{"id":3659,"date":"2020-02-11T17:06:03","date_gmt":"2020-02-11T17:06:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/druidry.org\/\/shakespeares-guide-to-the-druid-grove-a-study-of-a-midsummer-nights-dream-the-merry-wives-of-windsor-and-as-you-like-it-from-a-druidic-perspective"},"modified":"2020-03-03T14:38:14","modified_gmt":"2020-03-03T14:38:14","slug":"shakespeares-guide-to-the-druid-grove-a-study-of-a-midsummer-nights-dream-the-merry-wives-of-windsor-and-as-you-like-it-from-a-druidic-perspective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/druidry.org\/resources\/shakespeares-guide-to-the-druid-grove-a-study-of-a-midsummer-nights-dream-the-merry-wives-of-windsor-and-as-you-like-it-from-a-druidic-perspective","title":{"rendered":"Shakespeare\u2019s Guide to the Druid Grove: A Study of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor and As You Like It from a Druidic Perspective."},"content":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Elizabeth Cruse ~\u00a0<\/em>
\nTo enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we\u00a0 ourselves are \u00a0transformed.\u00a0 It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go\u00a0into the greenwood to grow, learn and change.\u00a0 It is where you travel to find\u00a0yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost.<\/em>
\nRoger Deakin\u2019s introduction to his eclectic book of sylvan essays, Wildwood\u00a0 offers no surprise to anyone who has become a druid and entered the forest whether metaphorically or actually.\u00a0 In this piece,\u00a0 I want to go further than merely noting Shakespeare\u2019s symbolic appropriation of the forest.\u00a0 I want to investigate in detail the meanings he gives to the wood and to explore through the impact on his characters who experience the wildwood what extra dimensions can be added to our understanding of our own journey through the forest as druids. I want to claim Shakespeare for druidry in general and OBOD in particular and so, as part of this project, I shall be alert for any signs that Shakespeare\u2019s wood was informed by a Celtic awareness as well as the English one with which Shakespeare is identified so absolutely.
\nIn the last decade of the sixteenth century, Shakespeare wrote three plays that draw on old traditions of the wildwood:\u00a0 A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, dated between 1594 and 1596; The Merry Wives of Windsor, probably written between\u00a0 1597 and 8 and As You Like It, dated by scholars between 1598 \u2013 1600. As befits a druidic reading, I will explore a triple aspect of these plays: the nature of the wood itself, the nature of the other beings in the wood and the dreams that are dreamt in the forest.\u00a0 As in a Medieval romance or, more pertinently, the border of a Celtic illuminated manuscript, these three aspects interlace.\u00a0 As Coleridge said \u201cthe meaning is all inwoven.\u201d\u00a0 These aspects of the wood are all familiar to druids as we walk between the trees that make up the groves and forests of our own journeys.\u00a0 What does Shakespeare discover in what might be described as his own Druid, or perhaps Ovate, period ?
\nTo run away into Shakespeare\u2019s wood near Athens is to come into a place where time and space are changed beyond human recognition.\u00a0 Puck and the fairy who introduce us to the wood at the beginning of the second act of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream move at vertiginous speed, \u201cswifter than the moon\u2019s sphere\u201d, \u201cThorough bush, thorough briar\u201d and are unscathed by fire and water. The moon governs the world of men (hence Cleopatra\u2019s lament \u201cThere is nothing left remarkable\/ Under the visiting moon\u201d, (Anthony and Cleopatra, 4,xvi, 69 – 70) but the realm of spirits and fairies who haunt the wood is not ruled by the moon, is in a different dimension which human beings will not perceive unless permitted to do so.\u00a0 \u201cWe the globe can compass soon\/ Swifter than the wandr\u2019ing moon\u201d (4,I, 94 \u2013 5) says Oberon to Titania as, reconciled, they leave the waking lovers. Bottom would not have perceived Titania had he not been enchanted.\u00a0 He has no clear memory of what he has seen:\u00a0 \u201cMethought I was, and methought I had \u2013 but man is but a patched fool if he offer to say what I thought I had.\u201d The lovers never see the fairies who torment them and as they wake their experiences \u201cseem small and indistinguishable, \/ Like far-off mountains turn\u00e8d into clouds\u201d. (4,I, 194 \u2013 5)\u00a0 But like them, the druid may sometimes wonder what is dream:\u00a0 the experiences in the forest or the apparent world of daily rule and responsibility? \u201cIt seems to me,\u201d says Demetrius, \u201cthat yet, we sleep, we dream.\u00a0 Do you not think the duke was here\u2026\u201d(4,I, 189 -90) Demetrius, of course, remains enchanted with the juice of love-in-idleness, but then, all of us who have entered into the wood and courted its magic are also permanently changed.
