3 - The Skirts of the Forest

Summary

As You Like It was probably one of the first plays staged at the Globe, which opened as a state-of-the-art theatre in 1599 with the motto Totus mundus agit histrionem – a version of which may be heard in Jaques’ famous set-piece in Act 2, ‘All the world's a stage’. The new theatre was built, as were most other places of entertainment, in the ‘liberties’ or suburbs, the area outside the jurisdiction of the walled city of London, but close enough to be a mere bridge or ferry-ride away, across the river on the Thames's south bank. Steven Mullaney, in his historical study The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, argues that

long before the emergence of popular drama, the Liberties of London had served as a transitional zone between the city and the country, various powers and their limits… as a culturally maintained domain of ideological ambivalence and contradiction…. When popular drama moved out into the Liberties, it appropriated this civic structure and converted the moral license and ambivalence of the Liberties to its own ends, translating its own cultural situation into a liberty that was at once moral, ideological, and topological – a freedom to experiment with awide range of ideological perspectives and to realize, in dramatic form, the cultural contradictions of its age….

It was to the Liberties, according to Stow [a contemporary observer], that citizens retired to pursue pastimes and pleasures that had no proper place in the community…. What was lodged outside the city was excluded, yet retained; denied a place within the community, yet not merely exiled…. the margins of the city served as a more ambivalent staging ground: as a place where the contradictions of the community, its incontinent hopes and fears, were prominently and dramatically set on stage.

Building on this observation, we can speculate that when the play's original audience heard Celia say, at the end of Act 1, ‘Now go we in content, / To liberty, and not to banishment’, they might have felt a frisson of the special exploratory and potentially transgressive experience which ‘going to the theatre’ literally offered them.