What was Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden?

If you were to take a stroll through the leafy world of As You Like It’s Arden, you might begin to wonder exactly where this forest is supposed to be. Populated with perilous predators like lions and snakes, as well as the palm trees and olive groves of warmer climates, Shakespeare’s Arden seems a far cry from the English woodlands that the playwright would have been familiar with. It’s likely that Shakespeare was building creatively on the French Ardennes of the play’s source text: Thomas Lodge’s prose romance Rosalynde (1590). Yet Shakespeare infuses this fantastical French location with a set of environmental concerns that are distinctively English and, namely, a concern that the nation’s forests were being obliterated.

Shakespeare the Conservationist

In As You Like It, the Forest of Arden repeatedly falls victim to human activity, but Shakespeare gives voice to clashing opinions on the human-nature relationship. Orlando certainly has no issues hanging or carving love poems onto its trees, as he proudly declares his intention to ‘carve on every tree / The fair, the chaste and unexpressive she!’ But the melancholy Jacques is dismayed by this affront to nature, pleading with Orlando to ‘mar no more trees with lovesongs in their barks’. This summer, As You Like It will bring the Forest of Arden to life by painting onto blank canvases, continuing to highlight the way that humans impose on the natural world. But how might Shakespeare have understood this thorny relationship?

When As You Like It was first performed around 1599, there were increasing concerns over a national shortage of timber. Wood was essential to everyday life in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It provided fuel both for domestic and commercial uses, and materials like oak and pine were used heavily in the construction of ships and buildings (including the wooden playhouse in which As You Like It was first performed). In other words, the large-scale consumption of wood kept the cogs of early modern England turning. Whilst many opposed the destruction of England’s forests, the demand for wood was driven by a growing population, the need for fuel and a desire for profit and expansion.

Beyond the stage, writers called for more practical resolutions to the ‘timber crisis’. In Common’s Complaint (1611), Arthur Standish appealed to King James VI and I to stop ‘the general destruction and waste of wood made within this your Kingdom’, suggesting that a nationwide planting scheme was the only way to restore and preserve England’s forests. There is debate among historians about the extent of the ‘timber crisis’, and whether it was truly as desperate as some writers made out. What is clear is that many living in this era felt that irresponsible human activity was having a devastating ecological impact. These sixteenth- and seventeenth-century concerns bear a striking resemblance to the way that we approach the climate emergency today, and theatre provides a fertile space for us to explore our accountability to the natural world

The Fantasy of the Forest

In Shakespeare’s fantastical rendering of the Forest of Arden, the duality of the forest helps to bring these ecological concerns to the fore. Whilst the setting seems to recall the French Ardennes, it’s very possible that Shakespeare was also thinking of forests closer to home whilst writing As You Like It. After all, he grew up in relative proximity to the Forest of Arden in Warwickshire, which introduces a certain geographical slipperiness to the play’s setting of Ardennes/Arden.

The play also blends the real and present concerns surrounding English forests with the folkloric and mythic history of those spaces (lest we forget the sudden appearance of the goddess Hymen). Therefore, the French Duke Senior is introduced as living ‘like the old Robin Hood of England’ with ‘many merry men with him’. By 1599, Robin Hood had become a complicated English folk hero, best known for leading a group of outlaws as they poached and fought their way through the nation’s forests. When Charles compares Duke Senior to this folk hero, he transforms the forest of Arden into an Edenic paradise, where outlaws and misfits can escape the constraints of a courtly life. But how would an early modern audience, living through the destruction of their own forests, have responded to this fantasy of forest life?

Climate-Conscious Characters and the Theatrical Question

Well, several characters in As You Like It are seemingly unafraid to address these kinds of questions. Although the Forest of Arden cannot fully transform the courtly sensibilities of its newest residents, it’s striking that several characters in As You Like It display a kind of ecological consciousness. The melancholy Jacques expresses deep empathy for the forest, whether that’s the trees on which Orlando’s poems are hung or the deer who fall victim to the exiled courtiers’ hunting. Even Duke Senior expresses regret that his hunting targets the ‘poor dappled fools’ who are the ‘native burghers of this desert city’. Implicit in this description of the deer as ‘native burghers’ is an acknowledgement that humans are unnatural interlopers in the forest, endangering the lives of Arden’s original inhabitants.

When Rosalind declares ‘Well, this is the Forest of Arden’, she invites the audience to transform the wooden frame of the playhouse back into the forests from which it was constructed. In the dualistic world of the forest-playhouse, audiences are asked to reconnect to nature and to recognise it as a complex ecology deserving of our respect.

Today, exploring the role of theatre in addressing the climate emergency, both through our Climate Open House and our Climate Playwrighting Prize. It is clear that Shakespeare’s plays and the spaces in which they were performed encourage us to revisit our relationship with the natural world. What can As You Like It show us about our responsibility to the climate? What lessons can we learn from the past?

As You Like It plays in the Globe Theatre from 14 August to 25 October 2026. 

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