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Chapter 1
COUNTERFEITING TO BE MEN: MALE ROLE MODELS, IDENTITY, AND
GENDER BASED DISGUISE
In her Introduction to Speaking of Gender Elaine Showalter posits: “‘gender is not
only a question of difference, which assumes that the sexes are separate and equal; but of
power, since in looking at the history of gender relations, we find sexual asymmetry,
inequality, and male dominance in every known society’ (2-4)” (Gay, Notes, 181). Many
Shakespearean comedies comment on this “difference” when women dress as men and,
as a result, they inevitably deal with a power shift as well. Portia in The Merchant of
Venice rules the courtroom, Rosalind changes the course of action in As You Like It, and
Viola lifts the gloominess in Illyria. Specifically, in As You Like It and Twelfth Night,
“counterfeiting to be men” obviously does not make Viola and Rosalind real men, but
their gender-based disguises do allow them freedom, which, in turn, lends them power.
These disguises also allow them a certain amount of autonomy, especially as they both
embark on journeys into worlds with which they are unfamiliar: Rosalind exiled to the
Forest of Arden and Viola shipwrecked on the unfamiliar shores of Illyria. These chapters
discuss the power conveyed by clothes and assumed identities and analyze how Viola and
Rosalind differ in their feelings for and use of this power. Specifically, and to varying
degrees, Viola and Rosalind use their power to remark on socially-accepted male and
female behavior, revealing the foolish wooing habits of the men in the process. They also
utilize their power to “rewrite” their respective scripts, and in doing so, reveal that the
power created through their gender-based disguises only works because of the women
they were before the disguise. Regardless of what came before the disguise, however, in
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the worlds of Arden and Illyria Viola and Rosalind need the influence of male attire to
achieve their goals, because it empowers their individual situations, becoming
simultaneously liberating and satisfying. However, gender-based disguise only conveys
power because Rosalind and Viola are capable of wielding it.
According to Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare was interested in how clothing and
appearance can change or influence the way people see others. He supports this idea
through the knowledge that Shakespeare’s father was elected town bailiff, a role that
required ceremonial functions and special “costumes.” In his “Introduction” to the Norton
Shakespeare, Greenblatt argues that the effect of this ceremony would convey a sense of
power, reveal symbolism, and display the power of clothes, ultimately influencing
perception and creating an awareness of how clothing conveys possibly fraudulent
identities (9). In late 16th century England, of which the worlds of Arden and Illyria
provide mirrors, costumes were a necessary function of both real and stage life,
especially since all of the female roles on the Elizabethan stage were played by boys.
Richard Hornby posits that setting up these “multiple ironies of having a male play a
female who in turn plays a male…explores interesting areas of gender
identification…and raise[s] questions of human identity” (68). Intriguingly, in As You
Like It and Twelfth Night, both Viola and Rosalind initially adopt gender-based disguise
for security purposes: Viola understands that she cannot wander an unknown country as a
woman, much less be allowed admittance into Orsino’s court, and Rosalind understands
that the unknown Forest of Arden holds dangers for women travelling alone, especially
for the daughter of the recently-deposed Duke. As a result, both women adopt disguises
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that not only conceal their gender, but their class as well, which seems to add authenticity
to the disguises of Cesario and Ganymede because the women are unhindered by social
protocol. The women, then, do not merely adopt the guise of men but the guise of lowerclass men, which seems to allow them more freedom to enact stereotypical “male”
behavior. Rosalind becomes a “saucy lackey” who “plays the knave” with Orlando, while
Viola, who initially dresses the part of “an eunuch” to gain admittance into Orsino’s court
later becomes his messenger to Olivia (AYLI 3.2.287-8; TN 1.2.56). When this choice of
disguise is compared with the courtly gentlemen of the plays, who range from Dukes to
knights and lords, Viola and Rosalind’s respective choices of gender-based disguises
reveal both a gender and a social awareness that enables them further freedom.
After adopting their disguises, both women discuss how their clothes reflect a
fabricated self, while within they remain women who eventually use their respective
disguises to woo the men they love. Constant reminders to the audience about
“charming” outsides and condemnations of disguise as “wickedness” remind us that not
only are Viola and Rosalind superficially playing male, but they are undeniably women
despite the disguise. Their comments belie their false identities and reveal their true
selves. Robert Kimbrough convincingly argues that in “consciously using her disguise to
act in a way that society will not allow a woman to act, [Rosalind] is more her real,
essential self—or can move more easily to discovery and revelation of that essential self”
(25). Conversely, he argues that while Viola “experiences human freedom and growth in
male disguise,” she feels “constricted” and “self-conscious” throughout Twelfth Night
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(28). Thus, while Viola bemoans the pitfalls of her masculine masquerade, Rosalind
seems to embrace her disguise as an extension of self.
Despite these different attitudes though, as Ganymede and Cesario, Rosalind and
Viola effectively fool everyone else around them, save those characters who knew of
each disguise before it was donned. The dramatic blindness to the woman in the man may
be symptomatic of the cultural blindness of the “man” in the woman. As a result of this
“blindness,” Viola and Rosalind freely reveal the gap between appearance and reality in
their imitation of foolish men. Despite Viola and Rosalind’s dedication to their
counterfeits, however, the fabricated male selves of Cesario and Ganymede reveal quite a
bit of the woman beneath each disguise, and in this case, Viola’s Cesario seems
noticeably weaker than Rosalind’s Ganymede. I would argue that their extended success
in counterfeiting as men hinges on their preconceived notions of socially-accepted male
and female behavior and awareness of social hierarchy. Richard Hornby posits, “role
playing within the role is a device for exploring the concerns of the individual…not the
individual in isolation, however, but in relation to his society” (85). Rosalind and Viola’s
gender and class-based disguises allow them to comment on societal and gender-based
stereotypes and help us to understand the gender roles they perform, both in and out of
their male disguises.
In “Cross-Dressing, the Theater, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,”
Jean Howard discusses how cross-dressing, both as plot device on stage as well as
backlash against societal norms off stage, threatened the “strict principles of hierarchy
and subordination” (20). The sumptuary laws of the time regulated who could wear what
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by class, but not by gender, and while Stephen Orgel argues that there existed a “good
deal of violent rhetoric about the heinousness of such cross-dressing, it was not illegal for
women to dress in male attire” (107). Orgel, like Howard, focuses on the “fears of a
patriarchal society about the power of women” (107), and even the fictional, stage-based
characters of Viola and Rosalind as Cesario and Ganymede appear to threaten this order.
Dusinberre argues that the “performance of gender in As You Like It creates, as the antitheatricalists in the Elizabethan period feared that it would, a vision of liberty,” and Viola
and Rosalind embrace a freedom they would have been denied without their male
disguises (Introduction 13). However, while discussing the adoption of these genderbased disguises in both plays, one should consider the type of women Viola and Rosalind
are before the disguise and how that influences the role they undertake within the
disguise. For example, Viola and Rosalind already demonstrate boldness when they
choose to disguise their gender in the first place, and, while other characters disguise
themselves in various other ways, such as Celia demoting her status through costume and
Feste donning a gown and beard to play Sir Topas, those dictating the action and
consequences of these plays are Viola and Rosalind, although Viola undertakes a more
passive role than Rosalind. These two characters take on roles far different from their
own, roles that require more than a mere costume or status change; in fact, they require a
commitment to gender exploration that the others do not.
Both Rosalind and Viola base their individual counterfeits on numerous
characters, some of a highly personal nature, such as Viola’s reincarnation of her
supposedly dead twin brother Sebastian in the guise of Cesario, others of a stereotypical
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nature, as in the case of Rosalind’s Ganymede and then her layered portrayal of
Ganymede-as-Rosalind. It is reasonable to assume that Rosalind and Viola use the men
around them as models for their “counterfeit.” Their manner of dress and attitude could
not have been fabricated from thin air; thus, their perceptions of what it means to be
masculine inform their disguises, mirroring what they view as man’s true nature. It seems
easier for the audience to appreciate Viola and Rosalind’s “counterfeit” when we look at
the other men of the plays, who run the gamut of drunkards, absentee parents, usurpers,
and fools, which is an interesting contrast to the men’s high ranking social class. As
opposed to these ever-present examples, Cesario and Ganymede represent the reality of
man through their interpretation of the “ideal” not just because of the effectiveness of
Viola and Rosalind’s disguises but because of the foolish and self-centered nature of the
other men of the play. Arguably, Cesario and Ganymede are better “men” than some of
the men of these plays, since these gender-based disguises construct each woman as “the
man,” and the men of the plays serve as weak, effeminate contrasts to this perceived male
ideal as played by Viola and Rosalind.
In Twelfth Night, some of the most important and influential men of the play are
absent or rarely onstage: Olivia’s father and brother have recently died, causing Olivia to
“abjure the company and sight of men” (TN 1.1.40-41). Viola believes Sebastian to be
dead, and she references her own absent father only once in a recollection of his
mentioning Duke Orsino’s name. These absent men thus become the masculine ideal, and
Viola seeks to represent this ideal through her role of Cesario. In contrast to this ideal,
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the men present in the play epitomize various levels of foolishness, from Sir Andrew’s
naïveté to Sir Toby’s drunkenness to Malvolio and Orsino’s arrogance and self-love.
Indeed, Cesario proves a better model of ideal masculinity than even her own
model, her brother Sebastian. After Orsino, the few male characters that remain include
Antonio and the object of his desire Sebastian, who, in his own foolishness, accepts
Olivia as his wife without knowing who she is or why she claims to know him:
SEBASTIAN
What relish is in this? How runs the stream?
Or I am mad, or else this is a dream:
Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep:
If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!
OLIVIA
Nay, come, I prithee; would thou’dst be rul’d by
me!
SEBASTIAN
Madam, I will. (TN 4.1.59-64)
Sebastian, in meeting Olivia for the first time, gives in to his baser instincts, even while
he notes that there is something “deceivable” about Olivia’s love for him. Following his
“will” so readily reveals his powerlessness over love, and ultimately in allowing himself
to be ruled by Olivia, Sebastian reveals a stark difference between himself and Viola. In
contrast to her brother, Viola has shown substantial willpower in not shedding her
disguise, which would result in a relinquishing of control. Despite her feelings, Viola has
not made any overt effort to earn Orsino’s romantic love, choosing instead to remain
silent, a “blank.” This willpower also manifests itself through an emotional response to
Olivia, as Viola reveals genuine sympathy for her:
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VIOLA
How easy is it for the proper false
In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms!
Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we,
For such as we are made of, such we be.
How will this fadge? My master loves her dearly,
And I, poor monster, fond as much on him,
And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me:
What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master’s love:
As I am woman (now alas the day!)