\nThe wood outside Athens threatens the smooth course of love as the emotions of the lovers are let free without restraint. They go \u201cstumbling through the woods in a confused state of fear, anger and desire.\u201d\u00a0 Demetrius is prepared to see Helena die rather than have to deal with her passion for him: \u201cI\u2019ll run from thee and hide me in these brakes\/And leave thee to the mercy of wild beasts.\u201d(2,i, 227)\u00a0 Violence breaks out. Even the women come to physical conflict.\u00a0 The spirits that dwell there are non-human and inhuman.\u00a0 Lysander\u2019s courteous if reluctant respect for Hermia\u2019s virginal scruples in Act 2 receives short shrift from Puck who refers to Lysander as \u201cthis lack-love, this kill-courtesy\u201d on witnessing this pretty scene. Desire is a simple matter in the fairy world.\u00a0 Oberon wants Titania\u2019s changeling.\u00a0 She will not give it.\u00a0 He takes revenge by enchanting her into mindless lust for a donkey-headed man, a comic minotaur.\u00a0 So Oberon sees the Athenian boy\u2019s dilemma as simple also \u2013 enchant Demetrius so that he will love Helena.
\nTake thou some of it, and seek through this grove<\/em>
\nA sweet Athenian lady is in love<\/em>
\nWith a disdainful youth.\u00a0 <\/em>
\nAnoint his eyes \u2026<\/em>\u00a0 (2, I, 259)
\nAll this suggests that erotic love is not a state to be trusted, that it requires the constraint of civilisation, and may be predicated on enchantment rather than clear sight.\u00a0 In the forest we may find ourselves stripped of inhibition.\u00a0 The vicarious experience of this offered by A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream gives us the chance to learn about the potential perils and pleasures of that state before we decide to enter into it ourselves.
\nFor the druid facing the ecological uncertainties of our times the deepest chord is struck by the sense in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream that what emanates from the wood can disturb nature.\u00a0 The quarrel between Oberon and Titania has provoked meteorological chaos.\u00a0 The world has drowned
\nContagious fogs which falling on the land<\/em>
\nHath every pelting river made so proud<\/em>
\nThat they have overbourne their continents.<\/em> (2,i, 90)
\n
\nCattle are diseased; the green corn rots in the field. The seasons are awry.\u00a0\u00a0 \u2026. the spring the summer,<\/em>
\nThe chiding autumn, angry winter change<\/em>
\nTheir wonted liveries, and the mazed world<\/em>
\nBy their increase now knows not which is which.<\/em><\/p>\n

This is not within human control.\u00a0 As human beings we need the humility to recognise that there are natural forces we may not be aware of.\u00a0 It needs to be pointed out however, that none of the characters in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream recognise these natural forces consciously by the end of the play.\u00a0 The fairies bless Theseus\u2019 house and the marriage beds with the lovers all unaware.\u00a0 However, we can note the supernatural intervention as another pointer to the need to keep an open mind as to causation as we progress through our lives as druids.\u00a0 Shakespeare\u2019s tolerance of ambiguity and duality, (\u201ceverything seems double\u201d says Hermia as she awakens) offers an example of how to let our own minds play around the complexities of our lives and our environments.
\nThe enchantment of this spirit world is such that the elves can \u201ccreep into acorn cups\u201d, fairies wrap themselves in the shed skin of a snake, Titania herself no taller than a cowslip. Yet these diminutive beings can grow into elementals that exist on a par with the winds and the seas, so that the world is changed. Here we can see the shift in Shakespeare\u2019s writing between a medieval sensibility\u00a0\u00a0 in which mortals encounter faerie on an equivalent scale and live in the other world for long periods, and a modern miniaturisation of elves and fairies, which reached its apogee in Victorian art (Richard Dadd, for example) and faked photography.\u00a0 Now, with the ubiquity of Tolkien\u2019s mythos, elves have again become beings of physical and added moral stature.\u00a0 The medieval view we can trace back into the Celtic, Pwyll\u2019s descent into Annwn for example. In Shakespeare\u2019s playing with different scales in A Midsummer Night\u2019s we learn that in Shakespeare\u2019s wood we cannot trust our normal senses.\u00a0 We can only surrender to the dream and find ourselves in a different place when we wake up.\u00a0 This may be a phenomenon we recognise from some of our own inner journeying.\u00a0 There is always an assurance that we will awaken but inherent in that is the knowledge that we will awaken changed.
