As You Like It or As You Don’t: Shakespeare's Arden,Thomas More's Utopia,and their discontents

Abstract

Although As You Like It is criticised for the doubleness of its utopian vision, this article posits that the Forest of Arden challenges characters, spectators, and readers to evaluate alternative societies in the mode of Thomas More's Utopia (1516). Some characters, including More's Raphael Hythlodaeus and Shakespeare's Jaques, reject this dialectical education and refuse to apply their utopian experience to the governance of a ship of state. An alternative is embodied in Morus, More's narrator-character, and Rosalind, Shakespeare's poet-stage director. Shakespeare and More interrogate the relationship between the ideal and the real through a dialectically utopian mode of literary inquiry.