A Woman For All Time – Rosalind’s Daughters
Rosalind’s daughters both fictional and real have been a core element in my reading life. Jo March was an early heroine and my first proto-Rosalind when I was seven; Little Women the first book I bought with my own saved-up pocket money. The small volume cost five shillings (25 pence today) from our local, suburban W.H. Smith and its pocket size snugly fitted my hands. The dark blue leatherette binding with gold-tooled title on the spine is now shabby with re-readings. I lay flat out on the grass beside our equally shabby old house and read it in the sunshine. As soon as I finished, I turned back to the first page, and read the book all over again. And again. I had no historical sense (how could I have?) that its American setting, and the Civil War where her father was away fighting, were worlds and years away from my mid-century British childhood, but I knew Jo was the sort of girl I wanted to be. Especially when she cut off her hair. I always had short hair. Once Jo cut her hair, my identification with her was complete. Unselfishness like Jo’s was one of the female virtues my mother tried to inculcate in me when I was a child. Many years later, in Dublin, she heard Betty Friedan give a lecture which opened her eyes on to a new world of feminism. Inspired by Friedan, my mother applauded the fact that Rosalind’s daughters, like Jo March herself, can achieve their ambitions and independence.
When Rosalind first crosses the stage as Ganymede today, there’s a small intake of breath from the audience. Her long hair of Act 1 is usually shorn to indicate that she’s crossed the border between the sexes.1 Cutting your hair short was a seriously shocking act in the past. Women’s hair was thought to be their crowning glory and a visual sign of sexual allure, especially during the Victorian era when elaborate hairpieces were often added to the wearer’s own. Nowhere was the effect of masses of hair more provocative than in the intense portraits of women by Dante Gabriel Rossetti whom Mrs Gaskell called, ‘not mad as a March hare, but hair-mad’. This fixation with women’s hair persisted until the First World War when women entered the forces and munitions factories. While male farmhands were away at the Front during both World Wars, land girls took over their jobs and tied up their hair in headscarves for practical reasons. Women’s hair wasn’t scissored for style until the 1920s when the bobs and shingles of the Jazz Age came in. Even today, female celebrity hair is often big hair. Those 1980s sculptured helmets, symbols of wealth and power in the TV series, Dynasty and Dallas, are constantly reinvented. Twiggy’s cool crop challenged the 1960s fashion for lavish hair, and it’s still an assertive look for modern role models, such as Lena Dunham and Annie Lennox, who influence women today. Other public stars such as Kate Middleton, and Kim Sears, wife of tennis champion Andy Murray, sport long flowing manes of hair.
When Louisa May Alcott published Little Women in 1868/9, hair frenzy was at its height. Jo March was always a tomboy but she took pride in ‘her long, thick hair’ which ‘was her one beauty’, often wet, dishevelled, or flying through the novel – until Jo crosses the border and takes action on hair, ‘with a very queer expression of countenance, for there was a mixture of fun and fear, satisfaction and regret in it, which puzzled the family as much as did the roll of bills she laid before her mother.’ Secretly she’d had her wild tresses chopped and sold to contribute $25 to the straightened family finances. Under her new cap of Ganymede hair, Jo feels liberated. ‘My head feels deliciously light and cool, and the barber said I will soon have a curly crop, which will be boyish, becoming, and easy to keep in order.’ Her new hair was an outward badge not only of her altruism but, more importantly, of the independent way she will choose to make a professional career in journalism and writing. Katharine Hepburn played Jo March in the 1933 film of Little Women. She went on to play Rosalind on Broadway in 1950.
