The Uses of Adversity

The Uses of Adversity

It has been useful to me to think of As You Like It and King Lear as versions of the same archetypal story belonging to human experience both before and after the plays. This is the story: in the instituted life of a society "things fall apart" because the people of power have grown selfish, cruel, and dishonest. The effect of this is centrifugal: the powerless and the disempowered are sent flying from their settled domestic lives into the wilderness or the world's wildness—the state of nature. Thus deprived of civil society and exposed to the harshness of the natural world and its weather, they suffer correction, and their suffering eventually leads to a restoration of civility and order.

The outline of this story is clearly apparent in As You Like It. In King Lear the story is subjected to nearly intolerable stresses, and yet the outline remains unbroken; it is the major source of the play's coherence and meaning. What I believe is the proper understanding of both plays depends on our ability to take seriously the assumptions of the archetypal story—how we answer the following questions: Do all human societies have in them the seeds of their failure? Are those seeds likely to be the selfishness and dishonesty of the dominant people? Does failure typically reduce the society, or persons in it, to some version of the state of nature? And is there something possibly instructive and restorative in this reduction?

For most readers nowadays these questions will be an unwelcome dose. We have read some history, and we do not doubt that other societies have failed, but we are not much inclined to credit the possible failure of our own, even though we are less and less able to deny the implications of our propensity to waste or to mechanical violence, or of our entire dependence on cheap petroleum. We have pretty much made a virtue of selfishness as the mainstay of our economy, and we have provided an abundance of good excuses for dishonesty. Most of us give no thought to the state of nature as the context of our lives, because we conventionally disbelieve in natural limits.

Another problem is that there is a considerable overlap between this archetypal story and the pastoral tradition. In the pastoral tradition, as Shakespeare was fully aware, there is a prominent strain of frivolity. What is frivolous is the sentimentalization of rural life, which is supposedly always pretty, pleasant, and free of care. The famous example is Christopher Marlowe's:

Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields . . .

To this Sir Walter Raleigh justly and just as famously replied:

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields
To wayward winter reckoning yields . . .

What neither poet acknowledged is the possibility of a real need, as Robert Frost put it, "of being versed in country things."

Shakespeare knew, of course, the pastoral conventions represented by Marlowe's poem. But he was a countryman, and he knew the truth of Raleigh's admonition; he knew also the need of being versed in country things. He knew that "a true laborer" might have something to say to a courtier that the courtier might need to hear—because, for one reason, the courtier lives by eating country things.

Another obstacle between modern readers and the archetypal story underlying these plays is our popular, and uncritical, egalitarianism. To us, the order of the natural world is horizontal, and so, we would like to think, is the order of human society: Any creature is as important as any other; any citizen is as important as any other.

But to Shakespeare the order of the world, as of human society, is vertical, hierarchical. The order of created things descends in a Chain of Being from God down to the simplest organisms. In human society, order descends downward from the monarch...