SOURCE: Shapiro, Michael. “Layers of Disguise: As You Like It.” In Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages, pp. 119-42. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Shapiro analyzes the device of the cross-gender disguise in Shakespeare's As You Like It, as well as in the plays of some of Shakespeare's contemporaries.]

Even more ingenious than adding a second or third heroine in cross-gender disguise, as Shakespeare did in The Merchant of Venice, is having the cross-dressed heroine take on a second cross-gender disguise. It would be as if Balthazar, Portia's disguised male alter ego, adopted female disguise. Such a second cross-gender disguise would reverse the direction of the gender change of the first and intensify what was already a highly reflexive situation, for in representing a woman, the female page would be repeating in the world of the play what the male performer was doing in the world of the playhouse. In As You Like It, Shakespeare has Ganymed pretend to be a woman and at moments invites the performer to play broad female stereotypes but stops well short of a second cross-gender disguise. No play of the English Renaissance exploited the full potentiality of this variation, probably because of the technical difficulty of dramatizing two disguisings and undisguisings. The usual solution was to conceal the heroine's initial cross-gender disguise from other characters and ostensibly from the audience until the end of the play.

SECOND DISGUISE AS UNDISGUISING: HEYWOOD'S THE FOUR PRENTICES OF LONDON

Freeburg uses the term “retro-disguise” to describe plays in which female pages adopt a second disguise as a woman, although it should properly be reserved for plays in which the second disguise is perceived as a return to her original female identity.¹ Freeburg cites sixteenth-century examples of plays using retro-disguise from the tradition of commedia erudita, such as Porta's La Cintia and its Latin adaptation Labyrinthus, performed at Cambridge in 1599. The earliest example in English, probably acted several years before As You Like It, is Heywood's The Four Prentices of London (Admirals, 1592-94).²

Four apprentices, actually sons of the earl of Bulloigne, enlist in the Crusades, but one of them, Guy, is shipwrecked on the shores of France. He wins the love of “the Lady of France,” as the king's daughter is called, who announces, in a short soliloquy, that she plans to follow Guy when he returns to the wars as commander of her father's army. She neglects to say how she will do so, but spectators familiar with chivalric romance, Renaissance epic, and folk ballad would have anticipated her reappearance as a page or squire. Such suspicions are confirmed several scenes later, when his page (later called Jack) speaks a soliloquy, preceded by the stage direction “Manet the French Lady,” revealing himself to be the princess, who, “Under the habite of a trusty Page” (53, l. 1131), has become Guy's close companion:

My love and Lord, that honoured me a woman,
Loves me a youth, employes me every where. …
And now I have learnt to be a perfect Page,
He will have none to trusse his points but me,
At boord to waite upon his cup but me:
To beare his Target in the field, but me.

Such fondness has led to an awkward and unsatisfying intimacy:

Nay, many a thing, which makes me blush to speak,
He will have none to lie with him but me.

(53, ll. 1135-44)

In the world of the play, the passage registers the female character's embarrassment at having to impersonate a boy and perhaps at being used sexually as one, as play-boys were alleged to be in the world of the playhouse.

But Heywood, more than most writers of late chivalric romances and Renaissance epics, also allows the disguised heroine to articulate her sexual frustration at this emotional intimacy and physical proximity afforded to her in and because of her cross-gender disguise:

I dreame and dreame, and things come in my mind:
Onely I hide my eyes; but my poore heart
Is bar'd and kept from loves satiety.

(53, ll. 1145-47)

She can only experience “love[']s satiety” as a woman, although the reflexive effect of male disguise has also made the audience highly aware of the play-boy as a performer, and perhaps as a sexual object.

In the confusion of battle Jack runs off and is taken prisoner by Eustace, one of Guy's brothers, and asks permission to “cloath me like a Lady” (82, ll. 1832, 1846) so that he might evade his master's displeasure when they meet. But Eustace informs Guy that Jack intends to appear before him disguised as a woman and asks his brother to forgive the errant page:

The poore boy, brother, stayes within my Tent,
But so disguis'd you cannot know him now,
For hee's turn'd wench: and but I know the wagge,
To be a boy, to see him thus transform'd,
I should have sworn he had bene a wench indeed.

(111, ll. 2518-22)

Jack's appearance in female attire is interpreted in several ways. Eustace, who is privy to Jack's plan, sees a boy bride. Most of the other characters, taken in by the disguise, see a strange woman. Guy and the audience see this second disguise as an undisguising, as the reappearance of the lady of France.

As the princess had hoped, Guy recognizes her at once and embraces her. The onlookers, who believe this woman to be Jack in female disguise, are astonished to see Guy “kisse a boy, … a Page, a wagtaile by this light” (112, ll. 2533, 2536), although, as many spectators would have realized, that is precisely what was happening in the world of the playhouse. Eustace's “error” in taking Jack as male articulates the audience's awareness of the male performer beneath the female role. Eustace's warning to his brother about this maid is not altogether off the mark:

Do not mistake the sex man, for he's none,
It is a rogue, a wag, his name is Jack,
A notable dissembling lad, a Crack.

(112, ll. 2539-41)

Guy sheepishly explains that “she hath beene my bedfellow / A yeare and more, yet had I not the grace—” (112, ll. 2543-44). Unable or perhaps unwilling to continue his explanation, he takes her as his bride.

The second cross-gender disguise, though brief in duration, heightens possibilities of “discrepant awareness”³ and offers the spectators a choice of several erotic possibilities. At the nexus of this tangle is the play-boy representing a woman and by means of reflexive allusion to his male identity generating the theatrical vibrancy that enhances the princess's power to reclaim her beloved, just as it did Julia's in Two Gentlemen.

AS YOU LIKE IT: ROSALIND, GANYMED, AND “ROSALIND”

No one can say whether Shakespeare noted the use of a second cross-gender disguise in Heywood's The Four Prentices or in earlier academic or commercial plays. Nevill Coghill theorizes that a second cross-gender disguise reversing the direction of gender switch of the first occurred to Shakespeare as a permutation of his or others' previous work: “A boy can present a girl; a boy can present a girl presenting a boy; a boy can present a girl presenting a boy presenting a girl.”⁴ Ganymed's representation of Rosalind also occurs in Lodge's Rosalynde (pub. 1590), the primary narrative source for As You Like It (1599),⁵ but the suggestion of a second cross-gender disguise may be one of the features that attracted Shakespeare to this prose pastoral romance.

In the play, as in Lodge's romance, Rosalind, disguised as the page Ganymed, meets Orlando in the forest, and offers to pretend to be “Rosalind.” Because Ganymed never goes so far as to adopt female disguise, as does Heywood's Jack in The Four Prentices, “Rosalind” exists only as a pretense for as long as Orlando chooses to accept it. Neither he nor anyone else mistakes Ganymed for “Rosalind,” as happens in plays using retro-disguise, but the pretense of “Rosalind” resembles a disguise on top of a disguise by giving the performer a second, female layer of identity beyond the original female character and her first disguise as Ganymed. As a result of this triple layering, the text provides rich opportunities for the performer to shift abruptly from one layer of gender identity to another.

An audience would be confused unless the performer, regardless of gender, made it clear when Rosalind herself was speaking, when the character was speaking as Ganymed, and when Ganymed was posing as the stereotyped “Rosalind.” In the minds of the audience and the performer, all three of these layers are understood as forming the complex amalgam of the female character, but an attempt to convey them simultaneously would produce confusion. Instead, I suggest that the boy actor did what most actors do when called upon to play multiple layers of identity: he committed himself fully to one layer of identity at a time as suggested by the script or determined in rehearsal, perhaps occasionally suggesting connections and oppositions between layers, or trusting the audience to do so. In moving from layer to layer, the performer could probably also count on spectators to maintain awareness of the play-boy and to admire his virtuosity.⁶ Once the play shifts to the Forest of Arden, the text invites the performer to invent a different mode or style for each of these three separate and distinct layers of identity—Rosalind, Ganymed, and “Rosalind.”

