Shakespeare's Women in Drag: Rosalind

Lee Lady

William Shakespeare, As You Like It
John Russell Brown (editor), Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It: A Casebook
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Albert Bermel, Shakespeare at the Moment: Playing the Comedies
Philip Brockbank (editor), Players of Shakespeare, 1
John Palmer, Comic Characters of Shakespeare
Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love

One can easily imagine a contemporary Hollywood film based on the concept in As You Like It, maybe starring Meg Ryan, although Hollywood would need to stir in a little science fiction to make the plot plausible.

A man and young woman encounter each other once, and each of them falls in love with the other, although neither of them realizes that their feelings are reciprocated. Later, they meet under very different circumstances, except now the young woman (by name of Rosalind) has the appearance of a male in his late teens and calls herself Ganymede. The young man (whose name is Orlando) doesn't recognize Rosalind, and believing that Ganymede is a teenage boy, treats him as a male confidant and talks to him about his love for Rosalind. Ganymede teases Orlando about this woman he is in love with and promises to cure Orlando of his love, provided that Orlando courts Ganymede as if he were Rosalind. Orlando agrees to play this game.

The first thing that makes is the situation interesting is that although Orlando doesn't see through Rosalind's disguise at all and is completely convinced that Ganymede is male, he finds himself strangely fascinated by the youth, and even attracted to him.

One of the main points of having a character in a farce be in disguise is that the disguise is very obvious to the audience but is unnoticed by the characters in the play. Furthermore, for the audience there is an almost flickering effect as the character shifts back and forth between the true personality and the masquerade personality.

This is especially interesting when a woman is impersonating a man, as Rosalind does, so that at moments we see her as a woman and then there is a shift and we see her more as a man. It is comic when Rosalind tries to swagger and come across as convincingly male, but the audience, who know the truth, notice how awkward her attempts often are. But Orlando and the other characters in this Hollywood film, although sometimes confused by the mistakes Rosalind makes, are willing to believe that her awkwardness is the awkwardness of a boy in his late teens trying to come across as an adult male.

So the movie presents comedy and at the same time erotic titillation. Because even though the audience knows that under her male exterior, Rosalind is still a woman, there are moments when she does manage to seem convincingly male, and the males in the audience, like Orlando, at moments find themselves erotically attracted to someone who gives every appearance of being a teenage boy.

Of course this would make a Hollywood film rather problematic for heterosexual audiences. In Elizabethan society, on the other hand, where it was fairly commonplace for men, at least in certain social circles, to be sexually attracted to adolescent boys, there would be less of a problem.

In the BBC production of As You Like It (distributed by Time-Life), starring Helen Mirren as Rosalind (directed by Basil Coleman and with Brian Stirner as Orlando), this aspect of the play is made fairly conspicuous.

But in an Elizabethan production, there would be still a further complication, in that, as is well known, women's roles were in fact played by adolescent boys. So that the audience is seeing a boy impersonating a woman impersonating a boy.

Jan Kott, among others, suggests that there may have already have been a certain sexual thrill for many men in watching these teenage female impersonators. In fact, I can't help but think that perhaps the performances of these boys was perhaps a bit "swish." And certainly from what we know of Shakespeare's audiences, we can imagine many males in the audience making rude jokes to this effect. Maybe swish for Elizabethans looked very different than what we today call swish. But I can't help but think that there was some sort of exaggerated femininity, with an erotic suggestiveness, in those boys playing women, and that there would be those in the audience for whom this swishness would be the main interest in the play, rather than plot or dialog.

Now when the plot called for these women, played by boys, to disguise themselves men, then the gender ambiguities become quite intricate. I would certainly not want to assert that it was Shakespeare's intention to challenge his society's paradigms of gender, but certainly for at least some in the audience that must have been the effect.

But at the same time, seeing a woman dressed as a man would be extremely comic.

Scholars commonly say that the roots of comedy go back to festivals such as the Saturnalia, where many taboos were broken. The Twelfth Night of the Epiphany, incidentally, was one of those Saturnalia-like festivals. As Porter Williams, Jr writes in his essay "Mistakes in Twelfth Night and Their Resolution" (reprinted in Twelfth Night: A Casebook),

Traditionally in such celebrations, servants change places with their masters and say what they please, jests and pranks may be carried out with impunity, and the Fool becomes enthroned as the Lord of Misrule.

Certainly from what we know of the role of women in Elizabethan society, we can see that for a women, dressing like a man would be a strong taboo and on the stage it might easily seem very funny.

Not that the idea of a woman disguising herself in men's clothes to ensure her safety when traveling was a complete fantasy. In Elizabethan times, a woman simply did not travel alone. For reasons of both safety and propriety, she would if worst came to worst, find some monk who would be willing to accompany her. But if even this were not possible, it did sometimes happen that women would make a desperate attempt to ensure their safety by impersonating a man. But certainly no woman in Elizabethan society would have dared to behave the way Rosalind does.

In any case, having women disguise themselves as men was clearly an idea that appealed to Shakespeare, as well as to his audience, a whole lot, and he didn't need to resort to very strong motivation to justify it.

