[In the following essay, Gay analyzes the meaning of gender within the context of Elizabethan theater.]

Few critical issues in Shakespearean comedy have been discussed more energetically in the last twenty years than the question of what it meant to an Elizabethan audience to see boys playing the roles of women. For modern play-goers it is largely a dead issue … ; since the mid-seventeenth century the roles of Rosalind and Celia, Phebe and Audrey, have been claimed as their right by actresses who revel in the richness of Shakespeare's language and the potential for complex explorations of gender and sexuality that the roles allow.

There is an important distinction to be made here in the ideas about what it is that the actor/actress does on stage: do they impersonate the character or do they imitate it, standing apart from it a little so that we can see the gap between the actor and the role? Modern Western actors, for the most part, are locked into an ideology of ‘becoming’ the character, an ideology based on the dominance of naturalism in twentieth-century theatre, and particularly on the claim of films to represent ‘reality’ and therefore to demand total immersion of actors in the roles they are performing. This was not the theory in Elizabethan theatre, though throughout the history of Western theatre we find audiences praising actors for their ‘natural’ representation of characters. (A glance at any fifty-year-old film, however, will demonstrate that the criteria of ‘natural’ acting change approximately every half-century.)

Elizabethan theatre and acting delighted in the conscious recognition of its own artificiality. Disguise, masks, the performance of plays within plays, and word-play by characters on the notions of acting and theatre, are some of the means by which this consciousness was never allowed to lapse. Moreover, the plays that were performed on Shakespeare's stage almost never purported to represent contemporary life: their worlds were distant in time and place. Further, the characters spoke in blank verse most of the time—an artificially heightened version of the English language that allowed rich use of metaphor and other poetic devices that gave pleasure to audience and readers. (As You Like It has Jaques remind the audience of just this convention of artificiality: ‘Nay then God buy you, and you talk in blank verse!’ (4. 1. 29)—ironically enough, in response to Orlando's natural-sounding ‘Good day and happiness, dear Rosalind’.)

Nevertheless, C. L. Barber, in the seminal work Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959) observed that Shakespeare

wrote at a moment when the educated part of society was modifying a ceremonial, ritualistic conception of human life to create a historical, psychological conception. His drama, indeed, was an important agency in this transformation: it provided a ‘theater’ where the failures of ceremony could be looked at in a place apart and understood as history; it provided new ways of representing relations between language and action so as to express personality … his comedy presents holiday magic as imagination, games as expressive gestures.¹

I shall explore the idea of Shakespeare's injection of ‘personality’ into roles for actors later … by comparison with Lodge's originary text Rosalynd. Perhaps the vexed notion of ‘naturalism’ can be laid to rest with the formulation that Shakespeare's lines and scenes—despite their poetic artifice and witty conceits—are rich and complex enough for actors to apply their culture's notion of psychology to the characters. There is enough in the lines that actors can make sense of; they can fill in the missing bits of their narratives to create an illusion for the audience of meaningful human behaviour.

Whereas in the tragedies Shakespeare helps the actor create this illusion by providing him with soliloquies in which he explains himself to the audience (thereby, paradoxically, breaking a simple illusion of naturalism, the ‘fourth wall’ convention), in As You Like It there are no soliloquies. ‘What is missing’, says Karen Newman,

is not a sense of [Rosalind's] inner life or personal struggles … but rather self-consciousness about that equipoise expressed through soliloquy. Rosalind's inner debates are externalized in her role as Ganymede/Rosalind, and we are correspondingly distanced from her feelings, however much we may appreciate her character. We share the pleasures of flirtations, of transvestism, of shifting roles and playful irony, all of which testify to Rosalind's fascination by giving her dimensions in excess of her function. We are called upon to hold together, in the study or in performance, the multiple aspects of her character, but we never have the sense that she herself recognizes or struggles with that multiplicity.²

This seems to me a helpful formulation of a tricky issue. Rosalind, in her highly theatrical role as girl-playing-boy-playing-girl, is clearly a performative character: her role is to embody and make available to the audience the performative nature of those ‘natural’ categories we take for granted, such as gender. And here, if we wish, we can take into consideration the historical fact that this immensely playable and therefore believable character was originally performed by a boy (as were also, of course, Celia, Audrey, and Phebe). Michael Shapiro suggests of the original performances of the play,

