Why Must Rosalind Disguise Herself?
What freedoms does cross-dressing afford Rosalind in Shakespeare's ‘As You Like It’?
This is Part 2 of a two-part reading of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Read Part 1 here.
“Do you not know I am a woman? When I
think, I must speak.”
In Act III, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Rosalind speaks these words when Celia reveals that Orlando has been marking the trees in the Forest of Arden with love verses. Her dialogue brings out one of the central themes of the play — that of cross-dressing.
Cross-dressing was a common feature of the Elizabethan stage, where young boys played the roles of women characters. These words spoken by Rosalind — being played by a boy actor — while dressed as a man (Ganymede) complicates the ‘performance of gender’ in the play.
To what ends? Let’s unpack.
Freedoms and Transgressions
In the Introduction to the Pelican Shakespeare edition of the play, Frances E Dolan asks, “Why, precisely, must Rosalind disguise herself?”
The more obvious answer is — for safety. She is, after all, a woman leaving the ‘sheltered’ confines of the Court and entering the potentially dangerous realms of Arden. She says, in Act I, Scene 3 —
“Alas, what danger will it be to us,
Maids as we are, to travel forth and so far!
Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.
But there is more to Rosalind’s disguise.
Celia remarks at the end of Act I, “Now we go in content / To liberty, and not to banishment.”
What liberties and transgressions, then, does the transformative space of Arden and cross-dressing afford Rosalind?
As a pair and with the help of Corin, the sisters engage in transactions in Arden, buying the cottage, pasture, and flock — an option that may not have been available to them without their disguises.
Dolan writes that “Rosalind chooses to raise herself in the hierarchy of gender” and from the beginning “seems to relish the prospect of playing the man”, so much so that she even neglects to identify herself to her father.
When proposing the plan to Celia in Act I, Scene 3, Rosalind says (with relish),
“A gallant curtal ax upon my thigh,
A boarspear in my hand…
We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside…
Once in the forest, Rosalind takes command — she directs the plot and, eventually, Orlando in his pursuit of love. Dolan writes that Rosalind, as Ganymede, “explores the possibility of friendship, a relationship that not only does not require her subordination, but… gives her the upper hand over Orlando.”
Rosalind is assertive — in Act V, Scene 4, she says, “I have promised to make all this matter even” — and makes the other characters abide by her wishes and accept their respective partners in marriage.
She is a vibrant, resilient Shakespearean heroine, who gets an epilogue — the play’s last word. Harold Bloom writes about her in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998),
“We are in a lapsed world [in Arden]… but it has a woman beyond [the Biblical] Eve, the sublime Rosalind.”
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Doublet-Hose and Petticoat
“I could find in my heart to disgrace my man’s
apparel and to cry like a woman; but I must comfort
the weaker vessel, as doublet and hose ought to show it-
self courageous to petticoat.”
However, as this dialogue from Act II, Scene 4 suggests, Rosalind may be dressed as a man but she also often reinforces gender norms in the play; she never gives up her notions of what constitutes masculinity as opposed to femininity.
Playing Ganymede, she says to Orlando in Act III, Scene 2,
“…and I thank God,
I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy
offenses as he hath generally taxed their whole sex
withal.”
She also famously exclaims,
“Do you not know I am a woman? When I
think, I must speak.”
In the same scene, when Orlando asks, “Where dwell you, pretty youth?”, Rosalind responds,
“…here in the
skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat.
The simile hints at the fact that gender is everywhere in Arden, along with other power structures.
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Does the play, then, endorse or renounce gender hierarchies?
Marjorie Garber writes in Shakespeare After All (2004),
“Shakespeare always presents both his ideas and his character types contrapuntally, offering a response and a qualification, another way of looking at things, within the play itself.”
The Epilogue, Rosalind’s last words in the play, should give us further clues.
Cross-dressing and Theatre
We already know that a boy actor would play the character of Rosalind on the stage in Shakespeare’s time. Garber explains,
“The many cross-dressed roles in the plays took advantage of this material and historical fact, allowing both maleness and femaleness to be bodied forth in performance, and leading, in subsequent centuries, to a particular admiration for the liveliness and initiative of these Shakespearean women.”
Cross-dressing, therefore, takes on additional complexity, which is retained in the Epilogue as Rosalind — now no longer playing Ganymede, but reappearing onstage in women’s clothes — remarks,
“If I were a woman, I would kiss as
many of you as had beards that pleased me…”
She also expects to be applauded while making curtsy ‘like a woman’.
Dolan writes that between the ‘I’ who says “If I were a woman” and the ‘I’ who says “I make curtsy,” there is a complicated overlap, and the play “offers no easy way out of the conundrum of same-sex attraction [Ganymede and Orlando; Rosalind and Phebe].”
Garber takes this a step further (focusing on the ‘if’ instead of the ‘I’) and writes that “if Rosalind is Ganymede as much as Ganymede is Rosalind,” then,
“[T]he questions of gender and sexuality will also come under the rubric of “as you like it”, and the play emerges as not only a fantasy of genre, a pastoral fantasy, but also a fantasy about gender, a fantasy, that is to say, about the very nature of human desire.”
And what is gender if not a fantasy, a performance, an ‘act’?
Gender and Performance
Judith Butler notably uses the theatrical framework of ‘repetition of acts’ to present an understanding of sex and gender in ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory’. Butler writes,
“[G]ender is in no way a stable identity… rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time — an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (original emphasis).
They expand this idea in the essay, noting that “the acts by which gender is constituted bear similarities to performative acts within theatrical contexts” and that gender “is only real to the extent that it is performed” according to regulatory social convention — that is, when we repeatedly act according to the behaviours expected of our gender. It is the very act of performing our gender that constitutes who we are. Butler also negates the notion of “an essential sex, a true or abiding masculinity or femininity.”
Furthermore, in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Butler talks about how drag, cross-dressing, and the sexual stylisation of butch/femme identifies parodies the notion of an original or primary gender identity, revealing the “aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence.”
Viewed from this lens, Rosalind appears way ahead of her time, proving Bloom’s words — ironically, via a sexual-politics reading of the play, a critical theory that he disregarded —
“Yet I hardly see how one can begin to consider Shakespeare without finding some way to account for his pervasive presence… here, there, and everywhere at once.”
And,
“As You Like It is a title addressed to Shakespeare’s audience, yet the play also could be called As Rosalind Likes It…”