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Page 40 As a result, “our point is here that continental critics who have not seen the phenomenon or heard the birds singing through it, cannot understand this particular play” (Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson 1926:xi). Unsurprisingly, the German critics find themselves particularly disabled. In his “General Introduction,” Q had spoken scornfully of the “volume of laudation’’ surrounding Shakespeare, swelling and rising “ever with a German guttural increasing in self-assertion at the back of the uproar” (Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson 1921:xvi–xvii). In the case of As You Like It, The Germans especially are like the Wise Men of Gotham, “all at sea in a bowl”. They are sailing, in a bowl, on perilous seas of which they possess no chart. Fortunately for the mirth of Shakespeare’s countrymen they now and again cancel each other out. (Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson 1926:xi) Q then pillories passages from “the solemn Ulrici and the solemn Gervinus” (xi) side by side, inviting our derisive recognition that “neither one nor the other has a notion of what he is talking about” (xiii). Echoes of the war clearly inform such antics, but the pulse of Q’s involvement in the construction of “English” as an academic subject, thankfully free from Teutonic distractions, is also palpable. Arden’s “English” character thus takes on a slightly alarming double dimension as nationhood and academic subject merge. What need have we of foreign critics when, in this play, or syllabus, Shakespeare “has been at pains to provide us with a couple of his own moralists and philosophisers” much better suited to the task (Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson 1926:xiii)? The names of these English Moralists are of course Jacques and Touchstone. As an “amused critic” (xiv), Jacques is far more trenchant and incisive than any German pedant or “polite French” poseur might be, and Touchstone’s level-headedness and common sense, his “loyalty and complete honesty” (xv) are all the “correctives or sedatives” (xvii) that a sober-minded English student might require. These, it seems, are the veritable Hookers and Hobbes of the play. To “philosophise” it further would be “absurd” (xvii) or (same thing) foreign, for, in the end, its mystery lies beyond the reach of criticism: “its pastoral guise is the guise of a feeling that goes deeper into mortal concern than criticism can easily penetrate” (xvii). This can only be the realm of “common sense” and one can almost hear the exhausted “my God” that would confirm it. |
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