[In the following essay, Bono offers a feminist analysis of As You Like It and contends that the play "represent(s) both the masculine struggle for identity and a female 'double-voiced' discourse"—the latter implying that the feminine simultaneously adopts and derides the conventions of a dominant male culture.]

Does Shakespeare's preoccupation, especially in the comedies, with strong female characters and an underlying complex of "feminine" concerns—sexuality and familial and domestic life—provide evidence for what Juliet Dusinberre calls a "feminism of Shakespeare's time"?¹ Or does the same evidence indicate male projections of what women must be, what Madelon Gohlke terms a "matriarchal substratum or subtext within the patriarchal text" that "is not feminist," but rather "provide[s] a rationale for the structure of male dominance"?² Put more generally, does the literature and social practice of the early modern period exhibit, as Stephen Greenblatt and Natalie Zemon Davis suggest, a theatricality, a ready embrace of role playing and social inversion, that nonetheless functions most often to test and strengthen traditional authority?³ And if, with Davis and, more tentatively, Greenblatt, we wish to argue that the subversion occasionally escapes its cultural containment, how does this escape occur, and in what does it, or our latter-day perception of it, consist? In this essay I seek to erect a framework of contemporary feminist theory around a traditional genrebased analysis of the heroic, romantic, and pastoral strains in Shakespeare's As You Like It in order to conjure a complex response to these questions.

Recently Nancy Chodorow has offered a powerful and influential new model for psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender that seems very useful for analyzing the representation of gender in literature as well.⁴ In an object-relations account of identity formation that stresses the temporal primacy of the mother, Chodorow presses her analysis back beyond the oedipal phase to the preoedipal phase, significantly revising Freud's classic accounts of both masculinity and femininity.

Freud privileges the male sex in his account of gender identity, speaking of the oedipal castration fear of the boy child and the penis envy of the girl child. But by placing the mother as socializer at the heart of her account, Chodorow characterizes gender and sexual differentiation not "as presence or absence of masculinity and the male genital" but as "two different presences."⁵ The male child defines himself in a tension-fraught opposition to his potentially engulfing mother, while the female child has the more complex and extended, if less extreme, task of simultaneously affirming a gender identity with the mother and an individual differentiation from her.⁶ A girl child's "penis envy" is, then, not a recognition of a primary lack but a secondary, defensive reaction against maternal power and an attempted appropriation of what is seen as greater masculine autonomy from it. Chodorow argues that the events of the oedipal period must be understood against this preoedipal background that is itself more centrally a social than a biological experience: "In fact, what occurs for both sexes during the oedipal period is a product of this knowledge about gender and its social and familial significance, rather than the reverse (as the psychoanalytic accounts have it)."⁷

The strengths of Chodorow's clinically documented and tenaciously argued model seem to me many. Her stress on the early, preconscious psychological formation of these patterns in interaction with a female mother who is primary caretaker explains the seeming universality, rootedness, and strong elements of complicity in those arrangements through which women become the "second sex." Although the responsibility has often been diffused or configured somewhat differently, primary female mothering has been a cultural and historical constant. However, it need not be an inevitability. Chodorow's theory is genuinely anthropological and sociological in denying biological determinism and in noting considerable differences in the social practice of mothering, and it shares with thinkers like Dorothy Dinnerstein a revolutionary feminist belief in the possibility of change in our sexual arrangements based on changing the sexual division of labor into shared parenting.⁸

It also contains an embryonic historical dimension, for Chodorow notes that the emphasis on the single female mother has altered over time. She comments especially on the effects of modern capitalism in widening the sexual division of labor by separating home and workplace and institutionalizing within the workplace a division between largely female service occupations and the ideal of a male worker detached from prior community, eager to succeed, and highly malleable to organizational needs.⁹ Certain features of this analysis seem relevant to the early modern period in England, during the rise of capitalism—the period when Shakespeare's plays were written. Then men, often no longer owners or caretakers of land in a feudal system, were sent out early for education or apprenticeship and took up entrepreneurial schemes in court and city, while patriarchal values kept women even more closely tied to the work of childbearing and motherhood.¹⁰

Coppélla Kahn has demonstrated the applicability of Chodorow's theory of gender formation to the representation of male personality in Shakespeare's plays, particularly King Lear. Arguing that Lear's unconscious male fear of maternal power is displaced into metaphoric expression, Kahn instances his loathing of his "pelican daughters" and his shame at his own woman's tears and "female" hysteria (the "climbing mother," the disorder of the wandering womb).¹¹ She might also have added the most inclusive metaphoric expression in the play of this threatening female power, the goddess-Mother Nature whom Edmund invokes to "stand up for bastards," and who proves Lear and his followers not ague-proof. The implication of this sexual metaphorization of landscape is that pastoral and antipastoral—"soft" and "hard" primitivism—may figure the opposite sides of the male crisis of individuation from the mother—nurturance or antipathy.

