ACT ONE

In the Green Room – Rosalind’s Ancestors

Ancestors of Shakespeare’s Rosalind, though sporting different names, were adventuring far back in classical mythology. Homer’s Athene in The Odyssey often materialised as a man to rescue her favourite heroes from disaster. This daughter of Zeus, born fully formed from his forehead, apparently bypassed any female involvement in her creation. Champion of wit, reason and purity, Athene exhibits an androgynous, divine intelligence. Her gleaming eyes behind an austere helmet project a masculine beauty down the ages. Like Rosalind, she bears arms, a spear and a cuirass. While protecting Ulysses she crosses borders, nimbly morphs into an old man or a sea-eagle, but also transforms herself into a homoerotic young shepherd lad, as are the sons of princes.’ This is an early palimpsest of Rosalind, a duke’s daughter, who disguises herself as Ganymede, a shepherd boy in the Forest of Arden. Like Athene, the immortal Greek goddess of wisdom and war, Rosalind the character can never die. But unlike Athene, she derives her special authority not through wisdom about war, but through her wit and wisdom about love.

Any Elizabethan with a similar education to Shakespeare’s at Stratford Grammar School would have Ovid, the Roman poet, firmly in his cultural landscape. The Metamorphoses tells many stories of sensuous transformations like Rosalind’s to Ganymede. One of the most touching is the myth of Iphis and Ianthe.1 Iphis is a girl, brought up as a boy, who falls in love with Ianthe, a girl. To untangle these complications, Hymen the god of marriage allows Iphis to transition to a male in order to marry Ianthe and he presides over their wedding. At the end of As You Like It, when in reverse of Iphis, Ganymede appears dressed as Rosalind, Hymen arrives again to celebrate a wedding contract of true love between her and Orlando.

The same Elizabethans brought up on Ovid would have recognised the interchangeable names for Jove, Jupiter or Zeus, supreme ruler of the classical gods. They would also have recognised the gods’ erotic bisexuality. Jove was once fired with lust for a beautiful mortal youth, Ganymede, whom he saw tending his sheep on the slopes of Mount Ida. Turning himself into an eagle, Jove swept down and bore the lad off to his home on Mount Olympus.2 As official boy lover to the deity, Ganymede became the legendary model of erotic ambivalence. Jove appointed him cupbearer to the gods and granted him eternal youth. So Ganymede crossed the border from mortal to immortal, and in a different way, Shakespeare bestowed the gift of immortality on Rosalind. Ganymede is the natural male alias for Rosalind to choose when she flees the court and death sentence pronounced by her wicked uncle, usurper of her father’s dukedom. No stage name could have been more apposite for a girl who gets into boy’s clothes, and takes on a sheep farm. Ganymede is both Rosalind’s ancestor and her alter ego, and is also the precursor of Oberon’s Puck or Prospero’s Ariel. Like Puck and Ariel, Ganymede on an eagle’s back can fly to Olympus swifter than wind or thought. In role as Ganymede, Rosalind may not fly physically but she certainly has legs as she strides into Arden. ‘Ganymede’ with its ambivalent sexual connotations entered the English language in the 1590s. The name would have sounded distinctly edgy to Rosalind’s first audience in 1599.

As she first steps into Arden, no longer a Princess but transformed into Ganymede, Jove’s own page, Rosalind invokes his lover, Jupiter, sovereign of the gods. ‘O Jupiter, how weary are my spirits!’³ When she overhears Silvius proclaiming his hopeless love for Phebe, Rosalind summons Jove again,

Jove, Jove, this shepherd’s passion

Is much upon my fashion!⁴

And when cousin Celia reports she’s improbably found Orlando ‘under a tree, like a dropped acorn,’ Rosalind blesses Ganymede’s protector for the third time, ‘It may well be called Jove’s tree when it drops forth such fruit.’⁵

Rosalind’s classical ancestors cross into native territory with the shadowy source behind the source for Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The medieval men-only Tale of Gamelyn is the forerunner of Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde of 1590, and thence of As You Like It in 1599. Its hero Gamelyn is an early diagram for Lodge’s Rosader and Shakespeare’s Orlando. Written in a Middle English dialect from the North East Midlands, this anonymous romance invites us in to ‘Litheth and listeneth and herkeneth aright’ – that is to list and listen and harken closely.6 It runs to almost 900 lines of mesmeric rhyming couplets, dating from 1340-70, and plays off violence and loyalty, town and country, courts and wild woods, knights and outlaws. The poem is often associated with Chaucer because it was found among his papers, although he’s unlikely to have written it.