\nIn A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream Shakespeare spins an enchanted web as comprehensive and glittering as any woven by Arianrhod.\u00a0 We come to the end of the play in the company of fairies not mortals, and although Puck asks us to think only that we \u201chave but slumbered here \/While these visions did appear\u201d(Epilogue, 3 \u2013 4) the play leaves us with an abiding sense of the other world.
\nThe Merry Wives of Windsor, however, is set from start to finish among the worthy citizens of Windsor, prosperous, servanted, middle class.\u00a0 The world of faerie is, ostensibly, debunked.\u00a0 The tradition of Herne the Hunter who haunts Windsor Forest emanates from the \u201csuperstitious idle-headed eld\u201d. (4, iv, 34)\u00a0 Yet though the fairy realm is mocked and the \u201curchin, oafs (elf children) and fairies, green and white\u201d (4, iv, 48) are no more than Mistress Page\u2019s little son and daughter and their friends, Falstaff still has to be led into the forest and encounter, in his imagination, the other realm in order finally to learn his lesson that adultery is not acceptable.\u00a0 And for all that the Otherworld turns out to be a manifestation of this one, nevertheless Shakespeare\u2019s language momentarily hijacks his intent:<\/p>\n

There is an old tale goes that Herne the Hunter,<\/em>
\nSometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest,<\/em>
\nDoth all the wintertime at still midnight<\/em>
\nWalk round about an oak with great ragg\u2019d horns;<\/em>
\nAnd there he blasts the trees, and takes the cattle<\/em>
\nAnd makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chainIn a most hideous and dreadful manner.<\/em> \u00a0 (4.iv,26)<\/p>\n

The mortals who lead Falstaff into the forest and plague him there are as heartless as the fairies they decide to impersonate.\u00a0 It is a joke, but as Freud spends much effort in telling us, there is nothing as serious as a joke.\u00a0 It is also clear that Falstaff believes in fairies which is what makes the experience so salutary for him: \u201cThey are fairies, \/He that speaks to them shall die. \/I\u2019ll wink and couch. No man their works must eye.\u201d (5,v, 44)\u00a0 In the terms of the play, this puts Falstaff squarely and comically into the category of the “superstitious idle-headed eld\u201d yet in the language of Mistress Quickly\u2019s fairy queen there are echoes of the magic of A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream:<\/p>\n

Fairies black, grey, green and white<\/em>
\nYou moonshine revellers and shades of night,<\/em>
\nYou orphan heirs of fixed destiny\u2026<\/em> (5,v, 34 \u2013 36)<\/p>\n

We should note that this is quickly undermined and Mistress Quickly\u2019s housewifely concerns are writ large in the Hobgoblin\u2019s instructions to the fairy troop:<\/p>\n

Cricket, to Windsor chimneys shalt thou leap,<\/em>
\nWhere fires thou find\u2019st unraked and hearths unswept,<\/em>
\nThere pinch the maids as blue as bilberry.<\/em>
\nOur radiant queen hates sluts and sluttery<\/em>. (5, v, 40 \u2013 43)<\/p>\n

However, we find this also in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream in Puck\u2019s account of his pranks in the domestic world of country people:<\/p>\n

Are you not he<\/em>
\nThat frights the maidens of the villag\u2019ry,<\/em>
\nSkim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern<\/em>
\nAnd bootless make the breathless housewife churn.<\/em> (2.i, 34-6)<\/p>\n

Here is another indication that the everyday world is not so insulated from the forces of the wood as we might choose to think, and an important reminder to the druid that what occurs in one world, whether prosaic or extraordinary, may be affected by the other whatever the wishes of human beings.
\nThe political and bourgeois concerns of Windsor insinuate themselves into the fairy pageant: a fairy blessing of flowers on Windsor castle and \u201cnightly, meadow-fairies look you sing\/Like to the garter\u2019s compass in a ring\u201d. (5, v, 62 \u2013 3)\u00a0 This last can be read as an admonition to Falstaff, Knight as he is, to remember the motto of the knights of the Garter : Honi soit qui mal y pense. It would be intriguing to know if Shakespeare had read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight whose themes of a knight resisting adultery and the origin of the garter motto could be seen to counterpoint Falstaff\u2019s deliberate seeking of adulterous liaisons in The Merry Wives of Windsor.
