CURTAIN DOWN – LIGHTS UP – FINIS – EXIT – CUT!
Rosalind steps forward, alone, the focus of all eyes, to deliver her epilogue, the only heroine Shakespeare entrusted with this task. As well as star actor, she’s been director and dramaturge, like David Garrick, Henry Irving or Kenneth Branagh, organising people and events from the moment she fell in love with Orlando, until this finale. But her mood isn’t elegiac. Instead, it’s insouciant, loving, mischievous, embracing, as she invites our applause for her play. The epilogue marks the transfiguration and the enduring appeal of Rosalind. She’s not the same green girl at the end of the play that she was at the beginning. She’s authoritative and confident. Actors and audience together have tracked Rosalind’s progress through the play’s five Acts. With eternal youth intact, she now breaks out of her chrysalis to advance to full maturity in the epilogue.
Rosalind says goodbye with a kiss, as if each one of us were Orlando. To both sexes s/he offers whatever we desire, as we like it. ‘I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell’ – by putting our hands together in ovation. The clapping breaks the spell and we leave the theatre elated and transformed before returning to the ‘real’ world, the rolling stream of life, and the business of living.
When Sophie Thompson (Emma’s younger sister) played Rosalind in John Caird’s production for the RSC in 1989/90, Orlando moved downstage first, as if he was about to deliver the final words, symmetrically balancing the fact that he’d opened the play five Acts earlier. But then he dried up, just as tongue-tied as he’d been when he first caught sight of Rosalind at the wrestling match in Act I. In this production, she watched him struggle, then pushed past to rescue him, launching into, ‘It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue,’ before finishing the rest of the epilogue herself. It was comic and convincing.1 The 2014 Southwark Playhouse production also used physical movement to indicate how far Rosalind had closed the gender gap. Sally Scott, who played Rosalind, told me, ‘I felt it was very important for Rosalind to have the last word.’ The Duke made to step forward, but ‘I just pushed him aside. It felt a bit like those wedding speeches when the father of the bride gets up to do the speech, and you think, well, actually I’ll talk about myself.’2
The epilogue, like all of Rosalind’s part, was written for a boy actor to perform: a boy who first plays a woman, who then plays a man, and finally reveals himself as the female Rosalind in order to marry Orlando. Except that there’s a further sex change still to come, for as Rosalind points out in the epilogue, ‘she’ was a boy acting the role all along. All that quick-change layering reaches a giddying climax in the epilogue. When Rosalind asks us to ‘like as much of this play as please you,’ to take it or leave it, exactly ‘as you like it,’ we hear not just the actor but Shakespeare breathing his own words into her mouth. His invisible presence pulses through Rosalind’s epilogue. It feels like one of those rare occasions when we may be hearing the voice of Shakespeare himself.3
Rosalind breaks the first convention of epilogues by speaking as a woman. She also breaks the second convention by speaking in prose, at a time when epilogues were usually delivered in verse. However, another cross-dressing heroine, John Lyly’s Galatea, had delivered a prose epilogue, a decade before Rosalind.
| Galatea | Go all, ’tis I only that conclude all. You ladies [not ‘women’ as Rosalind says] may see that Venus can make constancy fickleness, courage cowardice, modesty lightness, working things impossible in your sex, and tempering hardest hearts like softest wool. Yield, ladies, yield to love, ladies, which lurketh under your eyelids whilst you sleep, and playeth with your heartstrings whilst you wake; whose sweetness never breedeth satiety, labour weariness, nor grief bitterness. Cupid was begotten in a mist, nursed in clouds, and sucking only upon conceits. Confess him a conqueror, whom ye ought to regard, sith it is unpossible to resist; for this in infallible, that love conquereth all things but itself, and ladies all hearts but their own.4 |
Galatea’s epilogue doesn’t attempt Rosalind’s risky strategy of dismantling the usual binary division between the sexes. She focuses on the comforting but predictable message that love conquers all. Unlike Galatea, Rosalind embraces complexity to unpeel yet a further layer of identity. Opening with characteristic attack, she seems to speak in the half-broken voice of a liberated teenage boy actor. ‘It is not the fashion to see the lady the Epilogue,’ s/he swaggers in the same voice that Ganymede used to court Orlando. I wonder if the youth who first played the part in 1599 came out of role in the epilogue, revealing his true masculine persona, or did he stay in character as Rosalind? We can never know. And what does the actress playing Rosalind today make of the great ‘IF’ of the play, ‘If I were a woman’? She may dip a curtsey, offer a bow, and speak both as male and female. Rosalind is not a-gender, she’s gender fluid. ‘Let’s be done with gender stereotyping,’ as Juliet Stevenson says.5 The epilogue is where Rosalind makes her inclusive great leap into the future.
