George Washington University

The Way to Arden: Attitudes Toward Time in As You Like ItAuthor(s): Rawdon WilsonReviewed work(s):Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Winter, 1975), pp. 16-24Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2869262 .Accessed: 05/05/2012 13:15

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The Way to Arden: Attitudes Toward

Time in As You Like It

RAWDON WILSON

N an essay on As You Like It published in I940, James Smith argued that Celia's remark at the end of the first act, that Touchstone would "go along o'er the wide world" with her,1 might have had "importance in an earlier version, but in that which has survived Shakespeare is no more concerned with

1@ Y pi how the characters arrive in Arden-whether under Touch- stone's convoy or not-than how they are extricated from it."2 More recently, J. L. Halio has clarified the distinction between "the timelessness of the forest world" and the "time-ridden preoccupations of court and city life" in order to stress the absolute distinction between the two localities.8 Each of these studies, employing markedly different critical methods, lays an obsessive emphasis upon an obvious half-truth: As You Like It contains no mention of the journey from Duke Frederick's court to the Forest of Arden. Each exemplifies a com- mon critical assumption that in As You Like It Shakespeare created a structure of contrast and juxtaposition in which a bare minimum of causal and sequential development is present. The most lucid presentation of this assumption is that advanced by Harold Jenkins in his analysis of the play, but it is implicit in most other studies.4 Thus Harold Toliver's recent discussion of time in Shake- speare's plays, though disagreeing with Halio with respect to the nature of the time associated with Arden, takes for granted that this nonsequential contrast exists.5

I should like to argue that, to the contrary, there is an explicit development in the play from the urban polity of Duke Frederick's court and Oliver's house- hold to the pastoral way of life in the forest of Arden, and that this develop- ment is marked by determinable transitional states. It is not, as Smith made clear, a geographical progress, but rather a shift in attitudes toward the charac- teristics of the public world. The public world may, I think, be equated with the polity, while the world of Arden, if not precisely private, is the condition of several private worlds which, freed from containment, find fulfillment there. Halio, demonstrated that the characteristics of the public world are predomi- nantly temporal, but he failed to note that the difference in attitude between the polity and the forest was marked by a real shift and not merely a leap. It

1 I. iii. 134, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. Hardin Craig (Glenview, Ill.:. Scott, Fores- man, i96i). All subsequent references will be to this edition and will hereafter be given paren- thetically following the citation.

2 James Smith, "As You Like It," Scrutiny, 9 (1940), 19-20.

3.J. L. Halio, "No Clock in The Forest: Time in As You Like It," SEL, 2 (i962), 204.

4Harold Jenkins, "As You Like It," Shakespeare Survey, 8 (1955) 40-51.

a Harold Toliver, "Shakespeare And The Abyss of Time," JEGP, 64 (i965), 234-54.

THE WAY TO ARDEN I7

is a shift, both gradual and sequential, in two respects. First, it is a shift in atti- tudes toward change. Second, because change is, in the conceptual referent which may be inferred from the play, the inseparable substratum of time, it is ultimately a shift in attitudes toward time. The importance of time in As You

Like It can scarcely be overstated, but change is the first fact of the play's being. There is more than one concept of time present in As You Like It-which,

in dramatic terms, means that there is more than one "time-sense"-and they are not as distinctly opposed, nor as mutually exclusive, as critics have assumed. The first act of the play is pervaded by the concept of time as an objective process in which things come into being and cease. Against this there is a con- cept of "timelessness," to be sure, but the time-sense of Arden is only partially and misleadingly reducible to it. "Timelessness" here functions largely as an element in the borrowed pastoral tradition and makes its presence felt in the play more as an implicit ideal than as an actuality. Distinct from both of these concepts there is the relativity of time which is not a single concept but rather a series of concepts expressing the specific time-sense of individual characters. It is the interior, private time of individuals which is, primarily, opposed to the objective time of the public world. This, however, is a multiple, not a single or absolute, opposition.

