It is late Saturday night of Labor Day weekend. I am at the top of the tree after a long drive back from Lenox, MA, where we saw an outdoor production of As You Like It at Shakespeare and Company. It’s been a good summer for Shakespeare, we made it to productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night (both for the umpteenth time, and still enjoyable), The Taming of the Shrew (for the first time, in a riotously funny, subversive production by the Vermont Shakespeare Company), and tonight, for the second or third time, As You Like It.
As You Like It is my favorite comedy and one of my two favorite Shakespeare plays alongside King Lear. It is very nearly an anti-Lear. With a female protagonist, Rosalind, who is fearless and passionate, verbally adroit, clever in an almost Odyssean way, able with nimble fingers to untangle the knot of romantic entanglements and usher the plot to a happy ending for all, what’s not to like? As well as being a character that, played by a man in Shakespeare’s day, would have amounted in some scenes to a man playing a woman playing a man playing a woman. O rich transubstantiation of selves! O palimpsest of bodies! We are all so quicksilver, or should be.
But As You Like It is also the most arboreal of Shakespeare’s plays, more so even than A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Nearly all of it takes place in the forest of Arden; love poems are nailed to every tree; and, as Duke Senior says, there are “tongues in trees, books in running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in everything.” And in the end, forest and woman wreak their magic: identities are restored, wicked brothers turn good, lions and snakes are vanquished, hard hearts are melted, and everyone has someone to love—except poor Jacques, who prefers his melancholy and absconds to a cave.
This is the power of art to transform the lived world: for tonight, I stand in the tree of Arden, Shakespearean language swarming around me like intoxicated (and intoxicating) fireflies.
Last night, Friday night, after the annual back-to-school potluck, I took Emme and five of her friends into Hanover late so they could go out to dinner together and get bubble tea, while I hung out at a cafe, doing a bit of reading and writing. On the way in they blasted music from the latest Mamma Mia! soundtrack, six girls belting out the songs as we drove through the night. Later, back home and in the tree, I was still helplessly vibrating with the absurdly irresistible jubilance of these songs. The sky practically shook with it (as did the car, earlier).
The tree of Arden I have climbed many times in my dreams.
But the Mamma Mia! tree is not so bad either, for a night.