Today film can make combi-gender and every gradation visual in new ways. If we could put Shakespeare into a time machine, how he would have revelled in the freedom of the movies. At the end of Paul Czinner’s 1936 film of As You Like It, the word EPILOGUE is engraved across a pair of wrought iron gates as they swing shut. Materialising before them, Elisabeth Bergner effortlessly sloughs skins from Ganymede into Rosalind, fading into and out of gender in a way that couldn’t happen on stage. She made the epilogue magical, touching and erotic.
Seventy years later in 2006, Kenneth Branagh explored how film can interpret Shakespeare afresh. He set As You Like It in the dreamtime location of nineteenth-century Japan, actually shot among the trees of Wakehurst Place garden in West Sussex, Southern England. Branagh visually exploited the curious challenge he’d set himself.6 He realised he could offset the imagery of Japanese prayer flags with the green shades of an English springtime. So he put all his bridegrooms against the flags awaiting their brides. In the finale, the cast whirled and danced back to the indoor Japanese court with its geometrically patterned floors and screens. From nineteenth-century Japan we cut seamlessly to the here and now, among all the paraphernalia of film making, cameras and caravans. Bryce Dallas Howard as Rosalind reappeared in her Ganymede outfit while the production team bustled around her. Suddenly we were back in our own western times with cars and movie trailers moving about as the off-camera staff started clearing the set. Watching the behind the scenes business of film made a neat parallel with the meta-theatrical way Rosalind’s epilogue refers to acting and the playhouse to spin us through gender. The set was being broken up before our eyes as she gave the epilogue, speaking it as though the most natural thing in the world. It made modern sense of words and theatrical conventions more than four centuries old. Rosalind straddled the film’s three time zones, said goodbye to her viewers, then firmly shut her trailer door. CUT!
After Rosalind has resolved her play, made ‘these doubts all even,’ restored paternity to her father, and given herself in marriage to Orlando, she does even stranger things in the epilogue. She becomes the playwright, writes the script for her own ending, and so breaks through the unseen fourth wall of theatre, between the world of the play and the world outside. Here she’s at her most agile, slithering from gender to gender, both baffling and releasing the audience. By this stage of the play she’s been through at least half a dozen illusory changes of sex. Her merging of gender and identity reaches apotheosis in the epilogue, where she speaks as an actor but transcends the role. Rosalind becomes man and woman. Everyperson. Past, present and future.
In Shakespeare’s day, a male actor played a woman, Rosalind. The boy dressed as a girl then disguised himself as Ganymede who pretended to be Rosalind in order to play a dating game with Orlando with whom ‘she’ was in love, and who was in love with her. In the play’s final Act, the boy actor impersonated Rosalind in order to marry Orlando. But in the epilogue Rosalind could change back into the boy player ‘she’ had always been. When the actor says today, ‘If I were a woman,’ how can we unravel this conundrum? In 1599 a male actor in his female persona suggested a mirage of potential. The Elizabethan audience was used to boy actors playing girls. They could accept the topsy-turvy convention, however pantomime or bizarre it seems to us. Perhaps they didn’t see Rosalind as a woman or a man but as an all-encompassing human figure.
The 2015 production at Shakespeare’s Globe hurtled us back to the way Rosalind might have performed the epilogue in 1599. Garlanded in her golden farthingale and airy cream ruff, Michelle Terry embodied a sumptuous vision of femininity, even recalling the young Elizabeth. But with the words, ‘If I were a woman,’ she ripped off her wide skirt to reveal a Ganymede suit of golden breeches and white hose. The audience gasped as she held the pose looking like an image of Virginia Woolf’s dual-sex Orlando. We were racing back and forth through time. It was a startling moment even in 2015, and an entirely plausible suggestion of how a boy actor might have delivered the epilogue in Shakespeare’s day.
