Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance

3 As You Liken It: Simile in the Forest

Chapter 3 As You Liken It: Simile in the Forest God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likenes, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the foule of the heaven, and over the beastes, & over all the earth. —Genesis 1:26, Geneva Bible A Similitude is a likenesse when two thinges, or more then two, are so compared and resembled together, that they both in some one propertie seeme like. Oftentimes brute Beastes, and thinges that have no life, minister great matter in this behalfe. Therefore, those that delite to prove thinges by Similitudes, must learne to knowe the nature of divers beastes, of mettalles, of stones, and al such as have any vertue in them, and be applied to mans life. —Thomas Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique For why should I presume to prefer my conceit and imagination, in affirming that a thing is thus or thus in its own nature, because it seemeth to me to be so; before the conceit of other living creatures, who may as well think it to be otherwise in its own nature, because it appeareth otherwise to them than it doth to me? —Sir Walter Ralegh, “The Sceptic” In the four syllables of its title, As You Like It contains both the words used to signal simile, and places “like” as a barrier between “you” and “it.” From that title onward, this pastoral play is permeated with the idea of likeness, which is to say, imperfect identity—and the way that both “liking” and “likening ,” even in apparently benign forms, necessarily impose on their living objects . Shakespeare describes the chronic nostalgia for nature as a sentimental manifestation of Pyrrhonist anxieties, the suspicion that we can know things only as we liken them, never in or as themselves. As You Like It emerged from a culture I have depicted as infatuated with hopes of recovering some original and authentic reality. Elizabethan theology was inquiring about the primitive church and shattering iconic representations. Gardening manuals boasted of reproducing Eden: “Thus we approach the resemblance of Paradise.”1 Political pamphlets—including those of the great radical Gerrard Winstanley, who suggested that digging could extirpate Original Sin—contrasted recent enclosure controversies and urban dystopia with a lost organic community. The fact that the Royal Society, at the opposite end of the period’s political spectrum, would offer a similarly regressive idealism suggests how pervasive this nostalgia became in seventeenth-century England.2 As fears about the substitution of a primarily urban society for a primarily rural one blended into fears about the substitution of representations for reality— the enclosure-controversy of the self—pastoral drama was well situated to sample the blend. While philosophers wrestled with a resurgence of skepticism, philologists strove to recover urtexts, Baconian scientists sought a transparent descriptive rhetoric, and painters tested the limits of verisimilitude, poets were bemoaning their artistic belatedness, particularly in the rediscovered pastoral mode. If my argument conflates a variety of conflicting definitions of nature— as Eden, as fauna, as entropy, and as reality—my excuse is that Shakespeare’s play does too, and, in doing so, echoes the characteristic cries of a culture in the agony of a major epistemological transformation. King Lear will demonstrate how agonizing the shifting definitions of nature could actually become. The multiple and elaborate explorations of the polarity of art and nature in As You Like It are mapped analogically onto a polarity of the linguistically entangled human mind and the material objects which that mind can know only partially, only by the constraints of comparison—the vocabularies and categories of mind people use to carve the sensory feast into edible bites. As in Richard II, Hamlet, and The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s story of the Fall is always partly a story about the irreversible human fall into the mediations of selfconsciousness and language, whether in terms of ontogeny or phylogeny, childhood or evolution. The arc of the human experience of knowledge is, in this regard, the same as the Christian story of humanity’s exile from the Garden. The pastoral genre is stubbornly artificial, as if to acknowledge that our hunger for simplicity is actually a symptom of sophistication, a self-conscious desire at once expressed and prevented by language.3 We gaze lovingly at ponds, but so did Narcissus; and the gates of Eden are firmly closed. As You Like It begins with that originary exclusion: “As I remember, Adam, it...