Call Me Ganymede – Rosalind Crosses the Border
| Rosalind | Were it not better, |
| Because that I am more than common tall, That I did suit me all points like a man? A gallant curtal-axe* upon my thigh, A boar-spear in my hand, and in my heart, Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will, We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside, As many other mannish cowards have That do outface it with their semblances. | |
| Celia | What shall I call thee when thou art a man? |
| Rosalind | I’ll have no worse a name than Jove’s own page, And therefore look you call me Ganymede.1 |
Rosalind’s uncle Duke Frederick, Celia’s father, has turned on his niece in an apparently irrational whirlwind of fury. He expels her from court where she’s been living in quiet amity with her cousin Celia since Frederick usurped and banished his brother, the rightful Duke Senior. Takeover was a theme that shuddered through Elizabethan society. The Queen’s own grandfather, Henry VII, had returned from France to seize the crown for the House of Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Shakespeare had dramatised the events in Richard III.
Elizabeth was haunted by fears of rebellion or even assassination which escalated after Pope Pius V excommunicated her in 1570. Records do not reveal whether the more distant abdication of the king in Shakespeare’s Richard II was performed covertly, openly, or not at all during Elizabeth’s reign. What’s certain is that when the play appeared in its first quarto edition of 1597, this scene was omitted.2 The Queen was adamantly opposed to giving air to any notions of regime change. ‘I am Richard II,’ she is supposed to have said, ‘know ye not that?’3 So when Duke Frederick warns Rosalind if she’s found within twenty miles of his court within the next ten days, ‘thou diest for it,’ he’s making no idle threat. He means it. Events on stage had political reverberations in the real world.
When Rosalind asks of what crime she’s being accused, uncle Frederick replies, ‘Thou art thy father’s daughter, there’s enough.’
| Rosalind | So was I when your highness took his dukedom; So was I when your highness banished him. Treason is not inherited, my lord, Or if we did derive it from our friends, What’s that to me? My father was no traitor.4 |
Rosalind dares to speak the truth to power, defending herself and her father from Duke Frederick’s fury in passionate, rational language that anticipates the trial scenes of Shakespeare’s future wronged women, Hermione in The Winter’s Tale and Queen Katherine in Henry VIII. Rebecca Hall who played Rosalind in 2003 when she was twenty-one says, ‘these Shakespearean women caught up in male-centric environments are incredibly eloquent and defiant...there’s the sense of utter injustice and incredulity.’ Rosalind ‘says these lucid things about the paranoid nature of tyranny. This is ridiculous behaviour, and she tells him so.’5 Tyrants are naturally fearful and feel compelled to eliminate any threats against them, as Shakespeare’s Richard III disposed of the boy princes in the Tower.
But like Leontes and Henry VIII, Duke Frederick’s edict is ‘firm and irrevocable’. He sweeps away leaving Rosalind reduced to silence and inaction for the one and only time in the play. It’s her habit of reserve that now enrages him, as he hisses to his daughter, Celia, in sibilant language –
| Duke Frederick | She is too subtle for thee, and her smoothness, Her very silence and her patience Speak to the people, and they pity her. Thou art a fool. She robs thee of thy name, And thou wilt show more bright and seem more virtuous When she is gone.6 |
At court, Rosalind’s withdrawn mood, the eclipse of her natural exuberance, was a direct outcome of losing her father to exile as well as losing her status as Duke Senior’s daughter. Actor Sally Scott thinks Rosalind is ‘potentially a tragic figure. She’s desperately let down by a lot of people, all of whom are men. Her father is banished, he doesn’t come back, he doesn’t send anyone for her. He’s the first person to do that to her. Her uncle then turns on a sixpence and banishes her. She’s deeply vulnerable.’7 The banishment of Rosalind so early in the play seems to herald a tragedy rather than a comedy. The forecast at court is ominous, dark and threatening. Before Chekhov, only Shakespeare had dared to combine genres so radically, inflecting potential tragedy with comedy, mirroring the authentic experience of the human condition.
Celia is the one who turns the mood. She’s dynamic and resourceful in crisis when Rosalind is too shocked to think straight. ‘Why, whither shall we go?’ Rosalind asks hopelessly. ‘To seek my uncle in the Forest of Arden.’ Escape seems to have the simplicity of all the most dangerous missions. To the perils ahead of them, Celia adds the sparkle of escapade. Let’s go in disguise, she says, let’s become different people.
| Celia | I’ll put myself in poor and mean attire, And with a kind of umber smirch my face – The like do you; so shall we pass along And never stir assailants.8 |
‘It’s Celia at the beginning, she’s making the plans, she just takes it on, she books the tickets, she packs the bags,’ observes Sally Scott.
Rosalind quickly picks up the baton from Celia and finesses the proposal. And her inventive spirit adds another layer of energy. Not only will the two aristocrats disguise themselves as artisans and leap over class boundaries, but as the leggier of the two, Rosalind proposes to go in drag. An Elizabethan audience was used to actors defying the Sumptuary Laws which decreed you had to dress according to your social class: furs, silks and purple allowed only for the upper classes; woollen academic gowns expected for lawyers, doctors and clerics; fustian for the lower classes. These laws were designed to keep you in your proper place although in reality they were almost impossible to enforce. Upwardly mobile merchants were challenging the old feudal rigidities. They sold gorgeous fabrics to the nobility but were hardly likely to deny them to their own families. Dress codes denoting social status proclaimed the man and woman then, quite different from today’s denim for all occasions, all classes, and both sexes.
Inside the freer though risky sphere of the playhouse, the Sumptuary Laws were openly flouted. In England women were banned from appearing as professional actresses, so boys or youths played all the female roles. In spite of this, some women like Mary Frith did tread the boards, and others, in the daring spirit of Viola de Lesseps imagined by Tom Stoppard in the 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, just may have done. It was different in Europe, especially in the Latin countries. Spanish Tirso de Molina’s fizzing comedy, Don Gil de las calzas verdes/Don Gil of the Green Breeches, written later in the same decade as As You Like It, also turns on cross-dressing. But in Spain women played the female roles. Donna Juana as Don Gil or Donna Elvira is equally convincing whether in gown or breeches. ‘The very image of deceit,’ s/he’s ‘counterfeited coinage’ and like Ganymede, not what s/he appears.