After the Restoration when the first female actress appeared on stage to say, ‘If I were a woman,’ she could make sense of it by implying, ‘If I were a real woman like one of you in the audience instead of a fictional character like Rosalind...’ because in the epilogue, we see the actor beneath the role. At one performance the actor was tragically unmasked. In 1757, Peg Woffington, notorious for her ‘breeches’ parts and scandalous love life, collapsed in the middle of speaking the epilogue. ‘O God! O God!’ she screamed as she lurched into the wings where stagehands caught her. Even though Woffington was cut down by a stroke, the impact of her vivacious Rosalind would never die.7 Rosalind’s epilogue marks our liberation. She sends us back to the world with our minds and hearts open to a more humane view of relations between the sexes. Her work is done. She is free to dissolve, disappear, and leave us. Her character has always been a fiction, however real she’s seemed. But the liberating ideas she leaves us with are material to our lives.
Shakespeare later risked a similar effect in the epilogue to All’s Well that Ends Well. Its rhyming couplets make it sound far less innovative than Rosalind’s wiry prose. The actor playing the King of France sheds his royal identity, although not his gender, to crave indulgence for the play we’ve just watched and applause for the company’s efforts. We watch the man beneath the skin as the actor steps out of role in a way that far pre-dates Brecht.
| The king’s a beggar, now the play is done; All is well ended if this suit be won, That you express content; which we will pay With strife to please you, day exceeding day. Ours be your patience then and yours our parts; Your gentle hands lend us and take our hearts.8 |
These metaphors of theatre and performance run throughout Shakespeare’s plays. They are especially resonant in As You Like It and Hamlet, both written in 1599. Duke Senior’s image of ‘this wide and universal theatre’9 prompts Jaques to remind us we strut life’s stage only for our brief allotted span.
| Jaques | All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.10 |
Life as theatre was a familiar comparison during an age whose chief communal entertainments, apart from the church and the gallows, were in the playhouse. Sir Walter Raleigh explored the same metaphor in a poignant late poem, perhaps written while imprisoned in the Tower during the reign of James I.
| What is our life? A play of passion, Our mirth the music of division. Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be, Where we are dressed for this short comedy. Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is, That sits and marks still who doth act amiss. Our graves that hide us from the searching sun Are like drawn curtains when the play is done. Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest, Only we die in earnest, that’s no jest.11 |
Life, like acting, is the performance art we all take part in, and Rosalind, more than anyone, understands the intimate connection between the two. In the Forest of Arden she discovers herself as a true thespian and gives the performance of her life as Ganymede. Her final colloquy with her audience is shot through with theatrical references to epilogue, prologue, good plays and good epilogues.
By her epilogue, Rosalind has broken all conventions of costume and gender. As she unpeels herself, we see the various Rosalinds. We’re all acting; actors are all characters; characters do, and do not exist. Rosalind encapsulates the idea that these apparent opposites can be simultaneously true. She’s boy and girl. She marches out of her uncle’s French court, marches into England, Arden, Eden and everywhere. She’s individual and everywoman, in a fictitious drama and yet alive, threatened by death but never dying, a heroine who breaks the bounds of her play and lives on long after it’s over. Falstaff and Hamlet share an afterlife with her and inhabit our collective imaginations. The favourite fantasy of literary scholar Harold Bloom ‘is that Falstaff did not allow himself to be done in by his murderous adopted son, the dreadful Prince Hal, and instead Shakespeare let him wander off to the Forest of Arden. There he sat on one end of a log, with the beautiful Rosalind on the other, and the two matched wits.’12
In Twelfth Night, the comedy thought to follow shortly after As You Like It in 1600, Feste the Clown sings the epilogue. He’s an observer or commentator on human frailty. In just five stanzas, each with its poignant refrain, For the rain it raineth every day, he recalls the inexorable procession of Jaques’ Seven Ages of Man speech, though Feste truncates them to just four.
