[In the following essay, Carlson refutes earlier critics who claim that As You Like It reflects sexual equality. She argues that patriarchal norms persist, especially in the play's ending.]

At the end of As You Like It, when Hymen teases Phebe that she cannot love Ganymede—“You to his [Silvius's] love must accord, / Or have a woman to your Lord” (V.iv.127-28)¹—he reminds us of the comic mileage Shakespeare has gotten from Rosalind's disguise as Ganymede. Also, less obviously, he reminds us of the most steady love of the play, that between two women, Celia and Rosalind. His mockery of such love and the uncharacteristic silence of the women which accompanies it are two final indications of the way women are treated throughout the play. We have learned to read As You Like It as a play about the expansiveness of love, the graciousness of fate, and the inevitability of human foible. But it is also a play about women in the comic world. Love's Labor's Lost remains our best evidence of Shakespeare's wariness of the comic form—especially as it affects women—but As You Like It is our best model of how Shakespeare's women function as part of a comic tradition.

H. B. Charlton has taught a whole generation of Shakespearean critics to see comic heroines like Rosalind as “poetic,” “creative” embodiments of “imagination” with powers “to shape the world towards happiness.”² It has become commonplace to consider women a key to meaning in Shakespeare's comedies. Along with more standard readings of the comedies, even the recent open-eyed, often feminist, criticism by women like Ruth Nevo, Linda Bamber, and Marilyn French grows out of Charlton's equating Shakespeare's comedy with his women.³ To find Shakespearean comedy a haven for women, as Charlton and others do, a critic must focus on the festive liberation of the middle of the plays where, as Mikhail Bahktin explains, we enter the utopian “realm of community, freedom, equality, abundance.”⁴ Northrop Frye's “green world” and C. L. Barber's “release” are two tidy labels for this decidedly untidy mid-play world where sex roles are reversed, wrongs righted, and problems solved.⁵ Women characters, who must normally exist in a world where double standards leave them less than equal, fare well in this topsy-turvy world, directing actions and emotions. To emphasize this middle section of the play is, as Charlton, Bahktin, and others make clear, to emphasize a world of female freedom. Shakespearean comedy does not, however, end in this liberated world. The multiple marriages, ritual male-voiced pronouncements, women's silence, and return to order of these plays' endings are signs of a return to a norm suspended during the middle of the play. To emphasize such endings is to emphasize an end to female freedom. Clara Claiborne Park, Shirley Nelson Garner, Nicholas Grene, Anne Parten, Peter Erickson, Carol Thomas Neeley, and others have adopted this second emphasis, and study of the comic ending as a construct full of power to defuse the sexual revolution of Shakespeare's comedies.⁶ In the analysis that follows, I would like to join this second group of critics, those who qualify Charlton's praise, by showing how As You Like It offers more limitations than possibilities for the women in the play. I will conclude my study with a fuller analysis of the play's ending, but will offer, first, a study of the play's middle, where Shakespeare establishes the world in which his women search for communities, choices, and changes.

BEGINNING WITH THE “NORM”-AL

The establishment of a “norm”-al world in As You Like It is as basic to Shakespeare's comedy as to others far less daring. We begin in the court of Duke Frederick where, in spite of several evil presences, we have a predictable world governed by civil laws and social mores; we move to a world where those norms are relaxed, often reversed; and we end promised a return to the court world, minus its rankest evils. While critics disagree on the effects of this cycle—do we or do we not reach a new (or better or different) world at play's end?—they generally agree on its presence. The special effect such circular motions have on the women of the play has been most thoroughly studied by Peter Erickson. To reach his conclusion that “As You Like It is primarily a defensive action against female power rather than a celebration of it,” Erickson compiles an extensive list of the signs of a patriarchy present throughout the play.⁷ Most importantly, he shows that the altered world of Arden is only superficially a release from everyday, patriarchal norms and that in being but a reversible reversal of the norms it is never a threat to them. Although Erickson never makes the connection explicitly, he bases this reading of As You Like It's persistent “norm”-al world on the presence of a sexual double standard. The sexual double standard in Shakespeare's “norm”-al world is not significant because it grants women less freedom and power than it does men. It is significant because in the middle world of the play, where norms are reversed, the power and freedom women do gain is still based on the double standard, and is only a reversal of it. In other words, the middle world of the play does not revoke the double standard, but only invokes a temporary criticism of it. While the social criticism of As You Like It is not negated by the play's reversals, it is continually undercut by the omnipresence of the play's double standard. Such persistent norms complicate a reading of any aspect of the play, but raise the most perplexing questions about those parts of the play generally acknowledged to be sexually liberating, the play's structural foundation in equality, for example.

While the words “equal” and “equally” each occur only once in the course of the play, they are notations of a pattern present throughout the play. Celia and Rosalind, in I.ii, offer us equality as a desirable goal and a standard of judgment, first when Celia finds that the ideal bestowal of Fortune's gifts must be an equal one—“Let us sit and mock the good housewife Fortune from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally” (I.ii.29-31)—and later when she counsels Orlando to “a more equal enterprise” (I.ii.161) than Charles the Wrestler appears to be. Most of the play's equality, however, comes not from such obvious pleas as much as from the standards that equality and symmetry become for actions, characters, and language. For example, a standard of symmetry balances one action against another when a conversation on the killing of deer (II.i) is matched by the actual hunting of deer (IV.ii); when Rosalind's first wooing of Orlando (III.ii) is mated to a second (IV.i); when Orlando's triumphant dialogue with Jaques (III.ii) is repeated in Rosalind's similar victory over the cynic (IV.i). The significance of characters is likewise refined when they are considered in pairs—Jacques's cynicism is tempered by Touchstone's loving parody, Silvius's idealism is braced by Corin's realism, one bad brother (Oliver, Duke Frederick) is paired with one good one (Orlando, Duke Senior), and one unrequited love (Phebe's) is upstaged by another one, less vain (Silvius's). And as critics have shown us countless times, the play's language is a comparable series of delicate balances. Orlando's bad poems come coupled with the reassured, regular rhythms of Rosalind's prose, for example. Rosalind, finally, is the crucible for all such equations, symmetries, and balances, acting as a matchmaker for others even as she is self-conscious of her own vacillations between the realistic and the idealistic. By the end of the play, when Silvius leads his litany of love in V.ii and when Hymen and Jaques parcel out their verbal gifts of love in V.iv, Shakespeare has us, also, seeing the play's four marriages as natural extensions of a play full of equations and balances. In the play's final scene, Celia's word “equal” has become “even”; first when Rosalind disappears “To make these doubts all even” (V.iv.25) and second when Hymen elevates her “even” by rhyming it with heaven: “Then is there mirth in heaven / When earthly things made even / Atone together” (V.iv.102-04). “Even,” like the “equal” of I.ii, is meant to assure us that life is orderly and balanced at the end of the play.

