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Page 45

version certainly indicates a number of the dangers implicit in the mirage of an uncomplicated, unified, and coherent Forest of Arden that awaits us somewhere beyond the reeds of the river Avon. Like the uncomplicated, unified, and coherent England for which it stands, this is at best a mere phantom, at worst a template of crude, Procrustean rigor. Constructed in the shadow of the events of 1914–18, perhaps more fervently embraced in the light of those signs of social discontent that climaxed in the General Strike of 1926, the year in which this edition of As You Like It appeared, it can claim, nevertheless, no higher status. Oddly, the date of its ultimate dispersal—such is the tenacity of dreams—remains a matter for conjecture.

Notes

1  

The terms “complaisance” and “acquiescence” are those of Mulhern. His account presents I.A.Richards, E.M.W.Tillyard, and of course F.R.Leavis as much more crucially formative elements in the establishment of Cambridge English. But it remains the case, however much this complicates the issue, that “English’’ was unlikely to have emerged at Cambridge in the form it took without the influence, approval, and persistent advocacy of the King Edward VII Professor. See, for instance, Quiller-Couch’s lecture “On a School of English,” delivered in Cambridge in October 1917, in his On the Art of Reading (1921:95–114). The account given by E.M.W.Tillyard in The Muse Unchained (1958:13 and 60–69) is of considerable interest here. Tillyard’s conclusion that Q “was essential to the group that founded the tripos, if only for negative reasons” (50) doesn’t wholly support the above argument, but the matter is obviously complicated and he is at pains to describe his own account as “one-sided” as well as “personal, hence limited” (Preface). Claiming, later, that Q “did not do much to give English Studies at Cambridge their future shape,” he also records his own “delight” at hearing him lecture on As You Like It, as well as his belief that the large audiences Q initially commanded were a considerable factor in the subject’s early success (65–70). Basil Willey refers with admiration to “the quality of the faith, the conviction, with which Cambridge English, thanks largely to Q’s evangelical zeal, began its pilgrimage” (1968:16). On Q’s wide-ranging influence on the subject, particularly on the importance of “background studies,” see Willey 1968:17–18. Willey concludes that “Q was a product of the last phase of England’s greatness—the era of Kipling and Elgar and Edward VII; he was intensely, and even sentimentally patriotic; unobtrusively but sincerely Christian; a passionate believer in liberal education, liberal politics, and the idea of the gentleman.… I can think of no better way of conveying the ethos of those early years of Cambridge English. At that time Qreally was its prophet, propagandist and spokesman; he provided it with a creed, he proclaimed its saving power, and he uttered what was latent in our own minds and thoughts” (20).

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