[In the following essay, Powell considers the relationship between animal allusions and Rosalind's shifting sexual identity in As You Like It.]

The presentation of the character Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It produces a dizzying cycle of both physical and verbal sexual disguises: the boy-actor plays Rosalind, who plays Ganymede, who assumes the nominal identity Rosalind, which is dropped in her return to Rosalind, who ultimately gives way to the boy-actor in the play's epilogue. Though the play's menagerie and Rosalind's delight in her role have drawn a good deal of critical attention, no one has yet remarked Rosalind's use of animal lore as she playfully alludes to her role as sexual chameleon.

I

In two instances Rosalind refers to the hare or “its more plebeian relative, the rabbit.”¹ First, in response to Orlando's question, “Are you natiue of this place?” Rosalind quips, “As the Conie that you see dwell where shee is kindled” (III.ii.355-57).² Later Rosalind remarks of Phoebe, “Her loue is not the Hare that I doe hunt” (IV.iii.18). Being, as Eric Partridge puts it, “notoriously repetitive in the act,”³ rabbits and hares have long enjoyed, in Beryl Rowland's terms, “a reputation for extreme lasciviousness.”⁴ But Rowland's research brings to light a more provocative piece of lore unusually applicable to the sexually variable Rosalind:

One of the most persistent beliefs about the hare is that it is a hermaphrodite or bisexual. This error appears in works of various periods and is said to have survived until the end of the eighteenth century. Aristotle does not record it, but the superstition appears in both Pliny and Aelian, and in the Gwentian code of north-east Wales, supposed to be of the eleventh century, the hare is said to be incapable of legal evaluation because it is male one month and female another. Twiti [in La Venerie] states that “at one tyme he is male, at other female,” and in common with the writer of The Master of Game he applies masculine and feminine pronouns indiscriminately. In a poem on the names of the hare in a late thirteenth century manuscript, the word ballart occurs, which may be an allusion to the hare's reputed bisexuality, and in the fourteenth century Welsh poem, “Ysgyfarnog,” the hare is termed gwr-wreic: a hermaphrodite.

(pp. 57-58)

John Boswell's recollection of a passage from “Alexander Neckam (d. 1217), an early and widely quoted encyclopedist,” may be added to Rowland's findings: “They say that the hare of the nobler sex [i.e., the male] bears the little hares in the womb. Can it be that a bizarre nature has made him a hermaphrodite?”⁵ More importantly, in his History of Four-Footed Beasts (originally published in 1607), Edward Topsell records the “opinion that all Hares were females, or at the least that the males bring forth young as well as females”—a belief provoking hunters to “make him an Hermaphrodite.”⁶ Phipson, in fact, identifies references to this unusual misapprehension in both Lyly and Fletcher: “Lyly alludes to a very curious notion: ‘Hares we cannot be, because they are male one year and the next female’ (Mydas); and Fletcher, in the Gentle Shepherd, writes, ‘Hares that yearly sexes change.’”⁷

Rosalind's allusion to the hyena is also provocative. In Act IV, scene i, Rosalind forewarns Orlando of her future perverseness, concluding her series of promises with the assurance, “I will laugh like a Hyen, and that when thou art inclin'd / to sleepe” (ll. 155-56). That the “bark of the hyena very much resembles a loud laugh”⁸ obviously explains Rosalind's remark. However, the allusion raises two other ideas about the hyena that apply well to Rosalind. First, the hyena's facility with imitation and impersonation was thought remarkable. Kenelme Digby, in his 1644 natural treatise, explains that the hyena, when hungry, imitates the “actions and soundes” of beasts “which vse to serue him in that occasion”: “… like a parat he representeth them so liuely that the deceiued beasts flocke to him, and so are caught by him. …”⁹ It was believed that the hyena could “counterfeit a mans voice” and thus lead men, too, to destruction, a practice which, as Topsell tells us, earned the hyena “her proper Epithet … Aemula vocis, Voyce-Counterfeiter.” (p. 341). Phipson calls attention to the line from Lyly's Euphues, “… Hiena when she speaketh like a man deviseth most mischief. …”¹⁰

Since Rosalind imitates, attracts, and captures a man and thus promotes the play's mischief, the hyena lore is quite apt. But a second belief about the hyena is no less so. The allusion raises the same “very curious notion” attached to the hare: “The Physiologus says that the hyaena changes sex, and is sometimes male, sometimes female. …”¹¹ Topsell remarks on this idea as one that was persistent in the earlier bestiaries: “… I marvail upon what occasion the writers have been so possessed with opinion that they change sexes, and are sometimes male and another female, that is to say, male one year, and female another …” (p. 340). Shakespeare may well have read Ovid's remark on the double-natured hyena in Book xv of Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses:

