Mayors, Aldermen,
and Justices of the Peace are comic, and take it not quite so well.
Beadles were so wholly dedicated to the purposes of comedy that I
suppose they found their position unendurable and went to earth; at any
rate it is very difficult to catch one in his official costume.
All this is reflected in Shakespeare. He knew the country, and he knew
the town; and he has not left it in doubt which was the cherished home
of his imagination. He preferred the fields to the streets, but the
Arcadia of his choice is not agricultural or even pastoral; it is rather
a desert island, or the uninhabited stretches of wild and woodland
country. Indeed, he has both described it and named it. 'Where will the
old Duke live?' says Oliver in _As You Like It_. 'They say he is already
in the forest of Arden,' says Charles the wrestler, 'and a many merry
men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England.
They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day, and fleet the time
carelessly, as they did in the golden world.' That is Shakespeare's
Arcadia; and who that has read _As You Like It_ will deny that it
breathes the air of Paradise?
It is quite plain that the freedom that Shakespeare valued was in fact
freedom, not any of those ingenious mechanisms to which that name has
been applied by political theorists.
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