Kahn's methodological tactic supports Louis Montrose's excellent sociological reading of that pastoral play, As You Like It¹² Focusing explicitly on the historically sensitive oedipal situation of brothers' rivalry over a paternal inheritance, Montrose rightly restores balance to the interpretation of the play by dwelling on the very engaging plot of Orlando's rise that frames Rosalind's androgynous disguising. He devotes the penultimate section of his essay on "the complex interrelationship of brothers, fathers, and sons in As You Like If to a suggestive discussion of Rosalind and of the play's strategies for containment of the feminine. In Montrose's shrewd formulation, "The 'feminism' of Shakespearean comedy seems to me more ambivalent in tone and more ironic in form than such critics [those infatuated with Rosalind's exuberance] have wanted to believe."¹³ Kahn's work suggests that from a male point of view both Rosalind and Arden are initially threatening but eventually beneficent manifestations of a nonfeminist maternal subtext. It is possible, then, that in Shakespeare's works both the explicitly threatening women of the tragedies and the seemingly benevolent women of the comedies operate within a "universe of masculinist assumptions" about the nature of women.¹⁴

Yet Chodorow's model would also argue for a positive female identity, although one severely handicapped by the perception of itself as culturally secondary. Kahn and Montrose do not inquire whether Shakespearean drama can plausibly represent this point of view, and if so, whether that drama can provide us with any tool for dislodging "the universe of masculinist assumptions" in which it is embedded. In what follows I would like to sketch both Orlando's and Rosalind's roles in the play on the basis of Chodorow's model for the formation of gender identity. I shall argue that the patriarchal, oedipal crisis of the first act of the play is displaced back onto its preoedipal ground in the nature of the forest of Arden—that place named suggestively after Shakespeare's own mother, Mary Arden, and the forest near his birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon.¹⁵ There the play can represent both the male struggle for identity and a female "double-voiced" discourse—Elaine Showalter's term for one that simultaneously acknowledges its dependence on the male and implies its own unique positive value—within it.¹⁶

For this Shakespeare employs, of course, not a modern psychoanalytic or sociological vocabulary, but his period's vocabulary of genre, set within the consciously experimental frame of the mixed genre of pastoral.¹⁷

Orlando's masculine heroic quest, couched simultaneously in the language of biblical typology and classical epic, is resolved within Arden's "sweet style." There Rosalind, fully acting out romance's conventions of disguise, transforms the social perception of woman from the Petrarchan conventions that both idealize and degrade them to a new convention of companionate marriage. Unlike Orlando's simpler quest, Rosalind's "double-voiced" discourse, criticizing the subject of which she is a part, can thus offer a method for cultural change. She performs within the text the critical task feminists today must perform toward the text as a whole. As Madelon Gohlke says, "For a feminist critic to deconstruct this discourse is simultaneously to recognize her own historicity and to engage in the process of dislocation of the unconscious by which she begins to affirm her own reality."¹⁸

But only begins. Rosalind's deconstructive efforts within her own text are one such beginning—a method, not an ideal end. Ironically, she resubordinates herself through marriage to masculine hierarchy, giving herself to her father to be given to her husband, and thus serves the socially conservative purpose of Shakespearean romantic comedy. And "she," of course, acts out a fiction of femininity on an exclusively male stage, her part played by a boy. The representation of women has, more often than not, functioned this way in literature, as in life—as an accommodating device within the dominant fictions of male identity.

Thus far I have emphasized Rosalind's critical role within the text and her eventual surrender of it. Nonetheless, the interaction in As You Like It between masculine heroic discourse and feminine romantic "double-voiced" discourse, which it is the burden of this essay to document, forms the dramatic "inside" to a metadramatic context or "outside" of more pure interpretative possibility. Rosalind's disguise, initially the most striking convention of romance implausibility in this text that is so largely structured like an "old tale" (1.2.120), ultimately functions to create new possibilities for it. Her mutable action most fully demonstrates Touchstone's peacemaking "If (5.4.97-103); Ganymede—the lovely boy whose rapture connected earth and heaven—predicates Hymen, the god of marriage who will "atone" all the elements of the play. In this play romance sustains the constructive, as well as the critical, aspects of pastoral. Arden and the audience addressed in the "Epilogue" function as the complementary environments of the play. Although, looking ahead to Lear, I shall characterize the pastoral environment of Arden as a sometimes harsh, sometimes nurturing "Mother Nature"; it is also, as Amiens hints to the Duke, a theater for literary and social criticism and change. For the culturally belated urban artists of the Renaissance, pastoral, which in theory promised a return to origins and a poetic apprenticeship, in practice often presented itself as a field for heightened reflexivity, itself criticizing the subject—the larger culture—of which it formed a part. The "Epilogue" to As You Like It freely acknowledges affect as in part constituting the meaning of a work of art: although we may never know what Shakespeare's audience made of the actor-playing-Rosalind's final address, we are licensed to make of it what pleases. At the close of this essay I shall offer a few tentative speculations on why Shakespeare himself, in his later career, made difficult or surrendered this "poco tempo silvano," this play-space of pastoral. But within As You Like It, at least, we and the forest are the final judges.

In Shakespeare's As You Like It both Duke Senior and Orlando are victims of parricidal rage. The anger of Orlando's brother Oliver is given biblical and classical archetypal overtones as their old family retainer Adam, a representative of the Golden Age "When service sweat for duty, not for meed" (2.3.58), stands in place of their father to bemoan the loss of original "accord" and to denounce Oliver, that Cain figure, who has made "this house .. . but a butchery" (1.1.64; 2.3.27). Shakespeare heightens the at once fairy-tale and all-too-contemporary figure of the impoverished younger brother into an image of paradise lost, where the rising spirit of one's father threatens to turn into rankling bitterness.¹⁹