But for a real Elizabethan woman in sixteenth-century England, dressing as a man could pitch you into more dangerous territory than challenging social etiquette. It set you against God. Preachers constantly invoked the law laid down in Deuteronomy: ‘The woman shalt not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God.’9 The clergy denounced theatre generally but the specific issue of cross-dressing and displaying a fine pair of legs enraged them. In The Schoole of Abuse of 1579, Stephen Gosson literally told women to stay at home. In his view, watching or performing plays ‘effeminated’ the mind. Philip Stubbes felt play-going could erode masculinity itself. When boy actors impersonated women on stage, the church saw it as a flagrant provocation to lust, lechery and wantonness. Sexual temptation horrified Dr John Rainolds, an influential Oxford theologian. ‘A woman’s garment being put upon a man doth vehemently touch and move him with the remembrance and imagination of a woman; and the imagination of a thing desirable doth stir up the desire.’10 Even worse, in Rainolds’ view, the troubling appeal of a cross-dressed, effeminate boy actor might incite ‘unclean affections,’ meaning homosexual desire. He ranted against the eroticism of the stage while nobody seemed to remember that back in 1566, during Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Oxford, Rainolds himself had played the part of Hippolyta in a production of Palaemon and Arcyte,11 In a modern riposte to the Sumptuary Laws, Jeanette Winterson’s transvestite heroine Villanelle asks: ‘If I went to confession, what would I confess? That I cross-dress? So did Our Lord, so do the priests.’12
John Lyly’s earlier gender-bending play, Galatea, first performed by St. Paul’s boys’ company ‘before the Queen’s Majesty at Greenwich, on New Year’s day [1588] at night,’ pulses with these ideas.13 Two shepherds decide to cross-dress their daughters, Galatea and Phillida – both played by boys – in order to escape the lust of the sea-god Neptune. When Galatea expresses her disgust for going Ganymede, her father argues: ‘To gain love the gods have taken shapes of beasts, and to save life art thou coy to take the attire of men?’ His daughter answers, punning, ‘they were beastly gods, that lust could make them seem as beasts.’14 However, for her own safety she accepts male disguise, only to chide herself in a soliloquy with the audience, ‘Blush, Galatea, that must frame thy affection fit for thy habit...Oh, would the gods had made me as I seem to be.’15 As a boy actor playing a girl, now cross-dressing back as a man, Galatea meets Phillida, each unknown to the other, though in the same predicament of male disguise. Of course they fall in love.
Echoing Galatea, Phillida, too, torments herself, ‘Poor Phillida, curse the time of thy birth and rareness of thy beauty, the unaptness of thy apparel, and the untamedness of thy affections! Art thou no sooner in the habit of a boy but thou must be enamoured of a boy?’16 This mirage of gender identity, common on the Elizabethan stage, teased the audience with a heady sense of sexual confusion. Only a dizzying vortex of plot complications could unravel the layers of identity represented by Phillida and Galatea in their multiple selves: boy-girl-boy-girl – although boy in the final analysis. At the denouement, the goddess Venus has no option but to change one of the girl-lovers into a boy, magically re-assigning gender without surgery.
Perhaps another factor agitated the church even more than the sexual implications of cross-dressing. For women in drag undermined the accepted social order which kept women firmly in their subservient relationship of Eve to Adam. If they dressed as men they might decide to claim the same rights and independence as men. As soon as Rosalind disguised as Ganymede arrives in Arden, she assumes the masculine role, superior to cousin Celia, posing as Ganymede’s sister, Aliena. ‘I must comfort the weaker vessel,’ Ganymede says, in irony or provocation when Celia is on the point of exhaustion. After Duke Frederick’s deportation order, Celia had been the practical one, but in the forest she dwindles, mostly, into the conventional model of female behaviour.
In contrast with Celia’s femininity, Rosalind forces herself to step up to her costume change, as ‘doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat.’ When she urges Celia, ‘Therefore, courage, good Aliena!’ the courage is as much for herself in trying on her new virility. She soon finds that it fits a certain aspect of her personality that had been hidden or sublimated during her life as a woman. There was a hint of this testosterone at the wrestling match when Rosalind offered Orlando ‘the little strength that I have, I would it were with you.’ Although a female monarch reigned, physical strength was not usually ascribed to women in Elizabethan times, except to the legendary Queen of the Amazons who married Theseus at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Queen Elizabeth’s strength was symbolic rather than corporeal. Even today we’ve become acculturated only gradually, or not at all, to the idea of women in the forces, or female Olympic boxers or wrestlers.17
Although aristocratic, Rosalind as a dispossessed, unmarried young woman, would have found it almost impossible, if not downright illegal, to accomplish her first autonomous action in Arden. As Ganymede, she buys some real estate. Cash in hand, she employs Corin, a local shepherd, as her property agent, instructing him to negotiate for a small working farm,
| Rosalind | I pray thee, if it stand with honesty, Buy thou the cottage, pasture and the flock, And thou shalt have to pay for it of us.18 |
The deal is closed ‘right suddenly’ and Rosalind has changed her life and Celia’s. For the foreseeable future they will own ‘The soil, the profit, and this kind of life.’ They’ve become independent, self-sufficient – and green.
Though moving within similar pastoral conventions to Lyly’s Galatea and Phillida, Shakespeare’s Rosalind challenges society altogether more assertively. A boy actor in girl’s clothes at the beginning of the play, then emerging as Ganymede, a triple layered boy/girl/boy, his/her stage presence would have been thrilling and suggestive to both sexes in the Elizabethan audience, as well as to fellow actors onstage. It was exactly this erotic excitement that Dr Rainolds most abhorred.
In our own times, Michael Billington, theatre critic of The Guardian, has identified ‘an umbilical connection between acting and sex.’ Ever since and probably before Ovid advised young men to haunt the theatre in search of love over 2,000 years ago, the stage has been a magnet for sexual adventure.19 Plays in performance exploit this heightened mood. ‘An actor, in a sense, makes love to his audience...The theatre is rooted in sex,’ observes Billington. ‘This takes many forms. There is the androgynous, bisexual quality that invariably underpins great acting’. He suggests that why boy actors playing girls were so popular was because the theatre ‘is a place where we can all admit that our natures are a compound of masculine and feminine....a place where inhibitions can be released by both the performer and the spectator.’20
The striking sexual ambiguity of screen and stage stars like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Laurence Olivier in the twentieth century fed into the fantasies of audiences worldwide. And as Janet Suzman observes, every performance needs its audience for the chemistry to work. ‘Whatever the show is will be made by the audience seeing it. A play doesn’t happen without an audience. It’s a complicit friendship, if you like, in that afternoon’s run. What I find wonderful is that the actor is saying, we don’t live without you, you bring us to life.’21 For the two hours’ traffic of the stage, and maybe as we leave elated after the show, Rosalind dressed as Ganymede transcends gender. Whatever our sexuality we can all identify with the universal experience of falling in love.
There is another frontier or rite of passage that Rosalind and Orlando negotiate as they trace their way through those early stages of life listed by Jaques in his Seven Ages of Man speech. The lovers find themselves in the borderland, or no man’s land of growing up where everything is fluid and exciting. Androgynous looks among teenagers were standard then and the look is still current today. With his ‘little beard’ Orlando hovers between boy and man. As the wild, romantic author of his own poems, he should present ‘a beard neglected’, but that, as Rosalind points out, ‘you have not’. Orlando can only muster some fuzzy designer stubble. So fresh faced are both Orlando and Rosalind/Ganymede that, like Viola/Cesario in Twelfth Night, they are poised on the tipping point between ‘a squash...before ’tis a peascod, or a codling when ’tis almost an apple.’ But while Orlando is still an idealistic teenager, Rosalind is slightly more than an adolescent. She’s on the cusp: between girl and boy, between girl and woman. She’s intellectually mature but still revels in the mischief and the truth telling of a teenager.
Once established in Arden as ‘Master Ganymede’, running a smallholding, the fantasy of so many urbanites, Rosalind feels safe and carefree even though she secretly longs for Orlando whom she’d seen once and fallen in love with at the wrestling match. It seems unlikely she’ll ever see him again. But to her amazement, she discovers the greenwood trees of Arden are festooned with love poems, addressed to a girl – coincidentally called Rosalind.
From the east to western Inde
No jewel is like Rosalind.