The original layer, the voluble and high-spirited Rosalind, is in love with a man she barely knows and is aware of the risks in loving. In I.iii, after the duke has decreed Rosalind's banishment and left the stage, Celia assumes the dominant role in the relationship, proposing that they both flee the court, while Rosalind replies in monosyllabic half-lines. But in response to Celia's suggestion that they don “poor and mean attire … [and] with a kind of umber smirch” their faces, Rosalind takes the initiative, beginning with the idea of her donning masculine apparel:

                                                            Were it not better,
Because that I am more than common tall,
That I did suit me all points like a man?

(ll. 111-16)

Within the world of the play, the mere idea of playing a man releases for Rosalind the same kind of wit and verbal energy it did for Julia and Portia; within the world of the playhouse, the passage allowed recognition of the fact that a boy actor, taller than most women, was performing the role and that his excessive height was cleverly woven into the fabric of the play. Shakespeare's Rosalind, like Portia, also imagines herself burlesquing male swaggering once she is dressed as a man:

A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh,
A boar-spear in my hand, and—in my heart
Lie there what hidden woman's fear there will—
We'll have a swashing and a martial outside,
As many other mannish cowards have
That do outface it with their semblances.

(I.iii.117-22)

This speech indicates a capacity for antiromantic wit, which finds expression through her adoption of male identity. But although Rosalind had already decided to take the name of “Jove's own page” (I.iii.124), she discovers her true Ganymed voice to be that of a Lylian page only after Orlando appears, well into III.ii, when she decides to “speak to him like a saucy lackey, and under that habit play the knave with him” (III.ii.295-97). After over a hundred lines of Lylian wit, Ganymed proposes to adopt yet another layer of identity by pretending to be Orlando's beloved: “I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind, and come every day to my cote and woo me” (III.ii.426-27). Before Ganymed impersonates “Rosalind,” he gives Orlando and the audience a preview of this female role by describing how he took it on once before in order to cure another inamorato:

He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me. At which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something, and for no passion truly any thing, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this color.

(III.ii.407-15)

Slightly less variable than this sketch, Ganymed's “Rosalind” is a blend of such misogynistic stereotypes as the scold, the fickle or cruel Petrarchan mistress, and the shrewish cuckold maker.

Although I believe that the text invites the performer to establish these three distinct layers of identity, it is not obvious at every moment which one should be played. Different performers will make different choices. In analyzing a sample passage, IV.i.171-200, I want to show how these distinctive tones might be articulated and how quickly they change.

Ganymed has been offering “man-to-man” advice to Orlando on the behavior of wives, has suggested the possibility of infidelity, and reaches a crescendo of exuberant cynicism in celebrating the wit of women to “make her fault her husband's occasion.” Orlando is either dumfounded or disappointed and, perhaps in order to break off this misogynistic diatribe, recalls his duty to the duke: “For these two hours, Rosalind, I will leave thee.” Unaware that the real Rosalind is present, he addresses “Rosalind,” the image of his beloved constructed by Ganymed, but it might well be the real Rosalind and not the coy or imperious “Rosalind” who replies, “Alas, dear love, I cannot lack thee two hours!” She could then cover this involuntary revelation of her true feelings in her next speech by resorting to tones usually associated with “Rosalind,” first the contemptuous dismissal of “Ay, go your ways, go your ways” and then the extravagant self-pity of “'Tis but one cast away, and so come death!” But the very next sentence is Rosalind's anxious attempt to verify the time of Orlando's return, while the breezy response to Orlando's “Ay, sweet Rosalind” is Ganymed's stern warning to his friend that he dare not be late lest he be unworthy “of her you call Rosalind.” At these and similar points in the play, different performers will make different decisions, but the text invites anyone playing the role to act each moment in one of these three distinct modes, to move rapidly between them, and to invent ways to negotiate the transitions.⁷

Nancy Hayles comments perceptively on Rosalind's “on-layering” and “off-layering” of disguise and pretense, suggesting that these multiple identities are established and dismantled in linear sequence.⁸ Broadly speaking, she is right, but closer inspection, I would argue, suggests that a rigidly linear pattern is disrupted not only by textual signals for the performer to change abruptly from one identity to another, but even more forcefully in Shakespeare's day by reflexive allusions to the gender of the boy actor. As in Two Gentleman, the saucy lackey called Ganymed is a Lylian page, a theatricalized version of the wit and audacity Elizabethans attributed to and sometimes cultivated in boys. Although we do not know the name of the play-boy who acted Rosalind, Heywood assures us that most Elizabethan spectators did. Whatever the real personality of that boy, it must have been difficult for spectators to separate the play-boy from the pert and cheeky adolescent, even if the pert and cheeky adolescent was, in the world of the play, a disguise adopted by a female character. Instead of existing at a further remove from reality, Ganymed would probably have seemed as much a figure of the audience's world, the world of the playhouse, as of the fictive world of the play. To add yet another dimension of reflexivity, Ganymed's representation of “Rosalind,” replicated within the world of the play exactly what the audience saw in the world of the playhouse: a boy impersonating Rosalind.⁹ Hayles's linear sequence of on- and off-layering produces a concentric model of roles nested within roles, but the intricacy of the text and the reflexive effects produced by the presence of a male actor suggest a far more complicated scheme.

Once Rosalind is in male attire, the play makes many more references to her concealed feminine identity than Two Gentlemen or The Merchant did and often encourages the performer to oscillate between female and male layers of identity with lightning speed, whether Rosalind is playing Ganymed or Ganymed is pretending to be “Rosalind.”¹⁰ On Shakespeare's stage, these oscillations became even more dazzling in the light of 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.

SHAKESPEARE'S ADAPTATION OF LODGE'S ROSALYNDE

In Lodge's narrative, Rosalynde is one of three women in love, whose stories he tells one at a time, at more or less equal length, and “on the same plane of courtly, artificial sentimentality.”¹¹ Shakespeare turned Rosalind's into the main plot, into which he wove the other stories, and made her the dominant figure in the entire play. Not only does Shakespeare enable her to outtalk any of the other characters,¹² but he makes her motives more enigmatic. Whereas Lodge simply tells the reader that his heroine offers to pretend to be Rosader's beloved to entice him to stay with her a bit longer, Shakespeare is far less explicit. He allows us to ascribe that motive to Rosalind, if we wish, in spite of Ganymed's antiromantic offer to cure Orlando of love. The play is similarly ambiguous as to whether Orlando, who really does not want to be cured, is accepting a dare or finding himself drawn to this strange youth.¹³ Shakespeare also makes more theatrical use of his heroine's multiple layers of identity than Lodge does by making her jump from one to another and by exploiting the additional layer of identity of the boy actor, obviously not available to Lodge or his readers. As Bruce Smith writes, “We are never tempted to forget that Rosalynde is a woman; the Orlando-figure never takes her for anything but a man. All of Lodge's sexual jokes turn … on keeping that distinction clear.”¹⁴

Cross-gender casting permits Shakespeare to treat these layers of identity more fluidly. He makes the heroine sometimes play Ganymed and sometimes “Rosalind,” as we have seen. He also highlights the contradictions between Rosalind and Ganymed, especially between the heroine's self-confessed unfathomable love for Orlando and the saucy lackey's antiromantic cynicism. Shakespeare also develops this contrast in snatches of dialogue between Rosalind and Celia, the only other character besides Touchstone who knows Ganymed's real identity. Here too Shakespeare developed ideas present in his source. Lodge's Rosalynde, for example, underlines the opposed genders of her dual identity by commenting on gendered articles of clothing and on the radically different attitudes toward women she considers appropriate to each layer of her sexual identity:

Thus (quoth Ganimede) I keepe decorum, I speake now as I am Alienas page, not as I am Gerismonds daughter: for put me but into a peticoate, and I will stand in defiance to the uttermost that women are courteous, constant, vertuous, and what not.