Orlando does not seek the patrimony. He desires only his "poor allottery" of "but poor a thousand crowns" (1.1.73; 2-3) and his due "breeding" in gentility. Ironically, he has only his physical strength, his wrestler's skill, to prove these largely immaterial claims, and even his victory over Charles is immediately frustrated by Duke Frederick's antipathy. As with Chodorow's oedipally fraught male child, these problems in the patriarchy open a greater void in his identity, a potential regression to a threatening maternal subtext. Orlando fears that his growth may prove, as Oliver says, "rank" (cf. 1.1.13 with 1.1.85-86). In the wrestling scene Charles taunts him with being, like Antaeus, "desirous to lie with his mother earth" (1.2.201). Although Orlando at first inverts the allusion by defeating Charles as the moral Hercules defeated Antaeus, he then assimilates some of its force when, in a "modest" displacement of Charles's incestuous image, he finds himself violently in love with Rosalind.²⁰ His formerly dignified speech before Rosalind is now shattered as the deepest dimension of his insecurity, his lack of good breeding, surfaces (cf. 1.2.165-193 and 245-260), and he fears exile in an inhospitable nature where he might have to beg, or, like Tom Jones, fall in with robbers (1.1.75; 2.3.31-35).²¹

When Orlando flees to the forest, he expects to encounter savagery. Instead, this young man struggling for gentility—"inland bred" (2.7.96)²²—meets not brigands but a kindly, paternal, philosophic ruler, the exiled Duke: "Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table" (2.7.105). Shakespeare compresses in this brief exchange the ancient ideal of hospitality, those guestrites most fully performed in the offering of a meal, the contemplative counterweight to epic's celebration of martial deeds and heroic adventure. And as with Odysseus at Alcinous's house or Aeneas at Dido's banquet, the gesture releases Orlando's pent-up memory and social desire. His deeply moving litany of the ceremonies of civilization is ritually echoed by the Duke:

True is it that we have seen better days,
And have with holy bell been knoll'd to church,
And sat at good men's feasts, and wip'd our eyes
Of drops that sacred pity hath engend'red;
And therefore sit you down in gentleness,
And take upon command what help we have
That to your wanting may be minist'red.

(2.7.120-126)

The text expands momentarily into a calm reflective pool of noble pity—"sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt" ("here, too, there are tears for misfortune and mortal sorrows touch the heart," Aeneid, 1.462). A moment later Orlando visually contradicts Jaques's vivid but reductionistic image of the "seven ages of man" by entering with the frail old Adam, quite possibly borne on his shoulders, and thereby evoking that classical image of pietas, Aeneas carrying his father Anchises from burning Troy (2.7.139-168). Then, even while Amiens sings of man's ingratitude, the Duke discovers that Orlando is his beloved "good Sir Rowland's son" (2.7.191-192) and welcomes him to his new society.

The Duke's masculine governing identity has not been violently dislocated by exile. Unlike Lear, who feels the "climbing mother," gives way to women's tears, and, in a sharply discontinuous action marked by disjoint, raving speech, exposes himself to the raging elements, Duke Senior exercises seemingly benign verbal control over his environment. The balanced blank verse of his first speech moves to contain the sharp sensuous apprehension of difference: "the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the winter's wind, / Which . . . bites and blows upon my body" is literally bracketed by his declaration that "Here feel we not the penalty of Adam" and his smiling philosophic conclusion (2.1.5-17, emphasis mine). The Duke tries to surround the threatening nature that had opened up with the failure of the patriarchy in the first act, controlling it so that Orlando, and to a large extent we, now experience it as the playfulness of Rosalind, rather than the threat of the unnurturing and devouring mother. His "kindly," "sweet" stylization—the words resonate with the high philosophic seriousness of the dolce stil nuovo and its ideals of gentility—now permits the growth of Orlando's romantic art.

Chodorow speaks of boys as having to "define themselves as more separate and distinct [from the mother], with a greater sense of rigid ego boundaries and differentiation," and thus resolving their oedipal crisis more rapidly, extremely, and definitively than girls. The resolution takes the form of "identification with his father . . . the superiority of masculine identification and prerogatives over feminine" (in Freud's more extreme language, "What we have come to consider the normal male contempt for women"), and the eventual displacement of his primary love for his mother onto an appropriate heterosexual love object.²³ Orlando, after initial conflict with paternal figures—his older brother and Duke Frederick—which nearly culminates in archetypal tragedy, experiences nature as harshly threatening. He is saved from its ravages by a kindly father figure who thus metaphorically restores the archetypal line of paternal descent. With the confidence of that masculine relatedness he is able to play seriously at the civilized game of love without threatening his basic male heroic identity. Then Rosalind-as-Ganymede can work to refine his personality while being herself ultimately contained by an overt masculinist sexual ideology.

Meanwhile, similar social problems unfold differently in an aristocratic women's world. Instead of Orlando's importunate strivings, Rosalind at court displays a more diffuse melancholy, partially relieved by feminine confidences—Chodorow's female "self in relationship."²⁴ Rosalind's musings about the precarious social position of women in love—"[Fortune] the bountiful blind woman doth most mistake in her gifts to women" (1.2.35-36)—suggest that the Duke's exile, deeply felt though it is, is less important than her problematic femininity, especially without his protection. And the desultory and slightly forced nature of the talk portrays the extreme constraints on women's expression in such a setting. Even Touchstone's flat joke about the pancakes must be triggered by a reminder of their feminine lack of a beard (1.2.60-80)! Against this sense of inferiority and vulnerability the young women here have only ready wit.