Gamelyn’s father, Sir Iohan of Boundys (Sir John of the Borders) makes the mistake of dividing his property between his three children, violating the long established feudal custom of primogeniture. Over two centuries later, Lodge re-names the father figure, Sir John of Bordeaux, to emphasise the French milieu of his work Rosalynde which Shakespeare picks up in As You Like It, then re-christening Orlando’s father as francophone Sir Rowland de Boys. Gamelyn, like Orlando, is the youngest of three brothers. His elder brother, like Orlando’s brother Oliver, plans to cheat Gamelyn out of his father’s legacy, treats him violently and plots his death. We first meet Gamelyn, as we later meet Orlando, in his brother’s ‘yerde’, a garden or orchard with echoes of Genesis. As much later in As You Like It, the medieval poem includes a wrestling match, a professional fighter hired to kill the young challenger, a poor old man who has already lost two sons to the champion (upped to three in Shakespeare), a victory for the amateur contender against all the odds, and our hero, strong as a ‘wylde lyoun,’ rejected for his success. As revenge Gamelyn beats up the clerics who fail to defend him, an antipathy reiterated in the whiff of anti-clericalism in As You Like It. Shakespeare makes a mockery of the forest priest, Sir Oliver Mar-text, and brings in mythological Hymen rather than a Christian minister to perform the final weddings.

‘Gamelyn stood anon allone frend had he noon,’ except for one loyal supporter, hoar-headed Adam Spencer, steward of the buttery, who rescues the boy from hunger and imprisonment. Old Adam doesn’t transfer into Lodge’s Rosalynde but is restored as a poignant character by Shakespeare. When the unlikely companions flee to the ‘wilde wode’ it’s Gamelyn’s turn to cheer Adam, just as Orlando cherishes his old friend in As You Like It. ‘“Adam,” seide Gamelyn, “dismay thee right nought.’” They could be in Robin Hood’s own Sherwood Forest, or in Lodge’s Forest of Ardennes, or with Rosalind and Orlando in the Forest of Arden. There are outlaws in this forest who live like the old Robin Hood of England,’ as does Duke Senior with his exiled court in As You Like It. They are as courteous to Gamelyn and Adam as Duke Senior is to Orlando and his Adam. But there is no love interest for Gamelyn, no Rosalind for him to win. Instead, in half a line at the end of his adventures, Gamelyn is briskly awarded a wif good and faire’. Yet much of the groundwork for As You Like It is already signposted in this folkloric poem that may stretch back in time and oral tradition even earlier than The Tale of Gamelyn itself.

The first contemporary Rosalind to foreshadow Shakespeare’s heroine is Spenser’s Rosalind. She features in his virtuoso debut work, The Shepheardes Calender, published in 1579, just twenty years ahead of As You Like It. The name Rosalind with its alternatives, such as Rosalyne, Rosalynde and Rosalinda, arrived in England after the Conquest in 1066. It remained unusual in England until the late Elizabethan age. Then Spenser, Lodge and Shakespeare chose it for their heroines and made it as hip as celebrity names today.

Spenser’s hero is Colin Clout, a shepherd with real sheep to be tended. Through twelve pastoral scenes or eclogues, each titled after a month of the year, and loosely modelled on Virgil’s Eclogues, Colin continues to love Rosalind. She has a devastating effect on him, as Shakespeare’s Rosalind has on Orlando. But there are significant differences – for Colin’s Rosalind fails to return his adoration. Colin and Rosalind are more like Silvius and Phebe in As You Like It than they are like Rosalind and Orlando. Moreover, although Spenser’s Rosalind is a potent presence and exerts a lifelong effect on Colin, unlike Shakespeare’s dynamic voluble heroine, she never utters a word. Spenser’s Rosalind is ‘a Gentle woman of no meane house,’ fundamentally a golden haired ‘Country lasse’ firmly planted in her sylvan setting. Although Shakespeare’s Rosalind operates in Arden which frees and empowers her, she’s not native and endued unto the place, and will eventually leave it. Rosalind’s impact on Colin is palpable up to the final Eclogue of December which brings the sequence to its cyclical and mortal conclusion, reminiscent of the arc of Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It. Colin concludes his poem by sending his shepherd’s calendar of love out into the world with a ‘free passeporte’ enjoining his readers, ‘The better please, the worse despise, I aske no more.’ At the end of her play, Shakespeare’s Rosalind reiterates Colin’s message, asking us ‘to like as much of this play as please you.’

