'As You Like It' in a Forest Without Green

STRATFORD, Conn.--To be fair. I had best start with a confession: As You Like It is not a play I particularly treasure. Sooth to say, I would if pressed have to place it, in the entire Shakespearean canon, about three-quarters of the way down the list. I know, I know: critics the world over continue to acclaim the work in rapture, and teachers ecstatically lead their charges through it in almost every high school in the land.

Yet I must to my own self be true, and I simply remain unconvinced. The great Elizabethan scholar Alfred Harbage (whom Harvard and the world lost only recently), having devoted most of his life to Shakespeare, said of As You Like It that "a fondness for it is the best single test of a reader's compatibility with Shakespeare." So I stand condemned.

Nonetheless I am thankful that As You Like It was written. But for me its chief virtue lies in having provided Shakespeare some practice in romantic comedy. Much Ado About Nothing, which I would like to think followed shortly after, since I consider it more successful, afforded further exercise in the genre. As a result, Shakespeare was fully equipped a year later to create Twelfth Night, which is not only his greatest achievement in this category but also the supreme romantic comedy in the English language.

I am quite willing to concede that As You Like It contains a host of wonderful things. But taken as a whole it seems an artistic failure. Shakespeare used as a basis Thomas Lodge's silly novel Rosalynde, which had appeared a few years earlier; he followed it rather closely, compressing and eliminating along the way.

The play, as it emerged, is not skilfully managed. Most of the plot is crammed into the first act, yet there is unnecessary repetition. Here too characters inform others of things already known to the hearers, while nobody ever tells anyone else--or us--why the animosity developed between the evil older brother Oliver and the good younger brother Orlando.

Shakespeare's real interest is in getting away to the Forest of Arden, where nothing much happens for three acts except a parade of bantering duologues. When it's time for us to go home, the playwright suddenly in the fifth act rounds people up for a quadruple wedding, has someone report that the usurping duke has reformed offstage, and (in a gesture unique for the period) bids the heroine directly dispatch us from the theatre in an epilogue.

The nitpicker might complain also that Shakespeare for some reason gave two different characters the same name of Jaques; that he forgot to assign the rightful duke any name at all; that Celia is described as taller than her cousin Rosalind early in the play, and shorter later on; that he confused Juno and Venus; and so on. This is not a careful piece of work.

More important is the question of general theme. Shakespeare was exploring here how one might best lead the Good Life. Can it be better achieved at court or in the country? Or is place ultimately irrelevant? Should we be content with the "real" world or espouse the pursuit of an idealized pastoral existence? And how can romantic love best function? In the tradition of the medieval and Renaissance poetic contests (such as the debat, disputaison, tenso, and conflictus), the play's cast becomes something of a debating society, and the text is filled with double-entry bookkeeping. This is, then, a highly literary play as well as a highly artificial one. It is also eminently lyrical, although nearly two-thirds of it is written in prose rather than verse.

The current production, directed by Michael Kahn, is the third one the American Shakespeare Theatre has mounted. The first, in 1961, was visually a horrible hodgepodge of styles and periods and a gallimaufry of gimmicks. It offered, however, in Donald Harron the only flawlessly spoken and acted Orlando I have ever encountered. When the work turned up here again in 1968, there was not a single tree in the Forest of Arden.

This time there are indeed trees, but they create the wrong effect. This play and this production are fine examples of the vital importance attaching to set design and color. Here Kahn presumably settled on the concept and the gifted John Conklin fashioned his scenery accordingly. The first act presents the discordant environment of the "envious court" and "the foul body of th' infected world." For this Conklin has provided barren brown trees. No complaint here.

The remaining four acts, however, except for three extremely brief scenes, take place entirely in the Forest of Arden. And what do we look at? Nothing but more bare brown trees. The whole point of the play is blunted.

From the start to the finish of this production there is not so much as a single green leaf. Not only that, but we get a chilly mist and even a snowfall; inhabitants blow on their frozen fingers and carry with them a brazier to warm themselves by. What is idyllic about such a wintry environment?

As You Like It is, after all, Shakespeare's bow to the vogue of the pastoral, with its shepherds and shepherdesses and attractive landscape--inspired by the publication a decade earlier of Sidney's Arcadia. The work is also Shakespeare's answer to two popular Robin Hood plays staged the previous year by a rival troupe. Indeed the exiled men are here explicitly compared to "old Robin Hood" and his "many merry men," whose Sherwood Forest has become Arden Forest.

To be sure, this Arden is not a realistic one; it is semi-magical. But whatever it is, the forest must contain greenery (the very word 'forest' occurs 23 times in this play, whereas no other Shakespeare play uses it more than thrice). The text mentions not only mossy oaks and osiers but also olive and palm trees, which are both evergreens; and it cites using the shade of boughs and bushes.

One might adduce the references in the text to "rough weather" and the like, or the presence of a song like "Blow, blow, thou winter wind." But these are not allusions to the current climate, which should be temperate throughout the play. The most important thing that goes on in Arden is ardent young love and courting (of several kinds), which are hardly abetted by snow on the ground and bare branches in the air. "Men are April when they woo," says the heroine.