Her worth being mounted on the wind
Through all the world bears Rosalind.22
It’s doggerel, but a little frisson shivers through her as she reads the lines. According to Touchstone, the sophisticated Fool the girls have brought with them to Arden, these trees yield nothing but ‘bad fruit.’ With his talent for improvisation Touchstone shows Rosalind just how glibly, and obscenely, he can reel off more of the same.
| Touchstone | If a hart do lack a hind, |
| Let him seek out Rosalind. | |
| If the cat will after kind, | |
| So be sure will Rosalind. | |
| Winter garments must be lined, | |
| So must slender Rosalind. | |
| They that reap must sheaf and bind, | |
| Then to cart with Rosalind. | |
| Sweetest nut hath sourest rind, | |
| Such a nut is Rosalind. | |
| He that sweetest rose will find | |
| Must find love’s prick – and Rosalind.23 |
‘This is the very false gallop of verses: why do you infect yourself with them?’ he taunts Rosalind. She defends the lines which bear her name, ‘but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge’. Celia, too, has found love poems hanging on trees.
| Celia | But upon the fairest boughs. Or at every sentence’ end, Will I ‘Rosalinda’ write...24 |
Even Rosalind has to admit that ‘some of them had in them more feet than the verses would bear.’ Her hopes rise as she finds poems everywhere, ‘for look here what I found on a palm tree. I was never so berhymed...’ Could they really be addressed to her? And who is the author? ‘Is it a man?...I prithee who?...Nay, but who is it?’ Celia knows the answer. Perhaps she’s spotted Orlando decorating trees, and she enjoys prolonging Rosalind’s agony. ‘O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful, and yet again wonderful, and after that, out of all hooping!’ hoots Celia.
In exasperation, Rosalind plays her inner girl. ‘Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet and hose in my disposition?’ The outfit can’t conceal her essential nature and now her verbal creativity overflows:
| Rosalind | One inch of delay more is a South Sea of discovery. I prithee tell me who is it quickly and speak apace. I would thou couldst stammer, that thou mightst pour this concealed man out of thy mouth as wine comes out of a narrow-mouthed bottle – either too much at once or none at all. I prithee take the cork out of thy mouth that I may drink thy tidings.25 |
Rosalind is given to spontaneous global comparisons like the South Sea of discovery, or the Bay of Portugal, which reflect not only the scale of her emotions but also the pioneering Age of Exploration in which Shakespeare lived. At last Celia reveals that the poet is indeed ‘young Orlando, that tripped up the wrestler’s heels and your heart both in an instant.’ Rosalind is reduced to a single-word enquiry: ‘Orlando?’ But almost instantly, her irrepressible verbal stream bubbles up.
| Rosalind | Alas the day, what shall I do with my doublet and hose? What did he when thou sawst him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see him again?26 |
Ten questions gush out of her in confusion and excitement. The only person who can stem them, momentarily, is Rosalind herself with the unanswerable, ‘Answer me in one word.’ The spate overflows again: ‘But doth he know that I am in this forest, and in man’s apparel? Looks he as freshly as he did the day he wrestled?’ Her constant interruptions to Celia’s account finally crescendo in yet another question, and the line all audiences savour: ‘Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.’
What are the choices? To reveal herself as a woman? Meet Orlando as Rosalind? Compromise her safety when Duke Frederick’s men may be on her heels, as we know ‘dead or living’ they are hunting Orlando? End a five-act play in the middle of Act 3? Or maintain her persona as Ganymede with all its complications? Events overtake any decision as Rosalind and Celia catch sight of Orlando nearby, joshing with Jaques. She has no option but to continue as Ganymede.
When Rosalind disguises herself as a man and calls herself ‘Ganymede’, she’s using a word first recorded in English in 1591, less than a decade before the first mooted performance of As You Like It. Members of the audience with a classical education would have known the reference to the name of Jove’s own page. But Ganymede the ‘amorous girl-boy’ as Thomas Lodge, author of the prototype Rosalynde in 1590, described him, sent another distinct frisson through the groundlings and up into the galleries. Richard Barnfield’s poem of 1594 is explicit about The Tears of an Affectionate Shepherd Sick for Love, or The Complaint of Daphnis for the Love of Ganymede.
| If it be sin to love a sweet-faced boy, (Whose amber locks trussed up in golden trammels Dangle adown his lovely cheeks with joy, When pearl and flowers his fair hair enamels), If it be sin to love a lovely lad, Oh then sin I, for whom my soul is sad...’27 |
Only a decade or so later, Rubens will paint a seductive Ganymede, borne away to Olympus by Zeus, disguised as an eagle. From antiquity until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the name Ganymede signalled a gay male lover. Marlowe pictured Ganymede’s bisexual appeal in his poem Hero and Leander. (The Roman version of Zeus was called Jove or Jupiter.)
| Some swore he was a maid in man’s attire, For in his lookes were all that men desire, ... Jove, slylie stealing from his sister’s bed, To dallie with Idalian Ganimed.28 |
In spite of natural objections from Juno his wife, Jupiter wooed Ganymede quite openly in Marlowe’s play Dido, Queen of Carthage.
| Jupiter | Come gentle Ganymede, and play with me, I love thee well, say Juno what she will... Sit on my knee... |
These linked gems | |
| My Juno ware upon her marriage-day, Put thou about thy neck, my own sweet heart, And trick thy arms and shoulders with my theft.29 |
There’s no doubt that Ganymede, Jupiter’s paramour, was up for sale. Derived from ‘catamite,’ Ganymede implied a rent boy to the Elizabethan audience. Alexander Cooke, one of the most likely young candidates to have played Rosalind in 1599, was then no more than fifteen.30 Dramatically trained boys were so adept at impersonating women that audiences accepted the illusion, confident ‘the boy will well usurp the grace,/Voice, gait and action of a gentlewoman.’31 Puritan pamphleteer, William Prynne, denounced the illusions practised on the seventeenth-century stage where ‘players and play-haunters in their secret conclaves play the sodomites...some modern examples...have been desperately enamored with players’ boys thus clad in women’s apparel, so far as to solicit them by words, by letters, even actually to abuse them...This I have heard credibly reported of a scholar of Balliol College, and I doubt not but it may be verified of divers others’.32
Rosalind’s transvestism has an erotic charge even when she’s played, as we usually expect today, by a young woman. Juliet Rylance noticed, ‘when I got dressed up as a boy, all the men came up with “Oh God, there’s something really sexy about this and we don’t know what it is!”’33
In 1599, a triply layered cross-dressing boy/girl/boy, probably made the effect even more exciting, as Janet Suzman says, ‘It’s also a little bit homoerotic, I suppose, because Rosalind is a pretty young boy really – and very natural to the Elizabethans. They weren’t ashamed of finding that Greek thing – boys adorable.’ So when disguise ambushes Rosalind into approaching Orlando as Ganymede, she decides to turn disaster into opportunity. Out of her predicament she summons an ingenious plan to make herself doubly adorable to Orlando.34
Rosalind first approaches Orlando with that age-old chat-up line, ‘what is’t o’clock?’ He shows the merest flicker of doubt that Ganymede is not quite what he seems but his misgivings concerns class, not gender. ‘Your accent is something finer than you could purchase in so removed a dwelling.’ That’s easy for Rosalind to bat away. ‘I have been told so of many. But indeed an old religious uncle of mine taught me to speak.’ She’s swiftly into her new boyish stride, and confident enough to brag to Orlando, ‘I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offences as he hath generally taxed their whole sex withal.’ It’s a test. Will he see through her disguise? Can she maintain it? No and Yes! Only the audience, Celia and Touchstone are complicit about Rosalind’s identity. She presses her advantage, probing, challenging.
