This document outlines three approaches for analyzing representations of nature and landscape in Shakespeare's As You Like It: literary traditions, spatial theory, and ecocriticism. It discusses how the forest of Arden draws on pastoral conventions but also introduces ambiguities. From a spatial perspective, it examines how the forest is a socially constructed space with economic and legal implications. An ecocritical reading considers themes of nature/culture, human/animal divides, and emerging ecological discourses in descriptions of the forest and its inhabitants. Key texts in each field are also referenced.

1. Tongues in Trees & Books in Brooks
Reading space, place and nature in As You Like It

2. 3 Approaches to Space,
Place, Landscape & Nature
— Literary Traditions – Pastoral (mode of
representing landscape)
— Cultural Geography and the Spatial Turn
(geopolitics and social construction of
space/place)
— Ecocriticism (environmental concerns
human/nature, nature/culture)

3. Literary Landscapes:
Pastoral
— literary genre or mode that reaches back to classical antiquity
(Hesiod’s Works and Days, Theocritus’s Idylls, Virgil’s Eclogues and
Georgics).
— idyllic landscape (Eclogues), innocence, Golden Age, Arcadia, prelapserian, song, bucolic, shepherds, working rural life (Georgics),
country vs. city, art vs. nature.
Key Texts and Further Reading:
— William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935) (Exeter library)
— Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (1973)
— Paul Alpers, What is Pastoral? (1996)
— Terry Gifford and David James. Eds. New Versions of Pastoral : post-romantic,
modern, and contemporary responses to the tradition (2009)

4. Edmund Spenser, The Shephearde’s Calendar, 1579 (December)

5. Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd, 1851

6. Is Blouzelinda dead? farewel my Glee!
No Happiness is now reserv'd for me.
As the Wood Pigeon cooes without his Mate,
So shall my doleful Dirge bewail her Fate.
Of Blouzelinda fair I mean to tell,
The peerless Maid that did all Maids excell.
[…]
Where-e'er I gad, I Blouzelind shall view,
Woods, Dairy, Barn and Mows our Passion knew.
When I direct my Eyes to yonder Wood,
Fresh rising Sorrow curdles in my Blood.
Thither I've often been the Damsel's Guide,
When rotten Sticks our Fuel have supply'd;
There I remember how her Faggots large,
Were frequently these happy Shoulders charge.
John Gay, The Shepherd's Week. In Six Pastorals. V. Friday (1714)

7. The essential trick of the old pastoral, which was
felt to imply a beautiful relation between rich and
poor, was to make simple people express strong
feelings (felt as the most universal subject,
something fundamentally true about everybody)
in learned and fashioned language…
William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), p. 11.
It is this (in some sense conscious) clash between
different modes of feeling which is the normal
source of pleasure in pastoral.
William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), p.114

8. Spatial Turn: An Epoch of Space
The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch
of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in
the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and
the far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at
the moment, I believe, when our experience of the
world is less that of a long life developing through
time than that of a network that connects points and
intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say
that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day
polemics oppose the pious descendants of time and
the determined inhabitants of space.
Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no.
1 (Spring 1986): 22.

9. “[O]ur experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time
than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.”
life developing through time (teleological/historical)

10. Key Texts/Further Reading:
— Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (1974)
— Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion
of Space in Critical Social Theory (1989)
— Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place (1993) and
The Fate of Place (1998)
— Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (1994)
— David Harvey Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical
Geography (2001)
— Robert T. Tally & Bertrand Westphal. Eds., Geocritical
Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and
Cultural Studies (2011)

11. Space vs. time:
— space is not an inert container or background where temporal
events unfold
— space produced by intersecting social practices
Space vs. place:
— Oppositional: For Yi Fu Tuan space = “openness”, “freedom”,
“movement”, “threat” whereas place = “security”, “stability”,
“pause”.
— Similarly for David Harvey “place-bound identity” is
reactionary as it depends “on the motivational power of
tradition”
— Thinking space and place together: For Doreen Massey both
space and place are inherently social and open. Space = “vast,
intricate complexity of social processes” whereas “place can be
thought of as “a particular moment in, the global network of
those social relations”.

12. Ecocriticism
What then is ecocriticism? Simply put, ecocriticism is
the study of the relationship between literature and the
physical environment. Just as feminist criticism
examines language and literature from a genderconscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an
awareness of modes of production and economic class
to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes and earthcentred approach to literary studies.
Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction” in The ecocriticism reader: landmarks
in literary ecology (1996), xix

13. Key Texts/Further Reading:
— Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, Eds., The ecocriticism reader:
landmarks in literary ecology (1996)
— Jonathan Bate, The song of the earth (2000)
— Greg Garrard. Ecocriticism (2004)
— Lawrence Buell, The future of environmental criticism: environmental crisis
and literary imagination (2005)
— Steven Rosendale, Ed., The greening of literary scholarship : literature,
theory, and the environment (2002)
— Timothy Morton, Ecology without nature: rethinking environmental
aesthetics (2007)
— Axel Goodbody and Kate Rigby, Eds., Ecocritical theory: new European
approaches (2011)

14. This is a book about why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new
millennium that will be ruled by technology. It is a book about modern Western
man's alienation from nature. It is about the capacity of the writer to restore us to
the earth which is our home.
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth, Preface
But…
Nature is like that other Romantic-period invention, the aesthetic. The damage
done [by modern society], goes the argument, has sundered subjects from objects,
so that human beings are forlornly alienated from their world. Contact with
nature, and with the aesthetic, will mend the broken bridge between subject and
object. […] Subject and object require a certain environment in which they can
join up together. Thus is born the special realms of art and nature, the new
secular churches in which subject and object can be remarried.”
Timothy Morton Ecology Without Nature 23

15. 3 Ways of Reading a Forest
— Literary Traditions – what pastoral conventions
does the Forest of Arden rely on, and are there
textual ambiguities regarding the politics of the
pastoral?
— Spatial Turn – how is space socially produced in the
play, and what economic, political/legal, or
gendered discourses of early modern England
might inflect the space of the forest?
— Ecocriticism – how might we read the Forest of
Arden in terms of nature/culture or human/nature,
human/animal, divide? Is there an emergent
ecological discourse here?