| Clown sings | When that I was and a little tiny boy, |
| With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, | |
| A foolish thing was but a toy, | |
| For the rain it raineth every day. |
| But when I came to man’s estate, | |
| With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, | |
| ’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate, | |
| For the rain it raineth every day. |
| But when I came, alas, to wive, | |
| With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, | |
| By swaggering could I never thrive, | |
| For the rain it raineth every day. |
| But when I came unto my beds, | |
| With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, | |
| With toss-pots still ’had drunken heads, | |
| For the rain it raineth every day. |
| A great while ago the world begun, | |
| With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, | |
| But that’s all one, our play is done, | |
| And we’ll strive to please you every day.13 |
After all, it’s only theatre. Having spent the play in his own particular disguise as a Fool, Feste dispels the world of the play with music, and copies the actor’s usual ploy, and Rosalind’s, by inviting us to break the magic with applause.
A decade after Rosalind brought As You Like It to its audacious conclusion, Dekker and Middleton gave an epilogue to their heroine Moll Cutpurse, the Roaring Girl, played, of course, by a boy actor.
| Moll | ...we with the painter shall |
| In striving to please all please none at all. Yet for such faults as either the writers’ wit Or negligence of the actors do commit, Both crave your pardons; if what both have done Cannot full pay your expectation, The Roaring Girl here herself shall hence Upon this stage give larger recompense, Whose mirth that you may share, in herself does woo you, And craves this sign: your hands to beckon her to you.14 |
Shakespeare had his epilogue imitators but they didn’t expand, as he did, the range and potential of human development. However much brio Moll attempts, her epilogue is far less daring than Rosalind’s. The Roaring Girl’s purpose is to ingratiate her play, invite applause, advertise the next performance of the boy actor playing her, or perhaps the sensational appearance of Mary Frith, the real life model for Moll, at the Fortune Theatre. Where Rosalind strips back gender in the brisk colloquial prose of everyday, Moll’s voice is constrained by clumsy rhyming couplets and doesn’t challenge the identity of the boy actor taking the role. Yet both heroines confront our preconceptions about exactly what is a woman, what is a man. Moll, however, unlike Rosalind, reaches her epilogue fundamentally unchanged. She remains exactly what she is, a cross-dressing woman, like the real-life Mary Frith. But in her epilogue Rosalind weaves in and out of gender, intimately connecting with every member of her audience, inviting us to reassess the teasing nature of sexual desire. A satirist of society’s preconceptions about gender, Rosalind anticipates the twenty-first century’s dissolving norms of human relationships.
Since As You Like It was revived in 1740, Rosalind has usually, though not always, been played by a woman. This makes the epilogue doubly challenging for actresses who can find the line, ‘If I were a woman,’ either perplexing or even fatally embarrassing. Helen Faucit who played an acclaimed Rosalind many times during the Victorian era found the epilogue filled her with ‘shrinking distaste.’ It’s not clear whether she retained the line, ‘If I were a woman,’ as she confessed she omitted some words and altered others. ‘Speaking the Epilogue remained the one drawback to my pleasure. In it one addresses the audience neither as Ganymede nor as Rosalind, but as one’s own very self. Anything of this kind was repugnant to me, my desire always being to lose myself in the character I was representing. When taken thus perforce out of my ideal, I felt stranded and altogether unhappy. Except when obliged, as in this instance, I never addressed an audience, having neither the wish nor the courage to do so. Therefore, as I advanced to speak the Epilogue, a painful shyness came over me, a kind of nervous fear, too, lest I should forget what I had to say, – a fear I never had at other times, – and thus the closing words always brought to me a sense of inexpressible relief.’15
In her self-conscious presentation of femininity, Helen Faucit felt exposed by the gender-teasing epilogue Shakespeare had written nearly three hundred years before for a boy to deliver. Had she become a professional actress as a way to conceal or protect her inner self? Would Faucit have felt less exposed if she’d been a man playing the part? Ronald Pickup, Rosalind in 1967, simply loved giving the epilogue, in some ways his favourite speech of the play. ‘It was wonderful and extraordinary. I just spoke it as me, speaking to the audience in my own voice. We had embraced an audience and they were ready to respond.’16 Yet even today, an actress can feel her soul laid bare in the epilogue, as Sally Scott did in 2014. ‘It’s not really Rosalind, it’s not really Ganymede, it’s sort of Sally, and I’m coming forward, and it’s the actor and that’s what’s scary about it.’17
