"As You Like It" at the Globe

In the As You Like It program, Will Tosh asserts that the play, “performed at the Globe for the first time in 1599, offered an enticingly polymorphous prospect: a pastoral romance infused with the freewheeling sexuality of the greenwood, staged under the transvestite conventions of early modern English theatre” (7). Despite little in the way of sets or scenery, the Globe production successfully captures pastoral romance by way of dreamy-eyed lovers and lulling guitar playing that accompanies songs original to the play text, while keeping intact the gender-bending, experimental nature of the play. Furthermore, the production plays with the idea of the forest as both a sexually immoral space and a sanctuary from political and familial depravity. The idea of the forest as a refuge contests the belief of the space as “an unpredictable, poorly-governed, alluringly naughty playground,” (6) suggesting that the city is no better and perhaps human nature and sexuality are too impalpable to adhere to the rules of society.

In the play text, the marital ending seems like a deus ex machina. A series of wildly unbelievable events and behavior are quickly and conveniently solved through marriage and the reader is left wondering about Rosalind’s gender identity, and Orlando’s willing naiveté. While the Globe’s production retained some of this open-endedness, the marriages aren’t as normalizing as they appear in the play text; in fact, Rosalind’s/Ganymede’s and Orlando’s relationship is quite progressive. In the marriage scene, Rosalind walks onstage wearing an elaborate wedding gown. At this point in time, it is clear to the audience that Rosalind is Rosalind (as opposed to her alter ego, Ganymede) and the audience feels some relief to be heading in a conclusive direction where Rosalind and Orlando can be together, no questions asked. However, just before they marry, Rosalind tears the skirt of her gown away and stands onstage in a man’s outfit; now, it appears that she is Ganymede. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is the first and only point in the play where Rosalind and Orlando kiss. Orlando came close to kissing Rosalind only once before, while she was Ganymede pretending to be Rosalind.

What the audience is left to wonder about, then, is whether Orlando loves Rosalind or Ganymede, and what gender Rosalind identifies as. The latter is made even more unclear in the epilogue when Ganymede addresses the male audience, “If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleas’d me . . .” Therefore, the audience must question his feelings toward Orlando; since he is not a woman and presumably won’t kiss the men, is he not attracted to the man he just married? This confusion, though frustrating, preserves the notion of the indefinite nature of human sexuality and society; an idea that the Globe’s production stressed throughout the play in Celia’s and Rosalind’s intimacy, Orlando and Ganymede’s intimacy, as well as Rosalind’s and the Hymen’s exaggerated cross-dressing. As the weddings all take place in the Forest of Arden and the play never returns to the French court, the effect of place must be questioned as well. The audience is left to wonder to what extent the Forest itself has destined the events that have transpired, further entangling the pastoral romance with sexual freedom.