Introduction

In the third act of As You Like It, Touchstone makes the offhand remark that “a wall’d town is more worthier than a village”. The comment is part of an absurd but ultimately tender defense of marriage in which a walled town and a rural village are compared, respectively, to the horned head of a “married man” and the “bare brow of a bachelor”. Touchstone is talking about marriage, but he is also talking about city walls and defenses, and his paradox works also because it engages with the walled city at a moment in European history when the walled city was in crisis. London had not rebuilt its walls in the new style. Insulated from continental ground warfare, Londoners had the luxury of contemplating the new wall systems from a distance and in the abstract. The refortification of Europe during the sixteenth century did affect England in many ways, however.