On Shakespeare's stage, these oscillations [between female and male identity] became even more dazzling in the light of the spectators' dual consciousness of the boy actor producing all of these abrupt shifts. These multiple layers of identity and the swift movements from one to another produced a theatrical vibrancy that engaged audiences in the illusion that an amalgam constructed of multiple and discrete layers of identity represented a unified character.³

The notion of a ‘unified character’ might well be an anachronism, as I suggested above, but Shapiro does point to one of the particular pleasures that the play provides: the Elizabethan theatre's liminal space is here utilized to disrupt fixed notions of gender through a safe and pleasurable spectacle: the boy who plays the girl (who, in this play, even more disruptively, plays the boy who plays the girl).

Much recent scholarship has attempted to tease out, through the reading of other contemporary documents, just what were the erotic and sexual politics of this experience for that original audience.⁴ Was it a homoerotic stage? that is, was the pleasure of the audience in watching the representation of the heterosexual lovemaking in fact a much more subversive pleasure in watching a man and a boy make love? Undoubtedly in As You Like It the audience was aware of the double entendre in Rosalind's decision to take as her male name ‘no worse a name than Jove's own page, / And therefore look you call me Ganymede’ (1. 3. 120-21)—since ‘Ganymede’ was a slang term for a young male homosexual. But, as Stephen Orgel argues, ‘there is no indication whatever that Shakespeare is doing something sexually daring there, skating on thin ice’.⁵ He presents evidence that the love of Elizabethan men for boys was generally unproblematic in that culture, rendered acceptable by the many literary models in Ovid and other ancient texts; and, in fact, often thought of as less dangerous than love for women, whose sexuality was thought to be voraciously overwhelming, effeminizing of ‘manly’ men. Although the puritans fulminated against the theatre in general, the potential for homosexual behaviour was only one aspect of their larger phobia. It was basically ‘the universal sexuality evoked by theatre, a lust not distinguished by the gender of its object’⁶ which was unacceptable to puritans—especially as it disrupts the specific definitions of gender and sexuality which are the bedrock of the patriarchal system. Even more so when in a play such as As You Like It such issues are amusingly foregrounded.

Yet on another level, as Orgel points out, the transvestite theatre simply reproduces the order of patriarchy. For ‘boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour’ (3. 2. 402-3). ‘Cattle’—Rosalind's slang puns significantly: the word is cognate with ‘chattel’, household possession. The boys were apprentices (not to theatre guilds, but to any profession convenient):⁷ dependant and ‘a medium of exchange within the patriarchal structure, and both [women and boys] are (perhaps in consequence) constructed as objects of erotic attraction to adult men’.⁸ Orgel's conclusion to the interesting question, ‘Why did only boys play women?’—or why the transvestite stage was so unproblematically homoerotic—is that

eroticized boys appear to be a middle term between men and women, and far from precluding the love of women, they are represented as enabling figures, as a way of getting from men to women. … In a society that has an investment in seeing women as imperfect men, the danger points will be those at which women reveal that they have an independent essence, an existence that is not, in fact, under male control, a power and authority that either challenges male authority, or, more dangerously, that is not simply a version or parody of maleness, but is specifically female. … In this context Rosalind's male disguise would be, in the deepest sense, for Orlando's benefit, not for Rosalind's; it would constitute a way around the dangers of the female libido.⁹

Orgel's scholarly speculations are an exciting insight into certain Elizabethan discursive fields which operate largely at the level of unconscious assumptions. On the other hand, historians such as Kathleen McLuskie and Jean Howard argue that at some level boy actors playing women must simply have been accepted in performance as a convention.¹⁰ Otherwise, there would have been little audience involvement with those aspects of the plays based on the representation of heterosexual desire. Howard goes on to underline the equally discursive nature of this more overt representation:

The representation of Rosalind's holiday humour has the primary effect, I think, of confirming the gender system and perfecting rather than dismantling it by making a space of mutuality within relations of dominance. … Progressively this text has narrowed the range of erotic possibilities the play has mobilized in the direction of heterosexual coupling. For example, it has displaced the same-sex bonds between Rosalind and Celia with heterosexual unions; it has muted the homoerotic implications of Rosalind's assumption of the name Ganymede by having Rosalind and Orlando so firmly committed to the heterosexual other; and, as with Olivia, it has corrected Phebe's ‘mistake’ in loving a man who is ‘really’ a woman.¹¹

If we take the evidence of the play's telos, its drive towards closure, then, we will conclude that the play privileges a heterosexual interpretation of the energy flow between adult male actor and adolescent boy-as-woman. But this is somewhat to oversimplify the experience of the audience in the theatre—that liminal space where anything may happen—particularly its moment-by-moment awareness of the potential for disruption that the cross-dressing generates. (It is also to ignore the astonishing Epilogue to this play, on which I shall comment later.)

