Shakespearian Margins in George Eliot’s ‘working-day world’

Summary

PRELUDE

The world of the first act of As You Like It proves a remarkably prosaic one – literally so in the first half of the act – an entangled world in which characters are burdened by their past actions, the intricacies of past relationships, the constraints of others’ actions and attitudes, inherited problems and problems of inheritance. However, as the act progresses, it emerges that this is a world which the play realizes only in order to leave it behind, its problems to be dissolved rather than resolved in the freer, transformative and Arcadian world of the Forest of Arden. Repeatedly the early dialogue records what we might call anticipatory tropes of transformation, culminating in Celia’s closing pronouncement that she and the banished Rosalind now go ‘in content, / To liberty, and not to banishment’ (1.3.136–7). Early in the same scene the same transformation of attitude had straddled an exchange between Rosalind and Celia:

rosalind [. . .] O how full of briars is this working-day world!

celia They are but burs, cousin, thrown upon thee in holiday foolery.

(1.3.11 —14)

It is in this exchange that we find George Eliot's 'favorite little epithet: "This working-day world"' The little phrase was truly a favourite Eliot quotation, its brevity compensated by the sheer frequency of Eliot's use of it in a great diversity of contexts: in effect George Eliot makes the phrase her own through repeated usages which are entirely ignoring of, or hostile to, the originating Shakespearian context. Eliot's is thus a remarkable appropriation since it runs counter to the Shakespearian grain, arresting and resisting the repeated movement of As You Like It, preeminently a holidaying play. Eliot's lighting on this phrase amounts to a refusal of the Shakespearian story.