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe? (TN 2.2.2838)
Viola reveals that she is “desperate” for Orsino’s love, yet unlike her brother who
follows his “will” immediately, she reigns in her emotions and continues to woo Olivia in
Orsino’s name. As a result, the twins serve as effective gender contrast for each other,
with Sebastian as the weaker of the two. Viola has proven herself stronger if only through
her extended charade as Cesario, despite her feelings for Orsino and her troubles with
Olivia. Specifically, Sebastian plays the woman to Olivia while Viola’s exercise of
control reveals her dedication to her male role of Cesario.
In As You Like It, Duke Senior is in exile, and the first men encountered in the
play (besides Orlando) are Duke Frederick and Oliver, who are villainous, ambitious, and
greedy. In contrast, Orlando and Adam, though presented as fair and “good,” also
represent flight; their actions are reactionary to the initial male power and dominance as
presented by the usurping Duke and Orlando’s murderous and greedy older brother. In
his altercation with his older brother, Orlando tells Oliver that he will “no further offend
you than becomes me for my good” (AYLI 1.1.75-6), thus setting up a contrast between
them, even as Oliver seeks to cause Orlando’s death in the wrestling ring. The polarities
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of “good” and “evil” and pacifist and violent characters are contrasted even more by
Duke Frederick’s antagonism toward Orlando’s respected father Sir Rowland de Boys, of
whom he tells Orlando: “I would thou hadst been son to some man else. / The world
esteemed thy father honourable, / But I did find him still mine enemy” (AYLI 1.2.21315). In contrast, when Duke Senior discovers that Orlando is Sir Rowland’s son, he
welcomes Orlando, telling him that he loved his father. Despite this difference, however,
the “good” Sir Roland de Boys is also a dead father who leaves his sons without a proper
model, and this absence manifests itself in Orlando’s feeble attempts at proclaiming love.
In these two plays, the men in love (as epitomized by Orsino, Sebastian, and
Orlando) are foolish while Rosalind and Viola are able to keep their wits about them,
enough so that they do not discard their disguises despite the problems these disguises
cause. Yet these male disguises donned by Viola and Rosalind only seem to become
problematic for Viola, while Rosalind is far from condemning her disguise as
“wickedness.” And while Rosalind has to deal with Phoebe’s love just as Viola has to
deal with Olivia’s, Rosalind solves her own problem through her wit, while Viola’s
problems are solved by the reappearance of Sebastian. As Jean Howard notes, unlike
Rosalind, Viola “freely admits that she has neither the desire nor the aptitude to play the
man’s part in phallic swordplay” and that the purpose of the dramatic narrative is to
“release this woman from the prison of her masculine attire and return her to her proper
and natural position as wife” (33). Rosalind, however, according to Howard, “uses her
disguise to redefine (albeit in a limited way) the position of woman in a patriarchal
society…while dressed as a man, Rosalind impersonates a woman, and that woman is
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herself—or, rather, a self that is the logical conclusion of Orlando’s romantic, Petrarchan
construction of her” (36-7). Rosalind says herself that her clothes don’t change her
nature: “Dost thou think, though I am caparisoned like a man, I have a doublet and hose
in my disposition?” (AYLI 3.2.189-91). Here, Rosalind compares herself with her
perception of what a man is, which is stereotypical in nature. It is also alternately her
parody of the simplistic way in which men and society view women as well; thus
Rosalind embodies both male and female stereotypical behavior within the guise of
Ganymede and the additional layering of another “Rosalind”:
Shakespeare’s Rosalind is both boy and girl, and must
realize Ganymede’s brashness not simply as a female
pretence of maleness. This is not what Rosalind does. She
becomes a boy playing a woman’s role: Ganymede playing
Rosalind for Orlando to woo. But Ganymede’s Rosalind is
not our Rosalind…the wayward Rosalind is Ganymede’s
fictionalized capricious woman, just as Ganymede is our
Rosalind’s fictionalized brash boy with ‘a swashing and a
martial outside’ (1.3.117), whom the heroine promised to
impersonate at the beginning of the play. (Dusinberre, As
Who 24)
Rosalind seems to relish the chance to sneer at the weakness of women (and herself)
rather than to always be the brunt of such comments. As such, Rosalind also turns the
tables to showcase stereotypical femininity as represented through her performance of
Rosalind for Orlando and through her interactions with Phoebe.
Viola too uses her Cesario disguise to comment on these stereotypical notions of
femininity, especially in her conversations with Olivia, and she uses those ideas to
condemn Olivia for her vanity when Olivia “draw[s] the curtain” to show Cesario “the
picture”: “Look you, sir, such / a one I was this present. Is’t not well done?” (TN 1.5.237-
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8). Viola responds to this superficiality and pride by calling Olivia on it, telling her that
she is “too proud,” but also by praising her, admitting that if Olivia were “the devil, [she]
is fair” (TN1.5.255). Much like Viola, Rosalind too uses her preconceptions of femininity
to rail against the idea that Phoebe could have written such an “angry-tenored” letter to
Ganymede:
ROSALIND
I say she never did invent this letter;
This is a man’s invention and his hand.
SILVIUS
Sure, it is hers.
ROSALIND
Why, ‘tis a boisterous and a cruel style,
A style for challengers. Why, she defies me,
Like Turk to Christian. Women’s gentle brain
Could not drop forth such giant-rude invention,
Such Ethiop words, blacker in their effect
Than in their countenance. Will you hear the letter?
(Reads.)
Can a woman rail thus? (AYLI 4.3.28-36; 42)
Rosalind does focus on the seemingly negative qualities stereotypical of women, such as
pride in appearance and superficiality, yet she handles her disguise and subsequent
adoption of “masculine” qualities well. As she tells Aliena:
I could find 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. (AYLI 2.4.4-8)
Rosalind embraces the ramifications of her male disguise in her need to protect the
weaker Aliena. Despite her success, however, Rosalind as woman must be reminded of
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her male disguise only once, when Oliver tells Ganymede to “counterfeit to be a man”
(AYLI 4.3.72) after Ganymede has fainted at the sight of Orlando’s blood. This fainting
spell is arguably the only instance of the play where Rosalind’s feminine instincts are
betrayed through her effective Ganymede disguise. Nancy Hayles argues that in this
instance, “her faint is a literal relinquishing of conscious control; within the conventions
of the play, it is also an involuntary revelation of female gender because fainting is a
‘feminine response.’ It is a subtle anticipation of Rosalind’s eventual relinquishing of the
disguise and the control that goes with it” (66).
The heroines’ cross-dressing in both plays also demonstrates the instability of
gender. In “As We Like It: How a Girl Can Be Smart and Still Popular,” Clara
Claibourne Park argues that Rosalind’s disguise, and to a lesser extent, Viola’s, allow the
two to be “assertive,” and this assertiveness is accepted by characters and audience alike
only because the two are dressed as men. She claims that with “male dress we feel secure.
In its absence, feminine assertiveness is viewed with hostility…Male dress transforms
what otherwise could be experienced as aggression into simple high spirits” (108).
Phoebe calls Ganymede “peevish” and “proud,” yet also states that this pride “becomes
him. / He’ll make a proper man” (AYLI 3.5.115-16). Cesario is seen as a boy who was
“saucy at the gates” and who “began rudely,” yet in the second visit to Olivia, Olivia
exclaims: “If one should be a prey, how much the better / To fall before the lion than the
wolf!” (TN 3.1.130-31). Later, she adds that when “wit and youth is come to harvest, /
Your wife is like to reap a proper man” (TN 3.1.134-35). Viola and Rosalind accent these
gender stereotypes on purpose and with purpose, as each is determined to continue the
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counterfeit to ensure her own safety. However, while Cesario and Ganymede adopt the
clothing, stance, walk, and voice of a boy, Viola and Rosalind’s ideas, conversational
traits, and feelings are female. Conversely, the “womanly” tears and the pining for love
exhibited by Orsino does not seem to fit the male image well, yet the “male”
characteristics of Cesario and Ganymede suit Viola and Rosalind. In his discussion of
“mannish” women on the stage, Orgel argues that this “anxiety” about women and their
role in a patriarchal society was a much-written about discourse during the English
Renaissance. His most effective example stems from John Knox’s A Blast of the Trumpet
Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (1558), which articulates these strict gender
categories for readers:
A man in his natural perfection is fierce, hardy, strong in
opinion, covetous of glory, desirous of knowledge,
appetiting by generation to bring forth his semblable. The
good nature of a woman is to be mild, timorous, tractable,
benign, of sure remembrance, and shamefast.
These gender polarities, of “fierce” and “mild” and “strong in opinion” and “timorous,”
are inverted in As You Like It and Twelfth Night, and Viola and Rosalind exhibit
“fierceness,” boldness, and strength of opinion both before their adoption of disguise as
well as after. Stephen Orgel remarks that this destabilization of categories “question[s]
what it means to be a man or a woman,” and despite the fact that Rosalind and Viola
retain some feminine characteristics even as they dress, walk, and talk like men, the
power they achieve through their gender-based disguise rejects a strict categorization.
Orgel argues that society “has an investment in seeing women as imperfect men” and that
the real danger is recognized when “women reveal that they have an independent
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essence…not under male control.” He adds that “more dangerously,” this independent
essence “is not simply a version or parody of maleness, but is specifically female” (63).
Rosalind and Viola, then, achieve power through their respective disguises, in their
“parody of maleness,” but also reveal their true power through their independence, which
is obviously in the play not “under male control.”
Besides Rosalind and Viola, however, other characters have their share of
problems with stereotypical representations of male and female behavior. Catherine
Belsey argues that the men of Shakespeare’s plays are not “equally courageous, but they
are all less vulnerable than women because they look like they can defend themselves”
(641). Like Rosalind, Orlando utilizes his share of disguises in As You Like It, but
Orlando’s are less successful; thus the women’s struggles with their parts are
understandable, since Orlando struggles with an even lesser endeavor in his attempt at a
mask of aggressiveness. In her introduction to the Arden edition of the play, Juliet
Dusinberre argues that Shakespeare has “rewritten the script of ‘masculinity’ as the
Elizabethans knew it.” She adds:
Just as Rosalind explodes myths of feminine sexuality so
the figure of Orlando revises the binaries of violent
masculinity and gentle femininity. Orlando’s characteristic
gentleness contrasts strongly with the male persona of
Ganymede as imagined and played by Rosalind. (32)
Orlando’s problems stem mainly from the nature of his disguise: as a wrestler, belying
his status as a gentleman, and in his faux aggressive mask of masculinity performed when
he comes upon the Duke and his men in the Forest of Arden. Orlando, arriving with
sword drawn to demand food for Adam from Duke Senior and his men, belies his
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“characteristic gentleness” through a “countenance of stern commandment,” yet when he
realizes that this “manly” guise is unnecessary, he acquiesces:
DUKE SENIOR
What would you have? Your gentleness shall force
More than your force move us to gentleness.
