Charles’ longing description of the Forest of Arden has its roots in classical myth, but his desire to “fleet the time carelessly” might also be connected to another mythic tradition: the Land of Cockaigne. Cockaigne was a medieval peasant utopia, a magical realm of ostentatious gluttony, continual drunkenness, sexual abandon, and complete idleness. The 14th-century poem “The Land of Cockayne” tells of an abbey where “pies and pastries form the walls,” among other delights, describing how roasted geese “fly to the abbey (believe it or not) / And cry out ‘Geese, all hot, all hot!'” and larks “land in your mouth, well-cooked and tame.” More than merely an escape from the brutalities of peasant life, Cockaigne was a kind of parodic paradise, devoted to the cares of the flesh instead of the soul. As the poem observes, “Though paradisal joys are sweet, / There’s nothing there but fruit to eat.”
In 1928, Harry McClintock recorded a modern version of the Land of Cockaigne, based (he claimed) on the tales he heard as a young hobo traveller. “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” begins with a tramp walking past the campfires of a hobo “jungle,” declaring, “I’m headed for a land that’s far away / Beside the crystal fountain,” and inviting the others to join him in its unique pleasures:
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
There’s a land that’s fair and bright,
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night.Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
On the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggsThe farmers’ trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh I’m bound to go
Where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall
The winds don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocksThe brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railway bulls are blind
There’s a lake of stew
And of whiskey too
You can paddle all around them
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.In the Big Rock Candy Mountains,
The jails are made of tin.
And you can walk right out again,
As soon as you are in.There ain’t no short-handled shovels,
No axes, saws nor picks,
I’m bound to stay
Where you sleep all day,
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains …I’ll see you all this coming fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
Much like As You Like It, the whimsy and humor of the song counterpoints, and perhaps obscures, its political undertones. (Certainly McClintock was thinking politically; in addition to being a kind of hobo troubadour he was a union organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, a revolutionary labor organization that sought the overthrow of industrial capitalism.) McClintock catalogues the persecutions, injustices, and brutalities of the transient life—begging, poor sleep, bad weather, police, attack dogs, railway authorities, jail, back-breaking labor, and above all persistent hunger—and imagines a land where they are entirely redressed.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain is thus a carnivalesque world, where hierarchies of power are inverted and everyday rules are suspended. And as with the Forest of Arden in Charles’ mind, there is a potent political element to this fantasy: to dream of such a place is to question the necessity of the world being as it currently is.
Of course, the hobo jungle where the song begins is not itself such a utopia, however romantic life on the rails might appear to those embedded in ordinary life. In another early version of “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” the hobo sings to a farmer’s son he meets by the road, enticing him to join him; at the end of the song the boy recounts the abuses he’s suffered on the road, remarking bitterly, “And I ain’t seen any candy.” This, too, is in keeping with As You Like It. Arden’s pleasures are always leavened by a profound reality principle, from Jaques’ melancholy satire to Touchstone’s wry ironies to Rosalind’s anti-romantic frankness: “men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.” The play offers us a sceptical utopia, a paradoxical hybrid: a disenchanted nirvana, an improvised paradise, a fantasyland that questions its magical foundations. (Or, to put it more simply, a world of theater.)