6 minute read
ALL THE WORLD'S A COURT
from Issue 3
MADDIE WODA
WORLD'S A COURT
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ALL THE WORLD'S A COURT S hakespeare’s As You Like It is a comedy of errors. In gorgeous poetics, it tells the story of Duke Senior, a French courtesan whose position is usurped by his younger brother, Frederick. Duke Senior is banished to the Forest of Arden, and his daughter, Rosalind, follows with Frederick’s daughter, Celia, her loyal cousin and best friend. In the forest, a mystical realm of disguises and sunlight, Rosalind meets Orlando, an aristocrat in hiding from his brother, Oliver, who desires Orlando’s title. So as not to be recognized, Rosalind costumes herself as a young man, Ganymede. She is in costume when she meets Orlando. While this Midsummer-esque comedy turns on the misplaced love of Rosalind, Orlando, and even some local shepherds, Duke Senior and his attendants’ monologues provide literary heft and eloquence. Even after his exile to the forest, Duke Senior cannot escape the court. In his opening monologue of Act II, he uses the contrasting languages of court and nature to assert that the “natural world,” although equally dangerous as the world of the court, is more virtuous because nature inherently rejects artifce and deceit. Duke Senior’s declaration is ironic, as he claims that the institutions he labels as evil exist in nature as forces for good. Duke Senior’s vocabulary in this unfamiliar environment—Arden—fails him; he is confned to the language of court to
praise its opposite.
Immediately, Duke Senior designates the forest of Arden as an “exile,” an inherently political word that implies the removal of one from their home. “Exile” distinguishes the court, where the political decisions are made, from the forest, where the “old customs” make “life more sweet.” Te forest is prelapsarian. “Here feel we not, the penalty of Adam,” Duke Senior muses, at once confating Arden with Eden, suggesting that there is fundamental goodness to be found in the forest that is not to be found in the court, where the consequences of Adam’s sin are evident in betrayal, quarrel, and loss. Te court and the forest are clearly demarcated: “these woods”
are “more free from peril than the envious court.” Envy, one of the seven deadly sins, reminds us both that the court is a den of vice compared to the forest and that, though the court can strive to be natural and holy, it will only ever be envious of Arden. T he court and the forest exist in binaries: one pre- and one postlapsarian, one old and one new, one safe and one dangerous. Within these descriptions, it is necessary to ascertain what Duke Senior means by the “natural world.” Clearly, as a man of the court, he does not spend much time in nature. He is exiled to an unfamiliar world. He speaks not only about physical objects particular to the forest’s environment (“trees,” “brooks,” and “stones”), but also intangible forces like “the seasons” and the “icy fang…of the winter’s wind.” He includes “the toad, ugly and venomous,” as an example of nature’s goodness, even if it is not as beautiful as “painted pomp.”
Despite claiming that the natural world is “more free from peril than…court,” Duke Senior clearly understands the forest’s dangers. Te wind isn’t just cold, it is personifed as a dangerous animal with an “icy fang” that “bites and blows upon [his] body.” Te wind seems to understand the harm it causes, blowing “even till I shrink with cold,” Duke Senior observes. He also describes its
MADDIE WODA movement as “chiding,” as if intending to punish. Nature is less perilous than court, then, not because it’s less dangerous, but because its danger is worth the toll it extracts. “Tis life,” Duke Senior declares, “exempt from public haunt,” is indeed flled with “adversity,” but this adversity is for a purpose. Its “use” is “sweet” for those who learn from it, presumably crafting a more durable individual through straightforward challenges. In Duke Senior’s mind, nature uses adversity to teach its inhabitants, perhaps because natural forces are impartial bystanders that do not care about exacting revenge or favors. On the contrary, the forces of the court are the forces of men, those “counselors” who use “fattery…[to] feelingly persuade me what I am.” In the court, men use artifce and deceit to infuence others. Unlike the ugly toad, who makes no pretenses and holds its jewel inside its head, these men dress in fancy clothes and use sycophantic phrases to convince Duke Senior to subscribe to an ill-advised plan. Tis lack of artifce establishes nature as the more virtuous place, one where men learn from adversity rather than be constantly tricked. Tis claim, that nature is more virtuous than court, harkens back to Duke Senior’s description of court as “painted pomp,” a seemingly esteemable place that is actually hollow and virtueless.
ALL THE WORLD'S A COURT T he court though, does not always strive to exist independently of nature. Te elements Duke Senior praises—nature’s lack of insecurity, lack of even a self to be conscious of—are sought after by many courts. In Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, written over half a century before Shakespeare’s As You Like It, this elegant negligence, this absence of self-consciousness, was awarded its own term, which described the perfect courtier: sprezzatura. Te perfect courtier displays “a certain nonchalance that shall conceal design,” an utterly unconcerned sophistication. Just as Duke Senior adopts the language of the court to describe nature, the court adopts the language of nature to describe its ideal courtier. Te paradox, though, that defnes sprezzatura, only emphasizes nature’s true indiference to human triviality. Sprezzatura, when performed by a master, is so well practiced that the practice is invisible. Nature has no need of practice, of rhetoric so careful as to seem casual, to display the very nonchalance for which the best courtier strives. Tough Duke Senior waxes poetic about the forest’s virtues and condemns the court as a place of shallow artifce, it seems he has no way to assign meaning to the space he believes to be so valuable without using the language of the court. In the last two lines of his speech, he asserts that one can fnd “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / sermons in stones, and good in everything.” Instead of leaving the institutions of the court in court, he inserts them into the forest. “Tongues in trees” alludes to his chatty counselors, those who can’t help but lavish words on their better in hopes of winning his favor. “Books in the running brooks” refer to the education of courtier’s minds; “sermons in stones” refer to the religious systems that educated their spirits.” Even if Duke Senior believes that there is no artifce in nature, and therefore nature is a more virtuous arena than the court, he does not have the language with which to properly praise it.
Duke Senior is a man of the court. Arden is not his home, and he does not reside there voluntarily. Tough he might believe that nature is more valuable, more virtuous than court, his language is structured around the worthiness of institutions inherently important to court life. While Arden, with its uncomfortably icy winds, may produce sturdier individuals, this process never breaks out of the language of manmade institutions, “books” and “sermons.”