ORLANDO
I almost die for food—and let me have it.
DUKE SENIOR
Sit down and feed and welcome to our table.
ORLANDO
Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you.
I thought that all things had been savage here
And therefore put I on the countenance
Of stern commandment. But whate’er you are,
That in this desert inaccessible,
Under the shade of melancholy boughs,
Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time—
If ever you have looked on better days,
If ever been where bells have knolled to church,
If ever sat at any good man’s feast,
If ever from your eyelids wiped a tear,
And know what ‘tis to pity and be pitied—
Let gentleness my strong enforcement be,
In the which hope, I blush and hide my sword. (AYLI
2.7.103-20)
Dusinberre notes that this reference to “blushing” is a dramatist’s trick to make the “word
suit the action,” since “in the theatre, [a blush] must exist in language rather than in
physical show—to signal the ‘feminine’ identity assumed by the boy actor” (AYLI
Introduction, n.28-9 162). However, in this case, the blush is not attributed to a female
character of the play but to Orlando, who just a few scenes earlier threatened his brother
with pulling out his tongue for disparaging their father and wrestled Charles, who had no
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intent to let Orlando live. Yet two scenes after this interaction with Duke Senior and his
men, Orlando hangs his verses on the trees, which serves as a direct contrast to his
previous role of aggressor. As such, he represents something more than his true self in his
adoption of Petrarchan convention and seems to embody the idea that gender itself is a
disguise. However, this passage is as much about class difference and gentlemanly status
as it is about gender. Duke Senior, as the model of a gentleman, especially in contrast to
the “savage” Duke Frederick, resorts to speech instead of action, telling Orlando that his
“gentleness shall force more than [his] force move to gentleness,” and it is through
speech and not violence that he is able to convince Orlando to acquiesce.
Additionally, Sir Andrew serves as an example of a character who, while male,
fails to attain this ideal of masculinity, and his lack of courage is most obvious as he is set
to duel Viola-as-Cesario. Toby has to talk up the effeminate Sir Andrew to Cesario
before their duel and vice versa, and this talk is an effort by Toby to make both Cesario
and Sir Andrew “real men.” In fact, Viola is so afraid of her impending encounter with
Sir Andrew that she reveals in an aside “Pray God defend me! A little thing would make
me tell them how much I lack of a man” (TN 3.4.307-09). Likewise, upon hearing from
Sir Toby that Cesario awaits, Sir Andrew tells Toby that he’ll “not meddle with him” and
that he is willing to “let the matter slip” even though Sir Andrew initiated the challenge
(TN 3.4.285; 291).Yet, even as Viola exclaims that this duel is “against [her] will,” both
she and Sir Andrew draw swords, which seems to speak more to Toby’s powers of
persuasion rather than Viola and Sir Andrew’s willingness to fight. It is interesting to
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note that if Viola admitted her true sex that Sir Toby and Sir Andrew would have been
not only reluctant but also unwilling to fight Cesario.
Sebastian and Antonio, on the other hand, are quick to draw and quick-tempered,
resorting to physicality instead of speech. As soon as Antonio wanders into the
swordfight between Sir Andrew and Cesario, whom he believes to be Sebastian, Antonio
immediately draws his sword, which is an ironic contrast to the preceding lines, where Sir
Andrew and Cesario were forced to draw theirs merely because of a prodding audience:
ANTONIO
[Drawing] Put up your sword! If this young
gentleman
Have done offence, I take the fault on me:
If you offend him, I for him defy you.
SIR TOBY
You, sir? Why, what are you?
ANTONIO
One, sir that for his love dares yet do more
Than you have heard him brag to you he will. (TN
3.4.318-24)
Orgel argues that Antonio is the “real man of the play, the fighter-pirate—and lover of
boys—who ends…coupled with no one.” He adds, “Falling in love with ‘real’ men in
Shakespeare is a dangerous matter: the model for it is provided in Othello” (82). If
Antonio is indeed the only “real man of the play,” then his masculinity, temper, and
physicality is what separate him from the more effeminate Sir Andrew and the disguised
Viola.
It seems that in “playing male,” there is always an undercurrent of a return to
female, of male being but a necessary disguise or costume until the proper ends can be
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achieved in Act V, (that being marriage, of course). In “Forget to be a Woman,” William
Carroll posits “only when a woman is trying to get a man must she become a
man…Rosalind and Viola achieve marriage only after the necessary detour through
transformation…” (127). However, Aliena and Olivia do not become men to get their
man, which complicates Carroll’s argument. I would argue that Aliena and Olivia “get”
their men specifically through the actions of Viola and Rosalind as Cesario and
“Ganymede,” and without these gender-based costumes, they too would be alone at the
end of their respective plays. In “The Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,”
which explores the sexual ambiguity of gender roles, Phyllis Rackin notes:
By playing the boy’s part of Ganymede, Rosalind enables
Silvius to marry Phoebe. By playing the girl’s part of
Rosalind, she enables Orlando to marry herself. These
heroines’ transvestite disguises are neither fully
repudiated…nor fully authenticated. Instead, they become
provisionally real, as, for instance, in Twelfth Night, Viola’s
disguise as the boy Cesario is both repudiated when she
marries Orsino and authenticated when her twin brother,
Sebastian, marries Olivia. (31)
Penny Gay argues that this return to female at the end of As You Like It is a
“return to the real world and its social constraints,” yet she adds that Rosalind’s behavior
prior to this reconciliation represents “the most thorough deconstruction of patriarchy and
its gender roles in the Shakespearean canon; yet it is a carnival license allowed only in
the magic space of the greenwood” (49). The same is true in Twelfth Night as well, in its
return to the “real world” and its constraints. In “Cross-Dressing, the Theater, and Gender
Struggle in Early Modern England,” Jean Howard discusses how, in a power rolereversal, Olivia initially wields power in the play while Orsino’s power is displaced:
19
[Orsino’s] narcissism and potential effeminacy are
displaced, respectively, onto Malvolio and Andrew
Aguecheek, who suffer fairly severe humiliations for their
follies. In contrast, Orsino, the highest-ranking male figure
in the play, simply emerges from his claustrophobic house
in Act V and assumes his ‘rightful’ position as governor of
Illyria and future husband of Viola. (34)
Restoring this natural patriarchy goes hand in hand with Viola’s return to female at the
end of the play, and although Orsino has been viewed as whiny, obstinate, and slightly
effeminate, by the end of the play, he is once again the powerful Duke of Illyria who
orders Fabian to “persue” Malvolio, continues to call Viola “Cesario” while she is a
“man,” and speaks the last lines of the play, save Feste's song. Olivia too is put in her
rightful place through this shift, as Orsino commands her servants in her own house. Thus
order is restored in Orsino’s role through the reclaiming of his power while Olivia’s
seems to wan.
While Rosalind and Viola are successful in their attempts to “counterfeit” the
male gender through the guises of Ganymede and Cesario, they do make a return to
“female” by the end of the play, just in time for marriage or in Viola’s case, the promise
of marriage. However, before this happy resolution, Viola encounters problems with her
disguise, unlike Rosalind. Viola admits to feeling as if there is no exit possible from her
disguise and leaves events to “time” instead of, as Rosalind does, to her wit and
intelligence. By contrast, Rosalind, despite her return to typical patriarchal conventions at
the end of the play, turns that convention once again on its head in her cheeky Epilogue.
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Chapter 2
ROLE PLAYING WITHIN THE ROLE: THE “BUSY ACTORS” OF AS YOU
LIKE IT AND TWELFTH NIGHT
In Drama, Metadrama, and Perception, Richard Hornby explains that “among
other things, role playing within the role is an excellent means for delineating character,
by showing not only who the character is, but what he wants to be” (67). He elaborates,
“when a playwright depicts a character who is himself playing a role, there is often the
suggestion that, ironically, the role is closer to the character’s true self than his everyday,
‘real’ personality…Shakespeare’s Portia and Rosalind and Viola dress up as men, and in
doing so reveal the ‘masculine’ side of their natures, their boldness, levelheadedness, and
persuasiveness” (67). It seems that when Rosalind and Viola dress as boys they are better
able to reflect their true personalities, which Hornby defines as “masculine.” The idea
that the women’s true characters are revealed through their disguises either demonstrates
how constrained they were by their previously “feminine” roles or suggests that these
“masculine” qualities are situational, since Rosalind has been banished and Viola is
alone. However, Rosalind exhibits more continuity than Viola in her shift from woman to
boy back to woman, and the effect of the double role of Rosalind as Ganymede and then
Ganymede as Rosalind demonstrates the natural ease with which she reveals these traits.
As a result, Rosalind’s disguise achieves a success that Viola’s does not, especially since
Rosalind’s disguise reveals more of her “true” character than Viola’s, despite the layering
of disguises Rosalind assumes compared to Viola’s single alternative identity. Rosalind
reveals her personality and love for Orlando even through the guise of Ganymede, (and
Ganymede-as-Rosalind), while Viola-as-Cesario must ever hide behind the role created,
21
unable to exhibit true emotion or feelings for Orsino. Because of this difference,
Rosalind’s end is happier than Viola’s, as Viola has to find herself again at the end of
Twelfth Night, while Rosalind’s characteristics never changed even while disguised.
Whatever the reasons or the situations governing the use of disguise, our two
heroines’ more “masculine” qualities, as defined by Hornby, are evident long before their
foray into a gender-based disguise and most evident in the beginnings of both plays, with
Rosalind’s speech to her uncle after his threat of banishment and Viola’s decision to dress
as a eunuch when she lands on the shores of Illyria. In As You Like It, this early
understanding of Rosalind’s “true” nature occurs specifically when Rosalind responds to
her uncle’s threats and suspicion with intelligence, poise and effective counter-argument:
ROSALIND
Let me the knowledge of my fault bear with me:
If with myself I hold intelligence
Or have acquaintance with mine own desires,
If that I do not dream or be not frantic, -As I do trust I am not -- then, dear uncle,
Never so much as in a thought unborn
Did I offend your highness.
DUKE FREDERICK
Thus do all traitors.
If their purgation did consist in words,
They are as innocent as grace itself.
Let it suffice thee that I trust thee not.
ROSALIND
Yet your mistrust cannot make me a traitor.
Tell me whereon the likelihoods depends?
DUKE FREDERICK
Thou art thy father's daughter; there's enough.
