With one Duke exiled, his younger brother takes his place in the court; a pair of girls, Rosalind and Celia, the daughters of each Duke, are forced by the new Duke’s anger and their ties of friendship to travel into the Forest of Arden, followed by a courtier, Touchstone. In the forest where the elder Duke resides, the girls’ paths cross with Orlando, himself fleeing his elder brother’s tyranny. Through song and dance, with poetry and cross-dressing, four couples take shape and eventually marry before the goddess Hymen. The play concludes as it began, with the old Duke leaves Arden and his brother entering the forest: one Duke absent, one Duke in the court.

Anne Barton described this play as “the most classical of Shakespeare’s comedies”, and any glance at its plot will prove her insight. For many critics the play closely follows the comic pattern of movement from injust world, to disorder, to a better place. That said, much more is “Obscured in the circle of this forest”, than any formula implies. In this play, Shakespeare probes the limits of the pastoral, a genre that was popular amongst the Elizabethans. What does it mean to say “Sweet are the uses of adversity” when the exiled courtiers must take the deer and “kill them up / In their assigned and native dwelling place”? Do we agree with Touchstone when he says “the truest poetry is the most feigning”? For all the classical elegance of the play, there are no shortage of subtleties: the boy playing the female Rosalind must disguise himself as the boy Ganymede – and where does that leave the question of gender? As we laugh in condescension at the buffoonery of the rustics, or in incomprehension before Rosalind’s complex machinations, we can never forget nor fully grasp the complexity of one of the most famous of all Shakespeare’s speeches: Jaques, the melancholic fool, telling everyone that “All the world’s a stage…”

Contributed by James Harriman-Smith