Aims
This course aims to:
• consider Shakespeare’s preoccupations with woods or forests and seas
• look closely at the Forest of Arden and the uses of the Mediterranean in Pericles
• explore the dramatic and dramaturgical uses to which woods and waters are put
Content
Shakespeare’s most famously invented sea is late, in The Winter’s Tale, but he did as much nearly 20 years before, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, while many plays that lack seas still use marine imagery and watery metaphor. As Northrop Frye pointed out, he also persistently structured comedy around a first world and a green world to which protagonists flee or escape, and the pattern reappears in some tragedies.
The Forest of Arden in As You Like It is probably his best-known green world, but what does it mean that it is always a forest, never a wood, just as the wood to which the lovers flee in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is consistently so termed, like Birnam Wood in Macbeth? Woods are everywhere, and may be anywhere, but a forest is a much more specific Frankish and English term, land under (royal) forest law, with many rights and restrictions, several of which As You Like It specifically mentions, creating an economic subtext too little mentioned in criticism.
Unlike those convenient and fictional seas, the Mediterranean of the collaborative Pericles, written with George Wilkins, is anchored in reality, and as much an agent of the action as any of the characters. Hugely popular in its own time, but now much neglected, the first of the Late Plays or Romances offers a sea-change, or changes, of many kinds.
In the last analysis, everything Shakespeare did persistently in his drama had a dramaturgical purpose, and those of woods, or forests, and seas, with the journeys they enable and endanger, are linked, both in developments of character and/or plot, and in larger evolutions of metatheatre.
Presentation of the course
Each session will begin with a mini-lecture and PowerPoint presentation, lasting 45–60 mins, and will then be open to question and answer, and contributions by all.
Course sessions
1. Woods, Forests, and Seas in Shakespeare’s Real World
We necessarily begin with some of the realities Shakespeare knew, from what wood one may or may not cut to the increasing flood of seaborne exotica being imported and the realities of marine insurance.
2. Green Worlds and Playhouses
Frye’s observation of first world/green world structuring was acute, but those green worlds have a strongly theatrical dimension he underplayed, and a generic reach greater than he allowed.
3. A Self-Respecting Forest
The Forest of Arden is at once deeply fantastical (hidden dukes, disguised women, stray lionesses, a theophany) and unexpectedly sharp about economic privilege and exclusion, underpinning its pinnacle of happy comedy.
4. The Generous Sea
Pericles is one of the most radical plays Shakespeare concocted, a collaboration that began the last phase of his dramatic career, but its Mediterranean (like that of The Comedy of Errors, which draws on the same source) both seems to claim lives and astonishingly restores them, helped along by another theophany. The play also has a structure not seen again until the twentieth century.
5. Losing and Finding
Oneself and Others. Perhaps the most vital unity of seas and forests, in Shakespeare’s art, is as places where one changes, losing one’s self only to re-find it. Both were a practical and familiar part of his world, but became the most potent topoi of his art as figures of both developmental change and the nature of theatre.
Learning outcomes
You are expected to gain from this series of classroom sessions a greater understanding of the subject and of the core issues and arguments central to the course.
The learning outcomes for this course are:
• to understand the practicalities and legalities concerning wood and water that Shakespeare
drew on
• to understand the uses to which he put both dramaturgically
• to be able to approach his drama with a deeper and more analytical grasp of why he so
often takes us out to the woods or out to sea
Required reading
Any modern, annotated editions of As You Like It and Pericles are acceptable, but the Arden 3s listed below are recommended. Complete Shakespeares that lack scholarly and critical annotation will be of less help.
* Dusinberre, Juliet, ed, As You Like It (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006) ISBN9781904271222
* Gossett, Suzanne, ed, Pericles (ed. Gossett, Suzanne, London: Arden Shakespeare, 2004) ISBN 9781903436850