Rosalind is an enduring example of female empowerment. But does she have implications for men, too? Actor Sally Scott thinks Rosalind and Orlando have plenty to show young people of her generation. ‘I do think their relationship is held up as an example, and rightly so, because they’ve taken the time to be authentic with each other.’ Rosalind’s insights about love are inclusive and directed equally to men and women. Scott loves ‘the fact that Rosalind is the protagonist, that she initiates everything. She’s an example to men of a woman who is standing on her own two feet. Men must feel that they’re allowed to connect with their more sensitive side. Orlando is not your typical alpha hero and I feel she celebrates that.’2
Blanche McIntyre, director of As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe during summer 2015, corroborates Scott, adding, ‘Rosalind is confident in herself, she feels she has a right to be heard; she has a right to boss Orlando around if she feels he’s messing it up, to cry if she feels unhappy. She can change her identity and it will be fine and can be even sexier. Rosalind is a wonderful message for young women. She does the talking.’ But she’s not all virtuous. Her tongue can be cruel. She can turn her back on Celia and be sharp with Phebe. ‘Orlando loves that she shows off, but he anchors her. Orlando is an emotional man and his nurturing side makes him much more interesting. His feminine side is empowering for Rosalind. I think they’re a lovely couple because neither of them fits into easily recognisable gender patterns.’ So there is a message for young men, too, I asked Blanche. ‘Yes, I think so.’3
Juliet Stevenson takes a feminist view. ‘Rosalind knows that she needs to negotiate this love with Orlando from her newly realised self. And I would say, that in itself has an awful lot to teach young women. Love from the centre of who you are, be loved from the centre of who you are. Don’t turn yourself into a shape that you think he wants, or she wants.’ Stevenson probes the modern conundrum of gender relations. ‘Young women are endlessly being asked to watch plays in which a man is the protagonist, in which it’s his passion, his dynamic. So I would hope young men could watch a play with a young woman at its centre. We don’t always learn through identification with our own gender. We must hear what Rosalind says about men and women because she’s very, very equal in her witty, mocking dissection of male and female stereotypes. She’s speaking to both genders very much. So I would say, both to young men and to young women, be true to yourselves when you love. Be true to yourselves and not to some idea of what femininity is, or should be in its prescribed form.’ Stevenson says, ‘Rosalind is iconoclastic, she challenges so many givens about gender: about men and women; how people should love; how to love; and how not to love; and all the cliches – and she pulls them all apart. This was central to my relationship to the play.’4
Rosalind’s daughters began to emerge almost immediately after As You Like It was posted on the Stationers’ Register in 1600.5 Moll Cutpurse, though brimming with verbal and physical vitality as the eponymous Roaring Girl in Middleton and Dekker’s comedy of 1611, is a coarser successor to Rosalind. The play is sometimes revived, and Moll has been notably played by Helen Mirren in 1983, and by Lisa Dillon in 2014 for the RSC.
Notorious fixer, pickpocket, petty criminal, and disruptive force in the city underworld, Moll Cutpurse dresses as a drag king, without wanting to disguise her female gender. Most of the cast and all the audience know she is a woman. Her purpose is to outrage society, defy the biblical veto on cross-dressing, and to live an independent life. Like Rosalind, Moll is an outlaw from society. But where Moll is low down the social pile, Rosalind is an aristocrat. Earthy and humorous, Moll is ‘such a kissing wench,’ and like Rosalind enjoys quips and badinage, declaring herself, ‘like Kent, unconquered!’ But whereas Rosalind’s driving purpose is enlightened marriage to the man of her choice, Moll explicitly rejects marriage. ‘I have no humour to marry. I love to lie on both sides of the bed myself.’ She’s worked out a way to live on her own.
Rosalind, on the other hand, dresses as a man in Arden in order to conceal her sex and stay safe. Only her cousin Celia, their accomplice Touchstone, and we the audience know she’s a woman. The first half of Moll’s boast, ‘I please myself and care not who else loves me,’ proves an unexpected outcome for Rosalind. Living in her uncle’s patriarchal court, female independence has never occurred to her before. Transfigured by doublet and hose, Rosalind as Ganymede can operate in the real world and even earn a living for herself and ‘sister’ Aliena. She and Celia could never have done this as two women under the control of Duke Frederick.
Apart from Moll, another woman gets into male disguise, though only temporarily, in The Roaring Girl. Mary Fitzallard does so with the single aim of achieving marriage with her true lover, Sebastian Wengrave. Once she’s in drag, her kisses have a special thrill for Sebastian. ‘Mary; I think a woman’s lip tastes good in trousers.’6 Then as now, the liminal area where male and female boundaries are blurred, seems specially erotic.
| Sebastian | I think every kiss she gives me now In this strange form is worth a pair of two.7 |
Kissing his boy-girlfriend is as exciting for Sebastian as it is for Orlando to kiss Ganymede.
Rosalind is a fictional character but The Roaring Girl had a real life model, Mary Frith, a celebrity who sauntered through Jacobean London in drag, smoking, drinking and roistering with the roaring boys. She made a sensational personal appearance in 1611 at the Fortune Theatre, flaunting her trademark costume of boots, breeches and a sword. Mary Frith, alias Moll Cutpurse, was a big draw on the London stage whether in her own person or fictionalised. The character escaped The Roaring Girl to thrill audiences again with a cameo appearance in a new play by Nathan Field, Amends for Ladies which probably premiered in 1615. (Field had to make amends to the ladies for his earlier play, A Woman is a Weathercock). Among a fresh crowd of roaring boys, Whorebang, Bots, Tearchaps and Spillblood, Nathan Field’s Moll shows lesbian sensibilities to flirt with Grace, a housewife, who considers her, bizarrely, both ‘man and horse.’ Reprinted in 1639, Amends was boldly advertised ‘with the merry pranks of Moll Cutpurse.’