(2:181)

Shakespeare's Rosalind also contrasts conventional gender roles in similar terms:

ROS.
I could find it 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; therefore courage, good Aliena.

(II.iv.4-8)¹⁵

Lodge sometimes makes Aliena comment on Ganimede's male clothing as a betrayal of Rosalynde's true female identity:

Leave off (quoth Aliena) to taunt thus bitterly, or els Ile pul off your pages apparell and whip you (as Venus doth her wantons) with nettles.

(2:182)

Shakespeare echoes this rebuke, adding anatomical innuendoes to the gender-based sartorial details:

You have simply misus'd our sex in your love-prate. We must have your doublet and hose pluck'd over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done to her own nest.

(IV.i.201-4)¹⁶

Adding sexual innuendoes not found in Lodge underscored the various layers of gender identity held in suspension in such scenes.

Shakespeare further departs from his source in using Celia, whether or not she speaks, to accentuate Rosalind's presence beneath her disguise as Ganymed. In other plays, Shakespeare has his heroines in male disguise convey their female identities in soliloquies or asides.¹⁷ In As You Like It, he makes Rosalind play off of Celia, who knows the truth of her identity. Rosalind, or more precisely the performer playing the role, can shift from Ganymed to Rosalind by turning to Celia in the midst of scenes involving other characters. Several scenes begin with a dialogue between Rosalind and Celia, before they are joined by other characters and become Ganymed and his sister Aliena. Shakespeare makes Ganymed by far the more active of the two in those portions of the scenes, but as long as Celia is present the two performers can activate the audience's knowledge of their other identities merely by glancing toward one another, as Lodge cannot make them do on the printed page without directly or indirectly narrating such an action.

The first time Ganymed pretends to be “Rosalind” in a scene with Orlando, Celia, who had much to say to her cousin before Orlando's appearance, suddenly turns mute. When Celia does speak, after some forty lines, she seems to be trying to prevent “Rosalind” from giving away the presence of Rosalind:

ORL.
Virtue is no horn-maker; and my Rosalind is virtuous.
ROS.
And I am your Rosalind.
CEL.
It pleases him to call you so; but he hath a Rosalind of a better leer than you.

(IV.i.63-67)

Celia's fear that Rosalind will reveal herself to Orlando articulates to the audience the layers of identity involved in the world of the play and points up the presence of the talented play-boy who constructs and juggles them all.

The second time Celia speaks while Orlando is present is about sixty lines later during the “wedding ceremony.” Whereas Celia proposes the mock marriage in Lodge's novel, and Rosalynde “changed as redde as a rose” (2:214), in the play Rosalind suggests it, and Celia seems so shocked either at the sacrilege or at Rosalind's audacity in realizing her deepest fantasy that she “cannot say the words” (IV.i.128).¹⁸ She seems irritated by Ganymed's prompting “Go to!” but does get out one line of the priest's part—“Will you, Orlando, have to wife this Rosalind?” (IV.i.130-31)—and then remains silent for about seventy more lines until Orlando leaves.

Some stage productions have Celia recede into the background and come forward only to deliver her lines. In the BBC version the camera usually frames its shots so as to exclude her. Her two scripted intrusions into the duet between Rosalind and Orlando suggest that her function is to provide the performer playing her cousin with a focal point for reestablishing the presence of her female identity as Rosalind. Similarly, when Ganymed attempts to disentangle himself from Phebe, some of his utterances to Aliena will be understood by the audience as communication between Rosalind and Celia as well, as in III.v, where Ganymed's three separate exit lines to “sister” indicate an increasing urgency, an urgency that reminds the audience of the heroine's female identity even if the performer chooses not to indicate it.

Lodge often reminds his readers of his heroine's female layer of identity by describing such involuntary physical reactions as blushing and weeping. Shakespeare dramatized only one such moment: Celia, having mentioned “a chain, that you once wore, about his neck,” notices that Rosalind blushes: “Change you color?” (III.ii.181-82). As in Two Gentlemen, Shakespeare either expected his boy actress to blush on cue or hoped that the verbal suggestion would create the illusion in the spectators' minds. Shakespeare also amplified Rosalynde's involuntary reaction to Rosader's wound. Lodge's heroine is “busie dressing up the wounds of the Forrester” (2:222) and later reacts more emotionally. Even when her feelings are stirred, she continues to administer first aid:

Ganimede had teares in her eyes, and passions in her heart to see her Rosader so pained, and therefore stept hastely to the bottle, and filling out some wine in a Mazer, shee spiced it with such comfortable drugs as she had about her, and gave it him.

(2:224)

Shakespeare dilates and complicates this moment. Rosalind listens to Oliver's account of Orlando's injury, presumably without betraying her own emotional response, but when Oliver shows her the napkin stained with his brother's blood, she swoons. Possibly suspicious of Ganymed's gender, Oliver charges the “page” with “lack[ing] a man's heart” (IV.iii.164). Rosalind seems to confess—“I do so, I confess it”—while Ganymed (or a weakened version of him) quickly retracts Rosalind's admission by claiming “this was well counterfeited! I pray you tell your brother how well I counterfeited. Heigh-ho!” (IV.iii.165-68).¹⁹ Whereas Lodge exploited the techniques available in prose narrative to remind his readers of the heroine's true gender, adapting the material for the stage required Shakespeare to provide moments for the performer to evoke the heroine's female identity with economy and precision.

In modern productions, the actress's swoon also emphasizes the presence of Rosalind behind her disguise but does so by narrowing the gap between the heroine and the female performer. As Mary Hamer has observed, playgoers and performers from the mid-eighteenth century on have often conspired to reduce this distance at such moments, in order to create an illusion of Rosalind's innate feminine delicacy. As embodiments of a “myth of femininity,” most Rosalinds of that period had to display such tenderness of feeling in order to counterbalance such “female vices” as volubility and bossiness.²⁰ On the Elizabethan stage, moments like the swoon would have been perceived as opportunities for the boy actor to construct the illusion of Rosalind's femininity.

AVOIDING INTIMACY IN AS YOU LIKE IT

An even trickier moment for the Elizabethan boy actor occurs later in the play, in V.ii, when Shakespeare brings Rosalind and Orlando alone on stage for the first time. Orlando refers to “my Rosalind” (l. 16) and Oliver greets the page as “fair sister” (l. 18), but these remarks seem playfully addressed to Ganymed's “Rosalind,” as neither brother elsewhere shows any sign (to me) of having seen through Rosalind's disguise.²¹

During this sixty-line duet with Orlando, Rosalind has no Celia to restrain her or to play off of as herself. In her opening line, an expression of pity from “Rosalind,” she seems inadvertently to betray the presence of Rosalind: “O my dear Orlando, how it grieves me to see thee wear thy heart in a scarf!” (ll. 19-20). To his matter-of-fact correction, “It is my arm” (l. 21), she offers a line that can be delivered as a continuation of Rosalind's concern, as Ganymed's nonchalant attempt to cover the error, or as “Rosalind's” wide-eyed mock confusion: “I thought thy heart had been wounded with the claws of a lion” (ll. 22-23). Orlando's reply marks a resumption of his earlier lovesickness, “Wounded it is, but with the eyes of a lady” (l. 24), but it puts enough emotional pressure on Rosalind to drive her hastily into Ganymed's sauciest mode: “Did your brother tell you how I counterfeited to sound [swoon] when he show'd me your handkercher?” (ll. 25-27). He then launches into a long account of Oliver's and Celia's courtship spoken with Ganymed's Lylian pertness, an amused account of the other couple's wildfire passion.