\nFrom a druid perspective the message behind Falstaff\u2019s discomfiture and disgrace is that when we go into the woods with an impure spirit we are likely to meet with a downfall.\u00a0 In The Merry Wives of Windsor the law of return manifests itself through human rather than supernatural agency.\u00a0 But still, it is in the departure from civilisation into the forest that Falstaff finally learns his lesson.\u00a0 The elementals do their work for those who encounter them despite, not because, of the belief of the majority of human beings.\u00a0 There is no evidence that Theseus and Hippolyta, and the lovers, believe in supernatural beings. True, Theseus sees the happy couples off to bed with the words \u201clovers to bed, \u2018tis almost fairy time\u201d but at the beginning of Act 5 he states categorically \u201cI never may believe\/These antique fables nor these fairy toys\u201d (5,I, 2 \u2013 3) putting them down to \u201cstrong imagination\u201d.\u00a0 Thus his reference to \u201cfairy time\u201d may be taken as light irony rather than a true expectation of supernatural visitation.\u00a0 In the end it does not matter since, whether objectively real or products of the imagination, the realms of faerie and the wildwood wield power which we do well to respect if we choose to invoke them, or enter into nature with all its unpredictability.
\nThe departure from the world, and specifically from the political and essentially corrupt world of the court, the sixteenth century place of worldly power, into the woods forms the entire subject of As You Like It, written at the very end of the sixteenth century.\u00a0 Duke Senior has been banished (why?) \u201cWhere will the old Duke live?\u201d asks Oliver at the beginning of Act 1. And Charles replies<\/p>\n

They say he is already in the Forest of Ardenne\u00a0 and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England.\u00a0 They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day and fleet the time carelessly as they did in the golden world.<\/em> (1, I, 98)<\/p>\n

On a light-hearted note, we may perhaps see Shakespeare offering us an early vision of an OBOD camp here.\u00a0 Certainly, he reminds us that there are other dreams of the forest besides those involving fairies.\u00a0 Robin Hood is an indubitably English folkloric hero. The earliest written reference to him occurs in the early 15th century ballad that begins \u201cRobyn Hode in scherwode stod\u201d .\u00a0 Scholarly attempts to link him with pagan figures such as the Green Man have now largely been discredited.
\nThe magic to be found in the forest of Ardenne overtly subsists in nature rather than in the realm of spirit and enchantment.\u00a0 Time as measured out by the occupations of civilisation is, however, disrupted.\u00a0 \u201cI thought all things had been savage here\u201d, says Orlando in relief when he comes across Duke Senior and his men.\u00a0 The distinction he goes on to draw, however, is not one of the supernaturally savage \u2013 as we find in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream \u2013 as against the human, but that of civilised man who lives in society as against human beings who do not.\u00a0 Shakespeare would have been thinking here of the outlaws, criminals and the sometimes insane destitute (presented to our view in King Lear by Edgar as Poor Tom) who frequented the forests and heaths of Shakespeare\u2019s day. Even the sane wood dwellers were seen by contemporaries as \u201cpeople of lewd lives and conversation\u201d.\u00a0 Thus we should not assume that Orlando\u2019s
\nWhate\u2019er you areThat in this desert inaccessibleUnder the shade of melancholy boughs,Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time
\nhas connotations of faerie, though I would argue that a remote echo of this remains in the repeated use of the impersonal nouns and pronouns: \u201cthings\u201d, \u201cwhate\u2019er\u201d.\u00a0 A man may be less than human for lack of human conditioning.\u00a0 The less than human may have access to or come from other realms.\u00a0 (Again I think of Poor Tom addressing various fiends in the third act of King Lear.)
\nNormal measures of time no longer apply in the forest of Ardenne:Ros.\u00a0 I pray you, what is\u2019t o\u2019clock?\u00a0 Orl.\u00a0 You should ask me, what time o\u2019 day; there\u2019s no clock in the forest. (Act 3, ii, 274 \u2013 6)
\nSubliminally, the magic of shape shifting runs throughout As You Like It as men change metaphorically into deer, and deer into men.\u00a0 In the study of these animals by characters in the play, much is learned.\u00a0 Duke Senior, for example, finds, even in the forest, that the exercise of power has a cost for the innocent:
\nCome, shall we go and kill us venison?And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,Being native burghers of this desert city,Should in their own confines with forked headsHave their round haunches gored. (2,i, 21-5)
\nJaques also, meditating on the sight of a wounded stag, sees the behaviour of the deer who pass by their wounded fellow (\u201cSweep on you fat and greasy citizens\u201d \u2013 a linguistic reminder of the bourgeoisie of Windsor and Falstaff in particular) as revealing the unpalatable truth, not only about \u201cthe body of the country, city, court\u201d but also about the essentially false position of the merry band in the forest who Jaques sees as
\nMere usurpers, tyrants and what\u2019s worse,To fright the animals and kill them upIn their assigned and native dwelling place. (2, ii, 61 \u2013 3)
\nThere is a modern ecological sensitivity here that the 21st century druid would be happy to embrace.\u00a0 This is a progression from the unconsciousness of the power of elementals already noted in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream.