Amends for Ladies focuses on a provocative debate about which state of life is best for women. Single, married or widowed? Three women, all played by boys, state their case: Lady Honour, an unmarried virgin, Lady Perfect, a virtuous wife, and Lady Bright, a widow. Only the last, Lady Bright, can operate independently in Jacobean society. Only she can say, ‘I am mine own commander’, the state Rosalind discovers for herself once she’s in drag.
Rosalind’s true daughter in Amends is Lady Honour who crossdresses as a jaunty Irish pageboy, a disguise that frees her to speak her mind about love. Nathan Field the playwright, had been a boy actor in the Children of the Blackfriars Company from at least 1600. After his voice broke he joined Shakespeare’s company, The King’s Men. He would have been well aware of the special frisson of boy/girl/boy roles from his own experience as a teenage actor.
Before Lady Honour chooses, like Rosalind, to join her life with her lover’s, she aspires to personal autonomy, unattainable for her at that time.
| Lady Honour | Nay, all the freedom that a virgin hath Is much to be preferred. Who would endure The humours of so insolent a Thing As is a husband? Which of all the Herd Runs not possessed with some notorious vice, Drinking or whoring, fighting, jealousy... Is it not daily seen, Men take wives, but to dress their meat, to washAnd starch their linen: for the other matter Of lying with them, that’s but when they please...8 |
A woman living her own life, independent of a man, was an impossible challenge for most Jacobethans. But it fascinated them and was clearly up for discussion in 1615. Such public debate on stage was soon shut down with the playhouses in 1642 during the English Civil War and later under the Commonwealth.
With the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, English women were at last released to appear on the professional stage, and audiences were quick to applaud the new stars who vied to show a shapely leg in the popular breeches roles. Daring new actresses could exploit their feminine charms as Sylvia, who cross-dressed as Jack Wilful in George Farquhar’s 1706 comedy, The Recruiting Officer, and at the same time they could embrace the thrill of androgyny. Peg Woffington who played Sylvia said after one of her shows, ‘in my conscience! I believe Half the Men in the House take me for one of their own Sex’. Another actress sniped, ‘It may be so; but, in my Conscience! the other Half can convince them to the contrary’.9 Eighteenth-century actresses were expected to lead scandalous private lives and Woffington enjoyed many lovers, including the great David Garrick.
To my mind, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Austen’s fast talking heroine of Pride and Prejudice, is a real daughter of Rosalind, even though, in 1813, she doesn’t cross-dress. Instead she tramps the fields six inches deep in mud like Ganymede, ‘at a quick pace, jumping over stiles, and springing over puddles,’ without any ladylike regard for petticoats. She’s on a mission to visit her beloved sister Jane, a cousin Celia figure, who is marooned with ‘flu at Mr Bingley’s Netherfield. Here Elizabeth encounters Mr Darcy. Far from falling in love with each other at first sight they enjoy a mutual antipathy, the other side of the coin of mutual attraction. ‘She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me,’ says Darcy. Elizabeth told the story ‘with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in any thing ridiculous.’ These are the exact qualities that Anna Jameson, one of the first female Shakespearean critics, noticed in Rosalind in 1832. ‘The wit of Rosalind bubbles up and sparkles like the living fountain, refreshing all around. Her volubility is like the bird’s song.’10 Elizabeth Bennet exhibits the same delight in witty observation as Rosalind. ‘Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.’
Elizabeth also shares Rosalind’s capacity to teach, and to learn from the man who will become her life’s partner. ‘I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good.’ Although apparently powerless as the second daughter of five in an only moderately comfortable family, Elizabeth is assertive in her dealings with Mr Darcy, with priggish clergyman Mr Collins, and with high and mighty Lady Catherine de Burgh. She believes she has the right to address men and women as her social equals even if they don’t think they are hers. Rosalind, too, exercises social fluidity in the Forest of Arden, at ease with every class of person from dukes to goatherds. Elizabeth achieves emotional maturity like Rosalind, and combines reason with passion in her choice of a good man’s love and final acceptance of Mr Darcy.11 Jane Austen lets us know that Elizabeth will go on talking in her lively and ‘sportive’ manner with Mr Darcy long after their wedding. ‘I am the happiest creature in the world,’ she wrote to her aunt Gardiner, ‘I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.’ Her wit is not going to be dampened by marriage and nor is Rosalind’s.