Reminded by their good fortune of his own “heart-heaviness,” Orlando's self-pity prompts Rosalind to ask an ambiguous question containing a common bawdy innuendo: “Why then to-morrow I cannot serve your turn for Rosalind?” (ll. 48-49). If the “I” is “Rosalind,” the line becomes a veiled offer, a test to see if Orlando wants to continue the game they have been playing, and his reply, “I can live no longer by thinking” (l. 50), indicates that he has exhausted such playful fantasies and now desires the real Rosalind. If the “I” is Ganymed, the sexual meaning of “serve your turn” may be activated in a way that provokes Orlando to declare an end to their innocent pastimes for fear of what they may lead to. In either case, she is pleased that Orlando has tired of “thinking” and wants her rather than the “Rosalind” he believes was the pretense of a boy, if not the boy himself. As Philip Traci argues, the name Ganymed evokes the idea of a homoerotic relationship.²² But whereas Twelfth Night explores that possibility by granting Orsino and Cesario several scenes alone and emphasizing their growing closeness, As You Like It allows Orlando and Ganymed only one brief moment alone onstage. Nor does the play refer to offstage intimacy between master and page as does Heywood's The Four Prentices. Although a production of As You Like It might suggest a degree of homoerotic attraction between Orlando and Ganymed, the language of the text generally keeps the tone of their relationship teasing and light, rather than somber and intense. In Ganymed's next speech, he takes control of the scene and, assuming Orlando is serious about marrying Rosalind, offers to use his magic to “set her before your eyes to-morrow” (ll. 66-67).

In addition to avoiding intimacy between Orlando and Ganymed, Shakespeare also avoided a spectacular disclosure of Rosalind's identity, such as he had used at the end of The Two Gentlemen when Julia “swooned.” Whereas the sudden onstage transformation of sexual identity would remain a feature of plays employing heroines in male disguise, Shakespeare makes Rosalind's off-layering occur offstage, as he did Portia's in The Merchant of Venice. Ganymed leaves the play for the last time at l. 25, while Duke Senior and Orlando remark on his resemblance to Rosalind. Rosalind returns ceremoniously at l. 107 as herself, escorted by Hymen, if not in her wedding dress at least “not furnish'd like a beggar” (epilogue, ll. 9-10). Having divested herself of both Ganymed and his creation “Rosalind,” she appears in the rest of the scene simply as Rosalind. Unlike Julia and Viola, who never remove male attire, Rosalind is restored to female garb as well as female identity, reaffirmed as daughter to the duke and now given as wife to Orlando.²³

REVERSIBILITY OF GENDER ROLES: THE EPILOGUE

The play ends with four marriages, familial reunion and reconciliation, and restoration of political authority. Within the world of the play, all of these gestures depend on a stable sense of individual identity, particularly gender identity. But the epilogue, the only one we have for Shakespeare's five plays with cross-dressed heroines, begins by dissolving characters' identities as it invokes the world of the playhouse:

It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue.

(ll. 1-5)

Although the speaker, still presumably wearing Rosalind's wedding gown, identifies herself as “the lady,” a change in gender is indicated by “If I were a woman.” One suspects that this change was signaled or accompanied by a physical gesture such as the removal of a wig or some article of female attire.²⁴

Most Elizabethan epilogues reminded audiences of what they always knew, that all of the characters are roles for performers, but this one goes further. Before the spectators' eyes it refracts the figure they had accepted as Rosalind into the various layers of gender identity adopted by a boy actor. Recent commentators regard this stress on the male performer as commentary on the politics of gender, although there is a difference of opinion as to its precise meaning. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, Janet Adelman sees the emergence of the play-boy as the reinstatement of an androgynous ideal, whereas Peter Erickson regards it as a dilution of Rosalind's female power. Juliet Dusinberre argues that the return of the play-boy is really the return of Rosalind “as insouciant as ever in her breeches,” while Catherine Belsey sees it as yet another disruption of sexual difference, a final gesture toward the arbitrariness of gender roles, for the play-boy if not for the audience he had just divided according to their gender and perhaps their sexual preference.²⁵

Another group of critics sees the epilogue's shifts in gender as movements between planes of illusion, what Keir Elam calls “a species of linguistic tightrope-walking between different ontological zones.”²⁶ In such readings, the epilogue is not the play's final word on sexual politics but an attempt to place the world of the play in some relation to the world of the playhouse. For Kent van den Berg, the splitting of character from performer “affirms … the boundary that separates her fictive world from the reality of the audience,” while Albert Cirillo sees Rosalind “stepping out of the play, as if out of the fiction, [to] exercise … the genuine force of her magic on us by bringing us into the fictional … [so that] the play is our Arden.”²⁷

My own inclination is to take the epilogue as theatrical play rather than social polemics. What both groups of critics fail to consider is that the text instructs the performer to end the epilogue with a gesture toward femininity, if not a complete return to female identity, inviting the men “when I make curtsy, [to] bid me farewell” (ll. 22-23).²⁸ The performer's male gender emerges clearly at “if I were a woman,” but the flirtatiousness with both men and women that follows could either be taken as a homoerotic come-on or a movement back toward the fictive female role, as you (the Elizabethan playgoer) like it. The emergence of the play-boy dissolved all three of the heroine's layers of gender identity, but the return of a fictive female character, as implied by mention of the curtsy and perhaps by the coyness which follows, would have been a kind of curtain call, the virtuoso repeating the trick for the audience's admiration even after showing them the secrets that made it possible.

DOUBLE UNDISGUISING: HEYWOOD'S WISE WOMAN OF HOGSDEN

Whereas Shakespeare had Ganymed merely pretend to be “Rosalind,” Heywood used a second full cross-gender disguise in The Wise Woman of Hogsden (1603-5).²⁹ Instead of presenting the heroine, Second Luce, as herself and then dramatizing her decision to don male attire, Heywood has her come onstage for the first time already disguised as a page. She is described in a stage direction as “a young Countrey Gentlewoman, in the habit of a Page” (93, ll. 352-53), and reveals her identity and her motives a few dozen lines later in soliloquy:

Heigh hoe: have I disguis'd my selfe, and stolne out of the Countrey thus farre, … To this Gallant was I poore Gentle-woman betroathed. … After him come I thus habited.

(ll. 385ff.)

The gallant in question is Chartley, who jilted her for another girl, also named Luce. The soliloquy informs spectators that they are watching the familiar plot of a young woman who dons male apparel in order to pursue the man she loves.

Under the name Jack, she enters the service of the title character, who is also something of a matchmaker. The Wise Woman asks Jack to disguise himself as a woman and to substitute for Chartley's bride, a third girl named Gratiana:

WISEWO[MAN].
Thou shalt be tyred like a woman; can you make a curtesie, take small strides, simper, and seeme modest? Methinkes thou hast a womans voice already.

(ll. 589-91)

Second Luce's reply, “Doubt not of me, Ile act them naturally” (l. 592; emphasis added), ironically highlights the artful complexity of the boy actor playing a woman disguised as a page now about to adopt yet another layer of cross-gender disguise. When another character, seeing Jack half into his female disguise, asks if he is a “Girle or Boye,” he replies:

Both, and neither; I was a Ladd last night, but in the morning I was conjured into a Lasse. And being a Girle now, I shall be translated to a Boy anon.

(ll. 1038-40)

The speech baffles the other character, but to the audience it not only describes Jack's plan to stand in for Chartley's bride during the wedding ceremony but also alludes to the play-boy's impersonation of a female character for the entire play. Whereas Shakespeare invoked Rosalind's multiple identities by having the actor shift abruptly from one layer to another, Heywood depends less on the actor than on his own writing, using ambiguous speeches and frequent asides as authorial winks to the audience.