But if that any noueltye woorth woondring bee in theis,
Much rather may we woonder at the Hyen if we please.
Loo see how interchaungeably it one whyle dooth remayne
A female, and another whyle becommeth male againe.(12)

II

Rosalind's references to the hare and the hyena are consistent with her determination to enjoy her fluctuating sexual identity. But the allusions may, in fact, have further import, for classical and medieval allusions associate the reputedly “sexually aberrant” hare and hyena with homosexuality.¹³ For example, Alexander Neckam follows his description of the hare's double nature with the observation that “Effeminate men who violate the law of nature are thus said to imitate hares, offending against the highest majesty of nature” (Boswell, p. 306). And the Physiologus account of the hyena closes with the injunction, “Be not you, man, like the hyaena, the symbol of those who in the beginning serve God, later give themselves over to lust, and assume the nature of the female. And the Apostle said: ‘Male lay with male in great ignominy, in the sight of God, and both died’ (Romans 1:27).”¹⁴ So persistent were the notions that, as Boswell points out, “Half a millennium after [the Epistle of] Barnabas [dated in the first century a.d.], the bishop of Pavia could make fun of a gay male by comparing him to a hare, and a thousand years later Bernard of Cluny could assail homosexual relations with the simple observation that a man who thus ‘dishonors his maleness’ is ‘just like a hyena’” (pp. 142-43).

The remark by Rosalind-Ganymede, “her loue is not the Hare that I doe hunt,” is quite suggestive in this context. Boswell shows that during the period 1050 to 1150, a time marked by “the reappearance for the first time since the decline of Rome of evidence for what might be called a gay subculture,” “‘Hunting’ and terminology related to it figure prominently in poetry by or about gay people, and it is possible that it represented what ‘cruising’ describes in the gay subculture of today, although as a metaphor it is obvious enough not to require any special explanation.” Boswell surmises that the “rich irony of Ganymede having been hunting himself when the eagle swooped down upon him doubtless added to the effectiveness of the metaphor, as did the residual association of hares with homosexuality” (pp. 243, 253). The terminology is used, for example, in “Ganymede and Hebe,” a “decidedly progay poem” of the twelfth or thirteenth century, in which Hebe laments the shameful state of the heavens since Ganymede's usurpation of her place; “Here,” she says, “a hare hunts hare.”¹⁵

Rosalind's allusions to the hare and the hyena come quite naturally in the play's principal setting, the Forest of Arden, and they serve the heroine's sportive sense of humor even in their surface meanings. But, further, they suggest that Shakespeare and his Rosalind were exploiting the well-known lore that the animals were sex-changers and that the hyena, in addition, was an accomplished male-impersonator. Because the cross-dressing,¹⁶ the same-sex pairings (Rosalind-Phoebe, Ganymede-Orlando),¹⁷ and the name Ganymede¹⁸ show Shakespeare flirting with the theme of homosexuality in As You Like It, it is interesting to speculate that the two animals (and, in particular, the notion of “hunting the hare”) may have retained the homosexual implications apparent in earlier periods. The hermaphroditic animals certainly emphasize Rosalind's symbolic role as a reconciler of opposites,¹⁹ an agent of harmony, since the dualities male and female, as well as heterosexual and homosexual love, are represented and resolved through her. In the closing scene, Rosalind puts all into ark-like order. But the epilogue, wherein the sexual duality is reasserted,²⁰ leaves us with a resistant afterimage of a character whose playful, ambiguous attractiveness is more compelling than the artistic and social proprieties of plot and sexual identity.

Notes

1. Emma Phipson, The Animal-Lore of Shakespeare's Time (1883; rpt. New York: AMS Press, 1973), p. 157.

2. All citations are to As You Like It, A New Variorum Edition, ed. Richard Knowles (New York: MLA, 1977).

3. Shakespeare's Bawdy (1948; rpt. New York: Dutton, 1960), p. 125.

4. “Animal Imagery and the Pardoner's Abnormality,” Neophilologus, 48 (1964), 58.

5. John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 306.

6. The History of Four-Footed Beasts (New York: Da Capo Press, 1967), pp. 207, 209. Following their observation that “the sex of the hare has always seemed a mystery,” George Ewart Evans and David Thomson quote from Topsell's discussion of the hare in The Leaping Hare (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 24-25.

7. Phipson, p. 160.

8. Knowles records this observation from Samuel Johnson and George Steevens' 1773 edition of AYL in his New Variorum Edition, p. 231, n. 2064.

9. Two Treatises: The Nature of Bodies, the Nature of Man's Sowle (Paris, 1644), p. 314. Phipson cites this work (p. 33).

10. Phipson, p. 32. I draw the quotation from John Lyly, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Euphues and His England, ed. Morris William Croll and Harry Clemons (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1916), p. 97. The editors quote a passage from Erasmus' Similia that they feel “makes it probable that Erasmus is Lyly's source” (p. 97, n. 2).

