Locating the Visual in As You Like It

The forest of arden seems in one's memory to dominate As You Like It. Yet the first picture of Arden is given by Charles the wrestler only as distant hearsay. Although one might expect a pastoral play to be replete with visual staging and visual effects (as in the sheepshearing celebration in The Winter's Tale), in As You Like It whatever "pastoral" might be is hedged round and inadequate from the outset. The most vivid pictures come in words, words already set forth, both by another speaker and by convention. The forest, not visual, is emblem: "They say he is already in the Forest of Arden. . . . They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world" (1.1.114, 116-19). ¹

In this essay I focus on the relation between the verbal and visual in As You Like It and how they vie for contested dominance, disrupting presentation of both character and scene. Specifically I focus on Rosalind and on the pastoral world, arguing that Shakespeare purposefully draws attention to the ways in which the one aspect of theater plays against the other such that what is presented is layered and qualified. Shakespeare thus underscores the artificial and unrepresentable nature of what is being represented, emphasizing the impossibility of that which seems theatrically most obvious (what one sees) and the vividness of that which one cannot see. As in the sonnets in which the couplets ask us to embrace the hyberbolic statement that the young man, having been described as ravaged by time, will live forever in these poems, so this play asks that we be both drawn into the reality of the stage's world and yet distanced from it, that we embrace both potency and failure. Now you see it, now you don't. As You Like It repeatedly destabilizes what we have seen and forces us to experience theater in the making. Any theatrical production offers a complex collage, many visual sign systems of text, space (off- and onstage/above and below stage), costumes, gestures, and scenery. To some extent here I take for granted the materiality of stage production in order to focus on ways in which what is obviously set forth is simultaneously erased and refigured, and to ask, finally, to what end. What Shakespeare's theater enacts explicitly is how different sets of signs undercut one another and purposely problematize theatrical representation itself. ² As such, As You Like It is more than an isolated play about lovers in the forest; it embodies a theory of theatrical production.

My intention here is to address various aspects of the visual in the play, including both literal seeing and seeing as, ³ in order to identify the differences and frictions between the verbal and visual; between ekphrasis (pictures in words) and actual staging; and between sight (falling in love at first sight, for example) and speech (falling in love through extensive dialogue). As we examine the plays, both as texts and visual productions, foreground and background shift and alter. This alteration does not merely reflect critical interests but is built into the plays' structure by means of various self-referential techniques that call attention to its construction and, more audaciously, as I hope to demonstrate, to failure. ⁴

Although we cannot know Shakespeare's intentions and although the arena in which the visual appears cannot always be circumscribed, it is nonetheless crucial to try to grasp some of the ways in which visual insistence creates and addresses disjunction, the disjunction at the center of this play and at the center of Shakespeare's culture. That As You Like It participates in historically cultural questions concerning the visual/verbal matrix is both obvious and complex, and can be explored here only briefly but, I hope, suggestively by referring to the tradition of ekphrasis, a verbal representation of a visual representation, and to Reformation...