The initial concept of time, as it is found in the play's first act, is essentially the Aristotelian one of time as a "kind of number"6-that is, the measurement of objective change. It is, for example, the notion of time which is operative in Book VII of The Faerie Queene. There, the Titanesse, in pleading her case before Jove, argues that "Time on all doth pray," but Jove (in a plain state- ment of Aristotelian doctrine) responds:

But, who is it (to me tell) That Time himselfe doth moue and still, compell To keepe his course? Is not that namely wee Which poure that vertue from our heauenly cell, That moues them all, and makes them changed be ?7

Although it is not possible here to reconstruct the whole of Aristotle's doc-

trine concerning time, certain points need to be made since they have a direct

bearing upon the present discussion. In the Aristotelian system, time is not

simply the measurement of motion, 'but also the "condition of destruction" in which being emerges into existence and passes away.8 Further, it is, as a "kind

of number," contingent upon a knowing mind.9 The internal dialectic of Aris-

totle's position arises from the constant play between the objectivity of time (as the correlative of motion) and its relativity (as the correlative of a knowing

mind). This dialectical balance has, I think, a great deal to do with the concept of time in As You Like It. Touchstone's comments upon the passage of time,

6 Aristotle, Physica, trans. R. P1, Hardie and R. K. Gaye, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed.

Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 292; hereafter all references will be to

Works. 7 VII. vii. 48, in The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. H. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt

(London: Oxford Univ. Press, i950).

8 Works, p. 298. 9 Works, pp. 298-99.

i8 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

as reported by Jaques (II. Vii. 20-28.), are both a statement of the nature of ob- jective time, as it obtains in the world beyond Arden, and, in their quality of pathos and lament, an indication of his inability to adjust to the forest world. If, and when, the time of Arden is reached, it is through losing the concern for (if not the awareness of) change. Thus, Aristotle's argument that "if nothing but soul, or in soul reason, is qualified to count, there would not be time unless there were soul, but only that of which time is an attribute"" is of the utmost importance. The subjectivity of time, stressed by later philosophers in the Au- gustinian tradition, has a firm basis in Aristotle's analysis of time. And As You Like It may be looked upon as presenting, through dramatic concretions, both sets of implications in Aristotle's discussion.1"

The sense of objective time in As You Like It gives way to the subjective, or interior, time-sense associated with Arden. This interior time is only partially equivalent to the pastoral concept of "timelessness" as exemplified, say, in the perennial May morning of Marlowe's famous lyric.12 Consciousness of the in- teriority of time, however disconnected from the awareness of objective change, is not at all a sense of non-time. I should, in fact, like to go one step further and assert that the sense of interior time which becomes possible within Arden, precisely because it is not correlative to objective change, mirrors a state of mind. It can exist, as a particular reflection of consciousness, only whet objec- tive change loses its importance and is no longer marked-but it is abundantly real, as minds and thoughts are real. The time-sense in Arden works outward from the mind rather than inward from things which change, and, indeed, finds its chief external show in the mutual obligations of lovers who keep' appointments as duties imposed on them by love. Between these two concepts there are transitional stages during which the characteristics of the world of the polity begin to lose significance and those of Arden to gain it. Hence I shall postulate a period of adjustment to Arden. But it is an adjustment which some characters, such as Touchstone and Jaques, never achieve, and others, like Orlando, do but slowly.

This interiority of time in Arden implies that, in comparison with the time- sense of the polity, Arden will appear as timeless and that, within the forest, time will appear as a relative factor, varying from mind to mind. The first judgment is clearly that which the polity makes of Arden, as for example when Charles remarks that the exiled court "fleet the time carelessly" (I. i. I24-25)

or when Orlando, bursting peremptorily upon the forest gathering with his mind full of preoccupations belonging to the polity, refers to Duke Senior's court as those who "lose and neglect the creeping hours of time" (II. vii. II2).