| Rosalind | There is a man haunts the forest that abuses our young plants with carving ‘Rosalind’ on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles; all, forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind. If I could meet that fancy-monger I would give him some good counsel, for he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him.35 |
Orlando confesses it is indeed he who is so ‘love-shaked’ and author of the poems dangling from Arden’s trees in praise of heavenly Rosalind. ‘I am that he, that unfortunate he.’ Rosalind is immediately wary. Does Orlando really retain the love that had flared between them after the wrestling match? Speaking is not writing and Orlando in conversation doesn’t sound like any pastoral patterns of courtly love. He’s so different from the histrionic shepherd, Silvius, whom she’s overheard declaring his passion for Phebe to his older friend, Corin.
| Silvius | If thou rememb’rest not the slightest folly That ever love did make thee run into, Thou hast not loved. Or if thou hast not sat as I do now, Wearing thy hearer in thy mistress’ praise, Thou hast not loved. Or if thou hast not broke from company Abruptly as my passion now makes me, Thou hast not loved. O Phebe, Phebe, Phebe!36 |
How can Rosalind be confident when Orlando doesn’t look the least bit like a lovesick swain, epitomised by Silvius? In her witty, semi-ironic inventory of what a true lover should look like, Orlando doesn’t tick any of her boxes. He should have:
| Rosalind | A lean cheek, which you have not; a blue eye and sunken, which you have not; an unquestionable spirit, which you have not; a beard neglected, which you have not – but I pardon you for that, for simply your having in beard is a younger brother’s revenue. Then your hose should be ungartered, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation. But you are no such man. You are rather point-device in your accoutrements, as loving yourself than seeming the lover of any other.37 |
Even as a refugee in the forest, Orlando looks as composed and desirable as a luminescent miniature by Nicholas Hilliard or Isaac Oliver. He can only protest to Ganymede, the ‘fair youth’ who has approached him, ‘I would I could make thee believe I love.’ Ganymede asks Orlando the crucial question Rosalind might never have dared in farthingale or skirts. ‘But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak?’ Orlando answers, ‘Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much.’ Rebecca Hall comments, ‘I don’t think [Rosalind] is quite comfortable enough with herself to believe that anyone could really be in love with her. I think she wants him to fall in love with her as the boy, oddly, because it is her. Yes, she’s playing the part, but it’s very much her personality. I think what scares her is him falling in love with his image of Rosalind, this fantasy Rosalind that he met for two seconds and has been writing poems about. She wants to be sure that he is falling in love with the real Rosalind...Well, the real Rosalind who’s pretending to be a boy.’38 Orlando’s Rosalind, the one who left him tongue-tied after the wrestling match, has spiralled into his fantasy life. He doesn’t know her at all. Love, Ganymede tells Orlando, ‘is merely a madness.’ Rosalind must test his fantasy. Is he the real deal?
Rosalind has a sudden inspiration, an audacious plan for a trial courtship. It will be flirting with a serious undertow. She can exploit her masquerade, charade, pretence, and yes, play-acting, as tools to excavate the emotional truth about Orlando. She can turn her predicament, her doublet and hose, to her own advantage. It’s rather like being in the wild, concealed in a naturalist’s hide. Not only will the trick keep her close to Orlando, but from the safety of her boy’s carapace, she can offer to ‘cure’ Orlando of his lovesickness by impersonating the very Rosalind he thinks he loves. She’s done it once before, she tells him cockily, ‘and in this manner.’
| Rosalind | He was to imagine me his love, his mistress, and I set him every day to woo me. At which time would I – being but a moonish youth – grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour; would now like him, now loath him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him...And thus I cured him.39 |
Ganymede/Rosalind knowingly brackets together boys and women. There was a blurring of genders during the English Renaissance, especially on the stage. It was a constant problem for acting companies to predict when their best boys would cross the border of puberty. Hamlet refers to this when he greets the boy who is to be the Player Queen.
| Hamlet | What, my young lady and mistress! By’r lady, your ladyship is nearer to heaven than when I saw you last...Pray God your voice, like a piece of uncurrent gold, be not cracked...40 |
There were many boy actors to choose from in an age when sexual maturity came later than it does now, sometimes not until 17 or 18. Treble voices could even remain unbroken up till 20.41 Men admired boys who looked effeminate, like Shakespeare’s patron, the startlingly beautiful 3rd Earl of Southampton. And they admired girls who looked flat chested and androgynous, like boys. Nicholas Hilliard’s portrait miniature of an exquisite Young Man Leaning Against a Tree Among Roses, hand on heart, his slender, balletic limbs in white tights, embodies all that gender fusion. It could be a portrait of Ganymede in Arden.42 So ambiguous and alluring is the identity of Rosalind’s ‘pretty youth’ that s/he not only sustains the love of Orlando but also inflames the desire of Phebe, a cream cheeked, black-eyed shepherdess, played misleadingly enough by another boy. On the Elizabethan stage, gender was totally jumbled. Not only was Rosalind in disguise but so were Celia, Phebe and Audrey. Perhaps gender became simply irrelevant, as we find today when we watch all-female productions of Julius Caesar and Henry IV,43 though these productions do not intend to convey the subversive erotic charge of boy actors cross-dressing on the Elizabethan stage.
After setting their next date, Rosalind languishes because like all teenagers Orlando hasn’t turned up on time, ‘Never talk to me; I will weep.’ Celia warns Rosalind not to harbour unrealistic hopes about her play-lover. She points out that having become a man, Rosalind had better behave like one, ‘have the grace to consider that tears do not become a man.’ She points out Orlando’s many shortcomings. His hair is the wrong colour, it indicates betrayal like Judas’s; his kisses have the ‘ice of chastity’ in them; and besides, Celia doubts whether he’s still in love. ‘Was’ is not ‘is’, she says tartly. Rosalind interrupts to say she’d met her father, exiled Duke Senior, in the forest yesterday, ‘and had much question with him: he asked me of what parentage I was; I told him, of as good as he; so he laughed and let me go.’
In the police state operating during the final dangerous years of Elizabethan England, Rosalind in Arden is a new kind of spy in a man’s world, infiltrating preconceptions about what makes a woman, what makes a man, as she eavesdrops on masculinity, accessing knowledge forbidden to women. She’s thrilled that her Ganymede disguise fools even her father. ‘But what talk we of fathers, when there is such a man as Orlando?’ Her focus has changed, she no longer needs her father. Instead, her mind constantly reverts to her lover, though Celia cautions her again. Orlando may write fine words but he hasn’t kept his promise to return on time. Corin interrupts the cousins, inviting them to witness ‘a pageant truly played,’ a love scene between shepherds Silvius and Phebe. Rosalind is more than willing to overhear their dialogue, for as she obsesses to Celia, ‘The sight of lovers feedeth those in love.’
