SECTION 11 - Concerning Arden

Summary

Here is another matter not unworthy of consideration. Granted that Lodge laid the scene of his Rosalynde in the Arden of France, I cannot doubt that in his play Shakespeare had in mind the Warwickshire Arden, which also supplied him with the woodland scenery of Midsummer Night's Dream. When Milton wrote of Shakespeare's ‘native woodnotes’; he was thinking of the comedies which gave him the setting of Comus, and probably he thought that native Stratford was in the woodland. In strictness this was not so. The county of Warwick, Camden tells us, consisted of two districts, the Feldon, ‘a champaign country’ of cornfields and pastures, and the Woodland, otherwise called Arden. The Feldon was in the southern part and was divided from the Woodland by the Avon. Stratford was therefore on the edge of the forest, but not actually in it: Camden reckons it as in the Feldon. But there is a group of villages which have, or had, the distinguishing addition to their names ‘in Arden.’ They are all in the central or more northerly parts of Warwickshire or in the neighbouring county of Leicester—Drayton, Hampton, Overton (otherwise Orton-on-the-Hill), Polesworth, Tan-worth, Weston. Henley in Arden is nearest to Stratford, eight miles distant. Ardens Grafton, some six miles west of Stratford, as Dugdale tells us, took its name, not from the forest, but from the Warwickshire family of Arden.