The apparent relativity of time within Arden has been frequently remarked. Indeed, given Rosalind's observation that "Time travels in divers paces, with

10 Works, p. 299. "1 It should go without saying that I am not suggesting an "Aristotelianism" in Shakespeare. It

does seem, however, that, to the degree that it may be inferred, the concept of objective time in As You Like It corresponds to Aristotle's. Probably, the basic notions of Aristotelian physics had as much currency in Renaissance England as they had elsewhere in Europe from the time of Albert the Great-that is, while never incontrovertible, always known. Cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Q. I0, art. 4.

12 Halio, p. I97, believes that "timelessness as a convention of the Pastoral ideal" is the only time-sense attributable to Arden.

THE WAY TO ARDEN I9

divers persons" (III. ii. 226-27), it would be difficult to ignore. H. B. Charlton, for instance, observes that one man's hour "is another man's minute."'3 And Toliver has noted how the lovers "all seek different levels and different ways of adjusting to time."'14 The shift in attitudes toward time which occurs between the polity and Arden is, then, largely a shift from a public to a private standard of measurement in which the latter becomes possible only through the fading into unimportance of the former.

It is less often noted, at least within the same context, that neither Jaques nor Touchstone perceives time as relative. Touchstone's reported comments upon the passage of time (II. vii. 20-28) and his later statement that he counts it "but time lost" to have heard the song which is, in effect, a description of the nature of interior time in relation to love (V. iii. I7-40) are equally indi- cations of his unbreakable commitment to the public world in which time is the conventional measurement of change. Jaques' reflections on the seven ages of man (IIv. v I39-66) indicate a similar bondage to the world of objective time. The fact that Jaques' speech arises out of Touchstone's and is, actually, the conclusion of the latter's hanging tale underscores the similarity of the bondage which they share. Like Touchstone, Jaques cannot lose his awareness of, and concern for, change. Hence his time-sense quickens only to the public standard of objective measurement. Further, the obsession with objective time is consistent with Jaques' character since, as Smith observed, "time hangs heavy on a sceptic's hands, for whom the world contains nothing that can take it off."'5 Jaques is defined, within his dramatic context, solely by his worldly experience-a "nurture" which has cultivated in him a fixed obsession with the sense of public time. Thus, since Jaques is the most articulate spokesman for that sense in Arden, complementing as well as concluding Touchstone's reflections, it is no accident that his speech on time has a complex function in the development of the play's theme.

On one level Jaques' speech is a simple reflection upon the passage of time, since it is within time that the change of growth and degeneration occurs and it is, of course, time which measures this change. Yet, on another level, the distinction between time and change is collapsed and time appears as the source of the objective change (as the Titanesses argues to Jove). Traditionally, the distinction had not been a strictly kept one, but exfoliated into a cluster of associations largely related to the Aristotelian concept of time. Samuel Chew has pointed out the manner in which time was considered, in the Renaissance, to be a source (and not merely a measurement) of change:

George Chapman speaks of the "violent wheels of Time and Fortune" as though they were to be differentiated, as indeed they are, for, properly speaking, Time turns not the Wheel of Fortune upon which kings rise and descend but the Wheel of Life on which revolve the Ages of Man. But the two instruments were easily confused and conflated; and furthermore the Wheel of Life suggests the wheels of a clock.'6

13 H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (London: Methuen, 1938), p. 294. 14Toliver, p. 240; cf. Hardin Craig, "Shakespeare and the Here and Now," PMLA, 67 (1952),

where an unconvincing claim is made for a general concept of relativity throughout Shakespeare's drama.

15 Smith, p. I4. 16 Samuel Chew, "Time and Fortune," ELH, 6 (1939), III.

20 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

Time often appears in Renaissance literature as the agent rather than the yard- stick of change, as, for example, in The Shepheardes Calendar or in Shake- speare's sonnets, as well as in As You Like It. This "conflation" of a rigorous philosophical distinction was a part of the Renaissance literary tradition, but it also had its roots in the writings of Aristotle. It is related to the insepara- bility of a knowing mind from the measurement of motion. Aristotle, at one point, argues that "not only do we measure the movement by time, but also the time by the movement, because they define each other. The time marks the movement, since it is its number, and the movement the time."'7 Thus Jaques' speech exemplifies, in a rich and provocative manner, several aspects of the cluster of associations which composed the Renaissance meaning of time.