Exiled by her tyrannous uncle, Rosalind assumes masculine disguise as a safeguard against female vulnerability in a threatening male world. Once she is safely installed in her cottage in Arden, however, there is in theory no need for her to maintain that role. Indeed, once she hears from Celia that young Orlando, who at court "tripp'd up the wrastler's heels and your heart, both in an instant" (3.2.212-213), is in the forest poeticizing her praises, she immediately exclaims, "Alas the day, what shall I do with my doublet and hose?" (3.2.219-220), and bursts forth with a stereotypically female torrent of questions and effusions, ending with "Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak" (3.2.249-250). She seems on the verge of throwing off her masculine attire and becoming the Renaissance total woman: witty, perhaps, but ultimately compliant.

At this moment, however, Orlando and Jaques enter in conversation. They implicitly raise the issue of women's dependence on men that Rosalind's exile from the court has merely transferred from the political to the psychological sphere. Orlando's "pretty answers," the love commonplaces that Touchstone has already parodied (2.4.46-56; 3.2.100-112) and that Rosalind herself has criticized as "tedious" and having "more feet than the verses would bear" (3.2.155, 165-166), are now attacked by the satiric Jaques, "Monsieur Melancholy." Although Orlando, "Signior Love," holds his own in this comic agon, it is not at all clear from the women's point of view that his disagreement with Jaques is anything more than a battle of wits masking potentially violent sexual appetite. As Jaques accuses, Orlando may be tritely copying his "posies" out of the inscriptions inside goldsmiths' rings. More ominously, he may have "conn'd" the "rings" themselves from the goldsmiths' wives, where the connotations "con" = "pudendum" and "rings" = "vagina" suggest seduction. As Celia warns, if you drink in this type of discourse uncritically, you risk putting a "man in your belly" (3.2.204). Hearing this affected and subtly threatening exchange prompts Rosalind to keep her doublet and hose, and what is more, to use them in exactly the sort of "double-voiced" discourse that, according to Showalter, has always characterized the relationship of female to male culture: "I will speak to him like a saucy lackey, and under that habit play the knave with him" (3.2.295-297). That is, she will adopt the "habit"—the clothing and habitual ways—of the dominant male culture, including its view of women, even while skewing it "saucily" toward self-consciousness and criticism, and maintaining a part of herself hidden and inviolate.

Nancy Vickers, in a recent article on Petrarchism, implies the defensive wisdom of this tactic.²⁵ This tradition imagines a chaste, inaccessible, Dianalike woman as the object of the male speaker's love, engendering in him a narcissistically luxuriant range of contradictory emotions that further objectify her, retributively fragmenting her body. Shakespeare continually documents and criticizes this pathology, from Romeo's bookish love for the chaste Rosaline, to Orsino's self-indulgent laments after the "cloistered" Olivia, to its reductio ad absurdam in Troilus' languishing after the parts of Cressida, soon to become nauseating "fragments, scraps, the bits and greasy relics / Of her l'er-eaten faith" (Tro., 5.2.159-160). Within this self-generating fiction the only power that women seem to have is the defensive one of refusal, for then, at least, they may put off being consumed and discarded: as Cressida says: "Therefore this maxim out of love I teach: / Achievement is command; ungain'd beseech" (Tro., 1.2.293-294). Orlando hymns a Diana-like Rosalind in a patently artificial language predicated on the Duke's philosophic sweet style; instead of finding "tongues in trees" (2.1.16), the eager new versifier vandalizes them: "these trees shall be my books, / And in their barks my thoughts I'll character" (3.2.5-6). Rosalind witnesses the hitherto uncultivated Orlando's burgeoning conventional love poetry, and by remaining a boy at first defensively distances herself from it.

But Rosalind ultimately accomplishes something more constructive through her pastoral disguise as Ganymede, that pretty boy beloved by Jove, alternately a figure of sexual degradation or of ecstasy.²⁶ By self-consciously retaining her superficially plausible disguise as a girlish boy—that is, by seeming to "be" Ganymede offering to "play" Rosalind—Rosalind simultaneously offers Orlando a chance to test "the faith of . . . [his] love" (3.2.428) within the relatively nonthreatening limits of supposed male discourse about women, and attempts to exorcise her own fears about giving herself into such a discourse.

In doing so she illustrates the greater social burden borne by women, in line with Chodorow's contention that the oedipus complex develops "different forms of 'relational potential' in people of different genders" and that "Girls emerge from this period with a basis for 'empathy' built into their primary definition of self in a way that boys do not."²⁷ Having suffered an oedipal crisis in the first act of the play because of the exile of her father and the opposition of Duke Frederick, Rosalind too is thrown back upon nature. Unlike Orlando, however, she does not experience this preoedipal nature as harshly threatening, nor does she require the immediate assurances of a restored father figure. Instead she arrives "weary" but resourceful; female ennervation in the court here translates into boyish pluck (2.4.1-8). As Chodorow says, "girls do not define themselves in terms of the denial of preoedipal relational modes to the same extent as do boys. Therefore, regression to these modes tends not to feel as much a basic threat to their ego."²⁸

Chodorow's careful characterization of "a relational complexity in feminine self-definition and personality which is not characteristic of masculine self-definition or personality"²⁹ not only highlights the difference between Rosalind's and Orlando's reactions to Arden; it also helps explain why Rosalind/Ganymede behaves the way she/he does there. In Arden Rosalind discovers a female identity that will allow her to complete the difficult, triangulated resolution of a girl's typical oedipal crisis: differentiation from and continuity with the mother and transfer of affection from the father onto an appropriate heterosexual love object. She must act out her own involvement with this less threatening "Mother Nature" in a way that does not shatter Orlando's more fragile ego boundaries; having done so she may deliver herself to the restored patriarchy, giving herself to her father to be given by him in marriage to her husband.