A generation later during the 1840s on the Yorkshire moors, the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, were writing impassioned novels, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The Bronte sisters called themselves the Bell brothers in order to gain attention inside the masculine world of London publishers. As Charlotte’s heroine Jane Eyre said, ‘Women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do.’12 There was no alternative for the Brontes but going Ganymede, and styling themselves the brothers Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
The most famous and prolific author of the mid-nineteenth century, Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, known internationally as George Sand, didn’t simply write under a male pseudonym, she also costumed herself as a cavalier. Her image excited both sexes, and herself, as she strode through Paris society in her severe English riding habit, dark hair spilling under her veiled top hat, a soft cravat at her throat, and a lighted cigar between her fingers. ‘I can’t convey how much my boots delighted me: I’d have gladly slept in them as my brother did when he was a lad and had just got his first pair. With those steel-tipped heels I was solid on the sidewalk at last. I dashed back and forth across Paris and felt I was going around the world,’ wrote Sand in her autobiography.13 (Quelle femme n’a jamais eu le fantasme de se retrouver dans la peau d’un homme?) She felt she was slipping hither and thither across gender, a state which fascinated her. A natural daughter of Rosalind, Sand paid homage to her Shakespearean heroine in 1856 when she freely translated As You Like It for the Comédie Française.
Thinking about the movement towards female emancipation was not confined to women writers in the nineteenth century. Thomas Hardy, too, was interested in independent women, as innovative in their Victorian way as Elizabethan Rosalind was in hers. His novel Under the Greenwood Tree published in 1872, taking its title from one of the songs in As You Like It, tacitly imagines a Victorian daughter of Rosalind. Although Fancy Day comes from a lower social class than the Duke’s daughter, and doesn’t cross-dress like Rosalind, she experiments, nevertheless, with dawning new freedoms for women, revolves a number of boyfriends, and makes sure she gets an education. Fancy is just as realistic and anti-romantic in her pastoral novel as Rosalind is in her pastoral play. Under the Greenwood Tree is the only one of Hardy’s novels to have a happy ending like Shakespeare’s comedy. His later novel in 1895, Jude the Obscure, examined another New Woman, Sue Bridehead, but her sacrifices were of tragic dimensions.
Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree was published in the same year, 1872, as George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Eliot’s given name was Mary Anne Evans. She wrote under a male pseudonym, even though in the Victorian era she was brave enough to live openly with a married man, George Henry Lewes. Her pen name was a coded tribute to George, ‘To L – I owe it.’14 Eliot herself represents a latter-day daughter of Rosalind, prepared to live the truth about love. In her beguiling personal study of Eliot’s novel, The Road to Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead identifies brainy but ‘homely’ Mary Garth as a daughter of ‘clever, irresistible Rosalind.’15 But for me, as I graduated from Little Women with its implicitly patronising title and began to make wider choices in my reading as a teenager, it was Gwendolen Harleth, George Eliot’s risktaking heroine in Daniel Deronda, who felt like a flawed but true descendant of Rosalind. Eliot even casts Gwendolen to play Rosalind.
The novel’s opening question about Gwendolen is the question that intrigues most teenagers: ‘Was she beautiful or not beautiful?’16 When I was seventeen, I imagined I was Gwendolen, just as I’d thought I was Jane Austen’s Emma when I was fourteen. It was Emma’s penchant for matchmaking I loved, even though most of her efforts ended in disaster. My own efforts resulted in one or two successes years later, although I’d attempted many more. Rosalind herself is a proto-Emma, if you consider all the weddings she brokers by Act 5. Departing from Jane Austen’s English canvas, drawn on her ‘little bit of ivory’, I went abroad on holiday with my family to the liberated Denmark of the late 1960s. Here I re-imagined the resort of Helsingør (coincidentally Hamlet’s Elsinore) as George Eliot’s middle European town of Leubronn. I found a casino and furtively replayed Gwendolen’s reckless roulette with myself in the starring role. ‘With a face which might possibly be looked at without admiration, but could hardly be passed with indifference’,17 Gwendolen was utterly riveting to me. Selfish, egotistical, but yearning to exercise her powers, she learns, bitterly, from experience.
‘Lovely and vigorous as a tall, newly-opened lily,’ Gwendolen is far too self-conscious ever to be wholly innocent, but while she’s still in a state of semi-innocence, she enjoys being Rosalind. Queen of the archery contest in a forest of Arden setting, ‘from roofed grove to open glade’, Gwendolen takes the lead in an extempore As You Like It. ‘When a pretty compliment had been turned to Gwendolen about her having the part of Rosalind, she felt the more compelled to be surpassing in liveliness. This was not very difficult to her, for the effect of what had happened to-day was an excitement which needed a vent, a sense of adventure rather than alarm.’
Gwendolen instantly identifies with Rosalind who had fallen in love with Orlando and then almost immediately been banished from court. Rosalind’s escape to the Forest of Arden was an exciting and adventurous template. Receiving a problematical proposal from Grandcourt, a man she is not in love with, fills Gwendolen with that parallel excitement which needed a vent.’18 Acting Rosalind puts her in touch with the idea of feminine empowerment. And above all else, imperious but penniless Gwendolen longs to be in command. However, as a result of her subsequent actions, Gwendolen Harleth turns out to be one of Rosalind’s unusual tragic daughters.