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ROSALIND
So was I when your highness took his dukedom;
So was I when your highness banish'd him:
Treason is not inherited, my lord;
Or, if we did derive it from our friends,
What's that to me? My father was no traitor:
Then, good my liege, mistake me not so much
To think my poverty is treacherous. (AYLI 1.3.42-62)
Rosalind’s pivotal response here reveals not only effective arguing technique, but also a
self-awareness that seems lacking in many of Shakespeare’s other characters, including
Viola. When Rosalind responds to Duke Frederick’s charge of espionage in this
exchange, Juliet Dusinberre, editor of the Arden Edition, notes that by Rosalind’s
mention of “intelligence,” she effectively “affirms her truth by claiming self-knowledge,
pointedly rejecting the associations of the word intelligence with spying” (181). In
addition, Hornby’s charge that by dressing as a man, Rosalind reveals the more
masculine side of her nature proves moot here, since his definition of “masculine”
includes the traits of boldness and levelheadedness, which Rosalind displays quite
effectively in this Act I exchange before her use of disguise. While this example seems to
counter Hornby’s argument, I would argue that it does effectively foreshadow Rosalind’s
later ability to “counterfeit” as a man, as her disguise seems one merely of clothing and
appearance. As such, her “masculine” characteristics as Hornby defines them were
already a part of her nature before the role of Ganymede, and these traits are evident
throughout the play. Later, when Rosalind and Celia don their disguises, Rosalind
announces that in her heart, “Lie there what hidden women’s fear there will, / We’ll have
a swashing and a martial outside…” (AYLI 1.3.116-7). Dusinberre notes that Rosalind’s
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commentary on the “duality of outer/inner—man/woman or woman man” mirrors a 1588
speech given by Queen Elizabeth I to her troops in Tilbury, when she tells them that she
has “the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but [I] have the heart and stomach of a
king and of a king of England too” (Introduction 11). Rosalind, like Elizabeth, is indeed
her “father’s daughter,” one who puts to rest the issue of gender and effectively displays
her power despite the perceived limitations of her gender.
Viola, unlike Rosalind, demonstrates some of these same traits in the beginning of
Twelfth Night, but she soon succumbs to the pressure of role-playing, something that
Rosalind seems to rise above despite the problems presented by her disguise (which
actually also involves role playing as well). When we first meet Viola, she has only just
survived a shipwreck and is mourning the supposed loss of her brother Sebastian.
However, just minutes after her initial mourning, Viola establishes a context for her
surroundings and immediately devises a plan for her own survival in Illyria, which,
ironically, hinges on her trust of the Captain’s “outward character.” Regardless of her
motivation, this decision to hide her gender demonstrates her own level-headedness and
boldness akin to Rosalind’s:
VIOLA
There is a fair behavior in thee, Captain;
And though that nature with a beauteous wall
Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee
I will believe thou hast a mind that suits
With this thy fair and outward character.
I prithee (and I’ll pay thee bounteously)
Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent. I’ll serve this duke;
Thou shalt present me as an eunuch to him.
It may be worth thy pains; for I can sing,
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And speak to him in many sorts of music,
That will allow me very worth his service.
What else may hap, to time I will commit;
Only shape thou thy silence to my wit. (TN 1.2.47-61)
Even after the catastrophe of a near-death experience, Viola keeps her wits about her and
realizes that she cannot call too much attention to herself, thus her use of disguise. The
main difference between Rosalind and Viola, however, is that while Rosalind maintains
this boldness and level-headedness throughout the play, Viola only allows it to resurface
one more time after this conversation with the Captain. When Viola, dressed as Cesario,
speaks to Olivia before the “willow cabin” speech, she returns to this forcefulness that
she revealed when speaking with the Captain, when she tells him to “conceal me what I
am” (TN 1.2.53). Viola tells Olivia that she is vain, and her bold statements to Olivia are
out of character for Cesario, yet believable from Viola only if we remember her selfawareness and ability to speak her mind as exhibited in the beginning of the play. Here,
Viola as Cesario breaks character and chastises Olivia for her superficiality and pride:
VIOLA
I see you what you are, you are too proud:
But if you were the devil, you are fair,
My lord and master loves you: O, such love
Could be but recompens’d, though you were crown’d
The nonpareil of beauty!...
If I did love you in my master’s flame,
With such a suff’ring, such a deadly life,
In your denial I would find no sense,
I would not understand it. (TN 1.5.254-58; 268-71)
Once she has left the “text of her message,” Viola also leaves her role as Cesario,
choosing instead to focus on how if she were in Olivia’s situation, she would find “no
25
sense” in denying Orsino his love. In leaving the deliberate nature of a penned speech in
lieu of an emotional response, Viola uses her emotions as a form of rationality, trying to
find reason in Olivia’s denial, telling Olivia that Orsino “loves [you]” and that this love,
with “such a suff’ring” demands to be requited.
Although Viola abandons her role of Cesario briefly in this encounter with Olivia,
she maintains her role-play throughout the rest of the play, choosing to defer and play the
role of Cesario rather than reveal the woman beneath. However, there is another role
laying within the role of Cesario in Twelfth Night as well, since Viola bases her image of
Cesario on her brother Sebastian. In effect, she is playing the role of Sebastian not just
through her attire, but through her mannerisms as well, which she admits after Antonio
mistakes her for Sebastian at the end of Act III: “I my brother know / Yet living in my
glass; even such and so / In favour was my brother, and he went / Still in this fashion,
colour, ornament, / For him I imitate” (TN 3.4.389-93). Trevor Nunn’s film version of
the play sets this role-playing up nicely by including an additional scene in the movie
version that is absent from Shakespeare’s play. In this scene that occurs just before the
shipwreck itself, Viola and Sebastian participate in a gender-bending parlor show, in
which Viola plays on the idea of male and female physical characteristics by wearing a
fake moustache, which Sebastian eventually pulls off to the delight and surprise of the
audience. This additional scene may speak to how Viola gathered the background
material for her characterization of a male, specifically, Sebastian, in the form of Cesario.
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Perhaps Rosalind is able to be herself in this role more easily than Viola because
Viola is constrained by what her role represents: in essence, a dead brother. Hornby
explains:
…role playing within the role sets up a special acting
situation that goes beyond the usual exploration of specific
roles; it exposes the very nature of role itself. The theatrical
efficacy of role playing within the role is the result of its
reminding us that all human roles are relative, that
identities are learned rather than innate. (72)
The only time we truly see Rosalind “acting” female is when she faints, and even then
she tries to stay in character by convincing Oliver that she was “counterfeiting” in her
response:
OLIVER
Be of good cheer, youth. You a man?
You lack a man’s heart.
ROSALIND
I do so, I confess it.
Ah, sirrah, a body would think this was well
counterfeited. I pray you tell your brother how well I
counterfeited. Heigh-ho—
OLIVER
This was not counterfeit: there is too great
testimony in your complexion that it was a passion of
earnest.
ROSALIND Counterfeit, I assure you.
OLIVER Well then, take a good heart, and counterfeit to
be a man.
ROSALIND So I do. But i’faith, I should have been a
woman by right. (AYLI 4.3.163-75)
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When Rosalind faints at the sight of Orlando’s blood-stained napkin, according to Nancy
Hayles in “Sexual Disguise in ‘As You Like It’ and ‘Twelfth Night,’” she demonstrates a
“relinquishing of her disguise” which in turn foreshadows her discarding of the role of
Ganymede at the end of the play in favor of reassuming the identity of Rosalind (66).
Rosalind’s mythological role model is less constricting than Viola’s mimicking of
her brother, yet she carefully chooses her name, telling Aliena that she’ll “have no worse
a name than Jove’s own page, / And therefore look you call me Ganymede” (AYLI
1.3.121-2). This name choice is a self-conscious appropriation, revealing Rosalind’s
ability to pre-plot and anticipate her future role as “Jove’s page.” In Greek mythology,
Ganymede was a beautiful young man abducted by Zeus, (Jove in Latin) who took him to
Mount Olympus. It is believed that Ganymede became Zeus’ lover and gained
immortality as the constellation Aquarius. Dusinberre notes that Rosalind’s name choice
is “richly provocative of the fears of anti-theatricalists because of its homoerotic
associations…by [reminding] his audience of Jove’s passion for the boy Ganymede, but
[it] also hints at ‘the symbolic extension of the role to include omnipotence’” (AYLI,
n.121-2, 187). Similar fears reign in Twelfth Night as well, especially in the improbable
coupling of male and female identical twins in Sebastian and Viola. Janet Adelman
argues that Twelfth Night “enables not only the fantasy that one need not choose between
a homosexual and a heterosexual bond but that one need not become either male or
female, that one can be both Viola and Sebastian, both maid and man” (91). These
homoerotic undertones, produced through names and role-play also materialize in the
conversations between Cesario and Orsino, a point driven home in Nunn’s production of
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Twelfth Night, in which the two characters stare at each other with longing, despite
Cesario’s male disguise. At the end of the play, when Sebastian tells Olivia that she
would have been “contracted to a maid” it seems a laughable offense, whereas when
Orsino is “mistook,” further sexual implications exist (TN 5.1.259).
For Viola there seems a constant imbalance between her “male” character and her
socially constructed femininity. The sword fight between Cesario and Sir Andrew is a
prime example of this paradox between Cesario’s masculine “outsides” and the Viola
who resides within. Although Sir Andrew himself certainly embodies a more effeminate
characterization than even Cesario despite his gender, when the two are juxtaposed in the
swordfight scene in Act III scene 4, Viola’s femininity is revealed starkly through Sir
Toby’s description of the two awaiting their swordfight:
SIR TOBY
[To Fabian] I have his horse to take up the quarrel.
I have persuaded him the youth’s a devil.
FABIAN
He is as horribly conceited of him, and pants
and looks pale, as if a bear were at his heels.
SIR TOBY
[To Viola] There’s no remedy, sir, he will
fight with you for’s oath sake. Marry, he hath
better bethought him of his quarrel, and he finds
that now scarce to be worth talking of. Therefore
draw for the supportance of his vow; he protests
he will not hurt you.
VIOLA
[Aside] Pray God defend me! A little thing
would make me tell them how much I lack of a
man. (TN 3.4.297-309)
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Sprengnether argues that “If femininity itself is defined as the condition of lack, of
castration, then there is no way around the masculine equation that to be feminine is to be
castrated, or as Antony puts it, to be robbed of one’s sword” (600). Viola focuses on this
“lack” throughout the play, going so far as to admit “I am not what I am” (TN3.1.143).
