rosalynde among the familists: as you like it and an expanded view of its sources

Rosalynde among the Familists: As You Like It and an Expanded View of Its SourcesAuthor(s): Robert SchwartzSource: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring, 1989), pp. 69-76Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2540524 .

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Sixteenth CenturyJournal XX, No. 1, 1989

Rosalynde Among the Familists: As You Like It and an Expanded View of its Sources

Robert Schwartz Oregon State University

Shakespeare's innovations on Lodge's Rosalynde in As You Like It have seemed haphazard and designed to broaden the play's scope of debate. However, the background of the antinomian, libertine "Family of Love" lends a curious coherence to many of the play's deviations from Lodge, especially in the addition of characters, in its altering of seemingly minor details, and its broad interest in the dynamics of 'family.'

GEOFFREY BULLOUGH, considering the ways in which Shakespeare used Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, observed that As You Like It "is more than a pastoral play of escape to an idyllic world; it is rather an inquiry into the different ideas of country life current at the time, and a reconciliation between them." Actually Shakespeare's play is an inquiry into, and a reconciliation of, quite a bit more than this. Nonetheless, Bullough is correct in stressing, as have scholars since, that, while pastoral in its underpinnings, As You Like It is more significant for the innovations it works on traditions of pastoral than for its wholesale adoption of much that is more superficially conventional in Lodge.'

Beyond the shift in pastoral tone evident both in the reduction in number and importance of 'shepherd' scenes as well as the addition of debates on virtually all aspects of love and life, Shakespeare's play differs significantly from Lodge in other ways. There is the addition of Jaques, Touchstone, Audrey, and Sir Oliver Mar-text. Familial parallels are inten- sified by making Frederick (Torismond) and the Duke Senior (Gerismond) brothers and characterizing the group of exiled "loving lords" as a brotherhood (i.e., Duke Senior: "Now my co-mates and brothers in exile"). Scenes are added which further describe the life of Senior's exiled band (in Lodge merely a "lustie crue," and we do not see them eating, drinking, singing, and commenting on the human condition) and especially in references to their somewhat pantheistic, perfectionistic, loving, and communal exis- tence. The notion of religious conversion is also added.

'Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 2: The Comedies, 1597-1603 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 153. Cf. A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: As You Like It, ed. Richard Knowles (New York: Modern Language Association, 1977), 476, which lists among Shakespeare's innovations on Lodge "reducing the pastoral elements;" and Agnes Latham, ed., The Arden Edition of the Works of Shakespeare: As You Like It (London: Methuen, 1975), who notes that "in some ways Lodge is more



70 Sixteenth Century Journal

These innovations have seemed haphazard and designed merely to expand the scope of debate in the play-to open up the play's comic and serious potential and introduce a broader range of character types. In fact, however, all of these major changes take on a striking coherence when seen in relation to a peculiar bit of information Shakespeare gives us about the background of his most important addition to the play, the character of Jaques:

Duke Senior: Most mischievous foul sin, in chiding sin. For thou thyself has been a libertine, As sensual as the brutish sting itself; And all th'embossed sores and headed evils That thou with license of free foot hast caught, Wouldst thou discharge into the general world.

(II, vii, 64-69)2

This reference to Jaques' "libertine" past has confused Shakespeareans for a very long time. It has been normal either to seeJaques, in light of this, as an exhausted epicurean" "long experienced in sin," a "sated voluptary," a "blase roue," one who has had "too intimate acquaintance with the seamier side of life," or simply to discount the Duke's comment on the grounds that what he says is just not true, but merely an attempt to draw Jaques into an argument. As George Kittredge pointed out in defense of the latter view, "Libertine, to be sure, meant 'loose liver,' but it had not become so specialized as in modern English."3 A closer look at what "libertine" did mean at the time the play was written allows us not only to question Kittredge's judgment about the insincerity of the Duke's comment, as well as the view that Jaques is merely licentious and dissolute, but gives, also, some coherence to many of the changes that Shakespeare made in his major sources for the play.