Two critics who have opened up the possibilities for discussion of what might have been the phenomenological experience of the audience watching the performance of this story are Valerie Traub and Stephen Greenblatt. Traub argues, incisively:

Clearly, insofar as gender hierarchies seem to be both temporarily transgressed and formally reinstated, the question of subversion versus containment can only be resolved by crediting either the expense of dramatic energy or comedic closure. Yet, to do either is also to reproduce the artificial distinction between content and form—a capitulation to the logic of binarism.¹²

Traub's version of ‘the homoeroticism of As You Like It’ identifies it as

playful in its ability to transcend binary oppositions, to break into a dual mode, a simultaneity, of desire. Insofar as Rosalind/Ganymede is a multiple sexual object (simultaneously heterosexual and homoerotic), Orlando's effusion of desire toward him/her prevents the stable reinstitution of heterosexuality, upon which the marriage plot depends …

In excess of the dominant ideology of monogamous heterosexuality, to which Rosalind is symbolically wed at the end of the play, exist desires unsanctioned by institutional favor. By means of her male improvisation, Rosalind leads the play into a mode of desire neither heterosexual nor homoerotic, but both heterosexual and homoerotic. As much as she displays her desire for Orlando, she also enjoys her position as male object of Phebe's desire and, more importantly, of Orlando's.¹³

Traub here, I think, touches on the simple reason for the play's apparent formal weakness. Earlier critics argued that it lacks drive, it lacks plot, its lacks motivation. Nevertheless, it is infinitely delightful because of the charm of Rosalind. But in what does this charm consist? Wit and vitality undoubtedly: but most audience members, when quizzed, would locate the play's charm in the courtship scenes. And these scenes are perpetually delightful because of the ‘multiple erotic possibilities and positions’ that they offer through a cheekily self-conscious employment of the dramatic ‘if’—Touchstone's ‘If you said so, then I said so’ (5. 4. 100-101): ‘The dependence on the conditional structures the possibility of erotic exploration without necessitating a commitment to it’.¹⁴

Stephen Greenblatt's essay ‘Fiction and Friction’ offers an analysis of Renaissance theories about sexual anatomy as a way of entering into an understanding of the multiple eroticism of Shakespearean comedy. In brief, the view of these anatomists is that women's sexual organs are the same as men's, only hidden and inverted inside the body. For generation to occur, there must be a pleasant ‘chafing’, which will cause the hidden female ‘penis’ to ejaculate. Shakespeare realized, argues Greenblatt,

that if sexual chafing could not be presented literally onstage, it could be represented figuratively: friction could be fictionalized, chafing chastened and hence made fit for the stage, by transforming it into the witty, erotically charged sparring that is the heart of the lovers' experience.

By means of this transformation Shakespeare invested his comedies with a powerful sexual commotion, a collective excitation, an imaginative heat that the plots promise will be realized offstage, in the marriage beds towards which they gesture … the unrepresented consummations of unrepresented marriages call attention to the unmooring of desire, the generalizing of the libidinal, that is the special pleasure of Shakespearean fiction. For the representation of chafing is not restricted to Shakespeare's lovers; it is diffused throughout the comedies as a system of foreplay.

‘Moreover,’ Greenblatt continues,

for Shakespeare friction is specifically associated with verbal wit; indeed at moments the plays seem to imply that erotic friction originates in the wantonness of language and thus that the body itself is a tissue of metaphors or, conversely, that language is perfectly embodied. … Dallying with words is the principal Shakespearean representation of erotic heat.¹⁵

In the second part … I shall explore this insight in relation to the courtship scenes in As You Like It, proceeding by comparison with the parallel scenes in the originary text, Thomas Lodge's Rosalynd.

