Abstract
This paper opens with Mary Beth Rose’s question, “Where are the mothers in Shakespeare?” Although
Shakespeare’s plays often dramatize the emotional bonds between fathers and sons or fathers and daughters,
mothers are generally presented as threatening, dangerous, or remarkably absent. Although there are no mothers
in As You Like It, embedded within the structure and ‘sounding’ of Arden there is a powerful maternal voice, the
Latin anima or Greek psyche as animating spirit or breath of the greenwood. Ironically access to the maternal voice
can be understood through Julia Kristeva’s notion of ‘the imaginary father,’ a ‘mother-father-conglomerate,’
which she revisions from Freud’s ‘father of individual prehistory.’ Unlike what most readers may think, such a
‘father’ is not a father but a metaphorical process – a ‘becoming’ – offering a means to consider how psychoanalytic
approaches can lead us to current theories of embodied cognition, ecofeminism, and the ecological nature of play.