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As I argued in chapter 3, the Forest of Arden is not an undifferentiated green space: we are invited to imagine different places off behind the two stage-doors, which are symbolically associated – one with male aristocracy and power, and the other with female and working-class people; one deep in the forest, the other on ‘the skirts of the forest’ where olives are grown and sheep are tended. It is the native inhabitants of that lower-status space that I want to look at in this chapter; they are ‘layered’ so as to produce a complex critique of certain habits of the aristocracy. They operate via the common Elizabethan literary convention of the pastoral, a genre to which Lodge's romance Rosalynd largely belongs.
In the hands of writers such as Lodge, Sidney, and Spenser, pastoral literature created an idealized landscape of love and art, simple and free of physical care (no Shakespearean ‘winter winds’ blow there). David Young in his book The Heart's Forest takes us beyond these generalizations to an analysis of the binary oppositions on which the genre is based:
The social antitheses are perhaps the most obvious: urban versus rural, court versus country. They could deal variously with manners (polished versus rustic), with class divisions (aristocrat versus commoner), and with economic differences (rich versus poor).
Other oppositional topics, Young suggests, are the active life versus the contemplative, worldliness versus innocence, nurture and nature, Art and Nature and Art and Fortune. If I add masculine versus feminine, I am not just indicating one of the main developments in critical interest in Shakespeare since the publication of Young's book in 1972; I am also arguing for a structuring principle in the play which underlies the simple extractable ‘themes’ of pastoral. This has been the main emphasis of chapters 1–4; I turn now to more traditional critical material, though I will be offering a reading of it in terms derived from the materialist positions of new historicism.
‘The pastoral characters of the play’, wrote the scholar W. W. Greg,
may be roughly analysed as follows.
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