Nora Helmer was a subliminal daughter of Rosalind’s when she first broke out of her Norwegian doll’s house in Ibsen’s wildly controversial play, first staged in 1879, and constantly revived ever since. Actors today notice the connection between the two roles, even though Rosalind comes from the world of comedy and Nora belongs to the tragedy of modern life. Actor Cush Jumbo who has played an awardwinning Rosalind, calls Nora, ‘Ibsen’s Rosalind. You never leave the stage and the journey she goes on is epic.’19 Nora shocked Victorian society by leaving her three children in order to explore a life of her own, outside her infantilising marriage. From Nora onwards, women increasingly asserted their independence, sought to retain control over their earnings, to hold property, and to sign contracts in their own names. The Married Women’s Property Act became law in 1882 in England. Rosalind and Nora make opposite but equally life-changing choices, choices that New Women began to make ever more decisively by the 1890s.
Rosalind was an inspirational prototype for the New Woman, a suffragette on a bicycle wearing the controversial vogue of rational dress, divided skirts or culottes. She was instantly recognised both as a role model for modern women, and as a slayer of hearts, by feminist writer, Ella Hepworth Dixon. Celebrating knickerbockers, an androgynous new trend in women’s fashion, Ella noticed how ‘those tweed-covered legs breathe defiance against the hydra-headed prejudices and conventions which perpetually harass womankind.’ Ella was quite sure that ‘Shakespeare knew this. He was aware that by donning masculine attire a woman...at once altered her manners and her attitude towards the world at large. Rosalind in petticoats is a conventional, slightly hysterical schoolgirl; Rosalind in doublet and hose is an impish wight; a merry, full-blooded, impudent youngster, who plagues Orlando, and steals feminine hearts without remorse. And it is to be remarked that, once she has worn breeches, her character is altered for good.’20 More than a century later, actor Sally Scott still confirms Ella’s observation. ‘A literal transformation like that makes your physicality entirely different.’ Once dressed as Ganymede, Scott told me, ‘I’ve got those stomping walking boots with two pairs of socks in and they made this noise as I walked, this slopping noise. I think it’s this idea about taking up space and I could be heard coming!’
Almost three hundred years after As You Like It, ‘new woman’ Ella Hepworth Dixon, an ‘advanced female’ in her own estimation, saw herself as a daughter of Rosalind whom she called her ‘immortal prototype’.21 Ella seized a whole array of opportunities for clever, entrepreneurial women. She became a journalist, magazine editor, novelist, playwright, critic, cultural commentator, and autobiographer. In carving a new career for a woman in the predominantly male workplace of late Victorian England, she looked to many of Shakespeare’s women, but to Rosalind above all, for inspiration. Aligning their era with her own, she claimed they would have been her true contemporaries, and ‘branded with the epithet “New Women.’”22
Oscar Wilde promoted the writing of Ella Hepworth Dixon in The Womans World, the magazine he edited for over a decade between 1887-1889. The following year his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine. If Dorian was going to fall in love with any woman, it could be only with Sybil Vane, as she played the delicious role of Rosalind. ‘You should have seen her!’ Dorian exclaimed to his artist friend, Basil Hallward. ‘When she came on in her boy’s clothes, she was perfectly wonderful. She wore a moss-coloured velvet jerkin with cinnamon sleeves, slim brown cross-gartered hose, a dainty little green cap, and a hawk’s feather caught in a jewel, and a hooded cloak lined with dull red. She had never seemed to me more exquisite. She had all the delicate grace of that Tanagra figurine that you have in your studio, Basil. Her hair clustered round her face like dark leaves round a pale rose...I forgot that I was in London and in the nineteenth century. I was away with my love in a forest that no man had ever seen.’23 Sybil Vane as transvestite Rosalind represented an ideal sexual fusion for Dorian, if only briefly. She crossed both gender and time in his Arden of the mind.
Henry James did something daring with Rosalind in 1902 when he re-worked As You Like It in his long short story, ‘The Papers’, the same year he wrote about Shakespeare in his other, better-known tale, ‘The Birthplace’. The papers of James’s title are the newspapers, the world of the popular press, hacks and journalism. James explicitly compares his modern girl reporter, Maud Blandy, with Rosalind. James’s critical re-write concerns Orlando, who is excised from the story. This is the first Rosalind to choose Jaques, a fellow hack, for her boyfriend, an even more radical re-imagining than George Sand’s 1856 version of As You Like It which awarded him with Celia. James’s male lead, Howard ‘turned a little, to rest on his elbow, and, cycling suburban young man as he was, he might have been, outstretched under his tree, melancholy Jacques looking off into a forest glade, even as sailor-hatted Maud, in – for elegance – a new cotton blouse and a long-limbed angular attitude, might have prosefully suggested the mannish Rosalind.’ James gives us an assertive Rosalind, at home in her own ‘young bachelor’ skin, quite different from Sybil Vane, Wilde’s creature of artifice. By contrast, Maud Blandy ‘might as easily have been christened John.’ James weaves references and counter-references from As You Like It into ‘The Papers.’ When Maud sighs, ‘I ain’t a woman...I wish I were!’ we hear Shakespeare’s Rosalind speaking to us in her epilogue, ‘If I were a woman...’
