The Use of Nature in as You Like It

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Nature plays a significant role in Shakespeare's comedies. It serves as a dynamic environment in which possibility abounds, wildness thrives, and discovery occurs. Nature is marked by moments of clarity and dreamy illusion. It serves both as a wise guide or a menacing adversary, depending on the characters' dispositions and circumstances. In plays like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, characters escape to the natural world when the structured life of court has gone morally and ethically awry. In other cases, such as Twelfth Night and The Tempest, characters involuntarily find themselves at the mercy of nature, forced to endure and face its challenges. It, however, mostly serves as a rite of passage of sorts, a pastoral setting of reflection and contrast, where characters are free and enabled to find a better understanding of who they are, where they belong in society, and how to amend social injustices. In the beginning of As You Like It, it reveals that there is a great deal of social turmoil and family dissention. Duke Senior has been banished by his younger brother Duke Frederick, Orlando has been wronged by his brother Oliver, and Celia has been banished by her own father after choosing to stay faithful to the exiled Rosalind. When the characters enter the forest, they encounter love, disguise, deception, and spiritual awakenings. It is in this topsy-turvy world that characters both learn from madness and folly as well as reason, spiritual growth, and the benign nature of real love. Duke Senior "finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones in stones, and good in everything," (2.1.16-17). In this particular passage, Duke Senior presents a dichotomy between courtly and country life. The wilderness contains the naked and pure truth, void of the polluted aspects of courtly life such as flattery, envy, and
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