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Page 39 After a perfunctory discussion of sources, he moves rapidly to a consideration of the play’s central focus, the very English Forest of Arden. The Englishness of the location, itself the source of Shakespeare’s “native wood-magic” (x) ensures that Arden is “entirely different from Lodge’s forest of Ardennes” (x) and Q’s enraptured account of the place seems to find in that a license for breathtaking forays into biography: This Arden, on the north bank of Avon, endeared to him by its very name (name of his mother), had been the haunt where he caught his first “native wood-notes wild,” as the path by the stream had been his, known to this day as the Lovers’ Walk. (Quiller-Couch and Dover Wilson 1926:x) The evocation of local habitation and name seems to incite the now familiar theme-park frothing: Time has softened down Stoneleigh-in-Arden to a stately park, with Avon streaming through; but the deer are there yet, and the ford that “Makes sweet music with the enamelled stones” over which the deer splash—bucks leading in single file, does following in a small cohort; and there are the gnarled oaks with antique roots twisting through the bank.… [W]ith no stretch of imagination, we can still see the crooks of Phebe and Silvius moving, beribboned… (x–xi) The position constructed for the reader is quite clear: “To put it shortly, he who knows Arden has looked into the heart of England and heard the birds sing in the green midmost of a moated island’’ (xi). Somewhat precariously (England’s insular status having always been more metaphorical than geographical) the First Folio text even begins to take on some of the characteristics of the “moated island” itself. Imbued with an essential Englishness, it remains, so far as foreigners are concerned, wholly sequestered: “Herein possibly lies the reason why, of all Shakespeare’s plays, As You Like It has never crossed the Channel, to be understood by Continent sanctioners, readers, critics” (xi). Of course, the play readily constructs for us its own Arden of manifest textuality: poems appear on trees, there are books in the running brooks. But Q’s metaphor smugly intensifies Shakespeare’s, presenting Arden as a kind of hermetic, English page, intelligible only to natives and impenetrable to lesser breeds without the Law. |
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