'So Quiet and So Sweet a Style'

I read the tragedies and some of the history plays in heavy rotation, the comedies more sparingly. This is a dubious practice reinforced by habit. I picked up As You Like It on a whim. (I knew a newspaperman who named his daughter Rosalind because he loved the play.) I’ve made it a custom to read contrapuntally, interweaving books of different eras, languages, styles, forms and general ambiance. For several weeks I’ve been going through the stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a handful each day. Even in stories with settings that predate the Holocaust, its presence hovers. The Forest of Arden seemed like a refuge, and it is. Duke Senior, Rosalind’s father, addresses his companions at the opening of Act II, Scene 1:

“Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,

Hath not old custom made this life more sweet

Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods

More free from peril than the envious court?

Here feel we but the penalty of Adam,

The seasons' difference, as the icy fang

And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,

Which, when it bites and blows upon my body,

Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say

'This is no flattery: these are counsellors

That feelingly persuade me what I am.'

Sweet are the uses of adversity,

Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,

Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;

And this our life exempt from public haunt

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

I would not change it.”

The duchy has been usurped by Duke Senior’s brother Frederick. The conventional rules of life (and physics) are suspended. Rather than fretting or plotting revenge, as would likely be the case in one of the tragedies or histories, the Duke encourages gratitude and a celebratory spirit: “Sweet are the uses of adversity.” Shakespeare is no philosopher. He never theorizes, despite what critics may claim. Based on the Duke’s paean to a newly free life in the forest, we can’t say Shakespeare is an “optimist,” whatever the hell that means. But his characters happily live philosophy, dramatized by plot, energized by their creator’s copious reservoir of words.

“And this our life exempt from public haunt,” of course, reminds us of our ongoing pandemical shutdown. Nice to think of home as a Forest of Arden with my “co-mates and brothers in exile.” Inhabitants of the forest, we’re told, “fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.” “There’s no clock in the forest,” which suggests the timelessness of social distancing and work migrated homeward, away from the office. In Act II, Scene 7, Orlando says “I thought that all things had been savage here,” and continues addressing the Duke:

“If ever you have look’d on better days,

If ever been where bells have knoll’d to church,

If ever sat at any good man’s feast,

If ever from your eyelids wip’d a tear,

And know what 't is to pity and be pitied,

Let gentleness my strong enforcement be:

In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword.”

In reply, Shakespeare fashions a lovely musical echo of Orlando’s words for the Duke to speak:

“True is it that we have seen better days,

And have with holy bell been knoll’d to church,

And sat at good men's feasts, and wip’d our eyes

Of drops that sacred pity hath engender’d: 

And therefore sit you down in gentleness

And take upon command what help we have

That to your wanting may be minister’d.”

Shakespeare gives the lie to today’s fashion for incessant whining. In reply to the speech delivered by the Duke in Act II, quoted at the top, Amiens replies:

“Happy is your grace,

That can translate the stubbornness of fortune

Into so quiet and so sweet a style.”