SOURCE: Milward, Peter. “Religion in Arden.” Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 115-21.

In the following essay, Milward posits that the locale of Arden may represent Shakespeare's dramatic invention of a pro-Catholic realm free from the religious persecution of the Tudor dynasty.

It is strange how scant is the attention customarily paid to the precise locality of the Forest of Arden in Shakespeare's As You Like It. Agnes Latham, in her New Arden edition of the play (1975), expresses the general opinion that it is set in ‘the Ardennes on the border of Belgium and Luxemburg’, while allowing that Shakespeare and many in his audience ‘could identify it easily with those parts of Warwickshire still known as Arden’ (p. 8). This identification may be traced back to Edmond Malone, who identified the forest even more precisely as ‘that in French Flanders, lying near the Meuse and between Charlemont and Rocroy’ (quoted in the New...