There’s a clip on YouTube of Peggy Ashcroft performing the epilogue in 1957. Her RP diction is of its time, clipped, very British, and initially distancing. But then Ashcroft’s energy and laugh break through, so you hear Rosalind, the authentic iconoclast. If the play has worked, the epilogue should move us, as well as make us laugh. Those who saw Maggie Smith’s Rosalind at Stratford, Ontario in 1978/9, have never forgotten her epilogue. She reminded critic Ronald Bryden of Hans Christian Andersen’s mermaid, ‘walking on knives to be near her prince’. For Bernard Levin, Maggie Smith’s Rosalind was one of the definitive performances of his lifetime. ‘She spoke the epilogue like a chime of golden bells. But what she looked like as she did so I cannot tell you; for I saw it through eyes curtained with tears of joy.’18
Actresses today, like Juliet Stevenson, acknowledge the challenge of delivering the epilogue as a woman. They can only experiment and reimagine a Rosalind for our times. In the epilogue Rosalind holds her arms wide open to embrace a modern new world where distinctions of hetero or homo, character and self are blurred. When it was written, As You Like It celebrated the loves that were then permitted – and more – but new Rosalinds can include every kind of love. Juliet Stevenson found, ‘the epilogue is very problematic, because it’s quite clearly written for a boy, and all the wit in it concerns the fact that it’s a boy saying, ‘If I were...’ But we found a way through that. The audience doesn’t leave the theatre necessarily united. There may be some conversations in the car on the way home that are challenging!’19 As challenging perhaps as when Ibsen’s shocking new play, A Doll’s House, opened in Copenhagen in 1879 before reaching Broadway and London ten years later. Nora was said to have incited women to demand divorce as they were driven home in their carriages after the play.
Rosalind’s epilogue can feel so problematic that some productions cut it altogether, as Christine Edzard decided to in her 1992 film of As You Like It. The setting in a contemporary urban wasteland made the epilogue seem unplayable, perhaps because there was no live audience to connect with. In the same year Adrian Lester played Rosalind in Cheek by Jowl’s stage production. During the opening scenes as Rosalind at court, Lester used a slightly higher tone than his usual male voice. Then he lowered its timbre a little when in disguise as Ganymede. But this, as he told me, is how he approached Rosalind’s epilogue. ‘I tried to deliver it as honestly as I could. She/he thanks the audience for watching the play, flirts with both sexes in the audience a little, then for the line ‘If I were a woman’ I removed my head tie, earrings, and adjusted my voice so that I was no longer pretending to be female and wished them a good night. The moment I changed my voice, in some performances, got a huge intake of breath from the audience. The epilogue is a grateful acknowledgement that they have stayed and listened to the story. It can also be a plea for forgiveness if you have offended. But it always reminds you that you have been watching people pretend. And pretence is one of the core themes of the play.’20 At the end it came as a shock to ‘see’ a male actor standing there. Adrian Lester could achieve this effect because he was an adult man, he wasn’t a boy actor with an unbroken voice in 1599, nor even a woman of today. He could embody Everyperson.
Actresses adjust the way they perform the epilogue to fit their own interpretation of Rosalind. For Juliet Rylance in 2010, the epilogue was ‘as much about Rosalind trying to figure out what the play has been about, as what the story means to the audience. I feel that she gets to the point where she realises that it’s just about love conquering all. There’s nothing else, there’s nothing more than that.’ In Sam Mendes’ modern dress production at the Old Vic, Rylance knew she had to deliver the epilogue for her own times, not try to recreate the way a boy actor might have done it in 1599. The house lights went up and for the first time Rosalind could see us as clearly as we could see her. She who had been asking so many questions throughout the play looked for the answer in the audience. Rylance told me, ‘they have it, they’re just parts of you, they are the thirteenth character in the play. And you have to engage with them – so find the answers from them. I thought the epilogue is such a direct conversation. I can see everybody and we can really converse, breaking the spell, saying we’re all together now and I’m talking to you, and you, and you.’21 In giving us Rosalind’s epilogue, Rylance returned us all to the real world.