Like Heywood's French princess, as well as Shakespeare's Julia, Portia, and Rosalind, Second Luce shares the secret of her identity with the audience, and thereby acquires the theatrical power to make her control of the play seem convincing. Her plan is to fulfill the Wise Woman's scheme. Whereas Chartley thinks he has married Gratiana, and the Wise Woman plans to reveal the marriage later as a fraud, for Second Luce the ceremony is real and binding.

But Heywood delays her revelation. After the wedding, Second Luce resumes her identity as Jack for the remainder of the play, and Heywood avoids the problem of staging two distinct revelations of two different disguises. When Chartley is confronted by his two other fiancées, Second Luce rescues him by declaring herself his wife and reveals herself as his original betrothed:

You and I have bin better acquainted and yet search mee not too farre least you shame mee, looke on me well, nay better, better yet, ile assure you I left off a petticoate when I put on these breeches. What say you now?

(ll. 2304-8)

The stage direction that follows, “Shee skatters her hayre,”³⁰ suggests the sudden release of hair that has been tied up or concealed by a hat. The moment deliberately recalls Ariosto's Bradamante, Tasso's Clorinda, and Sidney's Parthenia, who became known as women when their tresses were revealed as their helmets fell off or were removed. The Wise Woman registers astonishment at Jack's metamorphosis: “My boy turn'd girle—I hope shee'l keepe my counsell; from henceforth, ile never entertaine any servant but ile have her searcht” (ll. 2311-13).

Unlike Rosalind and Portia, whose actual undisguisings occur offstage, Second Luce's scattering of her hair creates an instantaneous and highly theatrical revelation of her gender. To the audience, aware from the opening scene that Jack is Second Luce, the cascade of hair fulfills a long-held expectation, but to the characters on stage it is a complete surprise. In prose narratives, whether expected or not, such a gesture comes at the climax or denouement, signifies an end of disguise, and reveals the emergence of the female character in her own identity. To playhouse spectators, it was also a climactic moment in the world of the play, but, prompted by frequent use of theatrical reflexivity, they also perceived another level of illusion, this one created by a young male actor probably wearing a wig. The emotional power of the moment was enhanced rather than undermined by this self-conscious display of dramaturgical ingenuity, an invitation to the audience to become engaged in a familiar female-page plot brought to life by the playwright's juggling of four distinct layers of gender identity—the boy actor, Second Luce, Jack, and the false bride.

SURPRISE AND PARODY: CHAPMAN'S MAY DAY

Performed by a reactivated children's troupe at the newly reopened Blackfriars theater, Chapman's May Day (Chapel, 1601-2)³¹ strives for novel treatments of cross-gender disguise. The play is an adaptation of Piccolomini's Alessandro (1544), a variant of the Lelia tradition, in which each member of a separated couple adopts cross-gender disguise.³² Chapman gives the heroine a second cross-gender disguise on top of the first, the latter a surprise to the spectators, who are not told until the end that Lionell, a page, is really Lucretio's beloved Theagine, although they watch him deceive some of the characters in his disguise as a “Gentlewoman.”

Because the first disguising is hidden from the audience, Theagine/Lionell/gentlewoman is not nearly as central a figure as Rosalind was, and she pretends to be a woman not to gain her own ends but to serve the designs of others. Yet Chapman extracts considerable theatrical self-referentiality from Lionell's second, or female, disguise, when his master, Leonoro, introduces him to the roistering Captain Quintiliano, who immediately sees the boy as a potential female impersonator, singing to him as to a woman, and perhaps inquiring about his homoerotic experience:

Afore heaven 'tis a sweete fac't child, me thinks he should show well in womans attire: And hee tooke her by the lilly white hand, and he laid her upon a bed. Ile helpe thee to three crownes a weeke for him, and she can act well. Ha'st ever practis'd, my pretty Ganimede?³³

(III.iii.202-5)

For Chapman's spectators, the prospect of seeing Lionell “act well” as a woman would replicate what they were seeing in the theater—a play-boy portraying a female character. The captain's sexual interest in the boy may have been another reflexive allusion to the world of the playhouse, where boy actors were frequently thought to serve as “ganymedes.”

A few scenes later, Leonoro tells Lionell that he must be “disguis'd like a woman” in order to gull Quintiliano's lieutenant, Innocentio: “thou shalt dance with him, we will thrust him upon thee, … come Lionell let me see how naturally thou canst play the woman” (IV.iv.29-36; emphasis added). As in The Wise Woman of Hogsden, words like “naturally” and “play” illuminate the layers of artifice involved. The plot to discomfit Innocentio is never developed beyond a brief self-referential passage in the final scene.

At the climax of the play, Lucretio, no longer in cross-gender disguise as “Lucretia,” looks about for Theagine but fails to recognize her. Chapman even has him ask this “Gentlewoman” if she knows Theagine. Unlike Heywood's French princess, whose second, female disguise revealed her presence to her beloved Guy, Theagine's double disguise impedes the revelation of her real identity and so dilates the moment for theatrical effect. She addresses the forlorn Lucretio: “It seems you will not know her” (V.i.238), until he suddenly recognizes her as “the Gentlewoman to whom … I was betroth'd” (ll. 245-46).

May Day was the first play to achieve a surprise ending by concealing the identity of the heroine from the audience beneath the first of her disguises. In As You Like It and The Wise Woman, where the audience is at all times fully aware of the real gender and identity of the female page, the second layer of pretense or disguise increases the depth and resonance established by the first, and she comes across as complex and ingenious. But in May Day, which achieves surprise by concealing a female character's identity, she seems part of other characters' schemes or the playwright's design or both, “a puppet” rather than “a sentient shaper of self,” to use Paula Berggren's apt terms.³⁴ Chapman's innovative use of surprise, which he added to his source, extended Heywood's and Shakespeare's idea of the boy heroine's second gender-reversing disguise in the direction of parody. He may have taken into account the real or self-styled sophistication of his private theater audience as well as the tendency of children's troupes to burlesque plays of adult troupes.³⁵

In Chapman's cleverest parody of cross-gender disguise, a married woman named Franceschina, about to have an affair, dresses as a man to conceal her identity. Her husband, the play's miles gloriosus, sees her and immediately recognizes her as a woman, but not as his wife:

Upon my life the hindermost of them, is a wench in mans attire, didst thou not marke besides his slabbering about her, her bigge thighs and her splay feete?

(IV.v.106-8)

In the next scene, he concludes that she must be an adulteress, “some honest mans wife of the Parish … drest like a Page” (IV.vi.15-20). Unlike the boy actor playing Lionell, who represents a girl who can pass for a boy in the world of the play, the boy actor playing Franceschina represents a woman supposedly incapable of passing for a boy!

SURPRISE AND SATIRE: MIDDLETON'S THE WIDOW

The main action of The Widow (King's, c. 1616)³⁶ dramatizes the story of Valeria, a widow who protects her estate from predatory suitors and finally marries the one she chooses on her own terms. To Linda Woodbridge it demonstrates a sympathetic and undoctrinaire position toward widows, perhaps in response to the growing influence of women at the box office.³⁷ The title character, Valeria, is a strong-minded widow capable of fending off unwanted suitors, including a widow-hunting gallant who claims, fraudulently, that she has promised herself to him. Like the duchess of Milan in the main plot of More Dissemblers, and widowed duchesses in several other plays, Valeria preserves her chastity, her dignity and her independence, and marries the one suitor who wants her for herself, not for her wealth.