Maud and Howard bicycle out to Richmond Park, their Forest of Arden, to consider the outcome of a dangerous professional experiment they’ve conducted. Their direction is into the forest, not back to the city where Rosalind and Orlando are destined to go. Maud as Rosalind discovers a future with a new partner, Howard, who represents Jaques, but they make essentially the same decision as Rosalind and Orlando. ‘“We must love each other,” said Howard Bight. “But can we live by that?” He thought again; then he decided. “Yes”... But it all came to something else. “Whom will you marry?’” Howard asks Maud. ‘She only, at first, for answer, kept her eyes on him. Then she turned them about the place and saw no hindrance, and then, further, bending with a tenderness in which she felt so transformed, so won to something she had never been before, that she might even, to other eyes, well have looked so, she gravely kissed him. After which, as he took her arm, they walked on together’ – as professional comrades into the twentieth century.24
Ford Madox Ford took up the discussion of the ‘new woman’ and the whole mystery of sexual attraction in his great series of novels, Parades End. Here Valentine Wannop, a direct descendant of Rosalind, goes a step further into modern sexual relations. Valentine is an advanced suffragette and a young woman of complete integrity, prepared to commit herself to loving Christopher Tietjens, a married man and semi-autobiographical version of Ford himself. Parade’s End was published between 1924-8, and written, in a sense, lest Ford forget his experience as an officer during the First World War. The war was the forest that Christopher Tietjens and Valentine must negotiate and emerge from; its armistice the catalyst for the decision to consummate their long restrained love. Valentine and Christopher’s bond is built on ‘the intimate conversation that means the final communion of souls that ‘in effect was love.’25 This love based upon talk, though in a more melancholy key, is another incarnation of Rosalind and Orlando’s courtship by conversation, which culminates in marriage. Three centuries after As You Like It, Ford can allow us into Valentine and Christopher’s dialogue beyond consummation, and into the daily reality of their lives together. There’s a tragic dimension to this. As Rosalind pointed out: ‘Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.’26
Brooding on the relationship between love and marriage, Virginia Woolf invented another daughter for Rosalind. She’s Katharine Hilbery, a conflicted, independent minded woman in Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day, which came out in 1919 although it was set before the outbreak of the Great War. William observes that his one-time fiancee, Katharine, ‘pretends that she’s never read Shakespeare. And why should she read Shakespeare, since she IS Shakespeare – Rosalind, you know.’ Katharine’s mother also sees her daughter as Rosalind and tells her, ‘The best of life is built on what we say when we’re in love. It isn’t nonsense, Katharine,’ she urged, ‘it’s the truth, it’s the only truth.’ Katharine finds this hard to reconcile with her quest for autonomy. But it’s the same truth Rosalind discovers when she makes her free choice to say to Orlando, ‘To you I give myself, for I am yours.’ When Naomi Frederick played Rosalind at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2009, she echoed Mrs Hilbery: ‘I love this play! It’s about love, living, and the things that count in life.’27’
The title of Woolf’s innovative ‘biography,’ Orlando, makes an elegant link with Shakespeare’s Rosalind. Published in 1928, the hero-heroine, Orlando, is a modernist version of what Shakespeare’s Rosalind stood for when she crossed the border between the sexes, and showed that women and men experience love with matching intensity and self-doubt. Woolf delivers Orlando in subtle homage to Shakespeare’s Rosalind, even bearing the same name as her lover. In her effervescent concoction, Woolf not only undermined society’s preconceived notions about what exactly is a man, what exactly is a woman, she also challenged the literary world about what exactly is a biography. ‘It sprung upon me how I could revolutionise biography in a night’, she told her lover, Vita Sackville-West, whose character inspired Orlando.28
Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was the first editor of the monumental and ground-breaking Dictionary of National Biography. His daughter’s fantastic froth of a biography was a challenge to his world of masculine Victorian life writing that echoed the way Rosalind defied the male structures of court life, exemplified by her father and uncle. Woolf’s Orlando goes on a parallel but contrary journey to Shakespeare’s Rosalind who is first girl, then boy, then girl. Or first, boy actor playing a girl, then girl playing a boy, then boy playing a girl, then boy actor again by the epilogue. Woolf’s Orlando begins as a lad in the late sixteenth century, only to morph into a woman by the eighteenth century.