While it has been common to link the play's balances to a sexual equality, the play's symmetries are more reflections of the orderly “norm”-al world, double standards and all, than guarantees of an advanced notion of relations between the sexes. The androgyny that critics have praised as the pinnacle of the play's many equalities is not a sign-post of sexual liberation but yet another signal of the play's being founded on norms.

In his study of the androgyny of the play, Erickson points out that a levelling of sexual differences is not possible, even in this play's measured, tolerant world, because the basis for both worlds in the play is patriarchy.⁸ This limitation makes androgyny of benefit only to the men returning to power at the play's end, not to the women about to give it up:

However, the conservative counter-movement built into comic strategy applies exclusively to Rosalind. Her possession of the male costume and the power it symbolizes is only temporary. But Orlando does not have to give up the emotional enlargement he has experienced in the forest. Discussions of androgyny in As You Like It usually focus on Rosalind, whereas in fact it is the men rather than the women who are the lasting beneficiaries of androgyny.⁹

Androgyny is not a reality for the women in As You Like It in the same measure it is for the men because the women are never equal to the men; the most they gain in the middle of the play is only a reversal of an inequitable situation. The play's reversals ensure that while men learn their weaknesses and women their powers in the inversion of the play's middle world, norms do not change. In studying the issue of sexual difference in the broader scope of the Renaissance, Catherine Besley finds, contrarily, that plays like As You Like It offer a “radical challenge to patriarchal values by disrupting sexual difference itself.” She offers a dazzling case for the social and sexual instability Shakespeare's comedies threaten in their jockeying of sexual identity. She admits, however, that Rosalind's control of her disguise limits the danger posed by this play's transgressions.¹⁰

The play's inequitable “norm”-al world is tested by its free, levelling middle, but scarcely altered by it. It seems likely that Shakespeare was aware of the formal tension between his agenda for social change and his generic constraints, for this play abounds in his self-consciousness of the comic genre. It is so full of references to its own form that Ruth Nevo has dubbed it a “meta-comedy,” a comedy “so self-assured as not to care whether we notice or not that it is talking about its own mode of being.”¹¹ As I study the conventions of the play's middle and end, then, I do so not to berate Shakespeare for attitudes he never considered, but to expand our understanding of the choices he made among the many attitudes he considered—especially those choices influencing his women. As fiercely as any playwright before or since, Shakespeare writes comedy in which he battles against convention even as he nestles his characters into its comfortable, “norm”-al shelters.

INVERTING THE “NORM”-AL

The testing of the normal that constitutes the liberated middle of this play allows and encourages great power and control in the female characters. But the continuing though inverted presence of the “norm”-al helps explain the patterns discernible in the women's language and friendship.

Rosalind commands the special linguistic world at the center of As You Like It, yet her mastery of language is continually undercut. In our introduction to the cousins Rosalind and Celia in I.ii, such contradictions establish the women's linguistic pattern. Most immediately, we are struck with the women's facility with a language flexible enough for them to move from sadness to joy and intimate enough to encourage the trust and love equalled nowhere else in the play. After the straightforward discussion of Rosalind's sadness that introduces us to this direct, though playful, way the women trust one another with their emotions, we are introduced to the strategies the two women have had to develop to protect such linguistic loving and giving. In the sport they make of falling in love we notice, first, their verbal versatility: they banter with the good nature of two who indulge often in such matches (ll. 28-40); they feed questions and lines to Touchstone with the deftness of people used to indulging the verbal performances of others (ll. 41-85); and they badger Le Beau with a humane tolerance for his denseness (ll. 86-134). Only belatedly, we notice that such verbal acuity is tarnished by certain sexist assumptions and indirections built into the banter. As Celia and Rosalind discuss the bestowal of Fortune's and Nature's gifts, for example, they rely on traditional stereotypes of women—the fair are stupid and the honest are ugly. As Celia puts it, “for those that she [Fortune] makes fair she scarce makes honest, and those that she makes honest she makes very ill-favoredly” (I.ii.32-34). They depend on such stereotypes even when alone, and despite the fact that—as the rest of the play makes apparent—neither Rosalind nor Celia lacks either looks or brains. Even Touchstone allows for the breaking of such a type by acknowledging ladies “young and fair” and bright (II.vii.37-38). When Touchstone enters, these two non-stereotypical women adopt stereotypical behavior, allowing linguistic control to fall to the male as they feed him the lines he needs to exercise his wit. Later in the scene, as the court witnesses the wrestling entertainment, Rosalind protests she is weak—“The little strength that I have I would it were with you” (I.ii.177-78)—this time directly acknowledging that the world she and Celia inhabit is one where women are seen as less capable than men. While the women take first place with their language skills, they accept second place in society.

In Rosalind, especially, both this female mastery of language and the indirections and inversions it is tied to are traceable through the entire play. While in I.ii Rosalind operates in the familiarity and leisure she and Celia share, in I.iii her language, as well as Celia's, becomes a finely tuned instrument on which she must play the melodies of a range of emotions. First Rosalind matches Celia in playfulness, converting Celia's subject, Rosalind's father, into her own—“my child's father” (I.iii.11). Then she moves beyond playfulness to do verbal battle with her uncle, Duke Frederick. He forewarns her that traitorous acts must be redeemed by more than words, yet is battered by her reply, strong in its repetitions, its sound argument, and its graceful sincerity:

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.
Then, good my liege, mistake me not so much
To think my poverty is treacherous.

