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Rosalinds behavior suggests that she knows better than anyone else that her society makes different demands of men and women. For instance, she knows that, when dressed as Ganymede, she is forbidden from crying over a perceived slight from Orlando. Likewise, something as simple as a “doublet and hose”—her male disguise—stops her from celebrating the discovery that Orlando has authored love poems in her honor (III.ii.200–201). Indeed, as the clothes make the man, they also make the woman act like one. To Elizabethans, the fundamental divide between the sexes may have been as much a matter of external expressions of behavior and clothing as of anatomy. On one hand, this conception made gender a much more fluid notion than it is to many modern audiences. Codes of behavior were more a matter of mimicry than a function of chromosomal makeup, which Rosalind shows as she plays a swaggering young man imitating a woman.
On the other hand, this fluidity caused a great deal of anxiety among Elizabethans, who, in the end, wanted very much to believe that the categories that organized their world were stable. Thus, they insisted that certain behaviors and customs were established by ones sex. Women might pretend to be men for a brief and entertaining moment, but they must, in the end, behave like women. Rosalind eases the anxieties surrounding her very deft performance by reverting, time and again, to the behaviors expected of her as a woman: to the Elizabethan mind, she would be a much more troubling character if she did not faint at the sight of Orlandos blood. Although gender proves to be completely undefined in the Forest of Ardenne, everyone is returned to his or her supposedly proper place by the final act. Indeed, nowhere is the anxiety over gender–swapping quelled more than in the Epilogue, where the actor playing Rosalind, who is herself so talented at role-playing, unveils himself as an actor, thereby promising that with his bow comes an end to subversion and a return to the established social order.
Gender in As You Like It
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One of the most intriguing aspects of the treatment of love in As You Like It concerns the issue of gender. And this issue, for obvious reasons, has generated a special interest in recent times. The principal reason for such a thematic concern in the play is the cross dressing and role playing. The central love interest between Rosalind and Orlando calls into question the conventional wisdom about mens and womens gender roles and challenges our preconceptions about these roles in courtship, erotic love, and beyond.
At the heart of this courtship is a very complex ambiguity which it is difficult fully to appreciate without a production to refer to. But here we have a man (the actor) playing a woman (Rosalind), who has dressed