Nancy E. Wright

Cast out of Eden: Property and inheritance in Shakespearean Drama

Conflicts over property occur in courtly, urban, and rural settings in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI (1590–92) and As You Like It (1599).1 In the history play, grievances about landed property, varying from the enclosure of common lands to the loss of English territory to France, inspire laborers and nobles to rebel. Jack Cade, an urban laborer, leads a short-lived rebellion with the radical aim of abolishing all private property in order to eliminate the social hierarchy that differentiates poor laboring men from nobles and gentry. Nobles, who unite in order to defeat Cade’s rebellion and drive him from London, do so out of self-interest, which ultimately inspires their own rebellion against the king. Similarly, in As You Like It self-interest undermines social relationships. Frederick, the younger brother in a noble family, usurps its dukedom from the legitimate heir, Duke Senior, and Oliver, the eldest brother in a gentry family, not only neglects his responsibilities to Orlando, his youngest brother, but also threatens his life. In both plays characters flee from the city and the court to find protection from unruliness in secluded retreats: the Garden of Iden in 2 Henry VI and the Forest of Arden in As You Like It. It is these pleasant landscapes, modulations of the rhetorical and poetic convention of the locus amoenus, which explicate a nexus of property issues.2