(I.iii.55-61)

Rosalind's language is more convincing to us than to Duke Frederick, of course, and even though Celia follows her with an equally graceful plea to her father, his response shows us he has responded not to the cousins' verbal skill, their reason or their words, but to his distrust of female language. He tells Celia “She [Rosalind] is too subtile for thee” (l. 73) and orders his daughter to silence, “then open not thy lips” (l. 78). These women's language skills carry little weight in the Duke's court.

Yet in III.ii we move to Arden, a world where, without Duke Frederick, the limits Rosalind sets to her language are only her own. Rosalind blossoms enough to recognize the inadequacies of Orlando's verbal celebrations of her, telling Celia of his verses, “some of them had in them more feet than the verses would bear” (III.ii.159-60). She can then banter with Celia over the concrete image of “feet” she calls up. She further displays her versatility by matching witty analogies to nature with Touchstone (ll. 111-15) and by making more learned allusions at her leisure—calling up Pythagoras for example (III.ii.168). But her power and control are most obvious in her first conversation with Orlando. From the exit of Jaques in line 281 to Rosalind and Orlando's joint exit at the scene's end, a simple measure of her command of this conversation is the number of lines both characters speak. Rosalind has ninety-eight lines to Orlando's thirty, but even such lopsided numbers only begin to suggest her mastery of their interaction. Orlando, on the one hand, takes on the role Celia and Rosalind had assumed earlier, in I.ii, and feeds lines and questions to Rosalind. In addition, Orlando has brief speeches (usually one line or less) devoid of imagination or wit. Rosalind, on the other hand, is represented by a hearty prose in which form is matched to content, in which the melodies of the language are the melodies of her love. We have had a taste of Rosalind's prose before we see her in Arden, but only in Arden can she use it for power as well as for pleasure.

There continue to be moments when Rosalind's wit and verbal acuity are everything, as she chides Phebe in III.iv or as she directs the others in the recitations of V.ii. But the extent of her linguistic skills is clearest when her heart is in her language, in III.ii and IV.i especially. Rosalind reaches the height of her powers in IV.i. Here the gymnastic playfulness of III.ii is transformed into heart-felt pronouncements on love and marriage. When Rosalind plays the realist in denying to Orlando that one could die from lack of love, the great love she feels for him softens her harsh statement and gives it its graceful rhythms:

The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all that 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 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.

(IV.i.85-98)

Her feeling for and use of language in such skillful ways is what we miss so much when Rosalind gives up her language along with her disguise and is silent at the play's end. As the ritual takes prominence in the play's final scene, we experience a falling off in the language. As the emotions and powers of Rosalind's language give way to the comparative shallowness of song and dance, Rosalind takes her silent place in the marriage ritual. Even the Epilogue, in awarding the last words to Rosalind, does not make up for Rosalind's silence. Erickson points out that the Epilogue subverts the woman's world of this play by reminding us of the boy Rosalind-Ganymede and not the woman who has been the linguistic heart of the play.¹² I would suggest, in addition, that Rosalind's return as an actor (whether male or female) reinforces the consciousness we have had all along that her power comes only from a suspension of the play's—and the world's—reality. The fact that she still must make her last moment of power depend on her male disguise only increases our suspicion that we must lose the Rosalind of the play's middle because her linguistic command is as dangerous as it is endearing.

The Epilogue and the silence that precedes it are, in fact, only our last indications of the way the women's linguistic powers remain attached to assumptions which undercut them. Let me backtrack through the scenes I have already discussed to suggest how each one of them is burdened with a discrediting of the women's linguistic power. In I.iii, Duke Frederick warns Celia of the deception in Rosalind's language:

She is too subtile for thee; and the smoothness,
Her very silence and her patience,
Speak to the people, and they pity her.

(I.iii.73-75)

His warning we can dismiss, because he is so despicably evil, but only until we hear similar reservations voiced elsewhere by Rosalind herself. For example, she prefaces her talk with Orlando in III.ii by asking Celia the self-deprecating question, “Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak” (III.ii.237-38). She re-confirms her diagnosis of logorrhea by lacing the pyrotechnics of IV.i with similar undercuttings of her skill. Here she warns her future husband Orlando that “certainly a woman's thought runs before her actions” (IV.i.127-28) and counsels him, further, to be wary of his wife's wayward wit:

Make the doors upon a woman's wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and 'twill out at the keyhold; stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.

(IV.i.148-51)

Rosalind's comments may be tongue-in-cheek, but they cannot simply be dismissed as comic, for the direct discrediting of female language in these three statements is reinforced by the many indirect and subversive tactics women have adopted as part of their presence in the play.

Even as she is Ganymede and liberated from the restrictions placed on Rosalind the woman, Rosalind accepts limiting stereotypes. One might speculate that Rosalind adopts such deferential behavior to preserve her male disguise, but importantly, she makes the same patriarchal assumptions in I.ii, before she adopts the guise of Ganymede. Of the disguise itself, Rosalind tells us that it will help her hide in her heart “what hidden woman's fear there will” (I.iii.115). Later, while collapsing at the end of the journey into Arden, she blames the weak female in her: “I could find in my heart to disgrace my man's apparel and to cry like a woman; but I must comfort the weaker vessel, as doublet and hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat” (II.iv.4-7). She disdains the woman in herself as much as the woman, Celia-Aliena, she feels an obligation to comfort. Even in III.ii, so rich in Rosalind's confidence and control, her doubts about her female self loom large; she tells Celia that she retains the impatience of a woman (III.ii.185-89) and later after teasing Orlando with a catalogue of women's faults—“All like one another as halfpence are, every one fault seeming monstrous till his fellow-fault came to match it” (III.ii.334-36)—she paints a giddy picture of the female lover:

At which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, long and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this color; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my suitor from his mad humor of love to a living humor of madness, which was, to forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook merely monastic.