Her interaction as Ganymede/Rosalind with Orlando thus functions from the male perspective as a form of accommodation and as a test. In the court Orlando had been tongue-tied before beautiful, young, aristocratic women; freed and newly confident in the forest he understandably blurts out cliches. Talk with an attractive boy about women can work to root and refine his discourse, as encounter with "the real thing" at this point could not. Orlando recovers his quietly dignified desire in conversation with Ganymede: "I am he that is so love-shak'd"; "I would not be cur'd"; "By the faith of my love" (3.2.367, 425, 428). Meanwhile, Rosalind/Ganymede tests "the faith of. . . [his] love" against the tradition of misogyny that the unrealistic idealism of Petrarchism could reinforce. As a young man supposedly educated by a sexually disillusioned and withdrawn "old religious uncle of mine" (3.2.344), she professes scepticism toward Orlando and cynicism toward women (3.2.369-371, 348-350), and in her succeeding therapy, proposing to cure love by counsel, she acts out for his benefit men's stereotypical expectations of women's fickleness and seeming cruelty

in this manner. 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 . . . 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 live in a nook merely monastic.

(3.2.407-412, 417-421)

In response to her trying poses, Orlando remains constant. The Orlando we see in the final act of the play is now appropriately sceptical of fanciful love at first sight and has painfully earned the "real" love he is given.

However, he does not develop a very much more sophisticated understanding of women's ambiguous position in the world. Throughout Rosalind's disguising, Orlando retains an essentially simple faith grounded in his newly secure identity in the Duke's service. He has an increasingly melancholy feeling that this interlude is just a game—that he may be wasting time—and he breaks off wooing to "attend the Duke at dinner" (4.1.180). Rosalind's action as Ganymede/Rosalind does not shock or void his identity in the way nature had earlier threatened to do; instead she leads him to revise his Petrarchan idealization of women—"The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she" (3.2.10)—toward a desire for a chaste wife, and sets that desire within the dominant code of his male heroic identity.

Rosalind as Ganymede, however, transforms herself more thoroughly. As her words imply, she is not a dispassionate therapist: "Love is merely a madness, and I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish'd and cur'd is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too" (3.2.400-404, emphasis mine). Critics have always commented on Rosalind's control of decorum while in disguise, but in a play written almost contemporaneously with Hamlet her "holiday humor" (4.1.69), like his "antic disposition," is as much used to exorcise her own fears about love as it is to criticize or educate her lover. Rosalind's control lies in standing outside of amatory convention, but it is her action within these conventions that carries her, almost imperceptibly, into the "magic" of creating a new, and within the value judgments of this play, more adequate convention of companionate marriage.

This becomes clear in her interaction with Silvius and Phebe. During a frustrating break in her play with Orlando—he is late for his appointment with her—she slips from her earlier facile and uncritical sympathy for Silvius' mooning "shepherd's passion" (2.4.60) to a desire to do something, to enter their amusingly static and artificial pastoral "pageant" and "prove a busy actor in their play" (3.4.47-59). What she does there, quite to her surprise, is to become the sexually ambiguous means—a boyish "ripe sister" (4.3.87)—through which their hopelessly stalemated and conventional Petrarchan attitudes are softened toward reciprocal love. Silvius, who has previously been an utter fool in love, running off stage (as Orlando later does for Rosalind, cf. 3.2.9-10) exclaiming "O Phebe, Phebe, Phebe!" (2.4.43), assumes a sober fidelity under Ganymede's rebuke; the disdainful Phebe, having now felt the pang of love for Ganymede, is at least sorry for "gentle" Silvius (3.5.85). When Rosalind dissolves her disguise at the end of the play, they have seen each other through her, and Phebe assures Silvius that "Thy faith my fancy to thee doth combine" (5.4.150).

Rosalind-as-Ganymede's action within Silvius and Phebe's play has double relevance for her action within her own. It makes explicit her androgynous power, even while it implies her own subliminal desire to give herself to Orlando. In her next scene with Orlando she fulfills her earlier plan (4.1), acting as she thinks men expect women to do, alternately Lady Disdain and the threateningly promiscuous dark lady of the sonnets. The vehemence and verve of her acting here argues that she is now doing this as much for her own sake as for Orlando's. It is necessary for her to misuse her sex, to soil her own nest, as Celia half-jokingly puts it (4.1.201-204), in order to hide the "woman's fear" (1.3.119) in her heart. She must act out her ambivalence toward her social inscription as woman in order to participate in male privilege. Yet she has just sharply criticized such behavior in Phebe, urging her to "thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love" (3.5.58), and in 4.1 she becomes confident enough in Orlando's faithful replies to stage a mock marriage. Temporarily empowered within Petrarchan love conventions, she has worked her way through to surrendering them in favor of a provisional trust in her partially tested lover. The imaginative space provided by the forest can take her this far—to an imagined wedding.