Jaques' bondage to objective time, like Touchstone's more elementary commitment, is the reason for, as well as the sign of, his failure to adjust to the world of Arden. The central problem, then, would seem to be that of the process through which certain characters do adjust to Arden and substitute an interior time-sense for the sense of public, objective time-the process, that is, which leads to the full significance of such lines as Orlando's that "there's no clock in the forest" (III. ii. 3i8-i). This is the problem of transitional stages which criticism, allied to the "Jenkinsian" model of a method of con- trast and juxtaposition, has neglected.

The first act quickly and clearly establishes the mood of the urban polity. It is, to be sure, on all counts the "working-day world" of objective change, but it is especially a commercial world of exchange and transaction only' somewhat less marked than that of The Merchant of Venice. Orlando's initial lines (I. i. I-27) are strewn with references to types of change and exchange; and some of the same terminology is repeated in Celia's protestation of love to Rosalind in the second scene (I. ii I7-25). Such words as "bequeathed," "will," "profit," "hired," and "gain" are particularly suggestive of this theme. A sec- ond thematic strand is indicated by the sequence of such words as "breed," "unkept," "birth," "stalling," "bred," "feeding," and "growth." This sequence contributes to the very significant theme of nature opposed to nurture which runs through the play-as, in fact, it does in all of Shakespeare's comedies from The Comedy of Errors to The Tempest. It is not a simplistic opposition equat- able to the opposition between forest and urban polity. Nature is given an embodiment in the character of Orlando, and nurture finds its expression in the character of Jaques (about whom nothing is learned except what pertains to his education and experience). Hence the dramatic conflict between them goes beyond the clash between "Signior Love" and "Monsieur Melancholy" into a contrast of profound thematic import. When, for instance, Orlando appears as still violently under the sway of the urban polity (II. vii. 87-99), his reference to his "nurture" casts into an ironic relief the little of false nurture that, in fact, contaminates him. Similarly, Jaques' reference to his "humorous sadness" (IV. i. 20) sounds with an ironic twist since it follows straight upon his account of the "many simples" of experience which have gone into making him the malcontent that he is; that is, all the evidence of the play, including

17 Works, p. 294.

THE WAY TO ARDEN 21

Jaques' own account, points to a disposition bred by a certain kind of nurture and not the result of a "humor" or nature. I wish, however, to treat this termi- nology, in both sequences, as part of the thematic distinction between the awareness of change in the polity and its lack in Arden.

The references to change, and especially mercantile exchange, indicate the degree to which Orlando is dominated by the very polity from which he must escape. Significantly, Orlando's first statement of a willingness to withdraw from the world of the polity is couched in approximately the same language of commercial exchange (I. ii. i94-2o6) as the speech in which he had lamented his state. The cumulative effect of the references to types of change in the first act is to present the mood of the polity in terms of a kind of bondage to the awareness of change, and, through this awareness, to time. The mood is also created, in part, by the various peripeties connected with the characters. intro- duced in the first act. All the characters (except Le Beau) from the Duke Senior to Charles the wrestler undergo, or have undergone, some change in fortune. Chew has analyzed the intricate interpenetration of the concepts of Fortune, Occasion, and Time in the Renaissance,'8 and it would appear that this interpenetration is operative in As You Like It, contributing to the thematic distinction between polity and forest. The changes in Fortune-that "good housewife" about whom Celia and Rosalind argue so lengthily (I. ii. 34-57)-occur in time; that is, they are measurable, or numberable, according to the Aristotelian definition. Even more, perhaps, their very occurrence under- scores the passage of time, and the sense that time, as Aristotle noted, is that in which things cease to be. Charles's remark to Oliver that the old Duke and his exiled court "fleet the time" (I. i. I24-25) in Arden serves as a point of con- trast to the mood of the first act. It foreshadows Orlando's comment in the second act that the exiled court "lose and neglect the creeping hours of time" (II. vii. II2) and points the way out of the polity toward Arden. And it is per- tinent, I think, to note that after Charles's comparison of the life of the exiled court to the "golden world," there follow nine references to the "world" in the first act and, except for Le Beau's "better world," they all refer to the "work- ing-day world" of the polity (as, indeed, does Le Beau's expression by impli- cation). Thus Charles is the first counterweight to the world of the polity, and, though less than a full member perhaps, he suffers his reversal of fortune through his involvement in it.

