As You Liken It: Simile in the Wilderness

Summary

God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likenes, and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the foule of the heaven, and over the beastes, and over all the earth.

(Genesis 1:26, Geneva Bible)

A Similitude is a likenesse when two thinges, or moe then two, are so compared and resembled together, that they both in some one propertie seeme like. Oftentimes brute Beastes, and thinges that have no life, minister great matter in this behalfe. Therefore, those that delite to prove thinges by Similitudes, must learne to knowe the nature of divers beastes, of mettalles, of stones, and al such as have any vertue in them, and be applied to mans life.

(Thomas Wilson, The arte of Rhetorique)

For why should I presume to prefermy conceit and imagination, in affirming that a thing is thus or thus in its own nature, because it seemeth to me to be so; before the conceit of other living creatures, who may as well think it to be otherwise in its own nature, because it appeareth otherwise to them than it doth to me?

(Sir Walter Raleigh, 'The Sceptic')

In the four syllables of its title, As You Like It contains both the words used to signal simile, and puts a 'like' as a barrier between 'you' and 'it'. From that title onward, this pastoral play is permeated with the idea of likeness, which is to say, imperfect identity - and the way that 'liking', even in apparently benign forms, necessarily imposes on its objects. Shakespeare describes the chronic nostalgia for nature as a sentimental manifestation of pyrrhonist anxieties, the suspicion that we can know things only as we liken them, never in or as themselves.