DALLYING WITH WORDS

Shakespeare's Act 3 scene 2 and Act 4 scene 1—the courtship scenes in the forest between Rosalind (disguised as Ganymede), Celia, and Orlando—are modelled on two segments of Lodge's 1590 novel. Looking at the Lodge text, it quickly becomes clear that the major change that Shakespeare made was in reducing the ‘literariness’ of Lodge's writing (Lodge's text is subtitled ‘Euphues’ Golden Legacy’, in deliberate homage to the fashionable work of John Lyly). Lodge's Orlando (confusingly known as Rosader) performs five ‘sonnetos’ and a shared eclogue in the course of the courtship scenes: in Shakespeare these are represented by a couple of parodic pieces, read by the girls and improvised on by Touchstone. Rosader is generally more eloquent than Orlando—better educated and more consciously genteel. As performer of his own poems, he is given more textual space than Orlando; he is the ‘hero’ of the narrative much more than Rosalynd is the ‘heroine’.

A duetting eclogue is the only moment in Lodge when ‘Ganymede’ offers to ‘represent Rosalynd’, her eloquence matching Rosader's in a highly formal versified lovers' debate; there is no offer of a ‘cure’ through an extended cross-gender game as there is in Shakespeare, though Lodge's Ganymede does offer plenty of advice to Rosader about giving up the self-indulgent pains of love. She is eloquent but not witty in the way that Shakespeare's Rosalind is; her intelligence is displayed more through her performance of florid euphuistic prose and elaborate classical references. (The Silvius and Phebe scenes of Shakespeare are a comic displacement of the earnest pastoral of Lodge's principal characters. …) Lodge was apparently not interested in the comic or sexual potential of Rosalynd's cross-dressing; for him, safely in a disembodied novel, the girl-as-page trope is simply a plot device. Celia/Aliena has rather more to say in Lodge than in Shakespeare, though the mock marriage which is the culmination of both ‘wooings’ is over very quickly in Lodge, with none of the anxiety with which Shakespeare surrounds this doubly transgressive act. …

Shakespeare transformed the text he had at his elbow into a brilliantly playable theatre script which built on the expertise (and ambivalence) of his boy-players of female parts. This transformation is of the order of a quantum leap. But the experiment of workshopping the Lodge text¹⁶ indicates that had Shakespeare not decided to work his professional magic on this novel, it could still have made a perfectly respectable popular play of the 1590s, in the pastoral romance mode.

The first scene in Lodge which is closely equivalent to Shakespeare (3. 2) is the one in which we first hear Rosader/Orlando's poems. They are not nearly as dire as ‘From the east to western Inde’, but they do have the same persistent repetitiveness:

Of all chaste birds the Phoenix doth excel,
Of all strong beasts the lion bears the bell,
Of all sweet flowers the rose doth sweetest smell,
Of all fair maids my Rosalynd is fairest.
Of all pure metals gold is only purest,
Of all high trees the pine hath highest crest,
Of all soft sweets I like my mistress' breast,
Of all chaste thoughts my mistress' thoughts are rarest. (etc.)(17)

The conversation between Rosader, Rosalynd and Aliena which follows this effusion is led by Rosalynd as Ganymede in a style very similar to Shakespeare's Rosalind, a hearty parade of manliness which would not fool anyone less self-absorbed: ‘What news, forester? has thou wounded some deer, and lost him in the fall? Care not man for so small a loss’ (R. 68). And although the scene does not lead to a proposed ‘love-cure’, it is led by Rosalynd onto not dissimilar erotic ground, as she encourages Rosader thus: ‘Much have I heard of thy mistress' excellence, and I know, forester, thou canst describe her at the full, as one that hast surveyed all her parts with a curious eye; then do me that favour, to tell me what her perfections be’ (R. 69). This is of course a cue for a blazon, a nine-stanza feature-by-feature description of Rosalynd's physical excellences: it includes such amorous fantasies as:

Her paps are centres of delight,
Her paps are orbs of heavenly frame,
Where nature moulds the dew of light,
To feed perfection with the same:
                    Heigh ho, would she were mine.
With orient pearl, with ruby red,
With marble white, with sapphire blue,
Her body every way is fed;
Yet soft in touch, and sweet in view …

(R. 70)