The primary meaning of "libertine" in the late sixteenth century, and the one most clearly evoked by the context of the Duke's as well as Jaques' comments on chiding and cleansing sin, was one who was a member of an antinomian sect. Libertines, often also referred to as Seekers, Spirituals, Quakers, and, more often, Familists, were condemned as early as 1545 by Calvin (in his attack Contre la secte phantastique etfurieus des Libertins qui se nomment Spiritulez) and later very bitterly in England, for example byJohn Knewstub at Paul's Cross in 1576, by Stephen Batman in 1577, by Lawrence Chaderton in 1578, by John Dyos in 1579, by George Gifford in 1596, and

determinedly pastoral than Shakespeare, " and that the tone of the play runs less to the pastoral frame of mind than to an ethos stressing the "natural turn of events" (xvi and xliv).

2References to the works of Shakespeare are cited from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, repr. 1972).

3Knowles, ed., 120-21 n. Cf comments by Gervinus, Fletcher, Skipton, Gray, Kittredge and the editor.



Rosalynde Among the Familists 71

others, well into the seventeenth century.4 The attack on Familists (the libertine sect known as The Family of Love, The Service of Love, The House [or Household] of Love, or The Family) did not come, furthermore, only from the established church, but also from literary circles. Thomas Nashe "sneered at Familism in his Return of the Renouwned Caualiero Pasquill in 1589 and in Pierce Penilesse in 1592. Early in the seventeenth century we find the same mocking attitude in Thomas Middleton's Family of Love and Ben Jonson's Eastward Hoe and The Alchemist. "5 The relation between the term "libertine" and the so-called Family of Love was especially close in England toward the end of the sixteenth century. In general, as George Mosse writing about Puritan radicalism tells us, "libertinage . . had meant, in the sixteenth century, those who were filled with the 'Holy Spirit' and thus thought themselves free from any ecclesiastical discipline." It was later, in the seventeenth century, that "it came to be applied to those deists who seemed to justify moral laxness."6 But beyond this, as Alastair Hamilton has pointed out,

The identification between libertines and Familists had been a frequent feature of attacks both Catholic and Protestant throughout the 1560s and 1570s, and the Reformed Protestants, who prided themselves on their moral and political integrity, interpreted all attempts at compro- mise as the work of this vague, but at the same time ubiquitous, sect . . . 'the libertines are increasing, and with them the true atheists', wrote the Reformed preacher Hendrik van den Corput in November 1579. . . . In a further letter, in March 1581, Corput made it clear that libertines and the Family of Love were one and the same thing, that they were peddling their books openly and that the Reformed Protestants must do something about them.7

And other historians agree that, as Jean Dietz Moss says, "Familist eventu- ally became synonymous with libertine."8

Certainly the meaning of the term, its connection with Familism in a theatrical context, and the appropriateness of its application toJaques-the critic of romantic love in As You Like It-is nicely glossed in Middleton's bitter and relentless attack on the sect in his 1602 (very close in time to As You Like It) play titled The Family of Love, where the romantic hero,

4See George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), 788-89: "A distinctive feature of the radical movement in England was the close interrelation- ship of Libertinism, anti-Trinitarianism, Anabaptism of the Melchiorite strain, and Spiritual- ism." For English critics of the sect see Alastair Hamilton, The Family of Love (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1981), 128, and Jean Dietz Moss, "The Family of Love and English Critics," Sixteenth Century Journal 6:1 (1975): 44.

5Lynnewood F. Martin, "The Family of Love in England: Conforming Millenarians," Sixteenth Century Journal 3:2 (1972): 100; Hamilton, Family of Love, 134-35.

6George L. Mosse, "Puritan Radicalism and the Enlightenment," Church History 29 (1960): 426.

7Hamilton, Family of Love, 109. 8Moss, Family & English Critics, 35.



72 Sixteenth CenturyJournal

Gerardine, answers Lipsalve and Gudgeon ("two gallants that only pursue city lechery") as they mock men who wish to marry:

Profane not thus the sacred name of love, You libertines, who never knew the joys Nor precious thoughts of two consenting hearts!