The play also parodies women and male stereotypes of women. Just as Ganymed's “Rosalind” is a male's impression of the Petrarchan mistress and the willful shrew, so Middleton, in the second scene of The Widow, has one gallant help another practice wooing techniques. To do so they take turns playing the woman and comment on each other's acting. One plays a coy flirt, while the other enacts a scornful shrew and contrives the illusion of femininity so skillfully that his friend tries to “stop her mouth with kisses” (emphasis added)—until the spell is broken, with some difficulty and some regret: “A bots on thee, thou dost not know what injury thou hast done me; I was i' the fairest dream (I.ii.141-42).”

The subplot of The Widow is an even more explicit reworking of female-page plays like As You Like It that use or imply a second cross-gender disguise. Halfway through the play, Ansaldo first appears, and the audience does not know but may well have suspected that he is a girl. Alert spectators might have anticipated that a disguised heroine would turn up when someone refers to a runaway daughter named Martia. Questions about Ansaldo's gender might have arisen from his reaction, when he is stripped to his shirt during a robbery and a highwayman threatens bodily search. Ansaldo's timidity and youthfulness also might have furthered suspicions of his gender, for he is described as “a sweet young gentleman” (III.iii.29) who has “never a hair on's face” (IV.ii.75). Ansaldo's shyness and delicacy are the very qualities that attract Philippa (the young wife of an old magistrate), whose first choice for an adulterous liaison, Francisco, has failed to keep the rendezvous.

Middleton goes beyond As You Like It, for whereas Ganymed never fully adopts the persona of Orlando's Rosalind, Ansaldo is at one point dressed as a woman, dazzling all of the men who are present with her feminine beauty. This new woman especially charms Francisco, Philippa's paramour, who woos her ardently and takes her offstage to get married. Thinking Ansaldo is a man, Philippa behaves as if she is directing a boy-bride play, and intends to complete her revenge on Francisco by revealing to one and all that the gallant has pledged himself to marry a boy. But Martia's father recognizes this boy bride as his long-lost daughter. Whether or not spectators anticipated that Ansaldo was Martia, they would have enjoyed the satiric reversal of seeing the trickster tricked. Middleton's combination of surprise with double cross-gender disguise achieves exactly this kind of satiric discomfiting, an effect not found in any of Shakespeare's disguised-heroine plays.

Within the world of the play, the joke is on Philippa and her servant, but within the world of the playhouse they share another joke with the audience, for Francisco's bride really is a boy and they themselves are boy actors too. There is no logical reason Middleton could not have added yet another revelation, that Ansaldo is not really the long-lost Martia, a girl, but (say) a long-lost son named Martin, who disguised himself as Martia, who disguised herself as Ansaldo, and so forth. Like the epilogue to As You Like It, with its easy reversibility of gender, the series of undisguisings at the end of The Widow implies the possibility, at least in the theater, of an infinite regression of gender reversals.

Around the time of The Widow, plays with heroines in male disguise also acquired special resonance from extratheatrical sources, especially from the modified forms of cross-dressing that flourished roughly between 1610 and 1620. Like real women wearing masculine attire, cross-dressed theatrical heroines directly challenged the dress codes that helped to reinforce established gender roles, but unlike cross-dressed women in the street and in the audience, female pages on the stage were played by male performers. For that very reason, while the figure of the female page amplified challenges to the culture's rigid conception of gender roles, an awareness of the boy actor could undercut the female characters who made those challenges. Middleton exploited the interest in a hot issue without taking a position in the debate. As in The Roaring Girl, Middleton is here aware of gender politics, but as a playwright rather than a pamphleteer he embedded them in a field of ingenious and subtle theatrical play.

SURPRISE AND ROMANCE: JONSON'S THE NEW INN

In one of his last plays, The New Inn (King's, 1629),³⁸ Jonson also combined a second cross-gender disguise with surprise. He did so not to produce the kinds of satiric discomfitings noted in May Day and The Widow, but rather to create an ending in the spirit of Shakespeare's romances and Fletcher's tragicomedies. Female cross-dressing, which Jonson had lampooned in the Collegiate Ladies of Epicoene, could now be integrated into a tragicomic vision.

Following the examples of Chapman and Middleton rather than Heywood and Shakespeare, Jonson waited until the end of the play to inform his audience that the host's boy, Frank, is a woman named Laetitia Frampul. Nor are the spectators ever told that the secret of Frank's identity is bound up with other secrets: the host, called Goodstock, is really Lord Frampul, and the Irish nurse who sold “Frank” to him is really his own wife, who left home with Laetitia and has disguised the girl as a boy. By 1629, few spectators would have been surprised by such revelations of gender or kinship. Jonson has both the host and the nurse hint at who they are, makes “Frank” unwittingly pun that he descends “of a right good stock” (II.vi.23),³⁹ and mentions a long-lost daughter of the Frampul family named Laetitia.

Like Chapman and Middleton, Jonson makes the disguised heroine, Frank, the site of theatrical reflexivity. When Frank, who is “a bashfull child” (II.ii.11) rather than a saucy lackey, is compared to a “play-boy” (I.iii.5), the audience is pointedly reminded that it may be watching either a boy actor playing a boy disguised as a girl, or a boy actor playing a female character disguised as a boy disguised as a girl.⁴⁰ The issue is not settled until the final scene.

Like Chapman and Middleton, Jonson also reinscribes female impersonation into the world of the play when Frances, the host's daughter, agrees to help “Frank” pass as a “gentlewoman,” as a joke on the gallants who are visiting the inn. Unaware that Frank is her sister, she observes that his name is the male equivalent of hers (II.ii.19-23) and proposes that they “call him Laetitia, by my sister's name” (II.ii.56). The sisters establish a Court of Love, a pastime that enables Frances and Lovel to express the love for one another that they cannot otherwise acknowledge. As Jon Lawry has written, “Theatricality … [can] express truth as well as concealing or degrading it.”⁴¹ A tone of sadness overcomes the play when Frances's chambermaid, Pru, proclaims “the Court's dissolv'd, remov'd, and the play ended” (IV.iv.247).⁴² Lovel, echoing Pru's theatrical metaphor, reverts to despair and misery, while Pru disparages her “courtly” apparel as “this play-boyes bravery” (IV.iv.321). Lovel and Frances will eventually be reunited, not through the wit of a heroine in male disguise, or of any other character, but by sheer dramaturgical ingenuity lightly masked as chance.

In what seems at first to be a more farcical key, Laetitia pairs off with Beaufort, an Ovidian sensualist among a group of Neoplatonists. Their relationship survives the dissolution of the Court of Love, and they go through a wedding ceremony. Eager to consummate the marriage, the lusty bridegroom begins to disrobe, but his ardor is squelched by the host, who tells him that he “ha' married, / Your hosts sonne, and a boy” (V.iv.45-46). Like the end of Middleton's The Widow, the host's revelation ridicules the man who appears to have married a boy bride. By dissolving the last surviving trace of the Court of Love, this disclosure also helps establish a more wistful tone.⁴³

The roles played out by the lovers during the Court of Love have led only to evanescent and broken relationships, but a deeper level of theatricality, engineered by the playwright himself, now begins to restore those visions to actuality. Undoing the effects of the revelation of Frank's role as “Laetitia,” Jonson now makes the Irish nurse reveal that this boy is really a girl. As in The Widow, the marriage is binding after all, and Beaufort's attraction to “Laetitia” is validated. Other revelations follow: when Beaufort churlishly balks at a marriage to so evidently lowly born a spouse, the nurse reveals that the girl is Laetitia Frampul, and that she herself is the girl's mother. If this disclosure satisfies Beaufort, it astonishes the host, who announces that he is Lord Frampul, now reunited with his wife and both daughters. The revelations of the heroine's two fabricated layers of identity have provided the hinge on which the ending of the play pivots from satiric discomfiture toward the “Jonsonian equivalent of Shakespearean wonder.”⁴⁴

In As You Like It, Shakespeare allowed the audience to share the performer's perspective from the outset, and as the boy actor moved like quicksilver from one layer of identity to another, his nimbleness and skill in differentiating these various gender identities somehow seemed to endow the character of Rosalind with sufficient energy or power to control the world of the play, even as his epilogue enabled the boy actress to take control of the world of the playhouse. Dramatists like Chapman and Middleton, as we have seen, deprived the disguised heroine of her centrality and her power but carried the heroine's second cross-gender disguise to greater lengths for satiric discomfiting of comic gulls and for demonstrating their own dramaturgical virtuosity. Jonson tried to transcend satire by integrating surprise and double disguise into a romancelike central plot. Perhaps inspired by Shakespeare's last plays, Jonson deployed familiar devices defensively to forestall ridicule by acknowledging the play's artificiality and then invited the disarmed audience to enter an obvious if fragile fantasy of wish fulfillment and to enjoy an artistic tour de force.