16. What is a forest?
The word “forest” appears 23 times in AYLI. This is more
than any other of Shakespeare’s plays. So what is a forest?
CHARLES
They say he is already in the forest of Arden,
and a many merry men with him; and there
they live like the old Robin Hood of England.
They say many young gentlemen flock to him
every day, and fleet the time carelessly, as they
did in the golden world.
(I.i ll. 109-113.)

17. Reading the Forest as
Pastoral Convention
— “They say…” - part of a literary greenwood tradition, tales of Merry men
— Court vs. country – space of freedom, outside the law of the court where
“young gentlemen” can “fleet time carelessly”
— Like Hesiod’s golden age it is a golden world, outside of time
— Dangerous space (Rosalind and Celia)
— Georgics - place of work for Corin and Sylvius the shepherds, & Audrey.
— Textual invention – an imaginary or non-English location with palm trees,
olives trees, a lioness, a snake drawn in part from Italian pastoral
conventions. AYLI’s major textual source is Thomas Lodge’s prose romance
Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacy (1590) set in Ardennes in France.
— Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, was however a real part of Warwickshire

18. DUKE SENIOR
(II. i. ll. 1-17)
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say,
“This is no flattery: these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.”
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

20. Reading the Forest as
Social Space
— An extensive tract of land covered with trees and
undergrowth, sometimes intermingled with pasture.
Also, the trees collectively of a ‘forest’.
— Old French forest (French forêt ), medieval Latin forestem (silvam) the ‘outside’ wood (i.e. that lying outside the
walls of the park, not fenced in), forīs out of doors.
— Law. A woodland district, usually belonging to the king,
set apart for hunting wild beasts and game, etc. (cf.
quots. 1598, 1628); having special laws and officers of its
own.
“forest” n., OED Second edition, 1989

21. A Forest is a certain territory of woody grounds and
fruitful pastures, privileged for wild beasts and fowls of
forest, chase, and warren, to rest and abide there in the
safe protection of the King, for his delight and pleasure;
which territory of ground so privileged is meered and
bounded with unremovable marks, meers and boundaries,
either known by matter of record, or by prescription; and
also replenished with wild beasts of venery or chase, and
with great coverts of vert, for the succour of the said beasts
there to abide; for the preservation and continuance of
which said place, together with the vert and venison, there
are particular officers, laws, and privileges belonging to
the same, requisite for that purpose, and proper only to a
forest, and to no other place.
John Manwood, A Treatise and Discourse of the Lawes of the Forest (1592),
143

23. Reading the Forest
Ecologically
Nature/Culture
— Duke Senior can only describe the deer in terms of the
city, as “native burghers in this desert city” (II.i 22.)
— Orlando writes his desire onto trees: “Truly, the tree
yields bad fruit” (III.ii 112)
Human/Animal
— Jacques moralizes on the “sobbing deer” (II.i 25 to end)
— Jacques’ melancholy blurs boundaries between human/
animal: “I think he be transform'd into a beast” (II.vii 1-2)

24. The wretched animal heaved forth such groans
That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat
Almost to bursting, and the big round tars
Coursed one another down his hairy nose
In piteous chase.
(II.i 36-40.)
Canst thou in death take suche delight? breedes pleasure so in paynes?
Oh cruell, be content, to take in worth my teares
Which growe to gumme, and fall from me
Gascoigne, “The Wofull Wordes of the Hart to the Hunter”

27. For my own part, I cannot without grief see so much as an
innocent beast pursued and killed that has no defense, and
from which we have received no offence at all; and that which
frequently happens, that the stag we hunt, finding himself
weak and out of breath, and seeing no other remedy,
surrenders himself to us who pursue him, imploring mercy
by his tears.
[T]here is nevertheless a certain respect, a general duty of
humanity, not only to beasts that have life and sense, but even
to trees, and plants. We owe justice to men, and graciousness
and benignity to other creatures that are capable of it; there is
a certain commerce and mutual obligation betwixt them and
us. Nor shall I be afraid to confess the tenderness of my
nature so childish, that I cannot well refuse to play with my
dog, when he the most unseasonably importunes me to do so.
Montaigne, ‘Of Cruelty’ 1580
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3600/3600-h/3600-h.htm

28. 3 Ways of Reading a Forest
— Literary Traditions – what pastoral conventions
does the Forest of Arden rely on, and are there
textual ambiguities regarding the politics of the
pastoral?
— Spatial Turn – how is space socially produced in the
play, and what economic, political/legal, or
gendered discourses of early modern England
might inflect the space of the forest?
— Ecocriticism – how might we read the Forest of
Arden in terms of nature/culture or human/nature,
human/animal, divide? Is there an emergent
ecological discourse here?