The as you like it garden
Video guide transcript
[Shakespeare: Here is the As You Like It Garden.
[Interlocutor]: Which plants come into use for you, Will Shakespeare, in As You Like It?
[Shakespeare]: Oh, there are many of them: roses, hawthorns, brambles, briers, and burrs; chestnut, cork, osiers, oaks, and holly; moss, rushes, rye, peascods, nuts, medlars, grapes, and even sugar - a plant we never saw in England, for it came form a plant that grew afar off in the Indies.
[Interlocutor]: Why are so many of those plants trees and bushes?
[Shakespeare]: In As You Like It, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we spend most of the play in the forest. But here we have not a distant, magical, moonlight wood peopled by faeries. This forest is a daylight and familiar place, very like the real forest of Arden hard by my home, Stratford-upon-Avon. Many a time I went a-nutting under its trees as a boy.
This is the reason why, yes, there are more than half the plants in this play are forest trees and bushes: oaks and osiers; briers and brambles; chestnut and cork; hawthorn and holly. You think of the holly mostly at Christmas, but our holly was with us all the year. It often grew into huge trees, unlike the small, pleasant shrub here in this Garden.
[Interlocutor]: But then there are also a number of food plants, domestic garden plants. What are they doing in the play?
[Shakespeare]: Those few plants in this play which we expect to find in gardens, rather than growing wild, cluster chiefly around Touchstone—Touchstone, the court jester who never wanted to come to the forest in the first place. Rosalind calls him a medlar, which is both someone who meddles in others’ business, and also an orchard fruit, a kind of pear. You can see a pear tree growing in Romeo and Juliet Garden. The gardeners have trained and pruned it to keep its branches against the wall, in a formal shape very unlike any forest tree -- a garden fashion well known in my time and earlier, and well suited to Touchstone, who is very fond of courtly comforts. You now call this fashion of tree training an espalier.
Touchstone spins his jests in the garden, with peascods, grapes, and roses.
He calls to mind: when he is in love, she was a mere milkmaid, but he never dared tell his love. Rather he betook himself to a kitchen garden and tearfully wooed a peascod instead. Nowadays you call it a pea pod.
Rosalind’s name means “beautiful rose”, but he adds its thorns in his own bawdy voice, when he mocks Orlando’s love verse with bawdy scouplets of his own:
He that sweetest rose will find
Must find love’s prick and Rosalind.
He struts himself as a learned scholar before the ignorant swain William, expounding upon grapes as if they were too subtle a matter for a sluggish country mind:
The heathen philosopher,
when he had a desire to eat a grape,
would open his lips when he put it into his mouth;
meaning thereby that grapes were made to eat and lips to open.
Jests like these hold the play in place. The forest in As You Like It is wild and dangerous, a place of much wisdom and folly, but never very far from life of courts and towns. Ploughed fields, well-ordered gardens, and the streets of Stratford were just out of sight, beyond the edge of the wood.