In As You Like It, Rosalind continues wearing men's clothes long after her reason for doing so ceases to make sense. If we ask what her motivation is, as several critics have done, we are thinking in a very different way than Shakespeare did. Bermel's book quotes an explanation from Ann Barton (The Riverside Shakespeare, 1974):

Rosalind clings to the part of Ganymede because of the freedom it allows her. In her boy's disguise, she escapes (for a time) the limitations of being a woman the conscious object of Orlando's love. She learns a great deal about herself, about Orlando, and about love itself which she could not have done within the normal conventions of society.

He also quotes John Doebler (The Complete Works of Shakespeare, New York, 1992),

Rosalind wants Orlando to learn that women are not goddesses but frail human beings who can be giddy, jealous, infatuated with novelty, irritatingly talkative, peremptory and hysterical, though she is circumspect about whether women can also be unfaithful. Orlando must be taught that love is a madness, and he must be cured, not of loving Rosalind, but of worshipping her with unrealistic expectations that can lead only to disillusionment. He can love "Ganymede" (Rosalind's disguise) as a friend and then make the transition to heterosexual union in his blessed discovery that the friend is also the lover.

This second comment sounds especially idiotic, but I think that these are both actually quite valid comments on the play.

In other words, the play itself does not say either of these things. The play shows us certain things happening, characters saying certain things. It is the nature of us as human beings that when we see an interaction between people, we often have observations to make about it. We make judgements about these people and have opinions about what we see as their deeper motives. I think that the comments above are valid as this sort of observation about the interactions between Rosalind and Orlando. Other people would have a different take on these interactions, which might be equally valid. The play itself merely presents us with the interactions.

Contrast with these two comments the statement in Alexander Leggatt's book Shakespeare's Comedy of Love.

Rosalind's disguise as Ganymede, on the other hand, is genuinely liberating.... This is not to say that Rosalind and Ganymede are utterly different beings, and that nothing Ganymede says can be taken as Rosalind's serious view. It is not as simple as that. Ganymede is part of Rosalind's nature, but clearly not the whole; rather the role is a device allowing Rosalind a freedom of comment impossible in a conventional love affair, while at the same time freeing her from any final commitment to Ganymede's point of view.

To me, there is a significant different between this and Ann Barton's comment quoted above. While both agree that taking on the role of Ganymede gives Rosalind a sense of freedom, Ann Barton proceeds to explain this by a process of minding-reading, inferring things which, although compatible with what's in the play, can simply not be confirmed by anything actually in the text. This kind of fantasy, which takes what is in the text and imaginatively expands on it, is the sort of thing that an actor often needs to do in order to adequately interpret a role. But it does not constitute, in my opinion, good criticism. Leggat, on the other hand, simply describes what the text shows, but describes it in a way that makes us (or at least me) say "Aha!" thus clarifying my perception of what I had already noticed in the play. This is what I think criticism ought to do.

But the answer to the question of why Rosalind continues wearing men's clothes (or rather why Shakespeare kept her in men's clothes) is much simpler than this. Rosalind is not a real person, she is a role that enables a performer to entertain an audience. Her purpose is to speak lines that will be entertaining. And the reason that she stays in drag until the end of the play is simply that once she returns to her true identity, there is no more story.

The question of Rosalind's "motivation" becomes important only when there arises a question of her credibility as a character. If the audience starts wondering, "Why is she still wearing men's clothing?" or if they leave the theatre saying, "I couldn't really enjoy the play because it didn't make sense to me that she would keep on dressing like a man even after she didn't need to any more."  In this case, the playwright has a problem and needs to consider the question of motivation.

But I'm sure that this problem never arose for Shakespeare's performances, first because his audience looked at his plays the same way we look at sitcoms or Saturday Night Live skits and never had any expectation that credible human behavior was being presented. Rosalind is vastly entertaining and her disguise enables her to have all sorts of fun that would not be possible if the other characters recognized her for who she was. The audience was enjoying the fun, not thinking, "Would a real woman do this sort of thing?"

And beyond this, we can note that Rosalind is a good-natured cheeky young mischief maker, who loves putting people on, especially men. She doesn't reveal her disguise because it's much more fun for her to go on fooling people. Would a real woman behave this way? Undoubtedly not, certainly not in Shakespeare's time, but that's exactly what makes the play fun, just as a sitcom such as I Love Lucy is fun for us because the characters do zany things which no person in real life would ever do.

And yet at the same time, in its farcical exaggeration, the comedy is in fact making some points about the real-life interactions between men and women. And that's the basis for the above comments by Ann Barton and John Doebler. And that is also one of the things that makes it so funny. Because it wouldn't be very funny if the whole thing were merely contrived, the way A Comedy of Errors and Two Gentlemen of Verona are. We think, "Yeah, well, of course real life is never that blatant. But in a way, you do see men and women doing that sort of thing all the time."

The actress dressed in drag is meant, in my opinion, to really camp it up. I believe that it is useful for the actress playing Rosalind in As You Like It or Portia in the Merchant of Venice to imagine Lucille Ball playing the role.