Rosalind, however, because of the fluidity with which she adopts her Ganymede disguise
as well as her Ganymede-as-Rosalind role, embraces her new roles. Belsey argues that
Rosalind, unlike Viola, “is so firmly in control of her disguise that the emphasis is on the
pleasures rather than the dangers implicit in the transgression of sexual difference” (644).
Rosalind seems more “man-like” in her role than Viola does in hers, and, although she is
not physically challenged as Viola is by Sir Andrew, she has already stated at the
beginning of the play that she will have a “swashing and a martial outside, / As many
other mannish cowards have / That do outface it with their semblances” (AYLI 1.3.1179). The argument is one of assumption, but Viola reveals through her asides that her
“outward show” has disintegrated, whereas Rosalind, if placed in the same predicament,
would most likely continue the charade, despite the “hidden woman’s fear” in her heart
(AYLI 1.3.115).
Yet there is an additional and crucial difference between the two women and their
roles: while Ganymede is allowed to almost pursue Orlando as “his” Rosalind, Cesario
must ever hide behind the role created, unable to exhibit true emotion or feelings for
Orsino, and in front of Olivia, Viola becomes “Orsino” in his stead. Viola remains stifled
here, specifically because of the doubled male role-play, with Viola-as-Cesario-asOrsino. For Rosalind, she is able to be herself despite the role, while Viola seems so
30
defined by her “outsides” that she almost forgets herself in the process of disguise. In Act
III, Rosalind directs Orlando to “imagine [her] his love, his mistress” (AYLI 3.2.391) and
to call her Rosalind and “come every day to my cote and woo me” (AYLI 3.2.409), thus
invoking the woman behind the disguise. Viola, when given the opportunity to be just as
open with Orsino, chooses to skirt the truth, telling Orsino that if she were a woman, she
could love him. In other words, Rosalind’s disguise seems a natural extension of herself
in its recursive pattern of Rosalind-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalind, while Viola is constantly
removing herself as woman by “playing” a particular male, whether Sebastian or Orsino.
One reason for the difference between the two women’s loss of identity may stem
from the fact that Rosalind, even when dressed as Ganymede, is never alone, both in
terms of physicality as well as in terms of identity: Celia and Touchstone know
Ganymede to be Rosalind in disguise. However, Viola, alone in her knowledge of her
true identity (save for a sea captain who never reappears), must bear her Cesario disguise
alone. Carroll states that Rosalind “disguises herself initially for safety, but she soon
realizes the potential of play-acting” (134). Thus Rosalind takes her role one step further
by creating another character for Orlando’s benefit, and as a result of this awareness in
the power of her disguise(s), Rosalind benefits in a way that Viola never can. Viola is
stymied and constricted by her role, while Rosalind becomes further emboldened and
liberated through hers. For example, after Malvolio chases Cesario with a ring from
Olivia, Viola realizes the effect her disguise has had on Olivia and in her subsequent
speech she reveals just how perplexed she is by her disguise and bemoans the problems it
has already caused for Olivia, Orsino, and herself:
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VIOLA
I left no ring with her: what means this lady?
Fortune forbid my outside have not charm’d her!
She made good view of me, indeed so much,
That methought her eyes had lost her tongue,
For she did speak in starts distractedly.
She loves me, sure: the cunning of her passion
Invites me in this churlish messenger.
None of my lord’s ring? Why, he sent her none.
I am the man: if it be so, as ‘tis,
Poor lady, she were better love a dream.
Disguise, I see thou art a wickedness,
Wherein the pregnant enemy does much.
How easy is it for the proper false
In women’s waxen hearts to set their forms!
Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we,
For such as we are made of, such we be.
How will this fadge? My master loves her dearly,
And I, poor monster, fond as much on him,
And she, mistaken, seems to dote on me:
What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master’s love:
As I am woman (now alas the day!)
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?
O time, thou must untangle this, not I,
It is too hard a knot for me t’untie. (TN 2.2.16-40)
In contrasting her dual roles as “man” and woman, Viola reveals her internal struggle,
calling herself a “poor monster” who is caught between genders and bound by her roles.
Her sympathies lie with both parties, as she states that as a “man,” she longs for Orsino,
and as a woman, she sympathizes with Olivia, as she “were better love a dream.” Unlike
Rosalind, who would seek a solution to these problems, Viola leaves it to “time,” stating
that this love triangle is “too hard a knot for me t’untie.” Carol Hansen describes Viola as
a “creature caught in two worlds; for her the disguise is not so much a liberating force as
it was for Rosalind, but an additional dilemma” (177). This dilemma is further demonized
32
by Viola when she declares her disguise “a wickedness,” which suggests a relinquishing
of control to an unknown, supernatural force. Conceding her power causes Viola to
relinquish control over her disguise; thus, she loses herself within it.
Rosalind never deviates from her disguise and even takes her disguise one step
further by creating the role of “Rosalind” within the role of Ganymede. In undertaking
this role she admonishes Orlando for his love-sick antics by telling Orlando she has cured
others of this “madness” of love:
ROSALIND
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 anything, as boys
and women are for the most part cattle of this colour;
would now like him, now loath him; then entertain
him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at
him; that I drave my suitor from his mad humour of
love to a living humour of madness, which was to
forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a
nook merely monastic, And thus I cured him, and this
way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a
sound sheep’s heart, that there shall not be one spot of
love in’t. (AYLI 3.2.390-406)
Rosalind utilizes every stereotype of woman here, telling Orlando that in acting her part,
she played shallow, proud, mercurial, and emotional, but she also calls attention to her
initial “role” as a “moonish youth.” Orlando seems to ignore that Ganymede tells him
that in curing this man of his love, he “forswore the world” and now lives in a monastery.
Regardless, this speech plays to Orlando’s belief of an idealized “Rosalind” despite her
33
use of these negative stereotypes, and Rosalind artfully controls this scene despite her
various characters.
Rosalind and Viola are not just participating in gender-based disguise but rather
taking on the role of men by creating these alter-egos in Cesario and Ganymede. In
doing so, Viola and Rosalind both reflect their perceptions of manhood and display
aspects of their own natures that have previously been hidden and constricted by their
socially-constructed femininity. Thus, the women who go through the most physical
changes elicit corresponding changes in the men. However, this idea is complicated by
Celia, who, after hearing her father banish Rosalind, tells him “Pronounce that sentence
then on me, my liege; / I cannot live without her company” (AYLI 1.3.82-83). It is
Celia’s idea to go to the forest of Arden to find Rosalind’s father, not Rosalind’s idea.
She is also first to come up with the idea of disguising herself as they travel. Celia is a
woman making decisions, and she does not need a gender-based disguise to take on these
empowering characteristics, which Hornby describes as “masculine.” Yet Celia has little
to do with the action of the play, and although she falls in love with Oliver, who one
could argue is the most radically transformed man of the play, her initial boldness is
overshadowed by the boldness and inquisitive temperament of Rosalind.
Another interesting observation about these roles undertaken by Viola and
Rosalind is the nature of their romantic relationships before the disguise, those between
Viola and Orsino and Rosalind and Orlando. Viola, believing her brother dead and
herself alone in Illyria dresses as Cesario almost immediately so she can gain entry to
Orsino’s court. Orsino has no knowledge of the Viola who preceded Cesario; instead, he
34
comes to “tender dearly” Cesario, going so far as to threaten murder when it is obvious
Olivia has fallen for Cesario:
ORSINO
But hear me this:
Since you to non-regardance cast my faith,
And that I partly know the instrument
That screws me from my true place in your favour,
Live you the marble-breasted tyrant still.
But this your minion, whom I know you love,
And whom, by heaven, I swear I tender dearly,
Him will I tear out of that cruel eye
Where he sits crowned in his master’s spite. (TN 5.1.11826)
Here, Orsino reveals that his thoughts do not rest solely on revenge for Olivia’s refusal of
his love; instead, he publicly reveals his growing feelings for Cesario. Although the
Arden editors note that this speech “prepares the audience for the transference of his
(Orsino’s) love from Olivia to Viola as soon as the latter’s identity is disclosed,” it still
reveals that Orsino has fallen, against his will, for Cesario (Lothian and Craik 137). In
addition, Cesario’s betrayal hurts more than Olivia’s refusal to love, maybe because
Olivia is already playing the scripted role of “marble-breasted tyrant” and “cruel
mistress.” Her role is conventionally scripted while the role of Cesario becomes the
rewrite of the script. Thus, the betrayal is not only unexpected, but evermore painful.
Orsino first falls in love with the “boy” in the woman, while Orlando’s false love
of Rosalind must be disproved by the woman hidden as a “boy.” When compared with
Orlando and Ganymede’s relationship, a glaring difference is noted; Orlando had already
been introduced to Rosalind before her Ganymede disguise. Later in the play, in his
35
discussion with Duke Senior, Orlando even goes so far as to tell the Duke that Ganymede
reminds him of Rosalind:
DUKE SENIOR
I do remember in this shepherd boy
Some lively touches of my daughter’s favour.
ORLANDO
My lord, the first time that I ever saw him
Methought he was a brother to your daughter. (AYLI
5.4.26-29)
This exchange reveals a key difference between the two disguises. Ganymede is
superficial and those who knew Rosalind almost recognize her, while Viola’s identity is
completely subsumed by Cesario’s.
As a result, Orlando is in love with Rosalind and remains in love with Rosalind
despite Ganymede, and Orsino has fallen in love with Cesario, unaware of the woman
behind the disguise. One man loves the woman, while the other loves the role the woman
is playing. But Orlando loves his idealized notion of Rosalind- not Rosalind herself, and
until Ganymede teaches him to love the real Rosalind, he is also in love with an image of
love:
It is true that Rosalind is disguised as a man, and it is also
true that it is a convention in Shakespeare’s plays that no
one ever sees through a disguise even when, as here, it
consists merely of the clothing of the opposite sex. Yet
surely here the convention is being metadramatically
mocked. This is clear enough in act 4, scene 1, in which
Rosalind, dresses as Ganymede (her male disguise), plays
the role of ‘Rosalind’ to the love-sick Orlando. This is not
only multiple-layered role playing within the role; it carries
the added, exquisite irony that the innermost role coincides
with the outermost reality. Orlando is so idealistically blind
that he cannot see the very woman he loves, even though
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she is standing in front of him, ‘disguised’ only with male
garments, and playing herself. (Hornby 140-41)
Interestingly enough, Orlando never expresses any degree of love for Ganymede,
although Phoebe does, while Orsino frequently displays affection for Cesario. Orsino is a
man of extremes, and it seems that this nature of extremes allows him to fall in love with
Cesario in a way that Orlando cannot fall in love with Ganymede. Carroll writes that “the
women go through the changes but without essentially changing, whereas the men,
always and ever themselves, come out the end looking different, altered in shape and
point of view by what the women have done in their stead” (128). Accordingly, while the
women take on disguise they remain essentially unchanged whereas the men, who never
change their identity are transformed by their experience. This transformation of identity,
at least by Orsino and Orlando focuses on the women’s role play and calls into question
the aftereffects of gender role-play on the men and the homoerotic implications of their
love.
