ABSTRACT
Anti-conquest and As You Like It is through and through an English comedy, on English soil, in English air, beneath English oaks; and it will be loved and admired, cherished and appreciated, by English men as long as an English word is uttered by an English tongue. The explanatory notes to As You Like It seldom present glosses that would link elements of the play to things strange and un-English, except in the case of Jaques, who is made to carry the burden of foreignness in the process of annotation just as, in the Duke's estimation, he carries the effects of an array of foreign diseases. If 'Ducdame' means 'Lead, O deer', however sardonically Jaques may be uttering the phrase, then Jaques, the contaminated, the suspiciously cosmopolitan, threatens to become a spokesperson for its animals, both beasts and humans, and for the ethos of the Forest of Arden.