There is of course no single correct way to mount Shakespeare's plays, but the solutions should lie within certain limits. The Forest of Arden here can no more do without verdure and warm sunlight than the Athenian woods in Midsummer Night's Dream can do without foliage and magic moonlight. Peter Brook's recent staging of the latter in a glaring white squash court provided an unrelievedly offensive evening. This As You Like It is far from being such a total disaster, but the approach adopted does constitute a barrier rather than a bridge.

Kahn has done a little textual trimming and rearranging to bring the running time down to exactly two hours and a half. And Jane Greenwood has created an attractive bunch of period costumes, although the period is considerably later than Elizabethan.

The major acting burden falls on the heroine Rosalind, which is the longest female role in all Shakespeare (there are ten or so longer male parts, topped by Hamlet, Richard III, Iago and Henry V). Rosalind is longer even than Cleopatra, which is the most difficult of the women's roles. Bernard Shaw attributed the great popularity of Rosalind to three factors: she speaks blank verse only for a few minutes; she wears a skirt only a few minutes; and she makes love to the man instead of waiting for him to make love to her. The last idea of the woman-as-pursuer was especially dear to Shaw, who went on to use it as the basis for Ann Whitefield, the driving force of his masterly Man and Superman.

Women become actresses in part so that they may become someone else for a while. They jump at the chance to play Rosalind since it allows them to extend the make-believe to the point of portraying a young man who mocks the moods of a woman in love. Originally this artificiality was carried one remove further because all female roles were played by boy-actors. (England once more saw an all-male As You Like It in 1920, and, more recently, at the National Theatre in 1967.)

The current Rosalind is the much-honored Eileen Atkins, making her AST debut. Mis Atkins is no stranger to the part, having played it (in bluejeans) back home with the Royal Shakespeare Company three years ago. She is still young enough for the role, though she is not so pretty as one would like. Her angular face is no insuperable drawback, however, since she spends most of the play disguised as a curly-headed Ganymede in a riding outfit.

In a generally unfussy performance, she speaks Shakespeare's language naturally and swiftly, trippingly on the tongue. She is at her best in a passage like the one where she describes to Orlando the earmarks of a man in love. But at times an unwelcome hard edge creeps into her voice. In addition, I miss the extraordinary radiance and ebullience an ideal Rosalind should convey--a task that would be easier amid less bleak surroundings.

Tovah Feldshuh is amusing as Rosalind's inseparable cousin Celia--vivacious and at times even giddy. On her first entrance she looks just lovely in her white and gold costume. Later she appears with properly besmirched cheeks, toting a caged bird through the forest.

The second-largest role--though much less than half the size of Rosalind's--belongs to the hero Orlando, the object of Rosalind's sporting. Kenneth Welsh makes him sufficiently fervent and brave. Orlando is Shakespeare's most athletic hero, and Welsh is stocky and muscular. But as staged here he certainly doesn't deserve the prize in the wrestling match, though this is not the reason the evil duke, in a nice touch, takes the purse of money away from him. As Charles, Edwin Owens speaks far better than we would expect of a professional wrestler.

Touchstone (not found in the source novel) is Shakespeare's first intentional fool, a character the playwright would vastly improve on in Twelfth Night, All's Well, and King Lear. It is a tribute to George Hearn's skill that, with rouged cheeks and polychrome doublet, he makes this satirizing role better than it really is; and he fully merits the applause his speech on duelling elicits.

Jaques (also Shakespeare's invention), the cheerless square peg in a round hole, reflects the Elizabethan era's fascination with neurotic states of mind (as in the plays of Ben Jonson), which would climax a few years later in the publication of Burton's huge Anatomy of Melancholy. Jaques is the counterpart of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, which Philip Kerr played so admirably here two years ago. Kerr is now imbuing Jaques with the same wide-stanced, pigeon-toed gait he used for Malvolio. To this he has added a wonderful pasty face and a hilarious mannerism of gargling his r's in words like 'warble' and 'warp.' Since Jaques not only is a malcontent but also enjoys parading his melancholia, he carries a little notebook and pencil in which to jot down cynical quips for future use. Another bull's-eye for Kerr.

If this production is short on transcendent acting, it is for once also totally free of atrocious elocution--even in the bit parts, where one tends to find vocal ineptitude. I cannot fail to mention Tom McDermott's lovable portrayal of the tired old Adam, a role that some evidence indicates Shakespeare himself originally played. Praise too for Keith Baker, making his AST debut as Amiens; not only does he speak well but he proves himself an absolutely splendid tenor in rendering Lee Hoiby's songs. And the bright E-major setting of "It was a lover and his lass," the loveliest song in all the plays (albeit extraneous here), is enchantingly and impeccably sung by two little boy-sopranos, Harold Safferstein and David Vogel. These lads then scatter blossoms on the ground before the concluding lei-bedecked wedding festivities and swirling jig. But all this is not enough to make one forget the absence of green, green, green.