It is only after this emphatic reminder of Rosalynd's female body that Lodge toys momentarily with the pleasures provided by the cross-dressing trope: ‘It makes me blush’, says Rosalynd, ‘to hear how women should be so excellent, and pages so unperfect’. Rosader replies that the ‘page’ ‘resembl[es] the shadow’ of a woman, to which Rosalynd retorts (after a tart remark by Aliena), ‘Who knows not … if boys might put on their garments, perhaps they would prove as comely; if not as comely, it may be more courteous’ (R. 71). Lodge seems to accept the Elizabethan idea that there is little difference between boys and women, and that gender is often simply defined by appearance. The conversation ends with a teasing request from Ganymede for ‘more sonnets in commendation of thy mistress’, and a promise that Rosader will return tomorrow with more of his literary efforts. The courtship, that is to say, will continue to be conducted through the medium of literature, with Rosader as the male entitled to parade his charms through the use of literary (i.e. educated) forms, and Rosalynd playing the role of the (feminine) respondent, though her male disguise enables her to take on a teasing tone.

For Shakespeare, on the other hand, Orlando's literary affectations are merely a starting point for a much more equal dialogue. It is in fact Rosalind/Ganymede who consciously sets up a display of witty and imaginative verbal facility to Orlando's ‘straight man’ in their opening dialogue. Orlando feeds the cues to Ganymede: ‘Who ambles Time withal? … Who doth he gallop withal?’ and so on. It's a sort of intellectual flirtation—or friction, to use Greenblatt's term—in which Rosalind/Ganymede claims the ground which is culturally ascribed to the male, abstract reasoning.

Much critical ink has been spent on delving into the significance of Rosalind's disquisition upon Time (3. 2. 302-27): can it be read as a structuring theme of the play? Obviously it has connections with Jaques' ‘Seven ages of man’ speech (2. 7. 139-66): it reminds us that we all live in Time, and that our perspective on it is dependent on the social role we are playing. But perhaps the most immediately relevant effect is that of subconsciously alerting the audience to the ‘time out’ or ‘holiday’ aspect of life in Arden: although it is a place of labour for the shepherds, for the aristocratic visitors it is not the ‘working-day world’ whose ‘briers’ Rosalind complains about in Act 1. None of the activities and social roles that Rosalind mentions in this dialogue are to be seen in the forest community; as Orlando points out, ‘there's no clock in the forest’. Instead a simpler pastoral life, based on broader ‘time[s] o’ day’ (morning, noon, afternoon, night) is to be observed. In due course, the aristocrats who categorize and hierarchize the world of money and status will return to that clock-time.

Modern actors use this sequence, however, for its performative possibilities, not to spell out a sermon to the audience (the same is true of Jaques' famous speech): its function is to charm, even hypnotize, Orlando, so that he will be drawn into the next stage of the courtship—asking for the boy's/girl's address: ‘Where dwell you pretty youth?’ (3. 2. 328). Rosalind answers in terms that foreground the relation between gender and costume—‘here in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat’ (this is often accompanied in the theatre with a hastily covered-up gesture towards the non-existent feminine garment). She goes on to introduce a discussion of femininity as an abstract category: ‘I thank God I am not a woman, to be touched with so many giddy offences’ (3. 2. 340-4)—so that she can then proceed to deconstruct the Petrarchan stereotype of the ‘man in love’ (3. 2. 360):

Orlando
What were his marks?
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 sleeves unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and everything
about you demonstrating a careless desolation.

(3. 2. 362-71)

Orlando, despite his literary poses, is pre-eminently, as this speech makes clear to us, a healthy and natural-looking young man: he is not caught up in the conventional discourses of courtly love. Rosalind cannot resist teasing him about this—‘But you are no such man; you are rather point-device in your accoutrements, as loving yourself than seeming the lover of any other’ (371-4). Orlando's vitality and self-confidence are an important aspect of his characterization, if he is not to slip from one stereotype—the aggressive young man who protests with his fists—to another, the effeminized lover, whose improper costuming signals him as being ‘careless’ of his social role as a male. Like Rosalind, although less obviously to modern audiences, Orlando operates outside the strict gender binaries of his society's official discourse.