It takes an intrusion from outside the forest and a resurgence of male heroic force to turn the imagined wedding into a real one. The Duke's "kindness" and Rosalind-as-Ganymede's "play" have allowed Orlando to become a moral rather than merely a physical Hercules (see the wrestling match and Rosalind's cry at 1.2.210), and thus also a type of Christ.³⁰ Those inchoate energies which in the court could find expression only through wrestling Charles, in the forest focus on the picture of "A wretched ragged man, o'ergrown with hair" and menaced by a snake and a lioness (4.3.102-132). Suddenly Arden has grown threatening again, its postlapsarian state implied by the snake; its maternal peril implied by the Ovidian "suck'd and hungry lioness"; the masculine fear of return to nature emblematized as the supposed wild man. This threat presents itself to Orlando as a moral dilemma, for he recognizes the endangered man as his brother, his eldest brother, "that same brother .. . the most unnatural / That liv'd amongst men." The "old oak, whose boughs were moss'd with age / And high top bald with dry antiquity" and the "wretched ragged man, o'ergrown with hair" both suggest patriarchal and epic genealogy brought to the verge of savagery and decay by Oliver and Duke Frederick's actions: as Orlando earlier laments, "a rotten tree, / That cannot so much as a blossom yield" (2.3.63-64).³¹ The description builds to a climax that Shakespeare will repeat near the end of The Tempest. To Rosalind's anxious query, "But to Orlando: did he leave him there, / Food to the suck'd and hungry lioness?" the stranger, like Prospero to Ariel (Temp., 5.1.24-28), replies:

. . . kindness, nobler ever than revenge,
And nature, stronger than his just occasion,
Made him give battle to the lioness,
Who quickly fell before him . . .

Orlando redeems Eden, and the story bursts into present reality with all the force of its teller's awaking and sudden conversion to brotherly love: "in which hurtling / From miserable slumber / awaked" (emphasis mine).

The stranger is thus revealed as Orlando's eldest brother, Oliver. His conversion is emphasized by the dramatic introduction of the personal pronoun and the succeeding insistent play upon it (4.3.135-137). Oliver declares that his real identity surfaced from disguise through disguise; he states that his former unnaturalness has been "sweetly" transformed in the forest; he undergoes in a flash the experience of male bonding, of kinship, that his brother had found with the exiled Duke, to whose society Orlando now leads him (4.3.142-144).

The bloody napkin Oliver brings to Ganymede/Rosalind emblematizes the male adversarial experience of the world of nature. The sign of Orlando's wounding by the lioness, it intrudes the reality of death into Arden: et in Arcadia ego. Because of it Rosalind discovers how empathetically tied she is to Orlando: Oliver reports "he [Orlando] fainted, / And cried in fainting upon Rosalind," (4.3.148-149), and Ganymede also promptly swoons. She can now only lamely maintain her disguise; events have impelled her toward accepting this "reality," even with its implied threat to herself—for the "bloody napkin" will reappear in Othello as the strawberried handkerchief, a threatening emblem of the dangers of sexual consummation.

Things happen quickly after this. Orlando, now "estate[d]" with the patrimony by his grateful brother, readily gives consent to Oliver's marriage to Celia (5.2.1-15). The improbability of this marriage is satisfactorily glossed by Rosalind/Ganymede's witty "pair of stairs to marriage" speech (5.2.29-41), which at once raises our objections to the suddenness of it and reminds us that it is her own protracted negotiation with Orlando that predicates our conditional acceptance of this love at first sight. Rosalind is having increasing difficulty maintaining her disguise as Oliver and Orlando's words seem to cut closer and closer to her real identity. Pressured by Orlando's emotional urgency—"I can live no longer by thinking"—Rosalind/Ganymede declares, "I will weary you then no longer with idle talking" (5.2.50-52). Persuaded now by Orlando's "gesture" (5.2.62), which I take to be as much his heroic action in saving his brother as his fidelity within their love discourse, Ganymede promises to produce Rosalind to marry Orlando in truth tomorrow.

In the final act of As You Like It Rosalind seemingly surrenders the play. She gives herself to the Duke her father so that he may give her to Orlando (5.4.19-20, 116-118). She thus reminds us that their initial attraction to each other was as much through their fathers—the old Sir Rowland de Boys whom Duke Senior loved as his soul (1.2.235-239)—as it was to their unmediated selves, and gives herself into the patriarchy toward which her defensive behavior all along has been in reference.

Yet in As You Like It a tissue of metadramatic discourse has been woven through and around this pen-ultimate sublimation of the self-consciously fictive mode of romance to the redeemed biblical "realism" of its patrilinear plot that may help us suggest what "kind" of pastoral this play finally is. During the course of their comic wooing Audrey queries Touchstone, "I do not know what 'poetical' is. Is it honest in deed and word? Is it a true thing?" to which Touchstone replies, "No, truly; for the truest poetry is the most feigning, and lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry may be said as lovers they do feign" (3.3.17-22). Now Touchstone would dearly love to find Audrey a little more poetical, for then, despite her protestations, she might feign/fain (pretend/desire) to lie (to tell a falsehood/to copulate), and either way he might get to have sex with her. But more seriously, his reply and the play's constant allusions to the analogous powers of poetry and sexual relations to make something like, but other than, the previously existing reality have relevance to the metadramatic question of what its action produces in us, its audience. Is poetry merely a lie, or does it work to give apprehensible form to our desires? And what, we ask as feminist critics, are these desires?

As You Like It is the ultimately contextual play. Despite its very firm grounding in contemporary social realities and the conventions of romantic and heroic discourse, the play remains conscious that its pastoral inside reflects a playful outside of continuing interpretation. Thus act 3, scene 2, the initial scene of pastoral negotiation, is prefaced by a debate between Touchstone and Corin on the significance of "this shepherd's life," in which the old shepherd's simple and appropriate tautologies are circumscribed by Touchstone's courtly wit. Touchstone does not decenter the mysterious esse of Arden, any more than he discomposes Corin, but he does remind us that as sophisticated, postlapsarian auditors we will never be content to rest here. Structured as a debate in all its details and its major patterns, As You Like It also invites us to enter its debates, ourselves "busy actor[s] in their play" (3.4.56).