The most obvious example of this male metamorphosis is Orsino, who one could
argue gains a better sense of self and thus becomes less vain by the end of the play
because of his prideful folly. However, I would argue that Olivia too is “altered in shape
and point of view” by her experience in courting a woman; as Sebastian puts it in the
closing scene, she has been “mistook” and “would have been contracted to a maid” (TN
5.1.257; 259). She is able to laugh this misunderstanding off just as Orsino seems to do,
by asking who “wants share in this most happy wreck,” yet both exit their experience
changed: Orsino accepts Olivia as his “sister,” and they join hands at the end of the play,
37
all forgetting the pain and suffering endured by Orsino as he pined over Olivia and
forgetting the not-so-distant mourning of Olivia’s dead brother and father. These former
roles (pining lover, mourning daughter-sister) are discarded by the end of the play just as
Viola discards her Cesario disguise, suggesting that in Viola’s case, this was, indeed,
merely role-play. Orsino now knows that Cesario is truly Viola, and one of the first
directives he gives Viola is to see her in “thy woman’s weeds”:
ORSINO
Cesario, come
For so you shall be while you are a man;
But when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino’s mistress, and his fancy’s queen. (TN 5.1.384-87)
The pun achieved by Orsino’s use of “other habits” is not lost here: habits, of course,
could refer to costume, but additionally could speak to Orsino’s need for Viola to now
“play” the female. Only after he has asked her to change her attire from masculine to
feminine does he tell her that her master “quits you,” and “from this time, be your
master’s mistress” (TN 5.1.319; 323-4). Again, Trevor Nunn’s film version of the play
complicates this reading, as his additional final scene calls attention to the fact that within
Shakespeare’s play Viola never actually reassumes her female attire. Orgel argues that
this complication of costume at the end of Twelfth Night reveals quite a bit about Viola,
thus also commenting on her former role as Cesario:
…whatever Viola says about the erotic realities of her inner
life, she is not a woman unless she is dressed as one. Even
here, it is a particular costume that matters, her own dress
that was left with the sea captain: this is the dress that is
Viola. The costume is the real thing: borrowing a dress
from Olivia or buying a new one to get married in are not
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offered by the play as options. Clothes make the woman,
clothes make the man: the costume is of the essence. (104)
An interesting distinction between the two plays reveals itself here: while Viola ends the
play searching for her “woman’s weeds” so she can effectively fulfill her role as Orsino’s
mistress, Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede again for the epilogue instead of
remaining as Rosalind after the wedding ceremony, thus revealing a willingness to flit
between her gender-based roles rather easily. William Carroll explains that the metadramatic elements of the play, of actors who play roles within roles, calls attention back
to the freedom inherent in a gender-based disguise:
The most fundamental transformation, the most important
taking on of disguise, occurs among the actors, before the
audience sits down. But in As You Like It, Shakespeare is
confident enough to disenchant us…to undo the one
mimetic transformation we never saw begin but placed a
complicit belief in. The epilogue begins with Rosalind
speaking but ends with the actor’s words: another case of
‘Twas I. But ‘tis not I.’ The speaker’s initial difficulty is to
overcome the limitations of disguise…Rosalind’s last
transformation thus occurs before our eyes, though as usual
we don’t know it has happened until its cessation is
asserted. We had forgotten she was not a woman. (135-36)
This additional transformation at the end of As You Like It, when contrasted with the lack
of any such transformation at the end of Twelfth Night reveals the contrast between Viola
and Rosalind even more starkly: Rosalind, with typical adeptness, embraces her disguise
in a way that Viola could not. In the Epilogue, Rosalind states, “It is not the fashion to
see the lady the Epilogue, but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the
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Prologue” (AYLI 1-3), and it is up to us as audience to determine whether it is Rosalind,
Rosalind-as-Ganymede, or the actor playing Rosalind and Ganymede who is speaking.
Rosalind is a “busy actor” in her play, yet she is always aware of herself, of the
“Rosalind” beneath the role. And while Viola is ever mindful that she is woman beneath
the disguise, she forgets herself in her dual roles of Cesario and “Sebastian.” Despite this
divergence from stereotypical gender role-play, both Twelfth Night and As You Like It
make a return to convention, as they each end with marriage or the promise of marriage,
and although the men have been revealed as foolish in their approach to love, neither
Orlando nor Orsino seems to mind the women’s necessary role-playing. Novy claims that
women “gain their dramatic power because they seem to live so close to the conflict
between the desires to keep and to lose the self, between individuality and merging with
others…” (269). Nowhere is this conflict between keeping and losing the self more
apparent than in the juxtaposition of Rosalind-as-Ganymede (and Ganymede-asRosalind) and Viola-as-Cesario, and the roles played by each set Rosalind up for
continued happiness while Viola has to journey once again to reclaim herself.
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Chapter 3
“YOU ARE NOW OUT OF YOUR TEXT”: PERCEPTIONS OF GENDER AND
THE REWRITING OF SCRIPT
In “As Who Liked It?” Juliet Dusinberre suggests that Rosalind “rewrites” her
script as the play progresses and, “more than any other heroine,” Rosalind becomes the
author of her own drama who writes a part for herself, “which she likes better than those
written by men” (9). I would argue that Twelfth Night’s Viola “rewrites” her script as
well, literally by discarding Orsino’s poetical script in lieu of her own in her effort to woo
Olivia and figuratively by questioning his theories and beliefs about women. Rosalind
and Viola thus edit and embellish the existent scripts, as Dusinberre argues, to “rewrite
the record of female desire so that women want to read it” (16). However, these edits and
embellishments are often reliant on Viola and Rosalind’s perception and expectation of
what those gender-based roles entail, as well as complicated by the perceptions of what
the men already believe of women in general and vice versa. Add the women dressing as
boys, Ganymede’s creation of the faux Rosalind, and the questionable nature of “love at
first sight,” and the rewriting of roles becomes not merely the women writing roles that
they prefer for themselves, but rather rewriting out of situational and personal necessity
as well. It seems that Viola and Rosalind are able to communicate with the men and make
them understand women only because they are dressed as boys, and these non-scripted
conversations “between men” help Orlando and Orsino learn to love and win the hands of
Rosalind and Viola respectively. Arguably, Cesario and Ganymede are better “men” than
some of the men of these plays, because the men put the women they love on a pedestal;
the convention of love at first sight permits and reinforces such behavior, and such
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behavior makes the men insincere, as revealed in their language. Cesario and Ganymede
then must demonstrate the hollowness of the love discourse and the shallowness of the
men's affections to reveal this insincerity and enlighten the men as to the difference
between an idealized image and a realistic one. In both plays, it is performance and
disguise that demonstrate the fluidity of gender roles, which allows male and female
lovers to regard their beloveds as real, not idealized, people. Carol Hansen describes a
pattern that emerges when women don male disguise, arguing that the women of the
plays “appear for a time as equals in a male world where they are allowed to openly
initiate the action [where the] ‘woman’ character has been set free to do what the men
were always allowed to do: to act, instead of to react” (163; 164). Ultimately, through
their gender-based disguises, these conversations engineered by Cesario and Ganymede
serve to rewrite their initial roles as Viola and Rosalind over the course of the two plays,
despite their return to traditional gender roles at the conclusion of each.
In As You Like It, both Orlando and Silvius put women on pedestals, imagining
women as goddesses who represent some idealized perfection, just as Orsino exclaims in
the first scene of Twelfth Night:
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purg’d the air of pestilence;
That instant was I turn’d into a hart,
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E’er since pursue me (TN 1.1.19-23)
Both Twelfth Night and As You Like It invoke this Petrarchan ideal and conceit,
specifically through the characters of Orsino and Orlando. Petrarch, who wrote a series of
poems to his love Laura, uses the courtly love tradition as a starting point for his
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description of the courtly lover in love, but then adds a further physicality and spirituality
to this endeavor. As Jacob Blevins outlines in his text Catullan consciousness and the
early modern lyric in England: from Wyatt to Donne, in Petrarchan poetry, the “lover
suffers from a whole list of physical ailments” and Petrarch “conventionalizes the figure
of the sleepless lover, the conceits used to praise the beauty of his mistress, [and] the
acknowledgement that the lady herself (because she is his inspiration) deserves credit for
the poetry he writes” (13-14). Orsino and Orlando cling to this Petrarchan notion of the
ideal, as evidenced by their reliance on this model for their love and the fact that they
subscribe to this approach throughout the plays. Even after he has been rebuffed
numerous times by Olivia, Orsino still defaults to this idealized notion of women which
he sustains through the end of the play. In the final scenes, he resorts again to this
Petrarchan ideal, exclaiming, “Here comes the Countess: now heaven walks on earth”
(TN 5.1.95) as Olivia enters the stage after her marriage to Sebastian. Viola-as-Cesario
continues this adoring praise in her pleas on Orsino’s behalf to Olivia, replying when
Olivia asks how Orsino loves her: “With adorations, fertile tears, / With groans that
thunder love, with sighs of fire” (TN 1.5.259-60). Likewise, when Orlando first hangs his
verses in the forest in Act 3, scene 2, he declares:
O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character,
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witnessed everywhere.
Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste and unexpressive she! (AYLI 3.2.5-10)
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In Act III, Celia tells Rosalind that “the oath of a lover is no stronger than the word of a
tapster: they are both the confirmer of false reckonings” (AYLI 3.4.27-29). Later, Celia
reads Orlando’s verses that she found on a tree to Rosalind, and like his earlier
proclamations of Petrarchan idealism, this idealized Rosalind becomes infallible in
Orlando’s eyes:
CELIA [reads]
…Therefore heaven Nature charged
That one body should be filled
With all graces wide-enlarged
Nature presently distilled
Helen’s cheek but not her heart,
Cleopatra’s majesty,
Atalanta’s better part,
Sad Lucretia’s modesty.
Thus Rosalind of many parts
By heavenly synod was devised
Of many faces, eyes and hearts
To have the touches dearest prized.