\nOrlando chooses identification with the doe to express the absolute nature of his compassion for and duty towards old Adam, overcome with age and hunger:
\nThen but forbear your food a little whileWhiles like a doe, I go to find my fawnAnd give it food. (2, vii, 126 \u2013 8)
\nThere is shamanistic learning here carried through into Act 4 with the Lords\u2019 song
\nWhat shall he have that killed the deer?His leather skin and horns to wear.
\nTake thou no scorn to wear the horn,It was a crest ere thou was born.
\nThe overt reference here is to the horns of the cuckold. Shakespeare is never one to miss the opportunity for a double entendre.\u00a0 Yet the wraith of Herne the Hunter and before him Cernunnos may be detected, increasing the menace of the woodland, adding a numinous quality, underscoring the point that it is not, on the whole somewhere for human beings to dwell permanently.\u00a0 By the same rhetorical trick of introducing something as a joke, Shakespeare achieves the same effect with Orlando\u2019s tale of his origins:
\n\u2026this boy is forest bornAnd hath been tutored in the rudimentsOf many desperate studies by his uncleWhom he reports to be a great magicianObscured in the circle of this forest.\u00a0 (5, IV, 30 – 4)
\nAs in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream, everyone\u2019s state is changed by the end of the play.\u00a0 The joyfully androgynous Rosalind is to be married to Orlando. (It is impossible not to wonder how long a women of her wit will last with a man capable of such leaden, albeit shape shifting poetry, to whit, \u201cIf a hart do lack a hind\/Let him seek out Rosalind\u201d and Helena\u2019s estimation of love \u2013 \u201cLove looks not with the eyes but with the mind\u201d(1, I 234) – is undermined:\u00a0 \u201cAliena I cannot be out of sight of Orlando. I\u2019ll go find a shadow and sigh.\u201d (4, I, 185 \u2013 6)
\nCelia is married off to Oliver, Orlando\u2019s brother.\u00a0 As in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream the adolescent closeness of the girls has been ended by their sojourn in the woods. No space for the Sapphic in Shakespeare . Duke Frederick, the cause of Duke Senior\u2019s banishment is redeemed in one of the most cursory fastenings of a loose end in Shakespeare:
\nTo the skirts of this wild wood he cameWhere, meeting with an old religious man,After some question with him was convertedBoth from his enterprise and from the world. \u00a0(5, iv, 148 \u2013 151)
\nIs this a sincere conversion we may wonder. The fact that it takes place on the skirts of the wood, not within it, may lead us to think it is not.\u00a0 Rosalind, also dwells \u201cin the skirts of the forest, like a fringe on a petticoat\u201d (3,iv, 305) so perhaps she too takes no permanent lessons with her from the greenwood.
\nOnly Jaques ends as melancholy and disenchanted as he began, and retires to live in a cave, but that, as might be said in New Age circles, is his truth and it is one that has been amplified by his time in the Forest of Ardenne.
\nAll druids, but particularly ovates, look to the trees and other plants in and outside the forest for meaning, guidance and healing.\u00a0 A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream is famous for its references to flowers.\u00a0 Here we come back to the exploration of love already touched upon in some of its aspects elsewhere in this piece. \u201cI know a bank where the wild thyme blows\/Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows\u201d(2.ii, ll149-50) is almost too familiar to require quotation.\u00a0 Such flowers, together with cowslips, musk roses and eglantine (sweet briar) are known for their scent, enhancing by association the scene of Titania\u2019s adoration of Bottom with reminders of the sweet surrenders and sensualities of sexual love where we take leave of our rational senses.