In Sally Potter’s 1992 film, Tilda Swinton was the dazzling embodiment of Woolf’s amorphous Orlando. For Swinton the book ‘has always been a practical manual. A tourist guide to human experience, the best of wise companions...Where I once assumed it was a book about eternal youth, I now see it as a book about growing up, about learning to live.’29 The universal process of growing up is part of Rosalind’s perennial relevance. As she leaves us at the end of the play, she is filled with potential. Rosalind and Orlando have both expanded their emotional landscape in the Forest of Arden. Here they’ve learned to navigate the painful insecurities of adolescence, accepted they can feel all emotions in one day, and found out how to love and live.
After Orlando, Woolf continued to refer to Rosalind, and even to personify her. On 12 April 1937, the front cover of Time magazine carried a silvery, androgynous photograph of Virginia Woolf by Man Ray. The caption read, ‘It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple.’30 The quote was from Woolf’s A Room of Ones Own, the book based on a series of lectures Woolf had delivered to women students at Cambridge ten years earlier. Never an undergraduate herself, Woolf’s agenda was to inspire young women and to see them educated. And she looked to Shakespeare’s heroines, as well as to classical literature, to find role models for them. ‘Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time,’ she told them, naming Rosalind among a roll call that included Antigone, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, Phedre, Cressida, Desdemona and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. Woolf wanted young women not just to feature in literature, but also to make literature themselves, of whatever kind, in whatever genre, ‘travel and adventure, and research and scholarship, and history and biography, and criticism and philosophy and science.’31 ‘So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters...It is much more important to be oneself than anything else.’32
It must have been inspirational for young women to sit in that audience, listening to Virginia Woolf. She urged them to take their place side by side with men, for to her the mind was beyond sexual difference. ‘It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex.’33 ‘Perhaps to think, as I had been thinking these two days, of one sex as distinct from the other, is an effort. It interferes with the unity of the mind.’34 She reminded them of Coleridge’s view ‘that a great mind is androgynous’35 ‘He meant, perhaps, that the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.’36 Shakespeare, too, she told them, ‘was androgynous.’37 In effect, she wanted them all to think like Rosalinds.
Virginia Woolf, though notoriously anti-Semitic, sustained an odd but successful marriage with Jewish writer Leonard Woolf. This made me wonder if there had been a Jewish Rosalind?
“Yentl – you have the soul of a man.”
“So why was I born a woman?”
“Even Heaven makes mistakes.”
In the early 1960s, Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote Yentl the Yeshiva Boy, a fairy tale short story, in seven sections, faintly echoing Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man speech. Yentl looks like a handsome young man. Hovering between the sexes, ‘there was even a slight down on her upper lip,’ she longs for an intellectual life. Her father teaches her the Torah, the Pentateuch, the Mishnah, the Gemara, and the Commentaries, in secret, behind locked doors and draped windows. After his death, Yentl cuts her hair and dresses as a boy called Anshel in order to study in the all-male Yeshiva where she is fulfilled, leading the life of the mind. Here she meets Avigdor, a masculine Orlando figure, and falls in love with him. Her new male identity gives Yentl freedom to speak her mind, and to dare. Intellect is what is important to Yentl but she also has the emotional strength to unmask herself eventually, with a flash of nudity, to Avigdor the man she secretly loves.
Unlike Rosalind, there’s no happy ending for Yentl. But like Rosalind, she stage-manages her story. Yentl renounces her love for Avigdor, and after undertaking a potentially lesbian marriage to his girlfriend, Hadass, she arranges for Avigdor to marry Hadass, before she herself disappears. Avigdor collapses, only to appear at his wedding to Hadass as ‘a figure of desolation.’ He’d got what he wanted but seemed to be yearning for Yentl, or the boy Anshel with whom he’d enjoyed such friendship in the Yeshiva. The reader is left to imagine that Yentl will resume her male identity as Anshel and continue to study in some faraway place. Yend’s character and story are in a different key from the joie de vivre of Shakespeare’s Rosalind, but her powerful drive, her feminist message and the complexity of Singer’s narrative are resonant reminders. ‘Truth itself is often concealed in such a way that the harder you look for it, the harder it is to find.’ Soon after the wedding, Hadass became pregnant. ‘The child was a boy and those assembled at the circumcision could scarcely believe their ears when they heard the father [Avigdor] name his son Anshel.’38
Rosalind is re-imagined again in the adventures of Villanelle, the transvestite, titian haired heroine of Jeanette Winterson’s 1987 Venetian novel, The Passion. Villanelle recalls those pictures of Venetian courtesans in Rosalind’s era. They wore ‘braghessi’ under their skirts which flew up to reveal the trousered legs beneath. Working in the Venice casino, Villanelle explains why ‘I dressed as a boy because that’s what the visitors liked to see. It was part of the game, trying to decide which sex was hidden behind tight breeches and extravagant face-paste.’ It’s ‘the doom of paradox’ that thrilled the onlookers.39 In Winterson’s novel, Venice a city of many masks, functions like the Forest of Arden. ‘What you are one day will not constrain you on the next. You may explore yourself freely and, if you have wit ...no one will stand in your way.’40 Like Rosalind in drag, like Villanelle in disguise masked for carnevale, you can be whatever you want to be. And once you’ve found that freedom in being ‘the other’ you will never hand it back.
