Shaw, George Bernard (1897). "Shaw on Shakespeare". In Tomarken, Edward (ed.). As You Like It from 1600 to the Present: Critical Essays. New York: Routledge. pp.533–534. ISBN 0-8153-1174-5.

The ultimate recovery of harmony is marked with four weddings and a dance of harmony [18] [19] for eight presided over by Hymen, [20] before most of the exiled court are able to return to the court and their previous stations are recovered. General Editor's Preface by Una Ellis-Fermor, dated 1951, as printed in Macbeth, Arden Shakespeare, 2nd Series As You Like It follows its heroine Rosalind as she flees persecution in her uncle's court, accompanied by her cousin Celia to find safety and, eventually, love, in the Forest of Arden. In the forest, they encounter a variety of memorable characters, notably the melancholy traveller Jaques, who speaks many of Shakespeare's most famous speeches (such as " All the world's a stage", "too much of a good thing" and "A fool! A fool! I met a fool in the forest"). Holland writes: “Performance inflected her approach to plays and nothing in her writing […] allowed plays to be analysed as if their narratives could be divorced from the rhythms of performance.”

Venice

Act 2, scene 4 Rosalind, Celia, and Touchstone reach the Forest of Arden. Rosalind is in disguise as a boy named Ganymede and Celia as a country girl named Aliena. They overhear a conversation between an old shepherd (Corin) and a lovelorn young shepherd (Silvius). “Ganymede” and “Aliena” persuade Corin to help them buy a cottage. The Countryside Commission considered creating a new national forest in the area in 1989, but the proposal was not taken up. [33] A Community Forest was established in the 1990s to the north of the forest of Arden called the Forest of Mercia, and a national forest has since been established between Leicester and Swadlincote in the East Midlands, however. Superstitions were associated with Catholicism, and it’s hardly surprising that these lingered: in the thirty years before Shakespeare’s birth people in England had been forced to change their religion between Catholic and Protestant three times. A growing interest in scientific discoveries about the world also contributed to a loss of belief in old-fashioned traditions.

In 1758 the Earl of Aylesford and five others founded (or possibly refounded) the Woodmen of Arden. This is an exclusive archery club that takes its offices from the medieval Royal Forest court positions, such as Verderer and Warden. The organisation claims to be a successor to an older organisation of woodmen, however there is scant evidence that forest law ever applied in the forest of Arden. In March 2015, Bloomsbury Academic named Peter Holland of the University of Notre Dame, Zachary Lesser of the University of Pennsylvania, and Tiffany Stern of the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute as general editors of The Arden Shakespeare fourth series. [17] Arden Early Modern Drama [ edit ]

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a b Bate, Jonathan; Rasmussen, Eric (2010). As You Like It. Basingstoke, England: Macmillan. p.10. ISBN 978-0-230-24380-4. Reversing dramatic convention, it is the courtly characters who speak prose and the shepherds who court in verse. So, the Forest is a place where there are no regulations or limits set by Time. Its importance is that it provides the space for the development of the most elementary emotion in its characters which is love. University of Wisconsin professor Richard Knowles, the editor of the 1977 New Variorum edition of this play, in his article "Myth and Type in As You Like It", [26] pointed out that the play contains mythological references in particular to Eden and to Hercules. Excavation resumes at Wem manor at the centre of medieval and Tudor history". Whitchurch Herald. 3 June 2023 . Retrieved 8 July 2023. What is the atmosphere like in Shakespeare's As You Like It, especially with respect to the Forest of Arden?

Roger Quilter set "Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind" for voice and piano (1905) in his 3 Shakespeare songs Op. 6 More benignly, green men and woodwoses (wild men of the woods) are key characters in the dramatis personae encountered in fields, woods and forests. In medieval churches and cathedrals, leaf masks are carved into stonework as decorative motifs, stubborn leftovers from a pagan past. They are, observes Barton, “reminders that forests are places of transformation, where the boundary between human life and that of animals, plants or trees are likely to become confused, or even obliterated”.The stone varies in colour from a muddy brown-red to a brighter orange or red ochre depending on factors such as how long it has been exposed. It is a common building material across the Arden area, and many prominent and famous buildings use it, such as Kenilworth Castle, Maxstoke Castle, St Alphege Church, Solihull, Stoneleigh Abbey Gatehouse, and numerous others. [28] [29] Forests are secretive and mysterious, full of unexplained sounds and shadows, and many writers have conjured up a sense of unease combined with nostalgia by using a forest setting, from the wonderfully-imagined living forests of Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings cycle to Kipling’s poem The Way Through the Woods read here by Andrew Motion. Even so, in Shakespeare's day the woods had been severely thinned and enclosed, but as a romanticized version of his youth it is a fine picture of a dream. [2] History