(III.ii.384-94)

Rosalind's self-conscious mockery means that we never take such comments at their full value, yet we are inclined to agree with Celia in her charge to Rosalind: “You have simply misused our sex in your loveprate” (IV.i.185-86).

What Celia cannot tell us, however, is that we fail to dismiss Rosalind's comments because so much action in the play validates them. For example, all of the women in the play—Rosalind, Celia, Phebe, and Audrey—do become giddy and rash when in love, just as Rosalind has foretold. Rosalind herself is the most severe case, in IV.i, when she demands a wedding ceremony one moment and warns of cuckolds the next. More numerically overwhelming are the many indirect actions of the women in the play. In her disguise, Rosalind gains strength and control, but her indirect expressions of love pale next to Orlando's direct confessions of being “love-shaked” (III.ii.346). By the end of the play Rosalind has never once told Orlando she loves him. Phebe's description of her love for Ganymede similarly gyrates on its negations and contradictions:

Think not I love him, though I ask for him;
’Tis but a peevish boy; yet he talks well.
But what care I for words? Yet words do well
When he that speaks them pleases those that hear.
It is a pretty youth; not very pretty;
But sure he's proud; and yet his pride becomes him. …
There be some women, Silvius, had they marked him
In parcels as I did, would have gone near
To fall in love with him; but, for my part,
I love him not nor hate him not; and yet
I have more cause to hate him than to love him.

(III.v.108-13, 123-27)

Audrey's nearly non-verbal reactions operate on the same principles. As we laugh at her gross lack of understanding, we are laughing only at a less practiced indirection than we find in the other women. Celia's love for and relationship with Oliver may be an exception to these female patterns of indirection. But we never have the chance to see Oliver and Celia interact, so speculation about how she may have avoided indirection is useless.

In studying the consequences of such linguistic indirection, Madelon Gohlke and Coppelia Kahn have found the powerful language of comic heroines like Rosalind a reflection of a patriarchal order. Though Gohlke's work focuses primarily on the language of tragedy, she connects the linguistic freedoms of comic heroines to the threat of infidelity the women pose for their mates. Arguing that the indirections of the women's language connote infidelity for the men, she identifies the darkest threat implied in free female language like Rosalind's:

Whereas “honesty” in relations among men may be perceived primarily as a matter of keeping one's word, in relations with women, it is clearly a sexual concern. For a woman to lie is to be unfaithful. For this reason the attribution of complex speech to female characters in the comedies in the form of lies, riddles, puns and statements made in the context of disguise, often involves sexual matters generally or specifically the threat of infidelity.¹³

While such sexual betrayal remains latent in most comedies, the threat is so real that the linguistic freedom women gain is usually reduced to silence. Touchstone's prolonged digression on lies in V.iv (which not coincidentally coincides with Rosalind's silence) is symbolic of the male recapturing of playful language at the end of As You Like It. Discussing The Taming of the Shrew, Kahn uncovers similar consequences in the indirection of a comic heroine's language. Kahn notes the power of language in Shrew where it serves as Kate's only way of asserting herself in her world and as Shakespeare's only device for calling his male order into question. Yet even so, and despite her ironic reading of Kate's final speech, Kahn finds such language ultimately but one more measure of the patriarchical:

But on the deepest level, because the play depicts its heroine as outwardly compliant but inwardly independent, it represents possibly the most cherished male fantasy of all—that woman remain untamed, even in her subjection.¹⁴

I believe, like Gohlke and Kahn, that the language of the women in the play does double duty, acting both as a conduit for female power and an automatic check on it. While through her language Rosalind creates a strong counter universe in As You Like It, her power is as temporary as is her stay in Arden.

While Rosalind's most showy source of power in the play is language, a second, less immediately obvious one is her friendship with Celia. Not surprisingly, the friendship between the two women is as much affected by the cyclical patterns of the comedy as is the language.¹⁵

Initially, both the court and the forest worlds of As You Like It seem hospitable to female attachments. Although we first hear of Celia and Rosalind's bond in the hostile environment of I.i, bone-breaker Charles softens while describing what is, even to him, a beautiful, strong, enviable attachment:

… the Duke's daughter her cousin so loves her, being ever from their cradles bred together, that she would have followed her exile, or have died to stay behind her. She is at the court, and no less beloved of her uncle than his own daughter, and never two ladies loved as they do.

(I.i.100-05)

When we first meet Celia and Rosalind in I.ii, we are immediately struck by the chasm between the love, trust, and warmth of their woman's world and the harsh world depicted in I.i. In the second scene as in the first, we are told—this time by Le Beau—how deep is the women's love for one another: “[their] loves / Are dearer than the natural bond of sisters” (I.ii.256-57). But more important, we experience the love in the intimate word games that open the scene; here familiarity produces a conversation with two wits in league against the world, not against each other. Such teamwork characterizes the women's verbal games with Touchstone, Le Beau, and even Orlando. Their pleas to Orlando to abstain from wrestling are best described as choric:

Rosalind:
The little strength that I have, I would it were with you.
Celia:
And mine to eke out hers.
Rosalind:
Fare you well. Pray heaven I be deceived in you!
Celia:
Your heart's desires be with you! …
Rosalind:
Now Hercules be thy speed, young man!
Celia:
I would I were invisible, to catch the strong fellow by the leg.
Wrestle.
Rosalind:
O excellent young man!
Celia:
If I had a thunderbolt in mine eye, I can tell who should down.

(I.ii.177-82, 192-97)

The third scene stands as the climax of the play's celebration of women's love. Significantly, the voice of the achievement is Celia, not Rosalind. As the crises of this scene necessitate Celia's eloquent defense of her friendship with Rosalind, the two tributes she makes to their love become the touchstones on which we analyze the actions of the rest of the play. First Celia pleads with her father to respect the women's mutual love:

                    If she be a traitor,
Why, so am I. We still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learned, played, eat together;
And wheresoe’er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable.