On the specific issue of the play's treatment of gender identity and sex roles, we need finally to move beyond Rosalind's defensive fears, her complex interaction as Ganymede/Rosalind, and her resubmission of herself to the restored patriarchy of her noble father and tested lover to consider the altered environment of the last movement of the play, including Rosalind's invocation of magic, and the play's metadramatic "Epilogue."

For all its self-conscious artfulness, its impositions and nuances of style, a part of this play remains beyond man's control and is discovered in action. As the play closes, that part, suddenly, and without explanation, turns benign: "the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the winter's wind" (2.1.6-7) turns to "spring time, the only pretty [ring] time" (5.3.19); Rosalind/Ganymede's fictional misogynistic "old religious uncle" (3.2.343-350) becomes an equally fictional but now romantically helpful "magician, most profound in his art, and yet not damnable" (5.2.60-61; see also 5.4.30-34); and from beyond any rational expectations that the text has established, the god Hymen comes to "atone" the play, wedding earth and heaven, country and town. Hymen's own words can serve as an hermeneutic for this final movement of the play: "Feed yourselves with questioning; / That reason wonder may diminish" (5.4.138-139). Rational interpretation and the conversations that the characters conduct beneath Hymen's nuptial lyric can explain in great part how these characters have come together. But though "reason wonder may diminish," it cannot cancel it altogether. The play has worked toward evoking an atmosphere of wonder and a promise of fresh beginnings that Touchstone's realism or Duke Frederick's and Jaques's contemplative withdrawals can anchor but not destroy. As You Like It transforms the problem of sexual relations insofar as it suggests a world of possibility for the continued negotiation of these differences.

In the metadramatic "Epilogue" the continued negotiation of sexual difference becomes the tentative metaphor for the most successful art. Here, for once, men bear the greater burden. The Elizabethan boy actor who played Rosalind conjures women to please themselves and men to play with women for mutual pleasure:

My way is to conjure you, and I'll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you; and I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women (as I perceive by your simp'ring, none of you hates them), that between you and the women the play may please. ("Epilogue," 11-17)

He thus inverts the sexological situation of the play itself, where Orlando had but to become assured in his male heroic identity, while Rosalind had had, through her disguise, her "double-voiced" discourse, to accommodate herself to him. This final inversion in this consummately playful play suggests that men and women can work together—albeit often awkwardly—to transform a world not deterministically bound by its cultural conventions.

Much of Shakespeare's later career suggests how difficult that is. As You Like It itself delicately skirts, with the Duke's sweet style, Orlando's simple heroism, and Rosalind's self-restraint, the excoriating issue of the nonfeminist maternal subtext that will erupt in Shakespeare's tragedies. Although we may use Rosalind's double-voiced discourse and the final metadramatic openness of the play to decenter its patriarchal assumptions, Shakespeare's later plays gravitate around the threat to these values represented by a woman's projected infidelity, the "nothing" that is the source of her reproductive power.³² In closing I can only hazard some of the symptoms and causes of this shift from comic playfulness to tragic anxiety about sexuality.

I believe that as Shakespeare perfected his romantic comedies and the movement toward marriage within them, he was compelled to face more directly the threat within marriage that coincides with the metaphysical and political crisis uncovered in his history plays. If, as the history plays suggest, there is no clear divine sanction for ruling, nor any untainted or disinterested human succession, you confront your origin in the female body, where no one really knows his father: "there," as Othello cries, "where I have garner'd up my heart, / Where either I must live or bear no life; / The fountain from the which my current runs / Or else dries up" (Othello, 4.2.57-60). Literary conventions such as the traditional chaste inaccessibility of the idealized lady and the use of boy actors to play female parts might shield Shakespeare for a time from this threat of the female body, allowing him, in the romantic comedies, to experiment with a dazzling series of sexual permutations that we may now appropriate for our own ends. But Shakespeare also deconstructs these literary conventions in the course of his plays in a way that brings him up against the new social realities of marriage and the family in early modern Europe, where decline of external religious authority, loss of feudal power, urban centralization, and nascent capitalism all function to alienate actual women while making their sexuality the focus of ever more anxious regard. Within Shakespeare's career As You Like It offers us a brief moment of tremulous poise before we sound those depths.³³

Notes

¹ Juliet Dusinberre, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (London, 1975), p. 1.

² Madelon Gohlke, '"I wooed thee with my sword': Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray Schwartz and Coppélla Kahn (Baltimore, 1980), p. 180.

³ Stephen Greenblatt, "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and its Subversion," Glyph, 8 (1981), 40-61; Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), esp. "The Reasons of Misrule," pp. 97-123, and "Women on Top," pp. 124-151.

⁴ Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978).

⁵ Ibid., pp. 141-158, esp. p. 157.

⁶ Ibid., p. 169: "Women's mothering, then, produces asymmetries in the relational experiences of girls and boys as they grow up, which account for crucial differences in feminine and masculine personality, and the relational capacities and modes which these entail . . . From the retention of preoedipal attachments to their mother, growing girls come to define and experience themselves as continuous with others; their experience of self contains more flexible or permeable ego boundaries. Boys come to define themselves as more separate and distinct, with a greater sense of rigid ego boundaries and differentiation. The basic feminine sense of self is connected to the world, the basic masculine sense of self is separate."

⁷ Ibid., p. 151.

⁸ Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York, 1977).