Through Villanelle’s odyssey Winterson tries to untangle the mystery of love. ‘Is this the explanation then when we meet someone we do not know and feel straight away that we have always known them?’41 Perhaps as we’ve known ourselves? It’s this same sense of identification that fires love at first sight between Rosalind and Orlando. As if they are ‘family’, as if they’ve always known each other, and can pick up a conversation that has been ongoing, in some mysterious way, since the beginning of their lives.
Rosalind’s future life after the end of the play lies in government, ruling her father’s dukedom with Orlando. Her daughters can be shape shifters in any era, professional women with a wide range of careers. Pat Barker set her 2007 novel, Life Class, at the Slade School of Fine Art before the First World War. Her heroine Elinor Brooke (whose surname may allude to Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch) is a new Rosalind. ‘She was trudging along thinking of Kit and what she was going to say to him, but then suddenly she straightened her back and she was Rosalind in the Forest of Arden, swaggering about in her doublet and hose. Really, she ought to stop going on like this. Any sane adult female ought to be able to walk through a wood without turning into Rosalind, but she never managed it. It was a sign of immaturity, this constant trying on of other identities. Fun, though.’
Elinor makes modern choices for the early twentieth century. She sleeps with her lover, Paul Tarrant, but she doesn’t marry him. In 1599 Rosalind doesn’t sleep with her lover but she does marry him. Different choices for different times. But both Rosalind and Elinor enjoy the trying on of various identities. It’s an essential part of being young. In the wood, her Arden, ‘She’d been Rosalind then, and it hadn’t been an escape, she’d been happy.’ Elinor ‘did everything men did and generally better.’ No surprise that men who desired her found it ‘was more like being in love with a brilliant, egotistical boy than a girl.’ Elinor is Ganymede and Ganymede is Rosalind and both sexes can contain these contradictions at the same time. Pat Barker gives us a modern Rosalind who straddles the last hundred years.42
In her spectacular film of The Tempest in 2010, Julie Taymor cast Helen Mirren as a female Prospera. Such bold transgender casting is in direct line of descent from cross-dressing Rosalind. Taymor revealed special rewards in seeing Prospero as a woman. She gave us something Shakespeare doesn’t give us anywhere else: a strong, tender, tough, realistic, loving relationship between a mother and daughter. In her alchemist’s robe of iridescent metallics, Prospera watches the wreck she’s conjured up, and assures her daughter that by her magic she’s done ‘No harm!/I have done nothing but in care of thee,/Of thee, my dear one, thee my daughter.’43 Felicity Jones’s Miranda could be convincingly this Prospera’s daughter, both physically and emotionally. Like a true daughter of Rosalind, she shows tenacity to eventually marry the man of her choice.
Love is love wherever you find it and in whatever pairings that weren’t legally possible in Shakespeare’s day. Rosalind continues to be a paradigm of love for our own times, as actor Alan Cumming affirms: ‘I made my husband read a speech from As You Like It at our wedding. It’s when Rosalind says to Celia: “O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love. But it cannot be sounded. My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.” 1 used to say it to him.’44
But there’s still a journey to go on after the wedding’s over and long after curtain down for Rosalind and Orlando, Shakespeare’s contemporary couple. By the end of their play, we know marriage is only the beginning of the conversation and re-negotiation. It has been an education in love for both of them. ‘But there’s something about As You Like It you can’t control,’ says Michelle Terry. It has its wild and anarchic dimensions. Exploding the genres of tragedy and comedy – which he might have written as a Sondheim musical in the twenty-first century – makes this one of Shakespeare’s most experimental plays. Once arrived in Arden, the liberating, discursive form lets plot atomise in favour of scenarios, duets and conversations. Playing Rosalind, Terry found, ‘I just have to step on the stage, keep testing myself, keep running away to the woods, resisting being pinned down, labelled or reduced.’ The message as well as the form is avant-garde, for as Terry notes, we all have masculine and feminine energies within us.’ Over four centuries ago, Shakespeare was already probing and resisting a too literal binary explanation of human sexuality. ‘What Rosalind is exploring is how to be, and that will never stop. You could talk about her forever. Keep asking the questions because we may never know the answers. The answer is: As You Like It.’45