Thomas Lodge may have been inspired by the huge success of Spenser’s Rosalind to choose the name for the female lead of his prose fiction, Rosalynde, in 1590 just over ten years later. Lodge’s romance is the direct source whose form and plot Shakespeare adapted for As You Like It in 1599. Connections between the two are intricate and fascinating. By the time Shakespeare gutted Lodge’s tale it had become so popular that it had already gone through four editions. While sailing on Captain Clarke’s ship to the islands of Terceira and the Canaries, Lodge amused himself by writing Rosalynde, a Tudor rom-com. The story is precisely located in France and culminates in Paris, unlike Shakespeare’s play which toys with French references and a semi-French ambience. The Forest of Arden is first tramped through in Lodge, then seamlessly absorbed by Shakespeare who enjoyed its link with Mary Arden, his mother and first storyteller. Rosalynde’s pastoral roots lay far back in writers from Theocritus to Virgil, and in Middle English metrical romances, but Lodge’s modernity anticipated the new genre of the novel, not invented until the eighteenth century.

Somewhere deep in cultural consciousness and Lodge’s memory during his long hours on the high seas lay the medieval Tale ofGamelyn. He took Gamelyn’s basic story but he did something radical. He added women. Lodge’s new character, Rosalynde who dresses as a boy, Ganymede, is the model for Shakespeare’s Rosalind who does the same. Lodge’s Alinda becomes Shakespeare’s Celia, and they both take the name Aliena when dressing-down in the forest. Lodge invented the new characters of Phoebe and Montanus who become Shakespeare’s Phebe and Silvius; Coridon who becomes Corin; Gerismond who becomes Duke Senior, and Torismond who becomes Duke Frederick. Shakespeare in his turn invented the indelible new characters of Jaques, Touchstone, Audrey and his own namesake, William for As You Like It.

To stand on the shoulders of previous texts was not an act of plagiarism but accepted sixteenth century practice of adaptations with which we’re equally familiar today. A book is re-invented, adapted, expanded, cut, or changed to translate into a feature film or TV series. In a similar way, Gamelyn, a long poem, is adapted for Rosalynde, a neo-novel, which in turn generates a play, As You Like It. Shakespeare leans on the inciting plot of Lodge’s Rosalynde,7 which previously has lent on Gamelyn.

GAMELYN	LODGE	SHAKESPEARE
Sir Iohan of Boundys	Sir John of Bordeaux	Sir Rowland de Boys
Johan, 1st son	Saladyne, 1st son	Oliver, 1st son
Otho, 2nd son	Fernandyne, 2nd son	Jacques, 2nd son
Gamelyn, 3rd son	Rosader, 3rd son	Orlando, 3rd son
	Norman champion	Charles the wrestler
	Rosalynde/Ganymede	Rosalind/Ganymede
	Alinda/Aliena	Celia/Aliena
	Torismond, King of France	Duke Frederick, usurper
	Gerismond, old banished king’	Duke Senior, usurped
		Jacques (7 ages) 2nd character in the play named Jacques
Adam Spencer	Adam Spencer	Old Adam
	Coridon	Corin
		Touchstone
		Audrey
	Montanus	Sylvius
	Phoebe	Phebe

Like Gamelyn’s father, Lodge’s Sir John of Bordeaux also breeds trouble between his three sons in a King Lear-like scenario by which he leaves their inheritance uneasily distributed. Archetypal fraternal hatred between sets of brothers incites the potentially tragic opening of As You Like It. We get the whole of this lengthy back-story in Lodge but Shakespeare decides to kill off the father figure, Sir Rowland de Boys, before the play even begins. Blanche MacIntyre’s production at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2015 made this strikingly visual by staging an elaborate state funeral before the cast spoke a single word. Shakespeare adapts Lodge and cuts straight to the dramatic opening scene where the two brothers Orlando and Oliver are already fighting over rights.