(The Family of Love I, ii, 15-17)9

When the Duke Senior told the Elizabethan audience that Jaques had been a libertine or Familist he was telling them very much indeed. The Family of Love was founded by Henry Niclaes, a German cloth merchant, who, in his travels, left groups of converts all over Europe. His works were translated into English and disseminated by his disciple Christopher Vittels in the 1570s, perhaps after a visit to England by Niclaes around 1560.10 What is most interesting about the group is that although they seem to have been very well known in their time and almost universally condemned, no one seemed to understand exactly what they believed or stood for. As Alastair Hamilton, the most sophisticated and thorough historian of the sect, has admitted, "the doctrine of the community consisted of a confused, and frequently contradictory, list of tenets." E. Belfort Bax found Niclaes' central statement of Familist doctrine "nothing but a turgid mass of theological maunderings, which drones on page after page without apparently coming to any intelligible point, and out of which it is difficult to make any coherent doctrine. " While historianJulia G. Ebel adds that "little can be learned about the Family's beliefs, since most of the tangible evidence for their creed comes from defamatory literature."tt

But considerable effort has been made tojudge what the Familist creed held, or was thought to hold; and although sometimes muddled and contradictory, the following points have been stressed by church historians: 1) "Believing in the potential goodness of man, [Niclaes] taught that it was possible for him not to be a sinner in his life." 2) "There was something far more important than the Bible, [Familists] claimed: the Spirit, without whose inspiration the Scriptures would never have been written and whose inspiration continued to function independently of the Scriptures. " And that ". . . the spiritual formed a group apart in which human learning was of no account but in which divine wisdom was very much present. " 3)

9The Works of Thomas Middleton, vol. 3, ed. A. H. Bullen (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1885), 15.

10For background on Henry Niclaes and The Family of Love see Hamilton, Family of Love, passim; Martin, Family in England, 78-108; Julia G. Ebel, "The Family of Love: Sources of its History in England, " Huntington Library Quarterly 30:4 (1967): 331-43; Williams, Radical Reformation, esp. 778-90; Moss, Family & English Critics 35-52; Wallace Kirsop, "The Family of Love in France, "Journal of Religious History 3:2 (1965): 103-18; Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in Light of Recent Research (1550-1641), 2 vols (New York: Russell and Russell, repr. 1967), esp. 1:209-14.

"Hamilton, Family of Love, 118; E. Belfort Bax, The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists (London: Sonnenschein, 1903), 359; Ebel, Family: Sources, 332.




"Believing that 'all things are ruled by nature, and not directed by God,' they taught that heaven and hell were in this life and defended pre- Adamism. "12 4) Niclaes rejected the "Lutheran solafide and [urged] man to achieve righteousness by becoming a 'New Man.' [Henry Niclaes signed himself "H. N.," not for his given name but for Homo Novus.] As Luther accepted the fact that the believer continues to sin, but that through faith the righteousness of Christ is imputed to the undeserving sinner as a free gift, Niclaes taught that the believer would, through divine love, experi- ence holiness thus being 'made. . . alive, through Christ,' and being separated from the sinful condition through a sanctification which he described as being 'godded . . . with him [i.e. God].' "13

Other beliefs that may have some bearing on our specific interest in the sect for its possible relations to As You Like It are: (1) The principle stated in the Terra Pacis that the Family "do not vow or bind themselves in the Matrimony of Men, nor-yet suffer themselues to be bound therein; but are like the Angells in Heauen." This alleged doctrinal aversion to marriage, although we know Familists did in fact marry and moreover were pretty orthodox on this point, came to be a popular point of departure for attacks on the Family and the charge of loose moral behavior, a common association with the term "libertine" that explains the literal emphasis on sensual behavior and sexual disease in the Duke's admonition toJaques and perhaps Touchstone's attitude toward the institution of marriage. (2) Familists followed Niclaes' example of segregating himself from the "impure" and setting out on a journey to the Land of Peace by traveling to spread their beliefs. For instance, Christopher Vittels, it was said, "spent his time 'wandryng uppe and downe the Countrey"' proselytising. And Familism was spread by "such other lyke which by travailyng from place to place, do get their lyuyng." And those who, "using such a romyng kynde of Traffique keepe not commonly anyone certaine abidyng place, but runnyng fiskyng from place to place, stay not for the most part any where long together. "14

