Religion in Arden

Summary

It is strange how scant is the attention customarily paid to the precise locality of the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Agnes Latham, in her New Arden edition of the play (1975), expresses the general opinion that it is set in ‘the Ardennes on the border of Belgium and Luxemburg’, while allowing that Shakespeare and many in his audience ‘could identify it easily with those parts of Warwickshire still known as Arden’ (p. 8). This identification may be traced back to Edmond Malone, who identified the forest even more precisely as ‘that in French Flanders, lying near the Meuse and between Charlemont and Rocroy’ (quoted in the New Variorum edition of the play, p. 16). If for the source of these statements we go back to Shakespeare’s source, Thomas Lodge’s pastoral romance of Rosalynde, we find that the main setting is what he calls (like Shakespeare) ‘the forest of Arden’, but that the forest he has in mind is not so much that to the North-East of France as a vast unidentified forest between ‘the province of Bordeaux’, from which his hero Rosader (Shakespeare’s Orlando) sets forth with his old servant, and the city of Lyons, to which they make their way. This is evidently to the South of the royal capital of Paris, where the usurping king Torismond has his court (Shakespeare’s duke Frederick).