Into the drama between Silvius and Phebe, Rosalind can project her own longing for love, enacted by Silvius desperate for love of Phebe, who cannot requite him, nor even pity his pain. Rejecting Silvius, a good man’s love, Phebe falls catastrophically in love with Ganymede from the moment s/he steps out from a leafy vantage point. ‘Why, what means this? Why do you look on me?’ This is one more complication that Rosalind hadn’t envisaged when she cross-dressed. ‘I think she means to tangle my eyes too!’ The Silvius-Phebe courtship vibrates with the main love story between Rosalind and Orlando. It’s like watching a play within a play. In Phebe’s highhanded refusal of Silvius, ‘Now I do frown on thee with all my heart/And if mine eyes can wound, now let them kill thee,’ Rosalind sees her own worst fears of rejection by Orlando. That’s why she reacts, apparently so callously, to Phebe’s sudden infatuation with Ganymede.
| Rosalind | No, faith, proud mistress, hope not after it. ’Tis not your inky brows, your black silk hair, Your bugle eyeballs, nor your cheek of cream, That can entame my spirits to your worship. You foolish shepherd, wherefore do you follow her Like foggy south, puffing with wind and rain? You are a thousand times a properer man Than she a woman. ’Tis such fools as you That makes the world full of ill-favoured children. ’Tis not her glass but you that flatters her, And out of you she sees herself more proper Than any of her lineaments can show her. But, mistress, know yourself; down on your knees, And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love. For I must tell you friendly in your ear: Sell when you can, you are not for all markets.44 |
That line, ‘thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love,’ first dropped into my brain when I was studying English Literature at university. On that line I based a personal decision, and the words have lodged in my memory ever since. During a trip to Stratford in 1968 I heard Janet Suzman’s Ganymede deliver it to high-handed Phebe, played by Helen Mirren. Rosalind’s exchange with Phebe works in both directions, as Janet Suzman points out. ‘Rosalind has looked at Phebe. Phebe has been a big educative thing for her, hasn’t she? She’s looking a gift horse in the mouth with that lovely little Silvius. She’s seen the loyalty of little Silvius and she’s seen Phebe looking around. So maybe her Orlando isn’t Achilles but that was then and now she’s discovered that he’s morally a nice chap and he’s got fibre and bottom – and he truly loves her and that in itself is something worth treasuring.’45 But Rosalind quickly slips from her blank verse tutorial mode into a prose aside to the audience. Silvius has fallen in love with Phebe’s ‘foulness, and she’ll fall in love with my anger,’ Rosalind says as she interferes in the Silvius/ Phebe love plot. It’s instinctive revenge for seeing her own predicament in theirs.
Choosing the name ‘Ganymede’ impels Rosalind over so many borders. From girl to boy; from court to exile; from urban to pastoral; from insider to outsider; from poetry to prose. Her choice also somersaults the play from the tragedy of realpolitik at court to the comedy of love in Arden, like the cheeky somersault Elisabeth Bergner actually performed in the 1936 film of As You Like It. Bergner’s somersault was unforgettable for art critic Brian Sewell. Her appeal as Ganymede was homoerotic, establishing for Sewell ‘even at that early age [he was five in 1936] a canon of blond beauty that I was later to apply to boys.’46 Made visual in Bergner’s somersault, Rosalind’s transvestite exile in Arden brings deliverance. Sporting doublet and hose, or jeans and trainers, unlaced from corset and farthingale, or prom gown and high heels, Rosalind’s new erotic androgyny gives her the freedom to speak her mind. ‘Well, it’s a mask, isn’t it,’ said Rebecca Hall. ‘I found it a liberation. As soon as she starts being a boy she’s much more herself. She feels more at ease with herself, and able to say what she’s feeling and what she’s thinking...I just played it straight in boy’s clothes. In doing that you embrace a certain amount of ambiguity about her. I think there’s something genderless about Rosalind. She has aspects of femininity and she has aspects of masculinity.’47
When Rosalind is played by an adult male, rather than by an Elizabethan boy or a post-Restoration woman, the effect can be as multilayered as a mille-feuille confection. In a daring all-male production which opened in 1967, the year of Twiggy’s boyish fashion modelling and Yves St. Laurent’s iconic trouser suits for women, Ronald Pickup played Rosalind at the Old Vic. It was the ideal cultural moment for Pickup’s willowy and breastless’ Rosalind, clinically drained of sensuality.’48 Played by a man, going Ganymede can unexpectedly reveal the universality of Rosalind. ‘I was gender-free, I knew the play was about passion, between two men, or a man or a woman – you’re not sure which – but you’re led to a point where it doesn’t matter. It’s about people in love and it has an extraordinary purity. You’re allowed to love whoever and whatever you want. The joy of it is so liberating,’ Pickup told me he’d ‘insisted on having bare feet. Bare feet are very liberating. So much of a character starts with the feet. It really does.’49 He was twenty-seven and gangly. ‘Becoming Ganymede was the most natural thing in the world. It felt like a release, like a creature being set free in the forest. Rosalind is Ganymede – and she opens up to everything in the forest.’50
In 1991 Declan Donnellan cast Adrian Lester with his ‘beautiful voice and grace of movement’ as Rosalind for the Cheek by Jowl allmale production.51 Lester thinks ‘you have to lose track of gender in the middle of the play. The production must make you feel as though you are watching two human beings wrapped up in the dizzy rush of being in love. Only then does the play truly work. Because then it will be about the nature of fear, trust and love in whatever form you like it.’ I asked him what can be unlocked by an adult male actor playing Rosalind, rather than a female actor? ‘No one can play the part of a woman, better than a woman. I believe she will have a more immediate connection to the dilemmas Rosalind has to face in the play.’ But his masculine perspective may have enabled Lester to add something different. ‘From the mouth of a male actor,’ Rosalind’s comments on ‘the nature of women and what they are like either in life or love...have a playful resonance and irony.’52
In productions today an actress cross-dressing as Ganymede can choose to heighten either, or both, of the feminine or masculine facets of Rosalind’s temperament. She may be able to embody as many, or even more, multiple selves than a male actor. When Buzz Goodbody directed As You Like It in 1973 for the RSC, ‘any hint of sexual equivocation [was] knocked on the head by Eileen Atkins’s minimal attempt to disguise her femininity as Rosalind. Indeed, with her headband, fringed blouse and crotch-hugging jeans, she seemed even more seductive as Ganymede than before.’53 This was a pivotal moment for one young spectator. ‘I remember the first Shakespeare play I ever saw, a production of As You Like It at Stratford with Eileen Atkins as Rosalind. And at the end of the show, I came dancing out of the theatre, and we got in our beige Mini and drove back up to Preston in Lancashire, and I turned to my Mum and said ‘That’s what I want to do when I grow up.’54 Gregory Doran grew up to become Artistic Director of the RSC. More than a generation after Eileen Atkins, the real-life partnership of Juliet Rylance and Christian Camargo directed by Sam Mendes at The Old Vic in 2010, illumined the masculine energy in her Rosalind and the feminine resources of his Orlando. They encapsulated Montaigne’s opinion in the translation by Florio that Shakespeare would have known. ‘I say that both male and female are cast in the same mold; instruction and custom excepted, there is no great difference between them.’55 Or as Harriet Walter said in 2015, ‘What I’m finding is how blurred the edge is between being a woman and a man interiorly.’56 For me, Rosalind is neither feminine nor masculine but embraces both sexes. She’s dual-gendered, universal and inclusive.