The fundamental Familist belief that man, regenerated in nature by spiritual awakening, was free from the effects of original sin provides us with the most profound background possible for many of the comments by the Duke Senior added to Lodge's story by Shakespeare: "Are not these woods/More free from peril than the envious court?" he asks at the start of Act II, celebrating the regenerative quality and moral purity of nature- "Here feel we not the penalty of Adam." Without the background of the antinomian sects, this statement has always been problematic for critics, who don't know how to take the Duke's view in light of the chilling winter

12For this and above, Hamilton, Family of Love, 4, 7, 118. 13Martin, Family in England, 100-1. 14Terra Pacis. A true testification of the spirituall lande of peace, which is the spirituall lande of

promyse . . .(Cologne, c. 1574) cited in Hamilton, Family of Love, 37, 55, 119-21.




wind. But the real pantheism and optimism of the antinomian libertines is most evident in his elaboration:

And this our life, exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Freed to pursue the spirit of Christian value through nature rather than through scripture or the orthodox rituals of the church, the Duke Senior's band of outlaws find God not in their books, but in themselves and in the world around them. And that such a process is specifically dissociated from the authority of the church is made clear by the Duke Senior's admission to Orlando that "True it is that we have seen better days, /And have with holy bell been knolled to church . . ." (II, vii, 119-20), but that, due to circum- stances, this is no longer the case.

As far as such connections may take us in understanding the source of Shakespeare's additions to the story of Rosalynde, we must still ask: What does it matter ifJaques was a libertine and the Duke Senior seems, by virtue of his outlaw brotherhood and pantheistic/perfectionistic view, to express, or at least experiment with, Familist ideas?

To begin with, Jaques, once a libertine, is now a thoroughgoing melancholic and a skeptic. Is it because of his past that he continues to value "liberty, " to debunk orthodoxy, to travel "with license of free foot, " as the Familists did in spreading their views, and to remain somewhat the radical reformer? "Jaques, when he is with Touchstone," Agnes Latham says, "treats him with great courtesy, from which we may deduce thatJaques hits only those his own size."15 Be that as it may, certainly Jaques' kindness grows more from the fact that he sees his own past in Touchstone, and in fact catches the Fool in his affair with Audrey on the verge of making the same mistake in abusing license under the guise of religiousness (rejecting the orthodox rituals of the church as antinomians were thought to have done) for which the libertines were then being condemned, as Jaques himself has been by the Duke Senior. And like Jaques, Touchstone also makes a practice of chiding 'sin,' or, rather, parodies such practice, as in his exchanges with Corin on the evils of fostering the "copulation of cattle." In fact, almost all of the characters added by Shakespeare-Jaques, Touchstone, Audrey, Sir Oliver Mar-text-help to uncover the basis of antinomian belief and practice past and present against which the Duke Senior, the young lovers, and the newly defined 'pastoral' world of the play in general measure their own spiritual development. That Touchstone's desire for "not being well married" by Sir Oliver as an excuse "hereafter to leave my wife" smacks of the popular and cynical view of Familist ethics, we cannot doubt. But even the character of Sir Oliver himself has strong

15Latham, Arden Edition, lxxvi.




