Taken together, these two plays, written quite close together in the middle of Shakespeare’s career, develop to the full the genre of festive, holiday comedy which he began with Love’s Labours Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
As You Like It is set mainly in the Forest of Arden; Twelfth Night is set entirely in Illyria. Those are largely – though not entirely – fantasy spaces, where loss and danger seem to evaporate, where gender-roles can be exchanged or set aside, and where festive, pleasurable impulses can expand and be indulged without much pressure from any constraining reality. They represent a kind of holiday from the real world, not unlike comedy and the comic theatre itself.
At the same time, both plays are acutely aware of comedy’s limits. If these are spaces of imaginative transformation – spaces in which ‘nothing that is so, is so’ – they are also plays which make us acutely aware of the working of the imagination, its subjectivity, its foolishness, its giddy inconstancy. How much value is there in this holiday exhilaration? How much weight will it bear, how long will its good effects last? ‘There’s no clock in the forest’, but time cannot be suspended for ever.
These questions bear particularly on romantic love, which in Shakespeare (and perhaps in life) is always closely involved with the imagination. Shakespearean lovers see differently, they see the one they love in an ideal light which makes love peculiarly vulnerable to disappointment and disillusion. If love is released on holiday and flourishes through the (poetic) imagination, is it therefore to be celebrated? Or is its truest expression the melancholy which Jaques cultivates in one way, and Orsino in another?
Comedy: imagination: love. We shall explore these two great plays though that triangle of interests, reflecting on their differences as well as their similarities. A particular point of comparison will be their two cross-dressing heroines, Rosalind and Viola, very different figures, yet each a centre of comic, imaginative, loving intelligence in their respective plays, and among the finest female characters that Shakespeare ever created.
