From Elders to Medlars in the Forest of Arden
Résumé
As You Like It is often considered a comedy of “re-membering,” with all the polysemy of this word and in accordance with the opening line of the play, “as I remember” (1.1.1). This chapter argues that nowhere better than in the running commentary of trees can we see this process of re-membering in action, providing the comedy with both a structure and an ideological stance, based not on opposition and elimination, but on cross-fertilization and mutuality. Sending city dwellers to the forest in this play does not amount to opposing nature and culture, but rather to making us see the forest as endowed with a culture of its own, getting natural cycles and human experience to constantly overlap.