Heaven would that she these gifts should have,
And I to live and die her slave. (AYLI 3.2.138-51)
Orlando’s vision of a chaste, virtuous goddess encroaches on the true nature of the
woman Orlando loves, as he relies on an amalgamation of legendary women to describe
Rosalind instead of a true and realistic representation. These idealizations, as
demonstrated by Orsino’s “poetical” text to Olivia and Orlando’s posted verses, affect
both men’s wooing habits adversely, and as a result, poetic language and letter writing in
these two plays reveal the disconnect between written word and passion, as well as the
readiness with which a text can be discarded as vacuous rhetoric. In addition to resorting
to a Petrarchan abstraction to woo Olivia, Orsino also seems to commodify her love by
comparing his love with a variety of words that indicate wealth:
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DUKE
Once more, Cesario,
Get thee to yond same sovereign cruelty.
Tell her my love, more noble than the world,
Prizes not quantity of dirty lands;
The parts that fortune hath bestow’d upon her,
Tell her I hold as giddily as fortune:
But ‘tis that miracle and queen of gems
That nature pranks her in, attracts my soul. (TN 2.4.80-7)
In Shakespeare’s comedies, the convention of “love at first sight” reveals a loss of
reason and a sudden relinquishing of the senses. Additionally, when Shakespeare’s
characters fall in love at first sight, they experience difficulty in understanding how the
objects of their affection are real people who are more than mere images of perfection.
Many characters share this experience of love at first sight, and they are not always men,
but the object of worship is almost always female, even when it is a female dressed as a
male. There stand three exceptions, however. Rosalind and Viola are also guilty of this
experience of “love at first sight,” as within three days of being in Orsino’s court Viola
whispers in an aside that she’ll do her best to woo Olivia for Orsino, “yet, a barful strife! /
Whoe’er I woo, myself would be his wife” (TN 1.4.41-2). Likewise, when Rosalind first
lays eyes upon Orlando, she calls him over to encourage him before his wrestling match.
After he wins, she offers him a chain from around her neck, prompting Celia to later ask:
“Is it possible on such a / Sudden you should fall into so strong a liking with old / Sir
Rowland’s youngest son?” (AYLI 1.3.26-7). Thus the men can also be objectified in
these plays just as the women are. The same is true with Aliena’s love for Oliver, as
Ganymede tells Orlando:
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For your brother and my sister no sooner
met but they looked; no sooner looked but they loved;
no sooner loved but they sighed; no sooner sighed but
they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew
the reason but they sought the remedy; and in these degrees
have they made a pair of stairs to marriage,
which they will climb incontinent or else be
incontinent before marriage. They are in the very
wrath of love and they will together. (AYLI 5.2.31-39)
The men, however, epitomize this worshipful approach to women and love seems
further impacted by the importance of “love at first sight” in these two plays. Arguably,
Orlando, Orsino, Silvius, Oliver, Olivia, and Phoebe all are in love with women (or
women dressed as boys) based on their appearances. In an aside after her first meeting
with “Cesario,” Olivia reveals that she “fear(s) to find/ Mine eye too great a flatterer for
my mind”; thus, her eyes have lead her to “love” Cesario (TN 1.5.312-13). Likewise in
As You Like It, after Rosalind-as-Ganymede chides Phoebe for not embracing Silvius’
love, Phoebe reveals that not only has she fallen in love with Ganymede’s words, but also
his appearance. As soon as the others take their leave, Phoebe tells Silvius “Who ever
loved, that loved not at first sight?” (AYLI 3.5.82), and, although her description of
Ganymede begins with a discussion of how he “talks well,” Phoebe soon launches into a
description of this “pretty youth,” focusing on “his” appearance:
PHOEBE
The best thing in him
Is his complexion; and faster than his tongue
Did make offence, his eye did heal it up.
He is not very tall, yet for his years he’s tall;
His leg is but so-so, and yet ‘tis well.
There was a pretty redness in his lip,
A little riper and more lusty red
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Than that mixed in his cheek. ‘Twas just the difference
Betwixt the constant red and mingled damask. (AYLI
3.5.116-24)
This description by Phoebe serves to remind us as audience of Viola and Rosalind’s
beauty despite their disguises, as both are referred to as “fair youths,” and their beauty
through the disguise leads to more superficial love entanglements with Olivia and
Phoebe. Orsino, too, comments on “Cesario’s” looks, as he sends her to swear his love to
Olivia a mere three days after Viola has entered his court:
DUKE
Dear lad, believe it;
For they shall yet belie thy happy years,
That say thou art a man; Diana’s lip
Is not more smooth and rubious: thy small pipe
Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound,
And all is semblative a woman’s part.
I know thy constellation is right apt
For this affair. (TN 1.5.29-36)
While Orsino seems to avoid the trappings of “love at first sight,” he very quickly takes
note of Cesario’s feminine looks, if only to use them initially to his own advantage.
This notion of “love at first sight” also aligns in these plays with the notion of
absence, especially as it pertains to the men, and it is remarkable how little contact
Orlando and Orsino have with the objects of their publicly-protested affection. Orsino has
been consistently denied entry to Olivia’s court and thus is left with only his
remembrance of her beauty, and Orlando has only seen and spoken with Rosalind once
before she enters the Forest of Arden. Even the women who fall in love with the crossdressed Viola and Rosalind find their beloveds most compelling when they are absent in
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their duty and affections. Olivia and Phoebe are just as culpable and foolish as the men,
as evidenced by Phoebe in her exclamation of “Who ever loved, that loved not at first
sight?” (AYLI 3.5.83), and by Olivia, who only warms to Cesario after he leaves the
“substance of his text.” Phoebe falls in love with Ganymede after Ganymede has told her
he “likes her not” (AYLI 3.5.74), yet both Phoebe and Olivia were curious about these
“fair youths” from first glance. Likewise, Oliver has only to meet Aliena once before he
tells his brother that he loves her, prompting Orlando to ask him ironically, if it is
“possible that on so little acquaintance you should like her? That but seeing, you should
love her?” (AYLI 5.2.1-2). These instances justify the argument that the men and women
of these plays are in love with appearance over substance and focuses on the realization
that the lovers’ idealization depends upon the beloved’s initial appearance and continued
absence.
Rewriting the script, then takes a self-serving turn, as the disguises allow Viola
and Rosalind access to these men with whom they have fallen in love and the ability to
counter Orsino and Orlando’s perceptions of women in general. Conversely, this re-write
also serves to allow a metamorphosis in Orsino too, as he moves from the conceited
wooer who mopes around after Olivia to the affectionate lover who urges Viola to be his
“fancy’s queen” (TN 5.1.387). Regardless of this resulting change, however, Orsino and
Orlando prove insincere in their wooing and in love in general because they hide behind a
text, behind the art of language and poetry. Through Twelfth Night and As You Like It,
Shakespeare reveals a basic courtship paradox: the more the men try to express
themselves the falser they become and the less successful their appeal, and the more they
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(and Viola) try to hide their emotions (even to the extent of taking on another identity),
the more true feelings are revealed.
In Twelfth Night, Orsino uses high words to express how love has consumed him,
but his proclamations of love fail miserably. His addresses fail because his love is
feigned, as he really doesn’t know Olivia; instead, he seems to enjoy his role of jilted
lover because it provides him a purpose outside of his superficial and shallow role as
Duke. Orsino, pining away for love in his castle, does so from afar via intermediaries;
thus, he is twice removed (by distance and messenger) from any sentiment he expresses
to Olivia in his messages. Viola’s true expressions of love, however, do result from
Orsino’s choice to send Cesario as his messenger to Olivia, telling her that she must not
leave until Olivia hears his message. After all, Orsino sent Cesario to Olivia purposefully,
knowing that if anyone had the means to speak with Olivia, Cesario did. Cesario’s looks,
described by Orsino as “semblative of a woman’s part,” convince him that the disguised
Viola’s “constellation is right apt / For this affair” (TN 1.4.33-35). It is almost as if
Orsino subconsciously understands that an utterance of love is best heard from a woman
in love, one face-to-face with the object of affection.
These subconscious understandings are displayed through Olivia and Phoebe as
well, as both respond not only to Cesario and Ganymede’s looks respectively, but also
respond to their words and manners of speaking. Orsino too responds to Cesario in much
the same way, which is ironic considering the pedestal on which he has placed Olivia. In
order to provide his message of love to Olivia, however, Orsino had to divulge his heart’s
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contents to Cesario, something which he is incapable of doing for Olivia without
resorting to the superficiality of poetry and idealization:
DUKE
Thou know’st no less but all: I have unclasp’d
To thee the book even of my secret soul.
Therefore, good youth, address thy gait unto her,
Be not denied access, stand at her doors,
And tell them, there thy fixed foot shall grow
Till thou have audience.
VIOLA
Say I do speak with her, my lord, what then?
DUKE
O then unfold the passion of my love,
Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith;
It shall become thee well to act my woes:
She will attend it better in thy youth,
Than in a nuncio’s of more grave aspect. (TN 1.4.13-18;
23-28)
Within these confines of poetic convention, Orsino ironically tells Cesario to “act” his
woes, which adds an additional layer of metatheatricality to Viola’s role, as she must now
“play” Orsino as she “plays” Cesario.
Interestingly enough, Orsino seems to have no trouble revealing the emotion of
love to Cesario while simultaneously resorting to convention when sending messages to
Olivia. In “Androgyny in Shakespeare’s Disguise,” Robert Kimbrough argues that the
effects of Viola and Rosalind’s disguises are similar, in that “men can be relaxedly, if
only superficially, confessional with others of the same sex—the sort of ‘just between us’
collusion that men easily fall into” (29). Thus the juxtaposition that occurs when Orsino
“unclasps all” to “Cesario,” yet resorts to a “text” that is not only emotionally bereft, but
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physically absent as well when trying to woo Olivia reveals this schism between honest
thought and poetic artificiality. This artificiality is most evident through Cesario’s
repeated attempts to relay Orsino’s “text” to Olivia:
VIOLA
Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable
beauty—I pray you tell me if this be the lady of the
house, for I never saw her. I would be loath to cast
away my speech: for besides that it is excellently
well penned, I have taken great pains to con it…
I will on with my speech in your praise, and then show
you the heart of my message. (TN 1.5.171-75; 190-92)
Viola refers to this “speech in [Olivia’s] praise” as “excellently well penned,” which
seems to turn Orsino’s exclamations of love into something one-dimensional, into words
on a page as opposed to honest emotion. As a result, the artificiality of Orsino’s message
to Olivia serves as a reflection of his self-centeredness instead of as a true message of
love, denying Olivia an identity beyond his image of her perfection.