This point is made more clear by the willingness with which Orlando enters into the love-cure game that Rosalind/Ganymede proposes at the climax of this first courtship scene. Her long speech about her (invented) previous pretence to be a woman provides the equivalent stereotype to the male lover's behaviour that she has just described. The speech becomes obviously parodic through accumulation and exaggeration:

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 …

(3. 2. 396-403)

Despite this unattractive image, culminating in ‘a nook merely monastic’, Orlando hesitates only briefly before agreeing to be thus ‘cured’. How can the actor justify this decision? The answer must once again lie in the hypnotic energy of Rosalind's words and presence—Orlando wants more of them, on whatever terms. It is interesting, however, to consider the intonations and emphases possible for the actor in his immediate response to Rosalind's speech: ‘I would not be cured, youth’. Varieties of resistance, doubt, and self-confidence can be conveyed in these readings of the line:

I would not be cured, youth.
I would not be cured, youth.
I would not be cured, youth.
I would not be cured, youth.
I would not be cured, youth.

Rosalind's response—‘I would cure you’—is similarly variable and obviously dependent on the emphasis that Orlando gives his line. But she has an extra weapon up her sleeve, an extra clause, ‘if you would but call me Rosalind and come every day to my cote to woo me’. There is ‘much virtue in If’, as Touchstone remarks later in the play (5. 4. 102). What Ganymede offers is a new type of imaginative erotics, much more lively and unpredictable than the conventions of literary love-songs; here Orlando can act out his fantasies and perhaps even his frustrated longings through the complex reality created by bodily presence.

The second courtship scene, 4. 1, also has its parallel in Lodge. The changes that Shakespeare made to the text at his elbow are again subtle and significant. This is a much longer scene, culminating in the wooing eclogue and the mock-wedding. It takes place on the following day: Lodge informs us that Ganymede/Rosalynd has had a poor night's sleep, Aliena is feeling very chirpy. The two of them come upon their ‘melancholy forester’ (who hasn't had a good night's sleep in weeks) and Rosalynd accosts him:

what makes you so early abroad this morn? In contemplation, no doubt, of your Rosalynd. Take heed, forester; step not too far, the ford may be deep, and you slip over the shoes. … 'Tis good, forester, to love, but not to overlove, lest in loving her that likes not thee, thou fold thyself in an endless labyrinth.

(R. 74)

It is an eloquent warning against the excesses of romantic love which bespeaks the good sense of Lodge's Rosalynd, a trait carried over into Shakespeare's character; but Shakespeare's Orlando, as we have already seen, is certainly not one for moping around. In fact he arrives late for his appointment, having been, we assume, occupied with strengthening his bonds with Duke Senior and his merry men. This tardiness spurs Rosalind to another flight of fancy that carries a sting:

Rosalind
Nay, and you be so tardy, come no more in my sight. I had as lief be
wooed of a snail.
Orlando
Of a snail?
Rosalind
Ay, of a snail. For though he comes slowly, he carries his house on
his head; a better jointure, I think, than you make a woman. Besides, he brings
his destiny with him.
Orlando
What's that?
Rosalind
Why, horns—which such as you are fain to be beholding to your
wives for: but he comes armed in his fortune, and prevents the slander of
his wife.

(4. 1. 49-59)

A double insult: snails are but lowly (and slimy) creatures hardly to be compared with men, the lords of creation; and yet, they do have something in common with men: ‘horns’, the sign of cuckoldom. We are reminded subliminally of the play's ongoing deconstruction of the signifiers of masculinity, a theme to be taken up graphically in the following scene, the dance and song of the apparently triumphant hunters.

Lodge, who is not at this point using the Ganymede-as-Rosalynd trope, enables Ganymede to regain her witty defensive control of the situation in a speech in which she seems to want to push Aliena into Rosader's arms (‘one bird in the hand is worth two in the wood’, R. 74). The opportunity being declined, Rosalynd changes the subject in order to hear more of her lover's praise of her idealized self: ‘But leaving this prattle, now I’ll put you in mind of your promise about those sonnets, which you said were at home in your lodge’.¹⁸ Three more ‘sonnets’ follow, plus prose protestations from Rosader about the beauty of Rosalynd and the importance of his literary performances in ‘fixing’ this perfection in his mind. Ganymede is allowed one extended speech in response, a critique of the self-indulgence of this mode of being in love—and, itself, an eloquent verbal display:

‘I can smile,’ quoth Ganymede, ‘at the sonnetos, canzones, madrigals, rounds and roundelays, that these pensive patients pour out when their eyes are more full of wantonness, than their hearts of passions. Then, as the fishers put the sweetest bait to the fairest fish, so these Ovidians, holding Amo in their tongues, when their thoughts come at haphazard, write that they be wrapt in an endless labyrinth of sorrow, when walking in the large lease of liberty, they only have their humours in their inkpot. …’

(R. 76)

This speech, of which I have quoted only a third, is emotionally and rhetorically similar to Rosalind's swingeing demolition of the grand icons of romantic love:

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, 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 mid summer 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.

(4. 1. 89-103)

In Shakespeare's text, just before this flight of witty eloquence, there is a moment of physical tension when Orlando takes the initiative, ‘Rosalind’ having signalled that she is ‘in a holiday humour and like enough to consent’ (4. 1. 65-6). Orlando's answer to the challenge, ‘What would you say to me now, and I were your very very Rosalind?’ is to shift the action onto the physical plane: ‘I would kiss before I spoke’. Stage business—an attempted kiss—is clearly implied here, with Rosalind talking fast (and deliberately coarsely, with her mention of spit?) in order to put him off. This brief moment raises the stakes for the watching audience: the fact that the characters' desires are embodied in the actors will not be denied: we expect a kiss, if not now, then—all the more urgently for the delay—later.

Lodge is rarely concerned to imagine bodies enacting his story: the delight that he offers his reading audience is in the mind—particularly via the appeal of classical references to the educated reader—and the mind's ear, in the liberal doses of ‘sonnetos’ which dot the text. The climax of these is the ‘wooing Eclogue’, a duet between Rosader and Ganymede, in which Ganymede does play the female role. Whereas Orlando's response to the invitation to ‘woo’ is to offer to kiss, Rosader abides by the rules of courtly love and obeys his ‘lady's’ command: ‘let me see how thou canst woo: I will represent Rosalynd, and thou shalt be as thou art, Rosader. See in some amorous ecologue, how if Rosalynd were present, how thou couldst court her; and while we sing of love, Aliena shall tune her pipe and play us melody’ (R. 79). The reader, that is, is to imagine appropriate music accompanying this climactic literary performance.

The eclogue is a ‘pastoral dialogue’ (OED); each long stanza concludes with a variation on ‘O Rosalynd, then be thou pitiful, for Rosalynd is only beautiful’. Lodge varies it after three stanzas with the fourth stanza broken into short segments of dialogue as the wooing heats up. ‘Rosalynd’ gives in, and a triumphant duet follows, ‘Oh, gain more great than kingdoms or a crown!’ / ‘Oh, trust betrayed if Rosader abuse me’. Lodge was no doubt familiar with the popular musical mode of the madrigal-dialogue or pastourelle; what this scene irresistibly reminds twentieth-century readers of is full-blown opera (an art-form which was, in fact, just beginning to be established as Lodge and Shakespeare were writing). The analogy of tenor and soprano declaring their love for each other and finally uniting in a rapturous cabaletta suggests the formality and potential comedy of this scene in Lodge—a risibleness that Shakespeare avoids in favour of something that creates very much more natural-seeming characters:

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 sayest thou?
Rosalind
Are you not good?
Orlando
I hope so.
Rosalind
Why then, can one desire too much of a good thing?

(4. 1. 106-16)

Both these duetting exchanges—Lodge's high art, Shakespeare's colloquial familiarity—lead to the mock-marriage, a scene in Shakespeare which I want to look at in the context of the play's other ‘weddings’. … But it is worth noting here that it is Lodge's Aliena who proposes the ‘marriage’; she has no hesitation in playing the role of priest. It is Rosalynd/Ganymede whose embarrassed response is recorded: she ‘changed as red as a rose. And so with a smile and a blush, they made up this jesting match, that after proved to a marriage in earnest, Rosader full little thinking he had wooed and won his Rosalynd’ (R. 83). The conversation between the young women after this crucial event illustrates the difference between the two writers' imaginations. Lodge's Aliena, always a more chatty figure than Shakespeare's, begins to ‘prattle’ with Ganymede, offering the opinion that ‘by all probable conjectures, this match will be a marriage’. Ganymede is sceptical: ‘Tush … there goes more words to a bargain than one’, and so on; and Aliena concludes the exchange by remarking that she hopes Rosalynd will pay more attention to their sheep, now that she is assured of Rosader's love (R. 84). The girls seem very companionable in this chatter, their friendship undisturbed by the remarkable event that has just taken place, a public enactment of Rosalynd's and Rosader's commitment to one another.