In Lodge’s romance, Sir John advises his three sons, including his youngest and favourite, Rosader, to let ‘time be the touchstone of friendship’ – a spark for Shakespeare’s invented Fool, Touchstone – but he also warns them to beware of love. For ‘Venus is a wanton, and though her laws pretend liberty, yet there is nothing but loss and glistering misery...a woman’s eye...snareth unto death. Trust not their fawning favours, for their loves are like the breath of a man upon steel, which no sooner lighteth on but it leapeth off.’ In Sir John’s misogynist view, ideal qualities in a woman are ‘to be chaste, obedient, and silent.’ Obedience and silence are exactly those constraints of female behaviour that Shakespeare’s Rosalind will smash, though she might fulfil the rest of Sir John’s instructions to his sons, to ‘choose thy wife by wit and living well.’8

Lodge’s Rosalynde is the loveliest of all the court ladies, for in her golden hair ‘it seemed love had laid herself in ambush.’⁹ Her lover, Rosader, just like Shakespeare’s Orlando later, is overcome by her beauty. He ‘fed his looks on the favour of Rosalynde’s face; which she perceiving blushed, which was such a doubling of her beauteous excellence, that the bashful red of Aurora at the sight of unacquainted Phaeton, was not half so glorious.’¹⁰

Before Rosader steps into the ring for the challenge match, he’s already exchanging looks with Rosalynde and even during the bout they can’t take their eyes off each other. After Rosader kills the hefty champion, all ladies dart their admiring, amorous glances at him, ‘especially Rosalynde, whom the beauty and valour of Rosader had already touched: but she accounted love a toy, and fancy a momentary passion, that as it was taken in with a gaze, might be shaken off with a wink, and therefore feared not to dally in the flame.’¹¹ This is the first semaphore of Rosalind’s freethinking on the subject of love in As You Like It. Lodge gives his readers no stock heroine but an independent minded woman. She removes the jewel from round her neck and sends a page to deliver it forthwith to Rosader. Shakespeare omits the pageboy and makes his Rosalind award the necklace direct to Orlando. Rosader has no jewel to offer Rosalynde in return. Instead he writes her a sonnet. Unlike Shakespeare who is deliberately vague about Rosalind’s physical attributes, Lodge goes into microscopic and embarrassing detail itemising Rosalynde’s body parts. Her shape sends Rosader into rhapsody.

Two suns at once from one fair heaven there shined,

Ten branches from two boughs, tipped all with roses,

Pure locks more golden than is gold refined,

Two pearled rows that nature’s pride encloses;

Two mounts fair marble-white, down-soft and dainty,

A snow-dyed orb, where love increased by pleasure

Full woeful makes my heart, and body fainty:

Her fair, my woe, exceeds all thought and measure.12

This earlier model Rosalynde is undoubtedly a blonde with ‘two pearled rows’ of Hollywood teeth. But Shakespeare’s Rosalind has hair of no colour or any colour we please, simply As We Like It. We see nothing of her teeth but we hear plenty from her tongue.

Rosalynde feels herself ‘grow passing passionate’ for Rosader. She lingers over his ‘rare qualities’ and ‘the comeliness of his person, the honour of his parents, and the virtues that, excelling both, made him so gracious in the eyes of every one’. Thinking of her own difficult situation she rails against Fortune, the trigger perhaps for Rosalind and Celia’s debate about Fortune and Nature in As You Like It. Rosalynde examines the idea of Love in an early stream of consciousness internal monologue. ‘Tush, desire hath no respect of persons: Cupid is blind and shooteth at random...Thou speakest, poor Rosalynde, by experience; for being every way distressed, surcharged with cares...yet...love hath lodged in thy heart the perfection of young Rosader, a man every way absolute as well for his inward life, as for his outward lineaments, able to content the eye with beauty, and the ear with the report of his virtue.’¹³

This Rosalynde who knows ‘lovers cannot live by looks,’ is the technical rehearsal for Shakespeare’s rational Rosalind who never voices her inner thoughts alone on stage. She’s always in dynamic relationships with other people and therefore has neither time, space, nor taste for private monologues. Lodge’s Rosalynde is also cool as well as passionate. ‘Be not over rash,’ she tells herself, ‘choose not a fair face with an empty purse.’ But in her eyes, ‘Rosader is both beautiful and virtuous.’¹⁴ She sings lyrical madrigals and accompanies herself on the lute – unlike Shakespeare’s Rosalind who leaves all the music and singing to others. As she expresses herself mostly in prose it might seem out of character for her to burst into song. Perhaps the boy actor who first played Shakespeare’s Rosalind wasn’t musical and so the songs were given to other members of the company.