As Ganymede, Rosalind can reverse the usual dynamics of courtship, man wooing woman. With the liberty of androgyny, she can grasp the initiative. She has already set this up with her genius plan. He’s to ‘call me Rosalind and come every day to my cote and woo me.’ I’ll be you and you’ll be me. Her words have the simplicity of the nursery but also the guile of a woman in love. And like lovers anywhere waiting for that phone call, text, or ping from social media, Rosalind cannot endure a single minute’s delay to her next date, let alone an hour.
| Rosalind | Why, how now, Orlando, where have you been all this while? You a lover? An you serve me such another trick, never come in my sight more! |
| Orlando | My fair Rosalind, I come within an hour of my promise. |
| Rosalind | Break an hour’s promise in love? 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. |
| Orlando | Pardon me, dear Rosalind. |
| Rosalind | Nay, an you be so tardy, come no more in my sight. I had as lief be wooed of a snail.57 |
Ganymede demands the same punctuality as if he were indeed Orlando’s ‘very, very Rosalind.’ It’s courtship by proxy, conducted with the finesse of chess, for a love sparked in the brute physicality of a wrestling match. But Orlando’s not playing by the rules of Ganymede’s game which is courtship by conversation. Instead he tries stealing a kiss from the impossibly attractive boy. Even though constrained by a bewilderingly transvestite Ganymede/Rosalind, the ‘master-mistress of his passion,’58 Orlando’s love is not all theory. There has been kissing in Arden, ‘as full of sanctity as holy bread,’ Rosalind fervently reports to Celia. It’s a courtship full of implications for homoerotic love as well as for straight sex. Love is love, says Shakespeare in his modern way, wherever it’s to be found. ‘Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.’59 Nevertheless, Ganymede parries the kiss, ‘Nay, you were better speak first.’ ‘Am not I your Rosalind?’ she asks Orlando who ruefully concedes, ‘I take some joy to say you are, because I would be talking of her.’
| Rosalind | Well, in her person, I say I will not have you. |
| Orlando | Then, in mine own person, I die. |
| Rosalind | No, faith, die by attorney. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, (videlicit, [that’s to say] in a love-cause). Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Grecian club, yet he did what he could to die before, and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night; for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont and, being taken with the cramp, was drowned and the foolish chroniclers of that age found it was Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies. Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.60 |
When Orlando turns his passion into melodrama claiming it will kill him, Rosalind is ready to challenge him. As Ganymede, Rosalind can be far more forthright with Orlando, ‘man’ to man, than she could have been in a frock. Don’t be silly, she tells him, no one has actually died from lovesickness. ‘Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.’ [my italics]
However, though she’s ticked him off, Rosalind is in the grip of the same malady. Seizing the upper hand, she decides on a flash proposal. Rosalind’s ‘supreme moment of high camp is the wooing scene, where she pretends to be what she really is – Rosalind,’ observes feminist critic Camille Paglia.61 Rosalind has already disrupted the social etiquette of wooing, now she goes even further by proposing. In Lyly’s earlier play Galatea, transvestite Phillida said to Galatea, ‘It were a shame, if a maiden should be a suitor (a thing hated in that sex).’62 But as Ganymede, Rosalind is flying free. Under an alias, she can be her real self. And that self wants the commitment of marriage, and wants it now. She can present the proposal as make-believe for Orlando but it’s profoundly real for her. She even has a female celebrant, Celia, on hand, in an age which would have found the very idea beyond blasphemous.
| Rosalind | But come, now I will be your Rosalind in a more coming-on disposition, and ask me what you will, I will grant it. |
| Orlando | Then love me, Rosalind. |
| Rosalind | Yes, faith, will I, Fridays and Saturdays and all. |
| Orlando | And wilt thou have me? |
| Rosalind | Ay, and twenty such. |
| Orlando | What sayst thou? |
| Rosalind | Are you not good? |
| Orlando | I hope so. |
| Rosalind | Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing? Come, sister, you shall be the priest and marry us. Give me your hand, Orlando. What do you say, sister? |
| Orlando | Pray thee, marry us. |
| Celia | I cannot say the words. |
| Rosalind | You must begin: ‘Will you, Orlando –’ |
| Celia | Go to. – Will you, Orlando, have to wife this Rosalind? |
| Orlando | I will. |
| Rosalind | Ay, but when? |
| Orlando | Why now, as fust as she can marry us. |
| Rosalind | Then you must say: ‘I take thee, Rosalind, for wife.’ |
| Orlando | I take thee, Rosalind, for wife. |
| Rosalind | I might ask you for your commission. But I do take thee, Orlando, for my husband. There’s a girl goes before the priest, and certainly a woman’s thought runs before her actions.63 |
Even in the language of playschool, ‘You must begin...Then you must say..,’ Rosalind’s mock wedding feels as binding as a formal betrothal ahead of the marriage ceremony was in Shakespeare’s day. A pre-wedding betrothal may explain why his and Anne Hathaway’s first child, Susanna, born just six months after their wedding, did not imply a shotgun marriage. Susanna would have been seventeen when Shakespeare wrote As You Like It, the perfect age to inspire his creation of Rosalind. A few years later Susanna married John Hall.
| Witty above her sex, but that’s not all, Wise to Salvation was good Mistress Hall, Something of Shakespeare was in that Wholly of him with who she’s now in bliss. |
Susanna’s epitaph in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, could be a description of his model for Rosalind, Shakespeare’s portrait of his eldest daughter.
Rosalind and Orlando’s spontaneous, unofficial greenwood wedding completely renovates an aborted marriage of two scenes earlier. Jaques overhears Touchstone’s rash proposal to earthy goatherd Audrey just as Sir Oliver Mar-text, a dubious cleric, arrives to hitch the pair in a hurry. Not being a marrying man, Jaques can’t contain himself. He demands of Touchstone whether he wants to be married ‘under a bush like a beggar?’ Touchstone replies cynically that ‘not being well married, it will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife.’ The wedding is called off.
Unlike Touchstone and Audrey’s ditched ceremony, Rosalind’s mock wedding with Orlando has the sanctity of holy writ, even though she has no licence for it. The words she forces Celia to recite imitate the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer. ‘Will you, Orlando, have to wife this Rosalind?’ instead of the more archaic, ‘Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife?’64 The more idiomatic, ‘I take thee, Rosalind, for wife,’ in place of ‘I take thee [Rosalind] to my wedded wife.’ Concluding the impromptu ceremony, Rosalind in her role as Ganymede, must instantly puncture its solemnity. Orlando must not look too long or too deeply into her deceptive eyes. Anyway, a wedding is only a beginning, not a happy-ever-after, and Rosalind needs to teach Orlando what marriage really entails. Looking like a boy, she can ask him a graphic question about sex. ‘Now tell me how long you would have her after you have possessed her?’ Rapturously imagining making love with the Rosalind of his dreams, Orlando answers her question, ‘For ever and a day,’ in terms that explode time. His crazy hyperbole invites her bitter mockery:
| Rosalind | Say ‘a day,’ without the ‘ever.’ No, no, Orlando, men are April when they woo, December when they wed. Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives.65 |
Alex Waldmann who played Orlando in the 2013 RSC production, reflects that Rosalind ‘warns Orlando, you know, through Ganymede, about how difficult things are going to be. A marriage takes work, and it’s not always going to be fun, and there’ll be tears and pain.’66 Illustrating her lesson with a bizarre list of animal comparisons, Rosalind prepares Orlando for how a real woman could behave in the years after the wedding ceremony:
| Rosalind | I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more new-fangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey. I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry. I will laugh like a hyena, and that when thou art inclined to sleep.67 |
Bemused by this litany of female mood swings, Orlando asks, ‘will my Rosalind do so?’ Ganymede confirms, ‘By my life, she will do as I do.’ Moreover, there are special extra risks for a man who marries a witty, clever, talkative woman. It’s exactly her chatty intelligence that makes Rosalind beloved of bright girls everywhere.