\nSo doth the woodbine, the sweet honeysuckleGently entwist; the female ivy soEnrings the barky fingers of the elm. Act IV, I, 41
\ncoos Titania.\u00a0 That this love is not an altogether benign state we can see immediately if we think of the thorns of the rose and the way in which honeysuckle entwines itself around other trees, at first with sappy tendrils which turn, in time, to woody spirals that imprint their pattern into the supporting tree and cannot easily be removed.\u00a0 These subliminal threats are reinforced by the more generally threatening nature of the woodland flora.\u00a0 Puck describes the mechanicals running away as he casts his enchantment over Bottom:
\n\u2026briers and thorns at their apparel catchSome sleeves, some hats; from yielders all things catch. (3,ii. 29 \u2013 30)
\nHere is another reference to the dangerous aspects of the rose of love which may snatch from us objects of everyday necessity as well as giving us pleasure. The travails of enchanted love involve jealousy and violence, again expressed in the less than benign plants of the forest.\u00a0 In the emotionally chaotic third act of the play, Lysander shouts at Hermia \u201cHang off\u2026thou burr\u201d, and addresses her as a \u201cminimus of hind\u2019ring knot-grass\u201d. (3, ii, 261, 330)\u00a0 The wood is the place where all the niceties of civilised life break down.\u00a0 But in this process, as already noted in relation to As You Like It, a propos of the court, we also escape the insincerities and flatteries of life in Athens.\u00a0 Lysander, says Hermia\u2019s father has \u201cbewitched the bosom of my child\u201d.
\nThou hast by moonlight at her window sungWith feigning voice verses of feigning loveAnd stol\u2019n the impression of her fantasy.\u00a0 (Act1, i, 30-33)
\nThis is a more cynical version of magic which the lovers\u2019 experiences in the wood go some way to proving correct, for under the spell of love-in-idleness Lysander drops his allegiance to Hermia.\u00a0 His love may, after all have been \u201cfeigning\u201d though if so he returns to it at the end of the play.\u00a0 Demetrius\u2019 relationship with Helena only endures, presumably, because the juice is never removed from his eyes.\u00a0 Such is the power of plants to reveal or create the truth.\u00a0 It takes courage and wisdom beyond that of many people to look squarely at the illusions and ambiguities that present a show of beauty, like the sweet scents of flowers that divert our attention from thorns, burrs and knot- grass.\u00a0 In A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream at any rate it seems that for civilised life to endure many of us live in states of illusion. Perhaps the same is also true of Rosalind and other characters at the end of as You Like It. Whether this is always necessary and ever desirable are things that the ovate may choose to ponder.
\nWhat of tree lore in these plays?\u00a0 Trees sacred to the druids of both ancient and modern persuasions are referred to, though less in A Midsummer Nights\u2019 Dream where flowers predominate.\u00a0 It is noticeable, though, that the mechanicals gather to rehearse in a glade with a \u201chawthorn brake\u201d.\u00a0 Hawthorn has associations with the Goddess of which Titania may be seen as a manifestation and perhaps Bottom and friends inadvertently profane a sacred space with their clumsy rehearsals.\u00a0 Titania\u2019s final, disenchanted reaction to Bottom seems to support this to some extent. The liaison between Titania and Bottom refers to Apuleius\u2019 Golden Ass in which Apuleius is released from his enchantment into an ass by the goddess Isis and is initiated into her mysteries.\u00a0 The source was well known in the late sixteenth century, and by this means if by no other, Shakespeare ensures the presence of a greater goddess than a fairy queen in his play.