Shakespeare poaches most of his plot from Lodge’s story: toxic jealousy in two sets of siblings; a fight between two brothers; a lawful ruler usurped by his younger brother; the contrasting female bond of more than sisterly love between two cousins; a deposed leader living in exile in the Forest of Arden like Robin Hood; the usurper ruling illegally in his place; an elder brother bribing a wrestling champion to finish off his younger brother; the champion felling two or three contestants before being beaten or killed by the hero-challenger; and, most significantly, the exchange of glances at the wrestling match between the dispossessed son and the banished duke’s daughter.

In Lodge’s romance, Torismond who has deposed Rosalynde’s father Gerismond, arrives with a posse of French nobles to turn his niece out of court. He’s nervous that one of his peers will marry Rosalynde and de-throne him. So he accuses her of treason as Duke Frederick accuses Rosalind in As You Like It. Torismond’s daughter, Alinda, who loves Rosalynde ‘more than herself,’ pleads for her cousin, asserting ‘we have two bodies and one soul,’ a bond echoed by Celia in Shakespeare’s play who declares herself ‘coupled and inseparable’ with Rosalind. Alinda declares she will share Rosalynde’s exile. Enraged, Torismond banishes both women, even his own child. Duke Frederick in As You Like It doesn’t pronounce the same sentence on his daughter Celia but he might as well have done. He could have guessed it would be Celia’s choice to share exile with Rosalind. Just as Celia later feels a passionate attachment for Rosalind, Alinda’s love for Rosalynde has a lyric, sapphic quality. She accompanies Rosalynde into banishment, vowing ‘I will ever be thy Alinda, and thou shalt ever rest to me Rosalynde; so shall the world canonize our friendship, and speak of Rosalynde and Alinda, as they did of Pylades and Orestes.’*

It’s Rosalynde’s idea not Alinda’s, as it is Celia’s in As You Like It, to flee the court in disguise. ‘Of a tall stature,’ like Shakespeare’s Rosalind, Lodge’s heroine decides to cross-dress to face the dangers of banishment. Rosalynde will buy a suit, and belt on a rapier. According to Neil MacGregor in Shakespeare’s Restless World, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2012, a rapier was a heavy sword, not the light darting weapon we now imagine. Lodge’s women set off to the Forest of Arden, disguised as Ganymede and Aliena, the same noms de guerre that Shakespeare keeps for Rosalind and Celia as refugees in Arden.

Arriving in the forest, Lodge’s Ganymede and Aliena buy a farm and a flock of sheep and go about their shepherding duties ‘in more pleasant content of mind than ever they were in the court of Torismond.’ In their pastoral hideaway they find love odes written by shepherd Montanus (Shakespeare’s Silvius in As You Like It) in praise of his Phoebe. Ganymede enquires of Montanus, ‘Can shepherds love?’ raising a class issue of the period.15 Noble Rosader is in the forest, too, sighing for love and carving love poems to Rosalynde on the bark of trees, as hackneyed as any of Berowne’s, Benedick’s, Hamlet’s or Orlando’s efforts. In her boy’s disguise Rosalynde feels free to mock Rosader even though in her heart she’s as much in love as he is.¹⁶

Rosalynde tells her readers in a self-reflective interior soliloquy that she’s now ‘so full of passions’ that she can only sleep brokenly at night. The next morning the cousins go in search of Rosader who has also slept fitfully. Ganymede tells him, ‘Tis good, forester, to love, but not to overlove...lest thou fold thyself in an endless labyrinth.’ S/he teases Rosader by inviting him to transfer his affections to Aliena, a plot detail that Shakespeare omits. Ganymede teases Rosader for his poetic labours which are all words and no substance. They are conventional enough love poems but they’re not quite as ridiculous as Orlando’s in As You Like It. Shakespeare takes Lodge’s basic idea of the lovesick lover writing slushy poetry and ramps it up. He also renovates some of Lodge’s tropes. Rosader’s awkward thought, ‘The sun and our stomachs are shepherds’ dials,’ becomes Orlando’s unforgettable observation, ‘There’s no clock in the forest.’¹⁷ Lodge dreamed up the absurdly seductive game in which Rosader was to address his love talk by proxy to Ganymede, in the ‘absence’ of Rosalynde. Shakespeare took over this giddy device as the trigger for the dazzling courtship by conversation between Rosalind and Orlando.