(I.iii.68-72)

That he cannot understand or will not respect the love is predictable. That Celia must repeat the same plea to Rosalind suggests less the depth of their bond than its precariousness:

                    Rosalind lacks then the love
Which teacheth thee that thou and I am one.
Shall we be sund’red, shall we part, sweet girl?
No, let my father seek another heir.

(I.iii.92-95)

The disguises the two women subsequently put on, one the garb of a man, one the skirts of a country woman, are obvious manifestations of the rift developing between the two. This female-female couple must now become a female-male team to survive. The two can no longer appear (literally) “as one,” as Celia would wish. Thus when Celia and Rosalind set off “To liberty,” they set off without the full strength of the love that has, until now, sustained them. In the next four acts, the chart of their actions shows them moving only further and further apart. They never regain the safe, warm closeness of Act I.

The forces that separate the two women include the stereotypes which account for the undercutting of their language, but most detrimental to their friendship is the assumption in the play that the natural, inevitable pairing is that of woman to man. In II.ii, for example, Duke Frederick assumes either that Celia and Rosalind must have run off with a man in their entourage or that a man is the cause of their running off. Yet as wrong as he is in assuming that they are chasing Orlando, he is only making the same assumption they have made in preparing their disguises—two women could not take off on their own. The rest of Act II reinforces such assumptions. Rosalind, dressed as a male, assumes a protective male role as she transacts the women's business with Corin in II.iv. Jaques, in his seven ages of man speech, does women the courtesy of inclusion when he speaks of “The men and women merely players,” yet he mentions women again only as supernumeraries—nurses and mistresses. Though Celia and Rosalind temporarily gain power in Arden, they have only entered a different sort of man's world than the one they have left at the court, a world which forces one of them into dress as a man and prods both of them to marriage.

In the rich discussions of Acts III and IV, further impositions on the women's friendship accumulate. In III.ii, our first look at the women now happily settled into Arden, Celia teases Rosalind with her (Celia's) knowledge of Orlando's presence in the forest. In a stressful moment, the two are refreshed and comforted by their well-known patterns of banter. Yet as soon as Rosalind begins to woo Orlando, Celia falls silent. Her silence can be partially accounted for by the dynamics of the situation—it is Rosalind and Orlando who are in love, after all, not Celia. But Celia's presence as silent chaperon serves also as a strong visual reminder of the way her friendship with Rosalind no longer remains Rosalind's primary concern. In III.iv, with the two women once again alone together, familiar patterns of conversation return. Celia provides the support Rosalind needs by echoing agreement to each outrageous statement Rosalind makes (III.iv.1-23). She matches her praise for praise, complaint for complaint. But while Rosalind gets the support she needs, she can make no thankful acknowledgment of it. Her mind is all on Orlando, not Celia.

The two women continue to appear together, apparently inseparable, in III.v, IV.i, and IV.iii. Yet we never again have linguistic evidence of the comfort and support the women can provide for one another. While Celia participates in these scenes largely as a silent partner, Rosalind acts more and more on her own. In III.v, for example, Rosalind handles Phebe and Silvius without a single word from Celia. In IV.i, at the height of Rosalind's linguistic control, Celia has only six short speeches (and twelve lines total). And finally, IV.iii is evidence that the two women have come to face the world separately. The most convincing proof of Celia's sudden love for Oliver is the revival in her language in IV.iii, the scene in which Oliver first appears in Arden. Earlier, in her six short speeches of IV.i, Celia had demonstrated a playful distaste for Rosalind's actions, charging her with the misuse of “our sex” (IV.i.185), calling Rosalind's affection for Orlando, pejoratively, “bottomless” (IV.i.193), and responding to Rosalind's announcement of her vigil for Orlando with uncharacteristic unconcern, “And I’ll sleep” (IV.i.202). So by IV.iii Celia is well ready to focus her energy and concern elsewhere. While in the early parts of IV.iii Celia has only two short speeches, once Oliver enters, she explodes into speech and it is Rosalind's turn to be the bystander. In addition, IV.iii marks the first time we have seen Celia pay attention to anyone other than Rosalind. Celia and Rosalind's exit with Orlando at the end of the scene also marks the last time we can count on seeing the two women together. When Rosalind re-enters in V.ii, she appears without Celia for the first time in the play. When Celia next appears, at the opening of V.iv, she is similarly without Rosalind, who enters shortly after with Phebe and Silvius. By the end of the play we look for not Rosalind and Celia, but Celia with her love Oliver and Rosalind with her love Orlando. Hymen's amusement at the coupling of women in his comment to Phebe adds a final, godly consent to the separation of the cousins.

Rosalind and Celia, the heart of the play's joyous women-powered Arden, are only half of the female population in the play. While the cousins are inseparable until the very end of the play, Audrey and Phebe live isolated existences throughout the play. Their separate presences further underline the slim possibilities for female community in this world. It is no accident that immediately after Rosalind's first show of power in III.ii, we meet Audrey, an unforgettable reminder that few of the world's women are like Rosalind. We also meet, in Audrey, a woman effectively speechless in response to Touchstone's verbal battering, a woman outnumbered three to one by men telling her what to do. While she is a healthy reminder of sexuality in the play, by V.i she is no more than Touchstone's sexual possession. She provides concrete evidence that the stereotypes Rosalind and Celia joked of in Act I have a reality—here is a woman honest and ill-favored. The choice of Audrey and Touchstone as the representatives of a lover and his lass in V.iii is also revealing; instead of celebrating headstrong Rosalind and her lover, the two pages celebrate a safer couple, Audrey and her love. Finally, the ways Audrey fulfills our expectations about conventional stereotypes of women is certified by her isolation. The only time Audrey appears on stage with any other women is in V.iv, by which time the business of marriage assures she will be part not of a female community, but of a married, heterosexual one.

