Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-tf8b9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-04T09:17:12.486Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Subverting Rosalind: Cocky Ros in the Forest of Arden

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Lesley Anne Soule
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The foregoing article by Jan Kott explored the nature of gender in As You Like It largely by looking forward to later analogues of androgyny: but here Lesley Soule examines the character of Rosalind in close relationship to traditions of popular theatre and performance on which Shakespeare himself could draw. She points out how our own two-centuries-old love affair with an idealized heroine has, despite some recent feminist modifications of the character-myth, distorted our reading of the play, obscuring the fact that the text describes a performance in which the controlling presence is not a female performer but a male adolescent – a figure whose long theatrical antecedence she explores. This portrayal by a pert boy Roscius of Shakespeare's boy-girl character the author dubs ‘Cocky Ros’ – a figure who first represents and then subverts the feminine fiction of ‘Rosalind’, thus providing a paradigm of character-actor interplay. Only by giving authority to such subversive, gender-free performers, she argues, can we challenge the power wielded by theatrical illusion over our ideas of identity, gender, and love. Lesley Soule, who has taught at the University of British Columbia and at Polytechnic South West, is currently completing a study of theories of the character-actor relationship.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 26 , May 1991 , pp. 126 - 136
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes and References

1. Quoted in Cook, Judith, Women in Shakespeare (London, 1980), p. 18Google Scholar.

2. Wilson, John Dover, Shakespeare's Happy Comedies (London, 1962), p. 162Google Scholar.

3. Goddard, Harold C., The Meaning of Shakespeare Vol. I (London, 1951), p. 282Google Scholar.

4. The New York Tribune, 29 Nov. 1898.

5. Dowden, Edward, Shakespeare: a Critical Study of His Mind and Art (London, 1875), p. 81Google Scholar.

6. Quoted by Jamieson, Michael, Shakespeare: As You Like It (London, 1965), p. 69Google Scholar (Studies in English Literature, No. 25).

7. Lambert, J. W., Drama, Winter 1967, p. 19Google Scholar.

8. Hamer, Mary, ‘Shakespeare's Rosalind and Her Public Image’, Theatre Research International, XI (1986), p. 117Google Scholar.

9. Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford, 1974), p. 51Google Scholar.

10. Weimann, Robert, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore and London, 1978), p. 7Google Scholar.

11. Righter, Anne [Barton], Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (London, 1962), p. 89Google Scholar.

12. Gardner, Helen, ‘As You Like It’, in Garrett, J., ed., More Talking of Shakespeare (London, 1959), p. 21Google Scholar.

13. Ridley, M. R., ‘Plot and Character in the Plays’, in Gittings, A., ed., The Living Shakespeare (London, 1960), p. 71Google Scholar.

14. David, Richard, ‘Actors and Scholars: a View of Shakespeare in the Modern Theatre’, Shakespeare Survey, XII (1959), p. 79Google Scholar.

15. See Frye, Northrop, ‘Characterization in Shakespearian Comedy’, Shakespeare Quarterly, IV (1953), p. 274Google Scholar.

16. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, p. 143.

17. Quoted in Wiles, David, Shakespeare's Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse (Cambridge, 1987), p. 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18. Worthen, William, The Idea of the Actor (Princeton, 1984), p. 54Google Scholar.

19. Wiles, op. cit., p. 52.

20. Bamber, Linda, Comic Women, Tragic Men: a Study of Gender and Genre (Stanford, 1982), p. 39Google Scholar.

21. Bouissac, Paul, Circus and Culture: a Semiotic Approach (Bloomington, 1976), p. 170, 165Google Scholar.

22. Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition, p. 28.

23. The hyperbolic, ironic apotheosis of Rosalind parallels Aristophanes' Hymeneal endings and, for example, the sexually symbolic figures of Peace and Sovereignty at the end of Lysistrata and The Birds. There are other resemblances to Old Comedy in the play, including the processional/sequential plot and the agon between Rosalind/Ganymede and Orlando. See Frye, Northrop, ‘Old and New Comedy’, Shakespeare Survey, XII (1969), p. 1–5Google Scholar.

24. See Belsey, Catherine, ‘Disrupting Sexual Difference: Meaning and Gender in the Comedies’, in Drakakis, J., ed., Alternative Shakespeares (London, 1985), p. 166–90Google Scholar.

25. Lamb, Charles, Tales from Shakespeare (Boston, 1832), p. 94Google Scholar.

26. McCluskie, Kathleen, ‘The Act, the Role, and the Actor: Boy Actresses on the Elizabethan Stage’, New Theatre Quarterly, III, No. 10 (05 1987), p. 130Google Scholar.

27. Weimann, Robert, ‘Shakespeare (De)Canonized: Conflicting Use of “Authority” and “Representation”,’ New Literary History, X, No. 1 (Autumn 1988), p. 79Google Scholar.