However, it fails effectively to conceal a large contradiction which this very stance appears to generate in the ‘‘New Shakespeare” edition. On the one hand, Q argues, although the concluding nuptials seem “wildly incongruous with the English Arden Shakespeare has evolved for us out of his young memories,” nevertheless “Arden, having room for all fancy beneath its oaks, has room for all reconciliations on its fringe, and Hymen, surely, makes a better sealer of vows than, say, Martext, discoverable in that land” (xviii). In short, Arden can absorb any and all such incongruities.

On the other hand, the notes to the text (largely the work of J.Dover Wilson?) prove less generous. Here the moated island seems to require a more vigorous defense, and the entry of Hymen and the subsequent masque (5.4.105–43) is dismissed as rudely intrusive. In fact, the scene’s wholesale removal is recommended:

There is no dramatic necessity for this masque-business; the appearance of Hymen is completely unexpected.… Hymen’s

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