Notes

1. Freeburg, [Victor O., Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1915)], 11-14, 80-83; Edward Berry, Shakespeare's Comic Rites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 83, uses the term “disguise-within-disguise,” which is misleading, for the second disguise is laid on top of, not inserted within, the first disguise.

2. Mary Ann Weber Gasior, ed., Thomas Heywood, The Four Prentices of London (New York: Garland, 1980), vii-xv. Gasior thinks the play may have been written as early as 1592. It was registered in 1594 but not published until 1615. A second edition appeared in 1632. I quote throughout from this edition.

3. The concept is developed by Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare's Comedies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).

4. Nevill Coghill, Shakespeare's Professional Skills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 132.

5. On the date of As You Like It, see the play as edited by Agnes Latham (London: Methuen, 1975), xxvi-xxxiv.

6. For discussion of the theatrical aspects of Rosalind's voices, see Robert Hapgood, Shakespeare the Theatre-Poet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 133-37; D. J. Palmer, “As You Like It and the Idea of Play,” [Critical Quarterly] 13 (1971): 240-41; Robert B. Pierce, “The Moral Languages of Rosalynde and As You Like It,” [Studies in Philology] 68 (1971): 174-76; Hugh Richmond, Shakespeare's Sexual Comedy (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 142; and Laurence Lerner, Love and Marriage: Literature and Its Social Context (New York: St. Martin's, 1979), 20-22.

7. Carol J. Carlisle, “Helen Faucit's Rosalind,” [Shakespeare Survey] 12 (1979): 65-94, argues that Faucit moved with particular liveliness from one layer of identity to another in the Ganymed scenes. Carol Rutter, Clamorous Voices (London: Routledge, 1989), 104, comments: “For Juliet [Stevenson] … Ganymede did not simply replace Rosalind in Arden; he ran parallel with her. The two would sometimes collude, sometimes collide and even sometimes betray each other.”

8. Nancy K. Hayles, “Sexual Disguise in As You Like It and Twelfth Night,” [Shakespeare Survey] 32 (1979): 63-72.

9. Kent van den Berg, Playhouse and Cosmos: Shakespearean Theater as Metaphor (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 91; and [Marianne L.] Novy, Love's Argument [: Gender Relations in Shakespeare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)], 192-93.

10. [Juliet] Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women [New York: Macmillan, 1975], 250; Hyland, “Shakespeare's Heroines,” 33-34; [Robert] Kimbrough, [“Androgeny Seen through Shakespeare's Disguise,” [Shakespeare Quarterly] 33 (1982)], 24.

11. Marco Mincoff, “What Shakespeare Did to Rosalynde,” [Shakespeare-Jahrbuch] 96 (1960): 80; see also Edward I. Berry, “Rosalynde and Rosalind,” [Shakespeare Quarterly] 31 (1980): 42-52; Walter R. Davis, “Masking in Arden: The Histrionics of Lodge's Rosalynde,” [Studies in English Literature] 5 (1965): 151-63; and Albert H. Tolman, “Shakespeare's Manipulation of His Source in As You Like It,” [Modern Language Notes] 37 (1922): 65-76.

12. Charles H. Frey, Experiencing Shakespeare: Essays on Text, Classroom, and Performance (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988), 23-24.

13. W. Thomas MacCary, Friends and Lovers: The Phenomenology of Desire in Shakespearean Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 175-76, argues that Orlando sees Ganymed as an idealized image of himself. Cf. van den Berg, Playhouse and Cosmos, 96.

14. [Bruce] Smith, Poetics of Homosexual Desire [in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)], 145. Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 89-93, notes that Lodge switches from “he” to “she” to signal shifts between layers of gender, as required by the point of view at various moments in the narrative.

15. Elsewhere in this scene, Rosalind refers to such details of male attire as “doublet and hose” (III.ii.195-96 and 219-20) or to gender identity itself, as in “Do not you know I am a woman?” (l. 249) and “I thank God I am not a woman” (ll. 347-48).

16. For additional glosses on sexual innuendoes of this passage, see Peter F. Mullany, “Topographical Bawdy in Shakespeare,” [American Notes & Queries] 12 (December 1973): 51-53; and Robert H. Ray, “Addenda to Shakespeare's Bawdy: As You Like It, IV.i.201-18,” [American Notes & Queries] 13 (December 1974): 51-53.

17. Capell marks several of Rosalind's speeches as asides. Other speeches can be given as asides to Celia or the audience, as Janet Suzman did in the 1968 RSC production, according to Peter Ansorge, Plays and Players, July 1968, 51.

18. According to Latham, ed., As You Like It, app. B, 133-35, early modern audiences would have considered such a marriage valid under Elizabethan law and custom.

19. Peter W. Thomson, “A Shakespearean ‘Method,’” [Shakespeare-Jahrbuch] 104 (1968): 198, argues—unpersuasively, in my view—that Oliver here “penetrates Rosalind's disguise.”

20. Mary Hamer, “Shakespeare's Rosalind and Her Public Image,” [Theatre Record] 11 (1986): 109ff. See also Patty S. Derrick, “Rosalind and the Nineteenth-Century Woman: Four Stage Interpretations,” [Theatre Survey] 26 (1985): 143-62. Clifford Williams directed an all-male production for the National Theatre in 1967, revived in 1974. He intended to create “an atmosphere of spiritual purity which transcends sexuality.” Frank Marcus, “New Approaches,” London Magazine, December 1967, 78, dismissed it as “simply sexless,” while Irving Wardle, The Times [London], October 4, 1967, felt “real excitement in seeing this Rosalind and Jeremy Brett's very masculine Orlando being taken unawares by serious emotion in the midst of their game.” The two Rosalinds also differed, at least according to Clive Barnes, New York Times, December 4, 1974, L 32, who noted that Ronald Pickup “made no attempt to feminize his acting,” whereas Gregory Floy “plays her as a rather pretty girl being acted by a man.” Philip Traci, “As You Like It: Homosexuality in Shakespeare's Play,” [College Language Association Journal] 25 (1981): 97-98, felt that the production differed from an Elizabethan production in its deliberate lack of physicality as well as in its use of men instead of boys for the female roles.

21. Whereas the line might seem to prove that Oliver has discovered Rosalind's gender, Latham, ed., As You Like It (115n), argues that “Oliver is joining in Orlando's make-believe, which he knows about already.”

22. See Traci, “As You Like It,” 91-105. [Alexander] Leggatt, Shakespeare's Comedy of Love [(London: Metheun, 1974)], 211, links the bawdy innuendo of “serve your turn” with the play's increasing stress on the biological sense of springtime renewal. But “Ganymed” denoted a young male prostitute in Elizabethan England and a young homosexual lover in medieval poetry and in Renaissance Italy. See chap. 2; John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 251ff.; and James Saslow, Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Gordon Lell, “‘Ganymede’ on the Elizabethan Stage: Homosexual Implications of the Use of Boy-Actors,” Aegis 1 (1973): 5-7, cites homosexual usages of the myth of Ganymede and points out that while Shakespeare found the name in Lodge's Rosalind, he added Rosalind's reference to “Jove's own page” (12).

