The Wind from Salzburg

No one is sure if William Shakespeare had a reference in mind when he created his perpetual arcadia, the Forest of Arden. There indeed happens to be a forest of that name near his native Stratford-upon-Avon; and “Arden” is also the maiden name of Shakespeare’s mother—quite some materials for those who like their literary approach to be Freudian to work on. Yet there are also evidences in the play itself that suggest what the Bard was really thinking of might have been setting the scene of action in France, as many names in this piece have a distinctively “Gaulish” touch: de Boys, Le Beau, Amiens, Jacques. Perhaps Arden is just the Anglo pronunciation of the Forest of Ardennes. Therefore the questions remains: where is the Forest? Shakespeare himself gave this answer: as you like it.

So when Kenneth Branagh, one of the most productive and arguably the most skillful interpreters of Shakespearean plays in the international filming industry today, in 2006 transformed As You Like It from paper onto the screen (not the silver screen, though: this version of As You Like It, despite the fact that it was produced as a film, was released mainly through television network), he decided to set Shakespeare’s almost mythical arcadia in—as he liked it—late nineteenth-century Japan. Also, as is the usual practice with Branagh, a truly international cast of actors is assembled in the production, so that eventually the Forest is filled with people of every race and color, some wrapped in kimonos and others draped in late-Victorian attire, all feeling pretty snug and quite at home in their oriental surroundings. “Believed then, if you please, that I can do strange things” (5.2.57-58), in Shakespeare’s original script, a disguised Rosalind tells Orlando, just before she sets out to untangle every knot in the plot. Branagh’s “strange” decision of setting a play that has, for over 400 years, been taken for granted as essentially European in oriental Japan and populating it with actors of every description, then, is one of true “Rosalindan”—and thus Shakespearean—spirit. However, the outcome is not merely one film version of As You Like It that has managed to keep up with Rosalind’s ability of making strange things happen. Branagh’s choice of setting and cast has in fact helped immensely in illustrating and expanding one of the major themes of this classic Shakespearean comedy.

As You Like It, apart from being a story about how miracles do happen and love at first sight can eventually work out, is a play about opposites reconciled. Shakespeare’s original script is crammed with conflicts of all sorts: the usurpation of Duke Frederick and the banishment of Duke Senior and Rosalind; the hostility between brothers Orlando and Oliver; the contrast between Frederick’s court and Duke Senior’s Forest; the “song contest” between Amiens and Jacques and the argument between the shepherd Corin and the court jester Touchstone on the subject of country life and court life (reflecting the clashes between realism and idealism, cynicism and optimism)—in short, “oppositions between melancholy and laughter, country-life and court-life, humble and high-estate, danger and safety, time and timelessness, limit and freedom” (Beckman 50)—which have all been miraculously resolved by the end of the play.

Just as actors on the stage would have to wear highly elaborate costumes and paint their mouths twice as red for the audience in the back row to see them, Branagh’s Japanese setting and international cast function as visual aids enlarging these conflicts, some of which are highly microscopic and abstract in the original script itself. Moreover, by putting the play in the context of late-Victorian Japan, Branagh has added to this play of conflicts new clashes that are relevant to an audience in the 21st century.

The Japan in the late nineteenth century was a country ambitiously transforming itself from a nation of agriculture to one of industry. This fact alone has helped to pin down the country-city-opposition motif in the play. On top of this, to better visualize the theme of conflict, Branagh, instead of turning As You Like It into an entirely oriental production, has preserved the European identity of the major characters and specifically set the action of the play in a mini-English-kingdom within the Japanese empire, thus adding into the production the clashes between the East and the West. Such a setting is also entirely feasible from a historic point of view, as the Japan of that period, in an effort to go industrialized, abandoned its self-isolation and opened up to invite western people in to trade—and they did come, including many English people, bringing their families along and setting up “mini-empires” near the treaty ports. Such a setting means that most images flashing across the camera screen can be at once potently contradictory and potentially harmonious: the cross-dressed male geisha performing the traditional Japanese dance for a noticeably western audience; Jacques working at his typewriter on the tatami mat; a red-haired Rosalind (Bryce Dallas Howard) and a blond Celia (Romola Garai), clad in distinctly late-Victorian gowns, shielding their faces with Chinese fans and walking in Japanese-womanish quick short steps; Orland wrestling with Charles, the Japanese sumo wrestler—which all subtly contribute to complimenting the play’s dominating atmosphere of conflict as well as anticipate the eventual reconciliation demanded by the nature of a comedy.