Phebe's journey through the inverted world of Rosalind's rule surpasses Audrey's in showing the play's restrictions on female community. We first meet Phebe in III.v when Rosalind, Celia, and Corin are spying on her conversation with Silvius. For the first time, we have three women on stage, and a further attachment developing in that potential female community as Phebe is attracted to Rosalind-Ganymede. But Rosalind entertains Phebe's affection only as sport, and her decision ensures that Phebe's infatuation is cause for laughter—not for alarm or love. One might speculate, on the basis of her love for Celia, that Rosalind would show sympathy for Phebe. Instead, Rosalind shows disdain for Phebe in III.v and belittles her love whenever possible throughout the rest of the play. In IV.iii, for example, when Silvius carries Phebe's letter to Ganymede, Rosalind-Ganymede puts Phebe's love in the harshest terms, telling Silvius, “Wilt thou love such a woman? What, to make thee an instrument, and play false strains upon thee?” (IV.iii.68-69); and in V.ii, when Phebe tells Ganymede of her love, Phebe's desires become the comic link in Rosalind's love chain. As if in payment for her silly infatuation, Phebe is suitably embarrassed in the couplings of the final scene and forced to find her refuge in the man who has picked her, Silvius. While both Phebe and Silvius are silly in their poses, Silvius, through his doggish sincerity, earns a redemption Phebe cannot. There is no place in the play's final order for Phebe's attachment to Ganymede-Rosalind.

Audrey and Phebe serve double duty in the play. First they expose the isolation of the women in the play as Rosalind and Celia—with their long-standing love—cannot. In this way they defuse the threat of women that Shirley Nelson Garner finds responsible for similar isolations in A Midsummer Night's Dream; as Garner puts it, “the male characters think they can keep their women only if they divide and conquer them.”¹⁶ Second, Audrey and Phebe serve as a multi-purpose counterpoint to Rosalind and Celia. With the simplistic presences of Phebe and Audrey, the power, language, and love of Rosalind and Celia are undercut. What happens to Audrey and Phebe is especially important because they are women only of Arden. They, and not Rosalind and Celia, are the true representatives of Arden's inverted world. Most crucially then, the presence of Phebe and Audrey assures that Rosalind is not the rule, that women can be separated, even in Arden. The women of As You Like It, besides being no threat numerically (there are only four women in a cast of at least seventeen men), are also no threat to power and order.

Marjorie Garber and George Gordon read positively the movement of women away from each other in the play, each finding a psychic gain in such separation.¹⁷ Marilyn French and Carole McKewin are still more optimistic, French designating plays like As You Like It as rare literary sites where female bondage is transformed to female bonding.¹⁸ Most recently, however, both Janet Adelman and Carol Thomas Neely have accounted for a view, like mine, which finds the play's female friendships ultimately counterproductive for the women.¹⁹ I have limited hope for the women of the play, partly because—as I have shown—the play limits female power and community, partly, and more basically, because in doing so it precludes change. Change does occur in the play; the most obvious and important change comes in Rosalind herself, who matures from a sharp, witty, and probably bored woman into a loving, wise woman ready for the compromises of marriage. Yet her personal change loses its significance in the communal end of the comedy. Rosalind's changes remain hers alone and do not translate into social changes. The world emerging at the end of this comedy is “new” only in that four new couples are forming; the society the eight lovers are being accepted into is as old and predictable as is their acceptance of it. As the actions and cycles of the play have made clear, part of that predictability includes tolerance of traditional sexual stereotypes and acceptance of the double standard. The characters' final acceptance of each other is an acceptance of the limits to women's words, powers, and friendships that the play has enforced. To put it more precisely, in As You Like It the kinds of change possible for women are as restricted as are their language and their friendships. In a play headed irrevocably towards marriage, which As You Like It is as soon as it begins, women, their changes, and their choices are restricted.²⁰

Based on her considerations of the comic genre, Bamber comes to a nearly opposite conclusion—that the dictates of comedy are so flexible that an either-or world is created, that the liberation of this world makes choice unnecessary.²¹ But her optimistic conclusions hold true only when we consider the free middle section of the comic world without giving due weight to the reversals of comedy's ending. Clearly, as Bamber and others have seen, Shakespeare wants to demonstrate a need for change along with his plan for it—even plays like As You Like It and Twelfth Night are full of questioning of the status quo. Yet in choosing comedy, in guiding his characters between comedy's Scylla and Charybdis of the revolutionary and the reactionary, Shakespeare accepts a limited kind of social change.

RETURN TO THE “NORM”-AL

The middle of Shakespeare's play presents us with possibilities for female linguistic power and community, but only together with a plan, at the end, for disrupting them. That plan, in a word, is marriage.

Shakespearean criticism abounds with recognition of the blessing marriage bestows on the comic conclusion. Charlton's utilitarian description of such marriage—“Marriage is to the comic dramatist the beneficent arrangement through which mankind achieves a maximum of human joy and a minimum of social disability”—is decorated in various ways by scholars who applaud marriage's reconciliation of male and female, its service as the capstone to a woman's maturation, and its joyful promise of the continuation of a society and a world.²² On the other hand, critics who detect in marriage impositions on comedy's characters remind us that a full consideration of comic marriages must include a study of change.²³ The key issue, be it implicit or explicit, acknowledged or unacknowledged, is the relationship between marriage and social change.

In As You Like It, marriage is more an assumption than a visible institution. Although marriage is the goal of at least nine characters in the play (the four couples, plus William), we meet no character in the play who we know is married, though at least Dukes Senior and Frederick can be assumed to have been. Thus marriage exists as an abstract idea with the potential of becoming an ideal. Although the play overflows with critical evaluations of life in the country, life at the court, the age itself, and even love, marriage is rarely spoken of or criticized. In III.ii, as Touchstone's love for Audrey is to be translated into marriage by Sir Oliver Mar-Text, our first image of marriage is one Touchstone embellishes with cuckold's horns (III.iii.42-55). A brief exchange between Touchstone and Jaques adds to this a picture of marriage as a contest of animal desires (III.iii.68-71). Yet when Jaques refuses to let a mockery of a wedding take place, we find, curiously, that the sanctity of the institution is preserved by the biggest cynic in the play. Rosalind is the only other character to fully consider, before play's end, the transformation of love into marriage; her view, like Touchstone's, is mockingly brutal. As she fortells of her life as Orlando's wife in IV.i, her portrait of marriage promises little more than infidelity and animal passions. Orlando's firm response and his love stand as proof against her charges, however, as do Rosalind's own pleas with Celia to “marry” her and Orlando. The play absorbs Rosalind's mockery as it absorbed Touchstone's cynicism. Marriage is rescued once by the realist Jaques, once by the idealist Orlando, and is, in both cases, preserved intact for the play's final scene where the would-be marriages of III.iii and IV.i are transformed into real marriages. Marriage remains an ideal unblemished by example.

