SOURCE: "As You Like It: Et in Arcadia Ego," in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. XXVI, No. 3, Summer, 1975, pp. 269-75.

In the following essay, Morris observes the "presence of death" and other "dark ingredients" in As You Like It, and examines Shakespeares treatment of time in the play.

Some recent commentators have emphasized those features of As You Like It that stand as a healthy corrective to the too-readily, too-often applied adjectives of gay, bright, happy, or golden.¹ And yet it takes little critical acumen to remark that Jaques injects a note of melancholy, a forest gloom, into the sunshine glade of Arden, and that Touchstone, as his name warns, holds up measurable quantities of the real world. It now seems clear that it is against the views of Jaques and Touchstone that we must judge those yearned-after serenities in the play, those beatitudes of an Eden that man was...