The casting of the 2006 version of As You Like It also helps to extend the “oppositions” the major characters of the play are involved in. Branagh’s de Boys brothers—Orlando (David Oyelowo) and Oliver (Adrian Lester) (and Jacques de Boys, though he only appears for less than a minute near the very end of the play)—are of African descent. As a result, Orlando’s union with Rosalind and later Oliver’s courtship to Celia are no longer only threatened by their differences in social status and an overbearing guardian (Duke Frederick), but overshadowed by racial gaps as well. Although this “racial conflict” motif is not elaborated upon in the film, it is nevertheless an undercurrent; and the fact that the two major couples in the film—Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Olivier—are of different skin colors does make their eventual union all the more precious and triumphant.

With such a setting and cast, new layers of significance are added to the original actions of Shakespeare’s play, a perfect demonstration of which being Orlando’s “Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love” scene. In Shakespeare’s original script, the image of Orlando hanging his poems onto trees is a symbol of the clashes and inevitable reconciliation between art and nature, reality and the ideal:

Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love. And thou, thrice-crowned queen of the night, survey With thy chaste eye, from they pale sphere above, Thy huntress’ name that my full life doth sway. O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books, And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character, That every eye which in this forest looks Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere. Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree The fair, the chase and unexpressive she! (3.2.1-10)

Orlando’s speech is constructed with a formal rhyming scheme which resembles that of the Elizabethan sonnet, rhyming ABAB, CDCD, EE; his apostrophe to the moon (“thrice-crowned queen of the night”) is purely conventional, a cliché of Elizabethean poetry, something borrowed from the real world. Orlando fashions his poetry after the courtly convention of the day, “sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad/ Made to his mistress’ eyebrow” (2.7.149-150). The man’s attempt at composing verses is a dismal failure. His poems can be said to be the epitome of artificial inventions. Yet such badly-written, highly-conventional, and overtly-courtly verses (for there are more of them) are hung on trees and written down on paper—derived of course from the wood of trees and now returned to them, thus initiating a reconciliation and a union between gaudiness and simplicity, man’s invention and God’s creation, and the real world and the utopian world; and reiterating the theme of conflict resolved.

In the 2006 film version, because it is set in Japan, there is of course the issue of language to consider. Although in terms of audio presentation, Branagh has preserved Shakespeare’s original lines all through the film, he has chosen, in this particular scene, to have Orlando’s “tree decorations” written and visually presented in Japanese. So when Orlando shouts “Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree/The fair, the chase and unexpressive she!”, what is shown in the center of the screen is a gigantic piece of white cloth with the name of “Rosalind” written on it: in enormous katakana. This way, the image, besides acting as the art-nature-union metaphor, symbolizes the merging of the East and the West, and hints at the eventual inter-racial marriage between Orlando and Rosalind by the end of the film. Moreover, this scene also serves to make better sense of the figure of Rosalind in the play. The sight of the name of “Rosalind” written in glaring katakana is reminiscent of the idea of “What is in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet”: “Rosalind” written in the Japanese language would be just as sweet as “Rosalind” spelt with Roman letters. Therefore, one can conclude in a similar vein that the Rosalind in disguise as a boy would be just as lovable as the Rosalind with all her femininity; the Rosalind in exile just as witty and high-spirited as the Rosalind at court; the Rosalind falling in love with Orlando at first sight just as real as the Rosalind rebuking Orlando’s views on love—Rosalind is the embodiment of opposites reconciled.

