The Utah Shakespeare Festival has an annual symposium, called the Wooden O, that is a place where scholars meet to discuss Shakespeare and to share papers that they've submitted. I've yet to go, but I'm trying to write a piece that (I hope) might be a contribution to the symposium. It's a large topic, and I'm still wrapping my head around what I want to do, but I thought I'd lay out some preliminary thoughts. Since I used up my writing time today on this, I figured I'd do double duty and post it here. So here's the first part of my proposed paper, "Hooking Up and Marrying Down: Relationships in Shakespeare."
But all this pushes us again to the question: What does she see in Orlando? I think the realization that she is, as Gwen Stefani croons in her 1995 song, "Just a Girl". Because I'm so charmed by Rosalind, I want to give her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps there's something in Orlando that we can't see. Maybe the man is a bit of a doofus, but there's potential in him. She is obviously willing to work for things, and she takes pleasure in setting what is broken aright. Maybe that's actually what Rosalind seeks: Not her equal, but one that helps her improve herself because she is focused on helping others. This is seen by the way she tries to set all hearts to their proper place at the end of the play, and she thrills to see her uncle, who so heartlessly cast her out at the beginning of the story, repent and become an honest man. Her delight in the Forest of Arden is shared through her goodness, and though we might wish that Orlando had more to him (say, Benedick's wit), trusting Rosalind to be smart enough to know what she wants is maybe the best way to honor her character.
Marrying Down: As You Like It
Rosalind's charm is so pervasive
and charming, Harold Bloom prefers to think of the play by an alternative
title: As Rosalind Likes It (221).
It's almost becomes a tragedy at the end of one of the highest comedies to
think she marries a schlub like Orlando. In many ways, hers is the most
confusing choice to progressive sensibilities. Why should she marry? She is, of course, her own man and her own woman, a double-meaning
that, as English majors and historians and theater geeks all delight in
observing, was even more rich when you consider that she was a he who dressed like a she to then dress like a he to woo a he
into loving the she that looked like a he.
The "no female" rule
of Elizabethan stage (noting that a masque would not have the same constraints
as a theater on Bankside) makes for an interesting depiction of womanhood. In
the Jacobean play The Maid's Tragedy,
written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Evadne, a female, enters the
stage, attended in order to prepare for bed. "Madame, shall we undress you
for this fight?/The wars are naked that you must make tonight" says Dula
(2.1.1-2). The possibility of a voyeuristic strip-tease for a Jacobean audience
would have been tempered by the thought that they would actually be watching
the disrobing, as the editors of the Oxford World Classic's book Four Jacobean Sex Tragedies observed, of
the "unequivocally male leading lady" (viii). The awareness,
therefore, of the puerile sense of impropriety at cross-dressing, undergirded
by a sense of sexuality, coupled with the allure of sexuality have a much
larger congress than we tend to get in modern stagings of these stories.
Rosalind's feminine/masculine
approach for Shakespeare is likely one of commercial viability and reliance on
familiar tropes that the Bard seemed willing to visit--and revisit--frequently.
We can only surmise his truest motives. Based on nothing but my own sense of
humor, I like to imagine that Shakespeare wrote these cross-dressing play just
to keep his "female" actors (likely Alexander Cooke or Robert Goffe)
free from gowns. It's juvenile, but I'd like to think he had a bawdy joke to
throw at them--"Your only chance of getting into a skirt is when I write
it for you, ye strumpets."
One of the benefits of having
Rosalind cross dress throughout much of As
You Like It is that Shakespeare feels likewise emboldened to address the
inequities and biases of his society. Rosalind has the freedom to speak her
mind and to woo the man she loves; Shakespeare has the same freedom. Tina
Packer makes a similar observation: "Her disguise gives her the ability to
find out about herself, what she really thinks and feels…without having anyone
in power tell her how women should or should not behave" (184). But--and
this is a crucial conclusion--society prevails. Yes, the "Truth will
out" (MoV)--and so does our programming.
While Rosalind delights us on
the stage--and while she is performing so masterfully on the "stage within
the play" of being Ganymede--there is the limited freedom that this
playing allows.
Rosalind is drawing stereotypical expectations--along with sagacious commentary--within her speech. Comparing herself--though said in the garb of a man--to animals (and a goddess, tucked in with hardly a moment to digest her subtlety) is as sexist as could be. Despite her subtle appropriation and quasi-apotheosis, she is reporting as fact the assumptions of her society. She is playing at Ganymede while the actor beneath is playing at being a woman. It seems like the only place where a woman can be free is when she's on stage…pretending to be a man.
ROSALIND
…No, no, Orlando; men are April when they woo, December when they wed: maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. I will be more jealous of thee than a Barbary cock-pigeon over his hen, more clamorous than a parrot against rain, more new-fangled than an ape, more giddy in my desires than a monkey: I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain, and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry; I will laugh like a hyen, and that when thou art inclined to sleep.
ORLANDO
But will my Rosalind do so?
ROSALIND
By my life, she will do as I do.
But all this pushes us again to the question: What does she see in Orlando? I think the realization that she is, as Gwen Stefani croons in her 1995 song, "Just a Girl". Because I'm so charmed by Rosalind, I want to give her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps there's something in Orlando that we can't see. Maybe the man is a bit of a doofus, but there's potential in him. She is obviously willing to work for things, and she takes pleasure in setting what is broken aright. Maybe that's actually what Rosalind seeks: Not her equal, but one that helps her improve herself because she is focused on helping others. This is seen by the way she tries to set all hearts to their proper place at the end of the play, and she thrills to see her uncle, who so heartlessly cast her out at the beginning of the story, repent and become an honest man. Her delight in the Forest of Arden is shared through her goodness, and though we might wish that Orlando had more to him (say, Benedick's wit), trusting Rosalind to be smart enough to know what she wants is maybe the best way to honor her character.