The wooing between Ganymede and Rosader proceeds as a duet of poems, an eclogue, a parrying exchange of pretty verses and lines of poetry – which Shakespeare recasts into the thrilling inventive prose Rosalind uses to educate Orlando about how to love. Aliena performs a mock-marriage between Rosader and Ganymede, the same scene that Shakespeare reprises. But in Lodge, interestingly, Aliena says she must carry away the bride afterwards.18

For Orlando’s story, Shakespeare lifts from Lodge Rosader’s rescue of his brother Saladyne, his fight with the lion (a lioness, perhaps alluding to female power in As You Like It), and subsequent wounding, leaving Ganymede to lament Rosader’s delay in keeping their date. ‘For Love measures every minute, and thinks hours to be days, and days to be months, till they feed their eyes with the sight of the desired object.’ Shakespeare’s Rosalind riffs on this with a whirl of speed in As You Like It. ‘He that will divide a minute into a thousand parts, and break but a part of the thousand part of a minute in the affairs of love, it may be said of him that Cupid hath clapped him o’ th’ shoulder, but I’ll warrant him heart-whole.’¹⁹

Shakespeare’s variation on the theme of love in his Silvius-Phebe-Ganymede trio is pinched blatantly from Lodge’s Montanus-Phoebe-Ganymede threesome, except that Lodge’s Phoebe is incredibly beautiful, not mocked by Ganymede, nor told to ‘Sell when you can.’ Lodge’s Phoebe doesn’t understand what love means until she falls for Ganymede. Rejected by him, she becomes dangerously ill. Shakespeare treats the boy-girl-girl triangle with a much lighter and more farcical touch than Lodge. Towards the end of the Elizabethan age, perhaps it was safer to read about love between women as you turned the pages of Lodge’s novel in your study, than it was for Shakespeare to air the subject openly on the public stage.

At the denouement of Rosalynde, exiled Gerismond ‘noting well the physnomy of Ganymede, began by his favours to call to mind the face of his Rosalynde’ which Shakespeare echoes in Duke Senior’s rueful recognition of his daughter Rosalind. These lines always get a laugh,

I do remember in this shepherd boy

Some lively touches of my daughter’s favour.20

Ganymede/Rosalynde finally dresses as a woman for her wedding and Gerismond recovers his crown in a battle with Torismond. Shakespeare replaces Lodge’s violent denouement with Duke Senior’s forgiveness and Duke Frederick’s repentance, in an ending more like those of his Late Plays which celebrate the healing concept of ‘pardon’s the world to all.’

Lodge’s Rosalynde is gentler and more loyal to Alinda than Shakespeare’s Rosalind is to her cousin Celia. Rosalynde deals more gently with Phoebe than Rosalind does with Phebe. Lodge’s heroine is more feminine, even in her boy’s disguise, than Shakespeare’s arousing, erotic Rosalind who discovers an authentic element of her personality in the liberating androgyny of being Ganymede. Both Rosalynde and Rosalind provide forest classes in love for their boyfriends during which they both show determination and self-assertion, both relish their powers of exhilarating language, but ultimately Shakespeare’s scintillating Rosalind smashes more glass ceilings and is the wittier and the wiser.

The lineage from Lodge is unmistakeable. But Shakespeare is the great transformer. Lodge’s Preface to Rosalynde includes the throwaway phrase, ‘If you like it, so... ’ which may have prompted the thought for the disarming title, As You Like It. It can be emphasised and unpacked in as many ways, as you like it. No one knows if Shakespeare picked his titles or if they were decided collaboratively with the company. Nevertheless it’s much more than a throwaway. Shakespeare did something prescient and revolutionary in As You Like It. He changed the balance in the way men and women might think about relations between the sexes. Lodge’s Preface explicitly addresses an audience of ‘Gentlemen Readers’ but, in Rosalind’s Epilogue, Shakespeare shatters long-held male expectations by turning first to the opposite sex. ‘I’ll begin with the women.’

* In Greek mythology, famous for their intense, homoerotic friendship.