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

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)

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, pre-lapserian, 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)

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

Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd, 1851

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)

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

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.

life developing through time (teleological/historical)

“[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.”

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)

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”.

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 gender-conscious perspective, and Marxist criticism brings an awareness of modes of production and economic class to its reading of texts, ecocriticism takes and earth-centred approach to literary studies.

Cheryll Glotfelty, “Introduction” in The ecocriticism reader: landmarks in literary ecology (1996), xix

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)

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

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

But…

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?

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.)

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

DUKE SENIOR 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.

(II. i. ll. 1-17)

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 forest-em (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

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

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)

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”

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

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?