The less obvious but more pervasive presence of marriage lies in the long-anticipated happy ending of the play. Familiarity with comic convention has led us to expect an ending in marriage, at least since Rosalind and Orlando fell in love in I.ii, and Shakespeare's only interference with such expectations comes in the teasing of his aborted marriages and his gentle ironies. The drive toward marriage controls much action, as we have seen; friendship between women, for example, must finally take second place to the search for a mate, for the physical possibilities of regeneration. Comic endings in marriage are not simplistically happy—as even Shakespeare's array of comedies shows. And extensive criticism has confirmed that there is no equation between marriage and a happy ending; yet the two remain, even if only ironically, attached and inseparable. The pressing question, however, is what marriage as the ending of comedy symbolizes for the women in As You Like It.

Northrop Frye assures us that the new society created in the marriages at the end of comedy is a changed one where a younger generation triumphs and gains the right to assert its fresh answers to life's dilemmas.²⁴ The joy of the comic ending is affixed to the promise of social change. Both Rosalie Colie and Heather Dubrow agree, noting that because genres like comedy create expectations, writers can use them to question such expectations and create a climate where change is real.²⁵ Yet even if we accept this brightest of readings for comedy, for the women in the genre these possibilities are different than they are for the men, again because of the double standard at the heart of comedy's reversals. Comedy as a genre exists as a paradox; in its middle world the rules are bent, even reversed; but such reversal is acceptable only because we understand its extra-ordinary nature. As we have seen, then, the women who flourish in comedy as they do nowhere else do so only on a temporary basis. And further, the growth which a character like Rosalind does achieve is truncated, both by the isolation of the phenomenon (she may change, but the other women do not) and by the limited choices available to her at the end of the play. What Rosalind learns about love is limited by the fact that she cannot not choose marriage. Her choice becomes a lopsided either-or one. Either she has the illusive freedom and power of a Ganymede or she has the love and predictable comfort of a married Rosalind. Comedy does not allow for the possibility of combining Rosalind's linguistic power, her friendship with Celia, and her marriage to Orlando; we end the play with her marriage to Orlando, with her silence, and with an awareness of her new distance from Celia. While the promise of social change abounds in As You Like It, for Rosalind, Celia, Audrey, and Phebe, participation in that change must be funneled through marriage.

The limitations for female community, change, and choice in As You Like It are a small part of the play, of course, and my study of them is not meant to exclude a recognition of its invigorating freedom and its serious consideration of female power and community. Recent productions of Shakespeare have been instrumental in showing how, in spite of their patriarchal bases, Shakespeare's comedies can highlight sexual freedom and equality. The 1978 Ashland Festival production of The Taming of the Shrew, as Martha Andresen-Thom reports, showed great faith in that play's ability to counteract its own sexism. As Andresen-Thom reports, the action which precedes Kate's final treatise on marriage displays the invention of this production's staging:

In tone and action she [Kate] conveys to us and to the incredulous audience on stage that her alliance is with Petruchio (Rich Hamilton) who attends to her, subdued and moved, until she starts to kneel so as to place her hand beneath his foot. He then goes to her and kneels too, catching her hand in his. Slowly they rise together, face to face, the bond between them enacted in this public ritual and soon to be consummated in the private domain of their bedchamber.²⁶

Such action emphasizes an equality comedy's topsy-turvy world—with its emphasis on inversion—often has difficulty showing. The 1983 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Much Ado About Nothing employs a similarly bold ending to announce its refusal wholeheartedly to accept comedy's traditional final couplings.²⁷ The expected male-female coupling of the festive ending is replaced with a series of circle dances where combinations of men, of women, and of men and women make male-female couples only a minor part of a spectrum. In this broadened context of relationship, the final focus on Beatrice and Benedick can come from a new perspective, with the lovers' relationship retaining its romance not because of traditional assumptions but in defiance of them. Such productions stand in marked contrast to the BBC Time/Life production of As You Like It. With its mystical Hymen leading a stodgy, boring, and predictable finale of heterosexual coupling, this production endorses traditional marriage as a cultural centerpiece. What the alternative productions of The Taming of The Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing offer is a possibility for viewing Shakespeare's comedies—As You Like It among the rest—as plays which may provide their own ways of exploding comic sexism. These productions offer a joy and hope that mitigate against the closing in of comic marriage. They demonstrate that Shakespeare's plays, in spite of their encoded sexism, also contain a sensitivity to sex-based roles and conventions. As You Like It especially, with its surprising lack of a definition for marriage, leaves ample room for producers (and scholars) to posit their own definitions.

By focusing on the conventions of the comic genre that Shakespeare adapted to his drama, I do not intend to erase his artistic victories, only to qualify them. As I study the women in As You Like It, I cannot accept the glorious female presences without also acknowledging the parameters of their glory. The men in Shakespearean comedy are burdened with many of the same restrictions that limit the women, but the patterns they grow into accord them power and prestige. The patterns women like Rosalind grow into accord them a loss of freedom, a loss of choice, and an invitation to indirection. When we first meet her in The Merchant of Venice, Portia laments her powerlessness to choose—“O me, the word ‘choose’! I may neither choose who I would nor refuse who I dislike … Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I cannot choose one, nor refuse none?” (I.ii.21-25). Though Portia is as little a complainer as Rosalind is, she speaks for most comic heroines who find—as she does—lack of choice an overwhelming barrier. As much as Shakespeare attempts to make As You Like It transcend generic barriers, it does not. He creates magnificent women in an enviable free world, but cannot prevent us from responding by noting their losses as much as their gains.