Familist parallels: in reference to a group of "suspected Familists" who in 1574 "had been meeting in a secret conventicle in Balsham . . . ." it was noted that "the leader of the group appears to have been Robert Sharp, parson of the little village of Strethall. . . . It was reported of Sharp that he married people in the fields using a rite of his own." Further, "the unlikelihood of Robert Sharp being an orthodox Puritan minister is apparent from the fact that he was unable to write and had to make his mark at the foot of the confession. "16

Jaques was a libertine, but now, like all good Puritans of the time, looks for sin not in himself, but in others. Touchstone, in his relations with Audrey and Sir Oliver, represents what Jaques would like to forget about his past. The Duke and his co-mates and brothers in exile (Familists greeted one another with phrases like 'here is a brother in the family') as well as the other inhabitants of the Forest of Arden, represent what is best about Familist thought: its belief in the potential to redeem fallen man and to become Homo Novus, the New Man spiritually reborn in nature. This accounts not only for Jaques' fascination with what we may call the 'New Man' that is Frederick the convertite (which in itself mimicks the spiritual rebirth of Oliver), but for his disinclination to return from the forest to the world of civil authority as well.

This view of what Jaques represents, the function served by Touchstone, et. al., the relevance of comments given to the Duke Senior about original sin and the family of man (in fact the play's general intensification of the role of families and its occasional questioning of what constitutes a proper family), all serve to make the total action of the play a brief but invigorating antinomian fling-almost in religious terms what C. L. Barber discussed in social and ceremonial terms as "release" and "clarification."17 There is generally a rejection of the corrupt rules of the 'civil' world and a simultaneous celebration of the moral purity of nature. The unlimited questioning and testing of values in the forest ends in a reaffirmation of traditional social order and an even more orthodox sense of moral redefinition (a visit to an "old religious" man), the proper ceremony of marriage, and finally the restitution of civil authority.

More so than his source in Lodge (and the less proximate Tale of Gamelyn) Shakespeare asks the question, "What is a proper family?" In spirit some families, as Le Beau tells Orlando, cannot be said to exist:

Orlando: Which of the two was daughter to the Duke . . . ?

16N. A. Penrhys-Evans, The Family of Love in England, 1550-1650 (unpublished MA thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, September, 1971) 84-86. Cf. Hamilton, Family of Love, 121.

17C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), passim.




Le Beau: Neither his daughter, if we judge by manners.

(I, ii, 261-66)

Later, Adam, too, questions the nature of family ties:

Your brother-no, no brother, yet the son- Yet not the son, I will not call him son- Of him I was about to call his father-

And when his own family loyalty is challenged, Orlando firmly defends it:

I am more proud to be Sir Rowland's son, His youngest son, and would not change that calling To be adopted heir to Frederick.

(I, ii, 228-30)

Indeed, as Louis Montrose has demonstrated, "It is precisely in the details of inheritance that Shakespeare makes one of the most significant departures from his source," adding that "Shakespeare alters the terms of the paternal will in Lodge's story so as to alienate Orlando from the status of a landed gentleman. The effect is to intensify the differences between the eldest son and his siblings. ..."18

What is striking about Orlando's need to defend his family loyalty here is the degree to which Shakespeare has deviated from Lodge in this small point; for rather than wishing "I would thou hadst been son to some man else" (I, ii, 220), Torrismond in Rosalynde favors Rosader (Orlando) and especially for his parentage: "but when they knew him [Rosader] to be the youngest Sonne of Sir John of Bordeaux, the King rose from his seate and imbraced him. . .."19

To Adam's odd questions of Orlando, "Why are you virtuous? Why do people love you?" (II, iii, 5), we may apply Orlando's own observations that although "never schooled and yet learned" (Familists rejected formal education in favor of spiritual illumination), "the spirit of my father grows strong in me . . ." (I, i, 161-62; 68-69).

Indeed, freed from the rules of the civil world, in the benevolent and nurturing laboratory of nature, all men have found the spirit of their 'father'-what Familists called the 'holy spirit'-and thus their social and true Christian selves. That Jaques does not participate in the return to a civil society does not in any way diminish this, since the process of self- discovery is unending and, as he says, "Out of these convertites/There is much matter to be heard and learned" (M iv, 184-85).

18Louis Adrian Montrose, "'The Place of a Brother' in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form." Shakespeare Quarterly 32:1 (1981): 28-54.

19Bullough, Sources of Shakespeare, 172.



rosalynde among the familists: as you like it and an expanded view of its sources

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