\nThe oak tree figures strongly in The Merry Wives of Windsor and As You Like It.\u00a0 Falstaff\u2019s humiliation occurs under Herne\u2019s Oak (according to different traditions still standing \u2013 though dead at the end of the nineteenth century or cut down in 1796)\u00a0 and clearly a well-known landmark.\u00a0 In As You Like It we first catch sight of Jacques\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u2026as he lay alongUnder an oak, whose antic root peeps out?Upon the brook that brawls along this wood (2.i.30)
\nCelia describes how she found Orlando \u201cunder a tree, like a dropped acorn\u201d (which immediately suggests there are many more like him) and Rosalind, no doubt casting her eyes to heaven, cries \u201cIt may well be called Jove\u2019s tree when it drops forth such fruit.\u201d(3.ii.213-214).\u00a0 This shows again how love can make fools of us all even the wittiest. In contemporary OBOD lore the oak is doorway to mysteries and Rosalind\u2019s reference to Jove shows that Shakespeare is aware of some of the classical tradition surrounding the tree, though as usual there is no overt sign of Celtic awareness here.\u00a0 The presentation of Orlando as an acorn, which is potential only and may come to nothing, reflects his na\u00efve and vandalising attitude to the forest. Jacques, allowed to be human under the oak draws philosophical lessons from the forest and its beings.\u00a0 Orlando carves Rosalind\u2019s name and lumpen poetry in the bark of trees and hangs artificial leaves from their boughs, thereby showing that he has not abandoned the artifice of court.\u00a0 He lacks sensitivity to nature: \u201cI pray you,\u201d says Jacques, \u201cmar no more trees with writing love songs in their barks.\u201d (3, ii, 237) Not for Orlando \u201ctongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones\u201d as Duke Senior puts it. (2, I, 16 – 17) Finally, in his song \u201cBlow, blow thou winter wind,\u201d (2, vii, 174-176) Amiens invokes the holly, tree of \u201cenergy and guidance for problems to come\u201d .\u00a0 Again, there is no suggestion that Shakespeare was aware of traditional beliefs about this tree.\u00a0 There is no reference, for example, to the defeat of the Oak King by the Holly King at Midsummer.\u00a0 As You Like It moves from winter into spring as far as it is possible to locate it seasonally and so would have taken place under the reign of the Holly King.\u00a0 But this aside, the folk beliefs that surround the tree as a plant of protection are apposite in a story about courtiers escaping from treachery:Hey-ho, sing hey-ho, unto the green holly.Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly. (2, vii, 180 \u2013 1)
\nThe holly tree provides an enduring touchstone of truth and certainty in a world where little can be trusted.\u00a0 Few druids would disagree with this as a view of the importance of trees in general.
\nCan we, after all this, claim Shakespeare as a druid?\u00a0 Unfortunately not.\u00a0 Alert though my eye has been, there is not a shred of evidence that Shakespeare was consciously conveying esoteric knowledge of an ancient British tradition in these plays.\u00a0 It seems that Shakespeare was aware of the ancient bardic traditions of Ireland.\u00a0 \u201cI was never so berhymed since Pythagoras\u2019 time that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember,\u201d (2,v, 162) says Rosalind confronting Orlando\u2019s love poems in the forest.\u00a0 This is glossed in the Norton Shakespeare as being a reference to the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration of souls and the popular belief in England that Irish bards were capable of rhyming rats to death. The doctrine of transmigration of souls was a matter of common knowledge in educated circles in the 16th century. It is also a putative old druid belief. However, even if Shakespeare did connect Irish bards and the idea of transmigration of souls, there is a simpler explanation for the reference that does not involve any adherence to esoteric belief on Shakespeare\u2019s part.\u00a0 Essex\u2019s ill-fated expedition to Ireland (where English colonial efforts had been underway since 1170) took place in 1599 so this could have been a topical allusion. Its tone certainly does not suggest much admiration on Shakespeare\u2019s part (in so far, of course, as we can attribute the views of Shakespeare\u2019s characters to their inventor).\u00a0 Thus the appealing notion of Shakespeare enrolling in a Bardic college must be dismissed almost before being thought.\u00a0 However, in so far as Celtic traditions informed English folklore and history, and in so far as Shakespeare was aware of these English sources \u2013 which he undoubtedly was, we can credit him with infusing new life into such traditions, and not only in these plays.
\nIn each of the plays considered here it requires a journey into the Otherworld contained in, and represented by, the forest, to learn lessons about love and the ways in which the instincts of sexuality may be accommodated within the constraints of civilisation. In the forest Shakespeare\u2019s characters overtly and implicitly explore questions about the nature of the moral life and the meanings and relevance of nature, and as a result of their sojourn under the greenwood trees, some of them resolve problems in the world that they have to return to.\u00a0 These lessons are mediated through encounters with a spiritual otherness, most powerfully expressed as pagan in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream (in which the whole context is pagan myth \u2013 albeit classical) but always with a folk memory of the power of nature in general and trees in particular, which, it may be argued, is ultimately Celtic in its origins.\u00a0 This leaves its traces throughout Shakespeare\u2019s oeuvre, but does so most noticeably in these three plays.
\nWhat is not in doubt is that – whether we be Bards, Ovates or Druids – we can gain unusual insights into Shakespeare by considering his plays through the lens of our OBOD studies, and that knowledge of Shakespeare can lend depth and new perspectives to druidic thought. The lessons we can learn by falling into step with the greatest bard of the English language and landscape can illuminate our own journeys and indicate new directions to follow.
