SOURCE: Hunt, Maurice. “Kairos and the Ripeness of Time in As You Like It.” Modern Language Quarterly 52, no. 2 (June 1991): 113-35.

In the following essay, Hunt describes Shakespeare's references to classical and Christian notions of time in As You Like It as they suggest the possibility of a renewed Golden Age or the providential recovery of a lost paradise.

Not every series of critical articles cumulatively deepens our understanding of a Shakespearean play. Such an effect, however, does come from critics' exploration of the motif of time in As You Like It. In a now-classic essay, Jay Halio first defined a contrast in the play between the time consciousness of the court and the regenerative timelessness of the forest of Arden and a previous generation's gracious way of life. Taking issue with Halio, Rawdon Wilson has argued that the dialectic of As You Like It concerns not time consciousness...