11. Physiologus: The Very Ancient Book of Beasts, Plants, and Stones, trans. Francis J. Carmody (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1953), item xxviii. Carmody's translation is “a ‘composite’ text of the Greek, Syrian, Ethiopian, and Latin” (Michael J. Curley, trans., Physiologus [Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1979], p. xxxiii). Curley's translation, “based on the two editions of the Latin Physiologus prepared by Francis Carmody” (p. xxxiii), likewise identifies the hyena as “an arenotelicon, that is an alternating male-female” (p. 53). T. H. White's translation from a twelfth-century Latin bestiary (The Book of Beasts [New York: Putnam's Sons, 1954]) advances the notion that hyenas “are neither male nor female” (p. 32).

12. Ovid, The Fifteen Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, Entituled Metamorphosis, trans. Arthur Golding (London, 1567), fol. 192^v, ll. 9-12. Knowles notes that “The classical writer most often cited as a source for AYL is Ovid” (p. 500), and in his summary of these citations are found references to Golding's “Epistle Dedicatorie” and to passages in Book xv. In Lois E. Bueler's recent article, “Webster's Excellent Hyena,” Philological Quarterly, 59 (1980), 107-11, Bueler gives attention to Ferdinand's remark in John Webster's Duchess of Malfi, “Methinks I see her laughing— / Excellent hyena!” (II.v.38-39); she cites Pliny, Golding, Topsell, and Le Bestiare Divin of Guillaume de Normandie to establish the ideas of the hyena's “sexual mutability and magical potency” and concludes “that it is [Ferdinand's] sense of the Duchess as neither singly female nor male that is most important to his use of the word hyena” (pp. 107-9).

13. Boswell, pp. 138-43, 305-7.

14. Carmody, item xxviii. See plates 9 and 12 in Boswell for illuminations in medieval Latin bestiaries that depict “two hyenas embracing, a common artistic reference to the animal's alleged homosexuality.”

15. Boswell, pp. 253, n. 38, 393. This application of the terminology does not obviate J. H. Walter's obvious observation that, “The hare was one of Venus' creatures, and to hunt the hare was emblematic of a love-hunt” (Knowles, p. 244, n. 2166).

16. Puritans, citing Deuteronomy 22:5, regarded the adoption of female dress by boy-actors as a practice likely to lead male audiences into the “abomination” of homosexual desire (Nancy K. Hayles, “Sexual Disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night,” Shakespeare Survey, 32 [1979], 70). Hayles draws on the earlier article of J. W. Binns, “Women or Transvestites on the Elizabethan Stage?: An Oxford Controversy,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 2 (1974), 95-120. On the cross-dressing of Renaissance heroines, see M. C. Bradbrook, “Shakespeare and the Use of Disguise in Elizabethan Drama,” Essays in Criticism, 2 (1952), 167; F. H. Mares, “Viola and Other Transvestist Heroines in Shakespeare's Comedies,” in Stratford Papers, 1965-67, ed. B. A. W. Jackson (Hamilton, Ont.: McMaster Univ. Library Press, 1969), p. 97; and Doris Feil, “The Female Page in Renaissance Drama,” Dissertation Abstracts International, 31 (1971), 6007A (Arizona State Univ.).

17. Phoebe's attraction to Rosalind-Ganymede parallels Olivia's fall for Viola-Cesario in Twelfth Night, while the intimacy between Orlando and Ganymede is similar to the interest Guiderius and Arviragus express in Imogen-Fidele in Act III, scene vi, of Cymbeline.

18. The Ovidian account of Zeus's ravishment of Ganymede in Book x of the Metamorphoses is a potent homosexual myth, following the story of Orpheus' homosexual metamorphosis and preceding the tale of Apollo's love for Hyacinthus. So strong was the association of Ganymede with homosexuality that the name had served in an earlier period—one likewise “addicted to classical literature”—as an “equivalent of ‘gay’” (Boswell, p. 253). And contemporary attestations show that the word signified a “catamite” (OED, Ganymede 2.), “A boy kept for unnatural purposes” (OED, Catamite).

19. Margaret Boerner Beckman, “The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It,” Shakespeare Quarterly, 29 (1978), 44, 48.

20. Rosalind begins the play's epilogue by admitting that, “It is not the fashion to see the Ladie the Epilogue”; having overturned the custom, the female character gives way to the boy-actor, who negates Rosalind's female identity: “If I were a Woman, I would kisse as many of you as had beards that pleas'd me, complexions that lik'd me, and breaths that I defi'de not …” (V.iv.221-24). See Knowles, p. 3030, n. 2791-92; Hayles, p. 67.