\nNOTEAll quotations the plays taken from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E.Howard and Katherine Eisaman Maus (1997, USA)
\nFOOT NOTES
\n1 \u00a0Deakin,R., Wildwood (Penguin 2007)2 \u00a0Table Talk 7\/4\/18333\u00a0 Greenblatt, Stephen, \u201cA Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream\u201d in The Norton Shakespeare\u00a0(1997, USA)4\u00a0 See romances such as Sir Degar\u00e9 www.lib.rochester.edu\/camelot\/teams\/degint.htm and Sir Orfeo www.lib.rochester.edu\/camelot\/teams\/orfint.htm Even at this stage there are\u00a05\u00a0\u00a0 A programme note in the Globe theatre programme for The Merry Wives of Windsor suggests that this legend originates with Shakespeare (Programme Note, Jones, Gwilym, 2008).\u00a0 This is clearly possible. The legend is noted as having its first written record in the play (http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Herne_the_Hunter). \u00a06\u00a0\u00a0 Lauren Kassell in\u00a0 \u201cAll was this land full fill\u2019d of faerie\u201d or Magic and the Past in Early Modern England\u201d, in Journal of the History of Ideas 67. 1 (2006) 107 \u2013 122, cites Scot\u2019s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) for a categorisation of fairies into two sorts: wild ones who lived in the woods who occasionally harmed people who came across them, and who could be enticed into sharing their secrets, and domestic fairies less powerful and harmful, and who punished people who did not keep their houses tidy and servants who neglected their chores.\u00a0 These were presumably common popular beliefs that Shakespeare could have known of without having read Scot\u2019s book but it is clear that this division echoes the different approaches to fairies in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor.7 It seems likely that the play was first performed at the Garter Feast in 1597 (Jones, Gwilym, see Footnote 4).The fact that the inn in the play is called The Garter also adds a humourous aspect to this.8\u00a0 Customarily, following the Folio edition of Shakespeare\u2019s plays, the anglicised spelling Arden is used to evoke the English Forest of Arden close to where Shakespeare grew up in Warwickshire and also evoking his mother\u2019s family name.\u00a0 However, I have followed the Norton Shakespeare spelling throughout.\u00a0 The forest\u00a0referred to is in fact the ancient forest that covers parts of France, Luxembourg and Belgium \u2013 where an area is still known as the Ardennes..9\u00a0\u00a0 http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Robin_Hood for a lengthy discussion of Robin Hood and the stories surrounding him10 Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare the Biography (2005)11\u00a0Overtly, at least.\u00a0 However, there is much covert deconstruction of accepted views of sexuality and sexual orientation in all of these plays.\u00a0 OBOD and sexuality, is however, a separate debate.12\u00a0eglantine: derived from the old French via the Latin aculentus (from spinulentus = thorny), aucus \u2013 needle, aculeus \u2013 prickle, sting. OED records Shakespeare\u2019s as the first use of eglantine to mean sweet briar, later used by Milton to mean honeysuckle \u2013but for Shakespeare a thoroughly prickly word.13\u00a0\u00a0 Kermode, Frank, Shakespeare\u2019s Language, (London, 2000)14 See Valentine, Laura, 1891, Picturesque England: its landmarks and historic haunts, as described in lay and legend (London and New York, Frederick Warne) See also – http:\/\/mysteriousbritain.forumotion.com\/folklore-legends-f3\/herne-s-oak-…15\u00a0 The Ovate Book of Ogam, 200616\u00a0\u00a0 Capelli et al, \u201cA Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles\u201d in Current Biology, Vol 13,979 -984, May 27 2003 looks at DNA evidence that suggests that invading populations from the European mainland did not swamp native gene pools in the way that has often been assumed. The inference we may take from this is that if genes lines were maintained cultural traditions may also have been maintained.\u00a0http:\/\/neveryetmelted.com\/index.php\/category\/science\/dna carries an article on a similar theme from 19th August 2008<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0Elizabeth Cruse ~\u00a0 To enter a wood is to pass into a different world in which we\u00a0 ourselves are \u00a0transformed.\u00a0 It is no accident that in the comedies of Shakespeare, people go\u00a0into the greenwood to grow, learn and change.\u00a0 It is where you travel to find\u00a0yourself, often, paradoxically, by getting lost. Roger Deakin\u2019s introduction to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":3660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"acf":[],"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"Order of Bards, Ovates & Druids","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/druidry.org","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/druidry.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/druidry.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/druidry.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/druidry.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/druidry.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/druidry.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/druidry.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/druidry.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/druidry.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/druidry.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}