Friday, February 24, 2006
Poets in Shepherds clothes, or As You Like It
Marjorie Garber's chapter about As You Like It is a brilliant journey into Arden, or is it Arcadia, or Ardenne, or maybe Mary Arden--Will's mother? Possibly, as a melding of two past places, "the classic Arcadia and Eden." Garber swells these small paragraphs on page 440 of her book, "Shakespeare After All" with so much information about the mainfestation of this "golden world", or as Frye puts it, "Green World". Orlando's father--Sir Rowland De Boys, which in the french translation--du bois means "of the woods". Shakespeare is surely playing with the old convention of Pastoral. Everyone in Arden is a poet.
"Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything." Duke Senior, act 2.1
Garber talks about the psychology of a place like Arden, and that gets back to what we were talking about in class on Monday, that in Shakespeare, even in the crazyness of it all, when all order is thought to be lost, people find "themselves". Either in the reflection of a casket or in the reflection of a pond. Arden is a convention, but it is each character's individual convention, creation. It is "As [they] Like It". As we want it to be, or wish it could be.
"Find tongues in trees, books in running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything." Duke Senior, act 2.1
Garber talks about the psychology of a place like Arden, and that gets back to what we were talking about in class on Monday, that in Shakespeare, even in the crazyness of it all, when all order is thought to be lost, people find "themselves". Either in the reflection of a casket or in the reflection of a pond. Arden is a convention, but it is each character's individual convention, creation. It is "As [they] Like It". As we want it to be, or wish it could be.
# posted by Collin @ 12:01 PM 