| Orlando | O, but she is wise. |
| Rosalind | Or else she could not have the wit to do this – the wiser, the waywarder. Make the doors upon a woman’s wit and it will out at the casement. Shut that and ‘twill out at the key-hole. Stop that, ’twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney. |
| Orlando | A man that had a wife with such a wit, he might say, ‘Wit, whither wilt?’ |
| Rosalind | Nay, you might keep that check for it till you met your wife’s wit going to your neighbour’s bed. |
| Orlando | And what wit could wit have to excuse that? |
| Rosalind | Marry, to say she came to seek you there. You shall never take her without her answer unless you take her without her tongue.68 |
Rosalind’s tongue has a rough edge. She’s determined to raise all the negatives about women, love and marriage, and deflate Orlando’s claims for endless adoration. She sets out an intellectual rather than a financial pre-nup. She’s trying to prepare Orlando for the real world, for being a real husband to a real wife. Her wit is arousing for him and comforting for her. He can take it. But her speeding brain immediately recurs to the theme of time that torments all lovers.
| Orlando | For these two hours, Rosalind, I will leave thee. |
| Rosalind | Alas, dear love, I cannot lack thee two hours. |
| Orlando | I must attend the Duke at dinner. By two o’clock I will be with thee again. |
| Rosalind | Ay, go your ways, go your ways. I knew what you would prove. My friends told me as much and I thought no less. That flattering tongue of yours won me. ’Tis but one cast away, and so, come, death! Two o’clock is your hour? |
| Orlando | Ay, sweet Rosalind. |
| Rosalind | By my troth, and in good earnest, and so God mend me, and by all pretty oaths that are not dangerous, if you break one jot of your promise or come one minute behind your hour, I will think you the most pathetical break-promise and the most hollow lover and the most unworthy of her you call Rosalind that may be chosen out of the gross band of the unfaithful. Therefore beware my censure and keep your promise. |
| Orlando | With no less religion than if thou wert indeed my Rosalind. So adieu. |
| Rosalind | Well, Time is the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let Time try. Adieu.69 |
Although Rosalind is in control of her multiple identities, her underlying self contains fragility as well as enduring love. The rejection and betrayal she’s witnessed throughout her life, in both private and political spheres, have taught her to be on guard. But inhabiting Ganymede has only intensified her love for Orlando. It’s taught her as much as she’s trying to teach him. So when Celia berates Rosalind for simply misusing ‘our sex in your love prate,’ she responds with a piercing epiphany. She realises her affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal.’ As many fathoms deep in love now as Orlando, Rosalind cannot bear to be without him for a single second: ‘I’ll tell thee, Aliena, I cannot be out of the sight of Orlando. I’ll go find a shadow, and sigh till he come.’
However, before Orlando’s expected return, diversion arises in Arden like a musical refrain. Silvius brings a letter from Phebe addressed to Ganymede, which Rosalind first suspects Silvius has written. But when she reads it, she recognises it to be a love letter to Ganymede from the hand and heart of Phebe. In Rosalind’s judgement, Silvius deserves no pity. The Phebe/Silvius sub-plot ripples up to counterpoint the love story of Rosalind and Orlando. Missing his cue, Orlando yet again fails to keep his date but sends wicked brother Oliver instead. Oliver explains that Orlando has been injured saving his brother’s life, and as evidence he produces a napkin stained with Orlando’s blood. Rescuing Oliver from a lioness, the animal tore Orlando’s arm. As Ganymede faints, recovers, and then swears his blackout was all a fake, Oliver realises what Orlando probably has never guessed. Ganymede’s male identity is a sham. ‘You a man! You lack a man’s heart...take good heart and counterfeit to be a man.’ Rosalind has been outed by love itself.
Shakespeare now cuts from the sublime to the ridiculous, from noble to plebeian, from love to lust, to a glade where goatherd Audrey is nagging Touchstone for failing to get Sir Oliver Mar-text to marry them. The scene is a farcical recapitulation of Rosalind’s own faux wedding ceremony. But Touchstone asserts his genuine intentions by dispatching simple William, Audrey’s previous boyfriend, with a dozen witty threats that build into a hilarious crescendo of imperatives.
| Touchstone | Therefore, you clown, abandon (which is, in the vulgar, ‘leave’) the society (which in the boorish is ‘company’) of this female (which in the common is ‘woman); which together is: ‘abandon the society of this female’, or, clown, thou perishest! Or to thy better understanding, diest. Or (to wit) I kill thee, make thee away, translate thy life into death, thy liberty into bondage. I will deal in poison with thee, or in bastinado or in steel. I will bandy with thee in faction; I will o’errun thee with policy. I will kill thee a hundred and fifty ways! Therefore tremble and depart.70 |
After Touchstone’s fandango of words, Orlando finally arrives, his wounded arm in a sling, late for his tryst with Ganymede. Together they gossip about Oliver and Aliena [Celia] who have fallen in love so suddenly, ‘on so little acquaintance’, in subconscious parallel with their own love at first sight. Oliver has also told Orlando how Ganymede ‘counterfeited to swoon’ at the sight of the bloody handkerchief, and indeed ‘greater wonders than that.’ Alarmed that Orlando may have seen through her Ganymede disguise, Rosalind diverts him by ridiculing the speed of Oliver and Celia’s love affair. Her riff matches the escalating architecture of Touchstone’s speech a few lines earlier.
| Rosalind | For your brother and my sister no sooner met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved; no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs to marriage, which they will climb incontinent or else be incontinent before marriage.71 |
The thought of his brother’s imminent consummation with Aliena inflames Orlando. ‘O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!’ Games are no longer any use to him. Bluntly he tells Ganymede that he can live no longer by thinking. ‘I will weary you no longer with idle talking,’ responds Rosalind, taking the plunge.
| Rosalind | Believe then, if you please, that I can do strange things. I have since I was three year old conversed with a magician, most profound in his art and yet not damnable. If you do love Rosalind so near the heart as your gesture cries it out, when your brother marries Aliena shall you marry her. I know into what straits of fortune she is driven and it is not impossible to me, if it appear not inconvenient to you, to set her before your eyes tomorrow, human as she is, and without any danger.72 |
Ganymede promises Orlando, that as well as Aliena and Oliver, he too will be married tomorrow, ‘and to Rosalind, if you will.’ Inspired by the duality of being Ganymede, Rosalind now bids an amazed Orlando to attend their official marriage ceremony.
| Rosalind | Therefore put you in your best array, bid your friends; for if you will be married tomorrow you shall, and to Rosalind if you will.73 |
She is a woman with agency, the character who makes things happen in her play. She speaks in sober prose for ‘sober meanings.’ Rosalind has never been more in earnest.