Notes

1. All quotations from Shakespeare are taken from The Pelican Shakespeare, ed. Alfred Harbage (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1969). My thanks to Jenny Spencer, Barbara Hodgdon, and Lee Poague for their helpful responses to this essay.

2. H. B. Charlton, Shakespearian Comedy (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1938), pp. 277, 285.

3. See Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980); Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982); and Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York: Summit Books, 1981).

4. Mikhail Bahktin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978), p. 9.

5. See Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1965); and C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1959).

6. See Clara Claiborne Park, “As We Like It: How a Girl can be Smart and Still Popular,” in The Woman's Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, eds. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 100-16; Shirley Nelson Garner, “A Midsummer Night's Dream: ‘Jack Shall have Jill: / Nought Shall Go Ill,’” Women's Studies, 9 (1982), 157-76; Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare, Jonson, Moliere: The Comic Contract (London: Macmillan, 1980); Ann Parten, “Reestablishing Sexual Order: The Ring Episode in The Merchant of Venice,” Women's Studies 9 (1982), 145-55; Peter Erickson, “The Failure of Relationship Between Men and Women in Love's Labor's Lost,” Women's Studies, 9 (1981), 65-81; Peter Erickson, “Sexual Politics and Social Structure in As You Like It,” Massachusetts Review, 23 (Spring 1982), 65-83; and Carol Thomas Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985). Karen Newman has also recently considered the power that does or does not accrue to women in comedy's inversion and she traces out a middle critical ground contending that the inversion is not always “simply a safety mechanism” but can be an effective intrusion on male “structures of exchange.” See “Portia's Ring: Unruly Women and Structures of Exchange in The Merchant of Venice,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 38 (Spring 1987), 29.

7. Erickson, “Sexual Politics,” p. 82.

8. Erickson, “Sexual Politics,” p. 77. While Robert Kimbrough argues that the play's androgyny is a sign of sexual equality, Lisa Jardine concurs with Erickson that the gender swapping in the play does not necessarily benefit women. See Robert Kimbrough, “Androgyny Seen Through Shakespeare's Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 33 (Spring 1982), 17-33; and Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1983), pp. 19-20.

9. Erickson, “Sexual Politics,” p. 77. An interesting gloss on Erickson's feminist conclusion is provided by Barber and Grene, both of whom conclude that the reversals of comedy are benign. Barber assures us “it is when the normal is secure that playful aberration is benign,” Shakespeare's Festive Comedies, p. 245. Grene notes the “inverse proportion between the degree of influence normally associated with a social persona and the degree of influence he or she is accorded in the comic action,” Shakespeare, Jonson, Moliere, p. 45. Louis Montrose, on the other hand, finds the reversals of comedy a “structure for her [Rosalind's] containment” in his “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 32 (Spring 1981), 52. For other more general studies of the women in Shakespeare's comedies as affected by reversals see Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1981); Nancy Hayles, “Sexual Disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare Survey, 32 (1979), 63-72; Martha Andresen-Thom, “Thinking about Women and Their Prosperous Art: A Reply to Juliet Dusinberre's Shakespeare and the Nature of Women,” Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 259-76; Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men; and Neely, Broken Nuptials in Shakespeare's Plays.

10. Catherine Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies,” in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 180, 184.

11. Nevo, pp. 181-82.

12. Erickson, “Sexual Politics,” pp. 79-80.

13. Madelon Gohlke, “‘All that is spoke is marred:’ Language and Consciousness in Othello,” Women's Studies, 9 (1982), 167-68.

14. Coppelia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), p. 117. Garber also writes on the role of language in character development, yet studies language only as it applies to male maturation; see Chapter Four.

15. My study of the women in As You Like It has been informed by several recent feminist studies of female friendship and community, most centrally those by Nina Auerbach, Communities of Women: An Idea in Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978), and Elizabeth Abel, “(E)Merging Identities: The Dynamics of Female Friendship in Contemporary Fiction by Women,” Signs, 6 (Spring 1981), 411-35.

16. Garner, p. 61.

17. See Garber, pp. 140-70; and George Gordon, Shakespearian Comedy and Other Studies (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1944), pp. 31-32.

18. See French, p. 79; and Carole McKewin, “Counsels of Gall and Grace: Intimate Conversations between Women in Shakespeare's Plays,” in The Woman's Part, pp. 117-32.

19. Adelman summarizes the separation of Celia and Rosalind as she contrasts women's friendships in the play to men's. See her “Male Bonding in Shakespeare's Comedies,” in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber (Newark: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1985), pp. 82-84. In her study, Neely returns again and again to the conclusion that Shakespeare's plays consistently separate women. For a complementary study of male friendship, see W. Thomas MacCary, Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985).

20. Belsey, p. 188, is optimistic about the subversive possibilities of the play's ending in a way I cannot be.

21. Bamber, pp. 117-29.

22. Charlton, p. 117. See also Frye, pp. 82 and 123; and Garber, Chapter Five.

23. See Kahn; and David Sundelson, “Misogyny and Rule in Measure for Measure,” Women's Studies, 9 (1981), 83-91. For an encyclopedic background on changing Renaissance attitudes to marriage see Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (New York: Knopf, 1984). On the connection between marriage and equality, Neely provides a useful summary of Renaissance and critical attitudes to conclude that marriage was not as equal as some have wanted to make it seem, pp. 8-21. More specifically, Marianne Novy talks of marriage-bound relationships in As You Like It as reflections of mutuality; see Love's Argument: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 25.

24. Frye, p. 130.

25. See Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973); and Heather Dubrow, Genre (London: Methuen, 1982). Leo Salingar, likewise, convincingly notes how the convention of comedy finally limits Shakespeare's options in advocating social change. See his Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 322-23.

26. Martha Andresen-Thom, “Shrew-taming and other Rituals of Aggression: Baiting and Bonding on the Stage and in the World,” Women's Studies, 9 (1982), 123.

27. Descriptions are of the performance seen during the summer of 1983 at the Royal Shakespeare Company Barbican Theatre, London.