23. Maura Slattery Kuhn, “Much Virtue in ‘If,’” [Shakespeare Quarterly] 28 (1977): 40-50, believes that Rosalind is still in masculine attire. Her evidence is the first folio reading of Hymen's address to Duke Senior to “receive thy daughter … / That thou mightst join his hand with his, / Whose heart within his bosome is” (V.iv.111-15; emphasis added). Most modern editors accept the third folio's emendation of the first “his” to “her.”

24. Kuhn, “Much Virtue,” 40, argues that the gap of seventy-eight lines would not have allowed enough time for the performer to change into woman's clothing in time for the wedding scene, although Touchstone's gratuitous disquisition on “the Lie” allows Rosalind time to change into theatrical costume, which was probably a radically simplified version of actual apparel. In the epilogue, Rosalind refers to herself as “the Lady,” and notes that she is “not furnished like a beggar.”

25. [Janet] Adelman, “Male Bonding,” [in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985)], 84-86; Peter Erickson, Patriarchal Structures in Shakespeare's Drama (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 34-35; Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 266; and [Catherine] Belsey, “Disrupting Sexual Difference,” [in Alternative Shakespeares, ed. John Drakakis (London: Metheun, 1985)], 181, 187-88. For “androgynist” readings, see Kimbrough, “Androgyny,” 27; Margaret Boerner Beckman, “The Figure of Rosalind in As You Like It,” [Shakespeare Quarterly] 29 (1978): 47; and Kay Stanton, “The Disguises of Shakespeare's As You Like It,” [Iowa State Journal of Research] 59 (1985): 304. Hayles, “Sexual Disguise in As You Like It,” 67, argues that Rosalind appeals to men and women separately in the epilogue in order to reconcile them. 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, ed. Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene, and Carol Thomas Neely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 106-9, argues that Shakespeare sought to make Rosalind's assertiveness acceptable to male spectators. “Male dress,” Park writes, “transforms … aggression into simple high spirits” (108).

26. Keir Elam, Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 40.

27. Van den Berg, Playhouse and Cosmos, 100; and Albert Cirillo, “As You Like It: Pastoralism Gone Awry” [English Literary History] 38 (1971): 38.

28. Although the OED indicates that a “curtsy” was not at this time an exclusively feminine gesture, the citations suggest that it was appropriate only for boys and servants, which may explain why it shortly did become a feminine form of obeisance. Several plays use the term as an exclusively female gesture: see Gallathea, II.i.23-24, and quotations from More Dissemblers Besides Women in chapter 3 and The Wise Woman of Hogsden in this chapter.

29. Michael H. Leonard, ed., The Wise Woman of Hogsden, by Thomas Heywood (New York: Garland, 1980), 5-8. I have used this edition for all quotations from the play.

30. [Henk] Gras, “All Is Semblative [a Woman's Part ?” Ph.D. diss. University of Utrecht, 1991], 275, argues unpersuasively that “skattering” here means manually dispersing hair that was previously cut; see also 90-93. Removal of a wig, at once more economical and more spectacular, seems more likely. As Peter Stallybrass, “Transvestism and the ‘Body Beneath,’” [Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (London: Routledge, 1992)], 66, observes, “the commonest technique for the revelation of the ‘woman beneath’ after the Restoration was the removal of a wig, whereupon the female actor's ‘true’ hair would be seen.” But Stallybrass also suggests that such an effect would have been “perfectly possible on the Renaissance stage … [for] the audience would have no means of knowing (any more than we do today) whether the hair beneath the wig was the hair of the actor or another wig.”

31. Albert Tricomi, “The Dates of the Plays of George Chapman,” [English Literary Renaissance] 12 (1982): 245-46, argues persuasively that May Day (pub. 1611) was written in 1601 or early 1602. This earlier dating is significant, for it locates this play much closer to As You Like It and well before the Jacobean explosion of disguised heroine plays. I quote throughout from George Chapman, May Day, ed. Robert F. Welsh, in The Plays of George Chapman: The Comedies, gen. ed. Allan Holaday (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), II.i.33-35.

32. Rita Belladonna, “A Jacobean's Source Revisited: George Chapman and Alessandro Piccolomini's Alessandro,” [Quaderni d'Italianistica: Official Journal of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies] 3 (1982): 67-70.

33. In context, “practis'd” can mean impersonated a woman on or off stage. It also had a sexual meaning in Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, I.i.155-61, as pointed out by James T. Henke, Courtesans and Cuckolds: A Glossary of Renaissance Dramatic Bawdy (Exclusive of Shakespeare) (New York: Garland, 1979), 201. Lionell's reply of denial, “No, nor never meane sir,” evokes a comment from Giovenelli, one of the play's true saucy lackeys: “Meane sir? No marry Captaine, there will never be meane in his practise I warrant him” (ll. 207-9). “Meane” can signify a pander or the money earned by or used for whoring, according to Henke, 167, and [Frankie] Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns [and Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984)], 156-57.

34. Paula S. Berggren, “‘A Prodigious Thing’: The Jacobean Heroine in Male Disguise,” [Philological Quarterly] 62 (1983): 396.

35. Charlotte Spivack, George Chapman (New York: Twayne, 1967), 77-78; and Thomas Mark Grant, The Comedies of George Chapman: A Study in Development, Jacobean Drama Series (Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1972), 103-24.

36. On the date of the play, see David J. Lake, The Canon of Thomas Middleton's Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 38-43; and Robert Levine, ed., A Critical Edition of Thomas Middleton's “The Widow,” (Salzburg: Institute für Englische Sprache und Literatur, 1975), xxi-xxvii. Citations refer to Levine's edition.

37. [Linda] Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984], 244, 246-48, 257. In an unpublished paper, Heather M. McPhee, “Who's Got the Gun?: Performance, Gender, and Desire in Thomas Middleton's The Widow” (Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference, 1993), sees the appeal of the play in its subversiveness. It depicts a world in which the one-sex theory of human development has obliterated any meaningful differences between male and female so that sex and gender roles are performative.

38. Michael Hattaway, ed., The New Inn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 7-8.

39. Harriett Hawkins, “The Idea of a Theater in Jonson's The New Inn,” [Renaissance Drama] 9 (1966): 214n.

40. Unlike spectators, readers of the 1631 printed edition were spared any uncertainty over Frank's gender: according to “The Persons of the Play,” “Franke[,] suppos'd a boy and the Hosts sonne, … prooves to be Laetitia” (6:402).

41. Jon S. Lawry, “A Prospect of Jonson's The New Inn,” SEL 23 (1983): 324.

42. [Ann] Barton, Ben Jonson [, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)], 276-77; and George E. Rowe, Distinguishing Jonson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 167.

43. In his edition of 1860, William Gifford here added the stage direction, “Pulls off Frank's head-dress” (see Hattaway, ed., The New Inn, 196), probably recalling the end of Epicoene, when Morose's bride “removes her peruke” to establish male identity.

44. [Jon S.] Lawry, [“A Prospect of Jonson's The New Inn,” [Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900] 23 (1983)], 327. Barton, Ben Jonson, 258-59, 281-84, sees the influence of Shakespearean romance as the result of the publication of the first folio. On the play's relation to romance and the problem of tone, see Alexander Leggatt, Ben Jonson: His Vision and His Art (London: Methuen, 1981), 35-44; and John Lemly, “‘Make odde discoveries!’ Disguises, Masques, and Jonsonian Romance,” in [Comedy from] Shakespeare to Sheridan [, ed. A. R. Braunmuller and J. C. Bulman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986)], 137-41.