Silvius and Phebe join them to change the tempo and the form. Silvius launches into verse to describe what his passionate version of courtly love feels like. It was an accepted convention of pastoral for chivalric love to be expressed by a shepherd. A quartet of lovers’ voices, Silvius, Phebe, Orlando and Rosalind, reiterate the same tune.
| Phebe | Good shepherd, tell this youth what ’tis to love. |
| Silvius | It is to be all made of sighs and tears, And so am I for Phebe. |
| Phebe | And I for Ganymede. |
| Orlando | And I for Rosalind. |
| Rosalind | And I for no woman. |
| Silvius | It is to be all made of faith and service, And so am I for Phebe. |
| Phebe | And I for Ganymede. |
| Orlando | And I for Rosalind. |
| Rosalind | And I for no woman. |
| Silvius | It is to be all made of fantasy, All made of passion, and all made of wishes, All adoration, duty and observance, All humbleness, all patience and impatience, All purity, all trial, all obedience, And so am I for Phebe. |
| Phebe | And so am I for Ganymede. |
| Orlando | And so am I for Rosalind. |
| Rosalind | And so am I for no woman. |
| Phebe | [to Rosalind]If this be so, why blame you me to love you? |
| Silvius | [to Phebe]If this be so, why blame you me to love you? |
| Orlando | If this be so, why blame you me to love you? |
| Rosalind | Who do you speak to, ‘Why blame you me to love you?’ |
| Orlando | To her that is not here nor doth not hear.74 |
Out of sheer exasperation Rosalind/Ganymede breaks the roundel with one of her most bizarre similes, ‘Pray you, no more of this; ‘tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon.’ She then launches into her speech of the great ‘IFs’ that underlie all gender possibilities, and instructs the lovers to meet tomorrow, all to be married, in ways that at that moment can seem only opaque.
| Rosalind | [to Silvius] I will help you, if I can. [to Phebe] I would love you, if I could. – Tomorrow meet me all together, [to Phebe] I will marry you, if ever I marry woman, and I’ll be married tomorrow, [to Orlando] I will satisfy you, if ever I satisfied man, and you shall be married tomorrow. [to Silvius] I will content you, if what pleases you contents you, and you shall be married tomorrow, [to Orlando] As you love Rosalind, meet, [to Silvius] As you love Phebe, meet. – And as I love no woman, I’ll meet. So fare you well. I have left you commands.75 [my italics for if] |
As soon as Ganymede signals the final untangling of gender, we hear that the unlikely union of the fourth pair of lovers, Touchstone and Audrey, is also re- scheduled for ‘the joyful day’ tomorrow.
While awaiting Ganymede’s appearance, Duke Senior and Orlando wonder whether he can perform what he’s promised. Ganymede, master of ceremonies, checks everyone is ready to fulfil their marriage contracts. S/he and Aliena depart, presumably for a costume change. Duke Senior muses that he’s noticed ‘some lively touches of my daughter’s favour’ in Ganymede, and Orlando remarks he’s thought so, too. Touchstone picks up Ganymede’s recent riff and giving the actors time to don their wedding finery, he first recalls Jaques’ catalogue of ‘Seven’, and then extemporises on that pregnant two-lettered word, IF.
| Touchstone | Upon a lie seven times removed – bear your body more seeming, Audrey – as thus, sir. I did dislike the cut of a certain courtier’s beard. He sent me word, if I said his beard was not cut well, he was in the mind it was. This is called the ‘retort courteous’. If I sent him word again it was not well cut, he would send me word he cut it to please himself. This is called the ‘quip modest’. If again it was not well cut, he disabled my judgement. This is called the ‘reply churlish’. If again it was not well cut, he would answer I spake not true. This is called the ‘reproof valiant’. If again it was not well cut, he would say I lie. This is called the ‘countercheck quarrelsome’ – and so to the ‘lie circumstantial’ and the ‘lie direct’...All these you may avoid but the lie direct and you may avoid that too, with an ‘if’. I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel, but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an ‘if: as, ‘if you said so, then I said so’; and they shook hands and swore brothers. Your ‘if is the only peacemaker; much virtue in ‘if’.76 |
And if Ganymede is now a woman, as appearance seems to say when Rosalind returns to marry Orlando, in one small sad couplet Phebe realises that, at least in 1599, she can’t marry the pretty youth of her infatuation.
| Duke Senior | If there be truth in sight, you are my daughter. |
| Orlando | If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind. |
| Phebe | If sight and shape be true, Why then, my love adieu. |
And Rosalinds declaration’s as she divests herself of Ganymede, at least for the time being, are built on a triple If.
| Rosalind | I’ll have no father, if you be not he. I’ll have no husband, if you be not he. Nor ne’er wed woman, if you be not she.77 [my italics for all the ifs] |
Jan Kott, the influential Polish theatre critic, who famously called Shakespeare our Contemporary in his inspirational book of 1964, asked himself what exactly is Rosalind’s gender? ‘Rosalind is Ganymede, and Ganymede is Rosalind. But what is Rosalind’s gender? What is Ganymede’s gender?’78 In the endless possibilities of Rosalind, Kott found a character who extends our concepts of identity. Who are we in the final analysis? Through Rosalind, Shakespeare explores the idea that none of us is purely female or purely male. As human beings we are complex, and Rosalind offers us the perfect image to encompass the many nuances of human sexuality.
When boys no longer played Rosalind and the stage was accessible to professional women actors, Shakespeare’s cross-dressed heroines could be played with a new piquancy. At Smallhythe Place in Kent I saw a full-length lithograph of Ellen Tree, later Eleanora Kean, in her Ganymede costume playing Rosalind, which she did both in America and England in the early nineteenth century.79 Victorian ringlets corkscrew down each side of her face and on her head is a toque that looks as if it’s made from a feather boa. Her square-necked, softly belted tunic ends well above the knee. Cross lacing over her bosom accentuates her femininity rather than conceals it. One sleeve is folded over her arm, the other droops into a pointed, medieval shape. Tucked into her belt is a small hunting horn, useful in the forest. Her size zero model legs end in cuffed ankle boots. One long tapering hand cradles her boar-spear and she’s slung a short cloak round her shoulders. She doesn’t really look male at all.
Ellen Tree had stage presence. Though her features were too strong for conventional prettiness, she was nevertheless considered beautiful. ‘Her aquiline nose was offset by large flashing eyes, abundant brown hair, full lips, and a dazzling smile. She stood 5 feet 4 inches tall, was slender and graceful, with a resonant, musical, and emotively expressive voice. Her unique laugh could send audiences into gales.’80 She could do gaiety and it’s easy to imagine how erotic her Rosalind must have been.
American Charlotte Cushman, one of the most famous actresses on both sides of the Atlantic during the nineteenth century, made a splash in 1846 when she played Romeo at the Haymarket Theatre. Ellen Tree had also been Romeo, and earlier, Sarah Siddons had played Hamlet. Cross-gender casting existed long before the twenty-first century. Cushman’s Rosalind looked every inch a man...Her mind became masculine as well as her outward semblance.’81 ‘Airy young gentlemen would have said she was “a deuced good fellow” and so she was!’82 Cushman’s lesbianism informed her acting, although it couldn’t be openly acknowledged. La grande Charlotte’s figure ‘might have been that of a robust man; while her amorous endearments were of so erotic a character that no man would have dared to indulge in them coram publico,’83 She made a majestic and Veritable Ganymede’ when she lounged into the Forest of Arden. ‘Her comedy was rich and racy. Certain Shakespearian lines, which in this superfine age we have suppressed as indecorous, came lilting off her lips with a sense of enjoyment in which she appeared to relish,’ reminisced fellow actor, John Coleman in 1904, once Silvius to the Rosalind of ‘La Cushman’, as he looked back over fifty years on the stage.84
Coleman played Orlando to a completely different Rosalind, the super-feminine, ‘divine’ and ‘incomparable’ actress, Helen Faucit. Nevertheless, he expressed equal and undying admiration for both these Victorian women, from opposite ends of the female spectrum. Sexual ambiguity reaches perfection in Rosalind when a boy actor playing a girl, dresses up as a boy who then pretends to be a girl. By the epilogue, the boy actor at the Globe in 1599, or the man or woman playing Rosalind today, has explored many liberating options for human identity.
*A cutlass, a short broad-bladed sword.