Once Arden has been presented, with Duke Senior's speech at the beginning of Act II, the case is reversed and the references to the world of change and objective time are always in contrast to the world 6f Arden. Both Touchstone and Jaques, through their bondage to the world of the polity, contrast to, and force into deep relief, the characters who have adjusted to Arden. Similarly, the return, in Act III, to the polity and the idea of forcible seizure of prop- erty (III. i. i6-iS) contrasts not only the two dukes but also the two worlds. Further, when Phebe, although a native of Arden, shows that she cannot participate in the forest life through her unwillingness to respond to love, Rosalind, with deliberate irony, applies to her the harsh language of the alien commercial world (II. v. 6o). But the most important contrasts between the

18 Chew, pp. 103-4.

22 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

two worlds are made in terms of Orlando. Unlike Touchstone and Jaques, Orlando does adjust to Arden, but he does not, like Celia, do so immediately. Even Celia's remark, "I like this place, and willingly could / Waste my time in it" (II. iv. 94-95), may only indicate that Celia's adjustment to Arden begins immediately. "Waste" suggests something of the mood of the polity, as well as an implication that Arden presents to her no more than a temporary way- station. In fact, only Rosalind appears to adjust naturally and at once. Her father, of course, expresses his adjustment to Arden in terms of "old custom" (II. i. 2), which clearly implies a period of transition from one world to the other. Orlando, then, contrasts not only to Jaques and Touchstone but also to Rosalind in the manner of his adjustment to Arden. In so doing, Orlando pro- vides a focus for the consideration of the transition which all the characters, except Jaques and Touchstone, implicitly make.

The dialogue between Orlando and Adam in the second act (II. iii) marks one stage in the transition between the two worlds. Adam refers consistently to the transactions of the public world, but his service is grounded in duty- and hence is unspoiled by any merely covetous motive. It is his gold, the product of his "thrifty hire," which is the link between the false gold of the polity and the true gold of Arden. For not merely does Adam's gold allow Orlando to leave the one world for the other, but it shows him the possibility of duty grounded in love. Adam offers the first statement of what is the chief lesson of Arden and, conversely, the chief obstacle to adjustment to that world. This lesson is simply that duty ought to be founded in love, and perhaps no- where else (certainly not in the legal, political, and economic terrors of the polity) can it have any true basis. When Rosalind chides Orlando for breaking "an hour's promise in love" (IV. i. 44), her point is that love entails obliga- tions, and the failure to keep them must seem proof that the love is only ap- parent (the offender being still "heartwhole"). The time which Orlando has not kept is scarcely the objective time of the polity, of course, but rather the interior time of the lover's awareness. This interior form of time characterizes the time-sense of Arden.

A further stage in the transition to Arden is reached in Orlando's attack upon the exiled court, which shows both his sense of duty springing from his reciprocated love for Adam and also his almost total domination by the stan- dards of the polity which he has left. When Orlando says, "I thought that all things had been savage here" (II. vii. I07), he shows, as he does in his reiterated use of "desert," that he fails to understand the nature of Arden. Sword drawn, he has charged in among the exiled court very much as Oliver or Duke Fred- erick might have done; and the gentle answer of the Duke surprises him. Things are neither savage nor desert in Arden; the fact that they are not is, to the polity-ridden newcomer, a cause of wonder. Orlando's expectations, based upon his experience of behavior within the urban polity, are reversed and shat- tered as, i(ndeed, they must be if he is to acquire the free disposition which is inseparable from the mood of Arden. The lesson of duty based on love which he had learned from Adam had been a step but not the entire course.