Rosalind masterminds the denouement of As You Like It as Prospero unravels the plot at the end of The Tempest. Like Prospero, she’s interested in magic. Since childhood, she claims, she’s been taking lessons in the paranormal from a wise old magician. She may not brandish Prospero’s magic staff, but she too can conjure visions and work enchantments like a modern movie director. Derek Jarman’s innovative 1979 film of The Tempest presented viewers with one of Prospero’s earlier elegiac speeches instead of his usual epilogue. Prospero’s poetic, airy verse seems at first far removed from the ludic, questing prose of Rosalind’s epilogue with its ‘ifs’ of possibility, but like her, he plays on the illusory nature of theatre.
| Prospero | Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air; And – like the baseless fabric of this vision – The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.22 [my italics] |
As Prospero, played by Heathcote Williams in Jarman’s film, lay in reverie, his voiceover floated into our ears, so we felt we were entering his inner consciousness. Giving this as Prospero’s epilogue, with its foreshadowing of Raleigh’s poem, revived in my head Jaques’ earlier ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech that compares theatrical entrances and exits with the ages, acts, scenes, and brevity of human life.
In The Tempest everyone learns something but the person who learns most, perhaps, is Prospero himself. Like Rosalind before him, though with darker magic arts at his disposal, Prospero has been the actor-manager of his play, and brought more than lovers to a satisfactory conclusion. He has learnt to turn aside from fraternal revenge, just as Duke Senior and Orlando have forgiven their erring brothers. In the comedy of As You Like It, Duke Frederick and Oliver are enabled to be re-made and converted. However, by 1611 when the Tempest had its first performance, it’s questionable whether Prospero’s forgiven brother, the usurping Duke of Milan, really learns anything. Prospero himself, though angry and wronged, has the strength to pardon his enemies and break his magic wand. He keeps his promise to Ariel. He forgives Caliban for plotting to overthrow him and turns aside from vengeance. Divested of his magic, the incantatory rhyming couplets of his epilogue, so different from Rosalind’s playful, colloquial prose, undress him to become just another human being, whose power to forgive has set him free. Like Rosalind, he’s one of us, he’s become an Everyman.
| Prospero | Now my charms are all o’erthrown, And what strength I have’s mine own, Which is most faint. Now, ’tis true I must be here confined by you, Or sent to Naples. Let me not, Since I have my dukedom got And pardoned the deceiver, dwell In this bare island by your spell; But release me from my bands With the help of your good hands. Gentle breath of yours my sails Must fill, or else my project fails, Which was to please. Now I want Spirits to enforce, art to enchant; And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself, and frees all faults. As you from crimes would pardoned be, Let your indulgence set me free.23 |
The epilogues of Rosalind and Prospero strip their impersonators, respectively, of gender confusion, and magic, allowing them to vanish into the wings, or back into everyday life. But they both retain the richness of their discoveries. We can be man and woman in every gradation of sexuality, and an inclusive Everyperson. The house lights may go up as Prospero speaks or dreams his epilogue, asking us to liberate him from the island by our prayer. In prayer we put our hands together as we do for applause, exactly as Rosalind asks us – to ‘bid me farewell.’
Sharing three hours of the play together creates an intimate connection between actor and audience, and Rosalind’s epilogue performs the final bonding alchemy. The spirit of the play may leave us changed, as well as Rosalind. As Pippa Nixon, who played the role for the RSC in 2013, observes, ‘Rosalind is one of life’s great teachers and you find that rather than simply playing the part, “giving your Rosalind,” she has indeed given and transformed you.’24 If the play has worked, the epilogue leaves me uplifted and released in comedy’s parallel to tragic catharsis. Rosalind is forever young but she speaks to people of all ages, not just to those in love, or to those in love unrequitedly, but to those who ‘have loved ere now,’ either with memories of first love, or with long lives of enduring love.
Rosalind is universal, she partakes of both sexes, she opens up opportunities for all of us to dare, to organise and to direct our own life stories. During the play she has extended the frontiers of our so-called ‘male’ and ‘female’ human natures to embrace a larger humanity. By the epilogue she encapsulates all possibilities. She is you and me. We are all Rosalind now.