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Page 34

Arden. We know that Arden—a lovely word in itself—was endeared to Shakespeare by scores of boyish memories; Arden was his mother’s maiden name. I think it arguable of the greatest creative artists that, however they learn and improve, they are always trading on the stored memories of childhood. I am sure that, as Shakespeare turned the pages of Lodge’s Rosalynde—as sure as if my ears heard him—he cried to himself, “Arden? This made to happen in a Forest of Arden, in France? But I have wandered in a Forest of Arden ten times lovelier; and, translated thither, ten times lovelier shall be the tale!” …

…Now, in Stoneleigh Deer Park, in Arden, I saw the whole thing, as though Corin’s crook moved above the ferns and Orlando’s ballads fluttered on the boles. There was the very oak beneath which Jacques moralised on the deer—a monster oak, thirty-nine feet around (for I measured it) —not far above the ford across which the herd had splashed, its “antique roots” writhing over the red sandstone rock down to the water’s brim. And I saw the whole thing for what the four important Acts of it really are—not as a drama, but as a dream, or rather a dreamy delicious fantasy, and especially a fantasy in colour.

(Quiller-Couch 1918:122–24)

The first casualty of this disturbing encounter is obviously its reporter’s style. The sub-romantic fruitiness, those awkward “very’s” and “actually’s,” the gauche suburban pastoralism of “filmy’’ coppices, “brawling” rivers, and the dire explanatory specters of mothers and childhood speak ominously of a naive, almost provincial sensibility and the impact upon it of a sudden, breathless arrival at the center of things. The “monster” oak, primly measured, the too-pat materialization of the herd of deer, the nudging reference to Jacques, may offer to defend the moralizing as somehow appropriate to such a splashy, orgasmic confrontation with the fons et origo of a whole culture. But we could be excused for thinking that the resultant “dreamy delicious fantasy” smacks more of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm than of As You Like It. It is hardly what one might expect from the King Edward VII Professor of English at the University of Cambridge.

II ’A babbled of green fields

Yet Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944), appointed to that position in 1912, was noted as much for his mellifluous style as for his

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