The final stage in this transitional development is expressed in Amiens' song at the end of Act II (II. vii. i74-90). This is the stage of pastoral time- lessness which Halio, and other critics before him, noted as the chief charac-

THE WAY TO ARDEN 23

teristic of Arden. But it is, as I have argued, misleading to reduce the time- sense of Arden to mere timelessness. The consciousness of time continues but is transferred to the interiority of the mind's apperception. What is lost- precisely that which makes readers think of Arden as timeless-is the concern for change and objective, public time. Duke Senior's remark that in Arden they do not feel the "penalty of Adam" suggests the nature of this loss. It is, at best, a perplexing remark, and the nearly four pages of commentary in the Variorum demonstrate fairly well that it is far from univocal in meaning.19 I think, however, that it can be interpreted, without wrenching the context, as equivalent to feeling the passing of time. The "penalty of Adam" is, pre- sumably, decay within time which, when it is no longer a concern (as it is not in Arden), need not be felt or, in the terms of this essay, perceived. The "sea- sons' difference" is objective and absolute, but given the attitudes proper to Arden it is not necessary to feel a concern for this change.20 Thus, before Orlando can join the Duke in not feeling the penalty of seasonal change in time, he must lose his commitment to the world of change and time. This is achieved through Rosalind's playful strategem, and the final break in Orlando's weakening subservience to the world of the polity occurs when Rosalind qualifies his observation that "there's no clock in the forest." There is, she points out, a subjective time-the interior time-sense of an aware mind whose only external manifestation is, like all genuine duty (as Adam had shown), an obligation grounded in love. The lover keeps his appointments simply because he is in love, but in this case the external is brought about by the in- terior compulsion of the mind and not, as in the polity, the other way round. Ultimately, adjustment to Arden means an interior and relative sense of time, but this final stage implies a prior series of steps to be passed through: recog- nition of love and the duties which it entails, the breaking down of conven- tional expectations founded upon the experience of everyday court behavior, and a loss of the acute sense of change and public time which characterizes the polity.

There is, then, a way to Arden. It is not, surely, the kind of way which Smith had in mind, marked by dusty highroads, worn boots, and all the com- mon perils of travel. But it is there nonetheless. It is the way of the mind's journey; a mental voyage of discovery which leads to the recognition of self and the importance of feelings. It leads away from property and its appropriate concerns to a new experience of the value of feeling. In some respects it is a

19 Horace Howard Furness, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: As You Like It (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, i9i8), pp. 6i-65.

20 Although Furness sees in the line, "the seasons difference," a further proof of his theory of Shakespeare's "two clocks," I think that this does not preclude the possibility that the line also refers to the objective flow of time (Variorum, p. 392). Chew has shown that time was conceived of, by the Renaissance mind, as both continuous-"Time's thievish progress"-and also as pulsating or rhythmical. In the latter case it was associated with the passing of the seasons, the alternation of night and day, the movement of the stars, etc. (Chew, pp. i09-i0). Again, Aristotle appears to be the source not only of the relevant distinction but also of its conflation. Thus, Aristotle argues that "as movement can be one and the same again and again, so too can time, e.g., a year or a spring or an autumn" (Works, p. 294) and that "if one and the same motion sometimes recurs, it will be one and the same time, and if not, not" (Works, p. 297). Hence, while not denying the function of the line in the duration of the action or its relation to the "two clocks," I believe that it can be best read as a comment upon the nature of objective time associated with the world beyond Arden.

24 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY

process of stripping value from externals, such as property, that might recall the foreshortened voyage of Everyman to the same conclusion. Along the way to Arden, Time becomes not merely the measurement of motion and change, the necessary context of voyaging, but also the symbolic function of each stage of the journey. And, of course, all, save Jaques' return to the world of the polity when occasion allows. No one, I trust, except perhaps a Jan Kott, would find this return from Arcadia ironic. One leaves the play certain that life in the polity will never again be the same-convinced that the lessons of Arden have been real.

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