Very different is Shakespeare's coda to the mock-marriage and subsequent ‘flyting’ between Rosalind and Orlando. Celia seems irritated, feeling betrayed?—‘You have simply misused our sex in your love-prate. We must have your doublet and hose plucked over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest’ (4. 1. 191-94).¹⁹ Despite its proverbial origin, the specific image here of stripping off Rosalind's male gender to show a filthy female nakedness is not pleasant. Rosalind replies with an utterance of equally powerful feeling, though very different emotional reference: ‘O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded. My affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal’ (4. 1. 195-8). In response to Celia's tart remark (‘Or rather bottomless …’) she continues to expatiate on her feelings, concluding, ‘I’ll tell thee Aliena, I cannot be out of sight of Orlando. I’ll go find a shadow and sigh till he come.’ Rosalind is fully in thrall to love—though she cannot admit or display this feeling to anyone except her more-than-sister friend. It's an emotionally fraught situation, which leaves Celia on her own: no wonder she ends the scene with the weary, or cynical, remark, ‘And I’ll sleep’. The two women are seen to separate for the first time in the play.

Two patterns of movement suggest themselves here: either Rosalind exits stage left, towards the sheep-cote to wait for Orlando's return, while Celia settles to sleep on stage during the brief huntsmen's scene (4. 2); or Rosalind exits stage right, into the forest, narrowly missing the hunters' entrance from the forest, which happens after Celia's exit stage left towards the cottage for her nap. Whichever way it is played, it leaves the visual image of a situation which is particularly difficult for Celia, since unlike Rosalind she has no anticipation of further pleasurable friction at the next meeting with Orlando. The option taken in Adrian Noble's 1985 RSC production—to leave Celia onstage during the hunters' song—allowed this scene to be presented as invading Celia's unconscious, a dream of defloration, male violence feared yet desired. Noble's psychoanalytic reading created a heightened feeling of sexual frustration and expectation in Celia which was answered by the unexpected arrival of Oliver in the next scene. Significantly, there is much mention of violence and blood in this scene, and Rosalind faints at the sight of the ‘bloody napkin’, which can be read not only as a symbol of the absent, wounded Orlando, but also as a metonym of her own hidden femininity. Eventually the flirtatious and largely verbal pleasures of ‘friction’ have to give way to the physical realities of the body, if the play's story is to move out of the artificial world of pastoral into the real world of the audience.

Notes

1. C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959), 15.

2. Karen Newman, Shakespeare's Rhetoric of Comic Character: Dramatic Convention in Classical and Renaissance Comedy (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), 96.

3. Michael Shapiro, Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 126.

4. These debates are summarized in Shapiro, Gender in Play, Introduction; Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 159-60.

5. Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 43. See also Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 147-8.

6. Orgel, Impersonations, 28.

7. See Orgel, Impersonations, 64-72, for discussion of the boy players' social status.

8. Ibid., 103.

9. Ibid., 63.

10. Kathleen McLuskie, ‘The Act, the Role, and the Actor: Boy Actresses on the Elizabethan Stage’, New Theatre Quarterly, 3 (1987), 120-30; Jean Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle, 119-20.

11. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle, 118, 120.

12. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 120.

13. Ibid., 122-4.

14. Ibid., 128.

15. Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (1998; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 89-90.

16. This experiment was carried out with professional actors at Sydney University's Centre for Performance Studies in 1996.

17. Thomas Lodge, Rosalynd, ed. Brian Nellist (Keele University: Ryburn Publishing, 1995), 67. Further quotations from this edition will be incorporated into the text.

18. Rosalynd, 75. One likes to think that the author is consciously punning on ‘Lodge’ here.

19. Cf. Rosalynd, 49: ‘“And I pray you,” quoth Aliena, “if your robes were off, what mettle are you made that you are so satirical against women? Is it not a foul bird defiles the own nest?”’ Shakespeare's borrowing from Lodge is obvious.