Orsino is not alone in this seeming inability to be honest with women. Other men
in the play, from Orsino, to Sir Andrew and Sir Toby, seem comically inept at honest
verbal communication, and without Cesario’s interventions and deviations from the
standard text, love would have continued to be a “text” far removed from any true
expression of love. Orsino’s high words reveal his insincerity, especially when his
addresses are juxtaposed with the more heartfelt and emotional words Cesario “rewrites”
in her willow cabin speech. When Cesario first entered, Olivia was uninterested; she had
received Orsino’s empty messages before. It was only when Cesario left the text of her
message from Orsino that Olivia became intrigued. Viola uses this shift in reaction to her
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advantage, first by asking Olivia to see her face beneath the veil, and then by launching
into an explanation of what she would do if she were Orsino:
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons of condemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Hallow your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out Olivia! O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me. (TN 1.5.273-79)
As audience, we know that Viola is merely exposing her love for Orsino through her
conversation with Olivia, but Olivia cannot help but respond to the “fair youth” in front
of her who so vehemently berates her for withholding her love, which, unlike Orsino’s
text, is not poetical, but genuine in its emotion. This honesty is why Cesario’s rewrite of
the text makes such a profound impact on Olivia. Coming from Orsino, expressions of
love seem overblown and feigned. Coming from Cesario, “divinity.” Thus by juxtaposing
his “high” words with the more heartfelt and emotional words Cesario utilizes in her
willow cabin speech, Orsino’s insincerity is emphasized.
Why, then, can Orsino not speak equally sincerely in front of Olivia? Is it the
custom of the time that dictates precedent, or does Orsino simply hide behind the text
because Olivia is only a social match, not a romantic one? I would argue that the
shallowness of his feelings for Olivia contributes to Orsino’s inability to be authentic in
his wooing, while his subliminal feelings for Viola/Cesario reveal a true depth to his love,
a depth not exhibited through his messages and proclamations about Olivia. In Gender in
Play on the Shakespearean Stage, Michael Shapiro notes that the scenes between Cesario
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and Orsino “prepare the spectator for the violence of Orsino’s outburst when he hears that
Cesario has married Olivia” (161). Shapiro adds:
The strength of Orsino’s outrage indicates a wound
deeper than his alleged affection for Olivia. When she
enters, he observes her presence (instead of greeting her) in
a single line of Petrarchan cliché, ‘Here comes the
Countess, now heaven walks on earth’ (V.i.97)…while
Olivia remains the ‘marble-breasted tyrant’ she has always
been in his Petrarchist fantasy, Cesario, whom he tendered
dearly, has shocked him with an act of betrayal [and]
Orsino’s agonized sense of betrayal arises more from the
loss of Cesario than from the loss of Olivia, a reaction that
permits the audience to accept his love for Viola when her
true sex is revealed. (Gender 161-63)
Likewise in As You Like It, Orlando’s expressions of love, epitomized by his
hanging of verses, seem hollow, more an homage to what love should look like rather
than actually true in its emotion. Juliet Dusinberre argues that “Orlando’s Petrarchan
verses are derided (though no doubt relished as well) by Rosalind for being too long, like
a bad sermon, just as (in the guise of Ganymede) she scoffs at the claims of the great
romantic lovers of classical mythology to die for love” (Introduction 8). As she sets out to
“cure” Orlando of his love for Rosalind by becoming his faux Rosalind, Ganymede
mocks this worshipping kind of love exhibited by Orlando, telling him facetiously that if
he were a true lover, he would be “sighing every minute and groaning every hour” (AYLI
3.2.295). Thus Ganymede seeks to rewrite Orlando’s method of wooing by speaking to
him as a “saucy lackey and under that habit play the knave with him” (AYLI 3.2.287-88).
Her rewrite here, in which she inserts herself in Orlando’s life without revealing herself
as Rosalind offers her insight into Orlando she would not have otherwise. Ganymede as a
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character, then, as an addition to the script, is able to counter this preconceived notion of
women and of love:
When Rosalind-as-Ganymede insists that Orlando’s
Rosalind will have her own wit, her own will and her own
way, implicit in the portrayal is Rosalind’s insistence that
Orlando recognize the discrepancy between his idealized
version and the real Rosalind [and] it is because she is
disguised as Ganymede that she can be so free in portraying
a Rosalind who is a flesh and blood woman instead of a
Petrarchan abstraction. (Hayles 65)
Rosalind’s rewriting of the text, when compared with Viola’s, is much more direct. Jean
Howard describes Rosalind as “saucy, imperious, and fickle,” in arguing that Rosalind
plays out masculine constructions of femininity, in the process showing Orlando their
limitations” (37). Viola lacks this opportunity, as she can only describe her “sister’s”
faithfulness. Rosalind gets to live her example, and because of this difference, I would
argue that Orlando learns more about women than does Orsino.
By disguising their gender, the women are able to step in to remedy the men’s
ineffective wooing efforts, but these conversations “between men,” a result of the revised
script created by their disguise, allow the women to be seen as complex humans, with
many possible identities, not simply as empty vessels. Cesario argues with Orsino about
his representation of women, while Ganymede uses the stereotypical fickleness and
moodiness she mockingly attributes to women in Act III to encourage Orlando toward a
new understanding of women. Hornby argues that Rosalind is “realistic” while Orlando is
“blind,” and adds that Orlando sees “only an idealized image of [his] beloved” (142). He
further argues that “romantic love cannot be a permanent state…it must be transmuted
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into something more down to earth…husbands and wives must accept each other as real,
flawed human beings” (142). This “new understanding” of Rosalind occurs only because
of the layered role of Ganymede-as-Rosalind. In front of Orsino, Viola-as-Cesario
defends women, yet Orsino, caught up in his own unrequited love, is bullish in his belief
that men have a superior capacity for love over women. He insists:
There is no woman’s sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart
So big, to hold so much: they lack retention.
Alas, their love may be call’d appetite,
No motion of the liver, but the palate,
That suffers surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;
But mine is all as hungry as the sea,
And can digest as much. Make no compare
Between that love a woman can bear me
And that I owe Olivia. (TN 2.4.94-104)
Viola responds by telling Orsino that women are “as true of heart as we”:
We men may say more, swear more, but indeed
Our shows are more than will: for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love. (TN 2.4.107; 11719)
This outburst by Viola can be viewed in two distinct ways: first, as a connection to the
superficial love she sees Orsino display for Olivia, and second, as comparison with her
“real” love for Orsino with Olivia’s lack of love for him. Additionally, Viola also
comments on the discrepancy between word and action by calling attention to men like
Orsino who “say and swear more,” but “prove little in love.”
Rosalind’s situation is more complicated, because she has muddied the waters
with her wish for Orlando to see Ganymede as his Rosalind. Thus she doesn’t stand up
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for women as well as Viola does through her guise. However, differentiation frees
Rosalind to be herself within her disguise, while Viola almost loses herself within hers,
save for these instances where she uses her own emotions and experiences to “right”
Orsino’s understanding of women in general. Rosalind’s cause concentrates on
Orlando’s own wooing folly and the stereotypical view of women she assumes he holds;
thus Rosalind’s ends are deliberate while Viola’s seem more accidental. Rosalind-asGanymede-as Orlando’s Rosalind not only rewrites dialogue, but plots her way out of the
romantic knot she’s created, while Viola-as-Cesario inspires only an involuntary change
in Olivia and Orsino. In addition, Viola must depend on the happy reappearance of
Sebastian to ensure her future happiness. Unlike Viola, Rosalind orchestrates her own
happiness as well as others’, and she directs her plot so that all “Jack’s” have their “Jill’s
at the end of the play. Alison Findlay argues that while Rosalind and Viola enjoy the
independence granted through their disguises, “each is obligated to re-create herself in
fictional form in order to be both the subject and object of desire” (107). Ganymede
becomes the fictional Rosalind for Orlando while Viola, as Findlay notes, “creates
another persona who is a return to her female identity”:
VIOLA
My father had a daughter loved a man
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman
I should your lordship.
ORSINO
And what’s her history?
VIOLA
A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i’th’ bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought,
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And with a green and yellow melancholy
She sat like patience on a monument
Smiling at grief. (TN 2.4.108-16)
Here, Viola assumes a bold yet guarded approach to her relationship with Orsino,
keeping her identity a secret, yet revealing all. Unlike Rosalind, who becomes Orlando’s
Rosalind and dictates the course of events, Viola is passive, pining in thought; patient, yet
“smiling at grief,” unable to construct a second role to play, as Rosalind does within
Ganymede playing Rosalind. Thus Viola’s Cesario seems noticeably weaker than
Rosalind’s Ganymede, as Viola leaves events to “time,” while Rosalind, emboldened by
her disguise and the power inherent within it, dictates the course of action, which
inevitably, like most of Shakespeare’s comedies, leads to marriage.
Metadrama is defined as a “play which somehow draws attention to the acts of
playing, acting, and spectating,” and As You Like It and Twelfth Night comment on this
self-reflexive nature of theater as Rosalind and Viola perform gender in the guises of
Ganymede and Cesario. In “Shakespeare’s Female Characters as Actors and Audience,”
Marianne Novy argues, “At the center of Shakespeare’s comedies…the women’s acting
has been deed as well as pretense; their fictions have helped express some kind of truth ”
(256). Hornby would argue that this “truth” reveals itself in these plays through the roles
undertaken by Viola and Rosalind, which are “closer to the character’s true self than his
everyday, ‘real’ personality,” although he also argues that audiences accepted these
powerful women because their actions are an “agreed upon fiction” (67). Powerful
women without gender-based disguise are a threat, yet Shakespeare carefully constructs
the roles of Rosalind and Viola to reveal the strength inherent within, before “Ganymede”
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and “Cesario.” The women’s power, evidenced by Viola and Rosalind’s “rewrites” to the
existent script, showcases what Dusinberre believes as the need for the women to
“rewrite the record of female desire so that women want to read it” (16). In contrast to
Viola, however, who still depends on a male to “right” the action of the play, Rosalind
not only rewrites dialogue but also plots her way out of the romantic knot in which she is
entangled. The “deus ex machina” is unnecessary in As You Like It, despite the
appearance of the god Hyman, as Rosalind has already set up her “return” to Orlando and
Phoebe’s return to Silvius in the absence of Ganymede. Regardless of this difference,
however, both women exit the play changed, liberated by their efforts and happy because
of the outcome of their charade. While marriage was never a governing intent of either
woman’s disguise, it is a welcome byproduct, one that becomes attainable only after
those true feelings of love are revealed through the conversations “between men.” In A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Helena tells Demetrius: “We cannot fight for love, as men
may do; we should be woo’d and were not made to woo” (Lothian and Craik xciii). As
Cesario and Ganymede, Viola and Rosalind are able to woo effectively and re-write their
respective scripts to allow room for women who fight for love as well, thus allowing
women to dictate their lives as they like it and how they will.
58
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