⁹ Chodorow, Reproduction, pp. 173-190.

¹⁰ See, for example, Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York, 1977), pp. 123-218.

¹¹ Coppélla Kahn, "Excavating 'Those Dim Minoan Regions': Maternal Subtexts in Patriarchal Literature," Diacritics, 12 (1982), 37-41.

¹² Louis Montrose, "'The Place of a Brother' in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form," Shakespeare Quarterly, 32 (1981), 28-54.

¹³ Ibid., pp. 53, 52n.

¹⁴ The phrase is Myra Jehlen's, "Archimedes and the Paradox of Feminist Criticism," SIGNS, 6 (1981), 576, as cited by Kahn, "Maternal Subtexts," p. 32.

¹⁵ For the forest of Arden and Mary Arden, see Samuel Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford, 1977), pp. 4, 19-22.

¹⁶ Elaine Showalter, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), 201-204.

¹⁷ Rosalie Colie, Shakespeare 's Living Art (Princeton, 1974), pp. 243-261.

¹⁸ Gohlke, "Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms," p. 184.

¹⁹ Shakespeare first evokes the ideal image of Arden—where echoes of Eden fuse with Hesiodic hints of "the golden world" and more local, English tales of social inversion (1.1.114-119)—within the socially oppressive opening scene, where Orlando complains that Oliver mars the imago dei and "the spirit of my father" within him (1.1.29-34 and 1.1.21-23, 46-51, 70-71). See Montrose, "Place of a Brother," pp. 45-47, for parallels between the biblical story of Cain and Abel and the contemporary problem of the patrimony and unequal inheritance. Throughout my essay I cite the text of As You Like It from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston, 1974).

²⁰ See Montrose, "Place of a Brother," pp. 37-38, for a glossing of the significance of the fight, and Richard Knowles, "Myth and Type in As You Like It," ELH, 33 (1966), 1-22, on the allusions to Hercules.

²¹As You Like It has often been compared with Lear. Some of the deepest filiations connect Orlando's vague misgivings about his breeding with Edmund's vigorous embrace of his bastardy as cause of his naturalistic villainy, and Orlando's fear of nature with Edgar's painful exposure on the heath as poor Tom. As You Like It avoids painful male confrontation with the threatening maternal subtext of nature through Orlando's own restraint and the benign paternal mediation of Duke Senior, but it remains a latent menace.

²² See Madeleine Doran, "'Yet am I inland bred,'" Shakespeare Quarterly, 15 (1964), 99-114, for a discussion of the rich traditions of civility that inform the play.

²³ Chodorow, Reproduction, pp. 169, 94, 182.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 169; see also n.5 above.

²⁵ Nancy Vickers, "Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), 265-280.

²⁶ For the myth of Ganymede as potentially degrading or exalting, see Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York, 1962), pp. 212-218. In As You Like It Ganymede offers a homoerotic bridge to Orlando's encounter with a "real" female other. Shakespeare's decision to highlight the dramatic fact that boy actors played women's parts may indicate that we are seeing an essentially male drama of power in which women are even further objectified as mere roles. But I think it also indicates the strain which that convention of representation was coming under, as Shakespeare's portrayal of women shifts from the already powerful girls of the romantic comedies to the explicitly threatening women of the tragedies. In the later plays, although boys still play the woman's part, the extra-dramatic referents of their play have become an imagined woman, not an excluded middle term: we move from the boy actor who plays Portia playing a young male lawyer in The Merchant of Venice to the boy actor who plays Cleopatra complaining that a boy actor will misplay her—"Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I'th'posture of a whore" (Antony and Cleopatra 5.2.220-221)—and to the artifice-shattering resurrection of Hermione in The Winter's Tale.

²⁷ Chodorow, Reproduction, pp. 166-167.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 167.

²⁹ Ibid., p. 93.

³⁰ Knowles, "Myth and Type," pp. 14-18.

³¹ See Montrose, "Place of a Brother," pp. 50-51, for the female sexual threat of the snake and the lioness, and p. 43 for the genealogical significance of the description of Oliver. The lioness probably descends from the lioness who mauls Thisbe's mantle with her bloody mouth in Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe, Metamorphoses, bk. 4, a story that we know from the rude mechanicals' play in A Midsummer Night's Dream was much on Shakespeare's mind. I am grateful to B. Cass Clarke for suggesting its relevance here. The genealogical tree is one of the topoi of epic, invoked to establish the text's relationship to the past; see, for example, Homer, Odyssey, 23.173-204; Vergil, Aeneid, 4.437.449; Dante, Divine Comedy, "Purgatorio," 31.70-75.

³² This issue has received two recent impressive formulations: "I am reading the development from the comedies through the problem plays and the major tragedies in terms of an explosion of the sexual tensions that threaten without rupturing the surface of the earlier plays" (Gohlke, "Shakespeare's Tragic Paradigms," p. 174); "Possibilities for conflict latent in earlier writings are released in the violent action of tragedy, where boundaries previously provided by separation of genre are broken through, and the drama takes into itself the entire range of family-based conflict in Shakespeare" (Richard Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies: Turn and Counter-Turn [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981], p. 156).

³³ For As You Like It as a work of exquisite balance, see the classic essays by Helen Gardner, "As You Like It," in More Talking of Shakespeare, ed. John W. P. Garret (London; New York, 1959), pp. 17-32, and Ann Barton, "As You Like It and Twelfth Night: Shakespeare's Sense of an Ending," in Shakespearean Comedy, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and D. J. Palmer, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14 (1972), pp. 160-180.