The image of Rosalind is a complex one. For the most part of the play, she is a girl disguised as a boy pretending to be a girl. Thus characters of masculinity and femininity are united in her. She starts out as a woman, who “on a sudden…fall[s] into so strong a liking with old Sir Rowland’s youngest son” (1.3.25-27) but later remarks that “Man have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love” (4.1.97-98), which shows that in her idealism and realism is combined. Beckman wrote:

At the court she is in danger but of high estate; in Arden she is out of danger but of low estate, a simple country shepherd. But even in the forest she combines both low and high estate and both safety and danger, for she depends on others to protect her even as she protects them and unites them. While she passes time in the timeless forest of Arden, she is aware of time (giving Orlando several analyses of it) and effects a realistic, as well as “magical,” resolution to her own and others’ love affairs. And while she seems as helpless as anyone in the play—under sentence of death, without a father or lover, without money—she also seems to have greater powers than anyone else in the play, directing others as she will and finally entering in Act V with the god of marriage himself. (51)

Because of the setting and casting, the Rosalind in the film extends this already impressive list of opposites even further and in a visual way. The audience is presented with a girl who is the daughter of an Englishman coming to Japan with the purpose of doing trade but who has ended up living a predominantly “agricultural” life in Arden. In terms of physical appearance she is utterly “western”: red curly hair, grey eyes, fair skin; yet in matters of attire she is equally comfortable with European frock and with Japanese kimono. She appreciates Japanese traditional dancing and delights in watching a sumo-wrestling match; yet she also knows how to judge the quality of an Elizabethan sonnet. As a girl, she falls in love with a man of African descent; as a boy, she is loved by a girl of Asian origin (the Phoebe [Jade Jefferies] in the piece is cast as a local lady). And when she is finally united with Orlando, the wedding ceremony consistsof a Japanese wedding gown and a Christian priest to pronounce them man and wife. Indeed, to see Rosalind, is to see that opposites can be reconciled.

Which is probably why in this film version, when Rosalind assumes the identity of Ganymede, apart from cutting her hair and donning a cap, a jacket, a waistcoat, and a pair of trousers, she makes no special effort to look or act like a man: since Rosalind embodies the combination of reconcilable contraries, she should maintain a balance of maleness and femaleness. Traditionally, women had been associated with the “heart” or emotions, men with the “head” or intellect. In As You Like It, it is Rosalind who intelligently and realistically speaks from the head—so, plus the shortened hair and trousers and there is a Rosalind with enough male qualities to keep the balance between masculinity and femininity. Should she look and act over convincingly as a boy, she would upset the scale .

With his “bizarre” setting and cast of international actors, Kenneth Branagh has made yet another successful adaptation of Shakespeare’s plays, visualizing and intensifying the conflicts embedded in the original script and making the final resolution all the more satisfying. Of course, perhaps the most obvious reason for setting the Forest of Arden in nineteenth century Japan is the sense of mystery the East can invoke, especially in a western audience, who are the target viewers for the film. After all, all the conflicts in the play are miraculously resolved in the mystical arcadia of Arden—true love blossoms; souls are cleansed; political crisis smoothed over; and, most strikingly, villainous characters effortlessly converted almost the minute they set foot in the Forest—and it would be more believable when the audience is given to understand, by this specific setting, that there might be some kind of mysterious Oriental power at work. Indeed, the “old religious man” (5.4.158) who has awakened the conscience of Duke Frederick is portrayed as a Buddhist monk roaming in Arden. And Buddhist monks are well-known for their ability to stimulate an epiphany with a few words, or sometimes, no words at all.

All things considered, Branagh’s 2006 version of As You Like It is a fresh and effective adaptation of Shakespeare’s original play. Branagh has set it as he liked it—and it is most likely that had the Bard been in the audience, he would also like it.

Works Cited

Beckman, Margaret Boerner. “The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly. 29. 1 (1978): 44-51.

Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing. Ed. Claire McEachern. 3rd ed. London: Arden, 2006.

I would give anything to see Zigong's face then.