**This post is Part 4 of an ongoing series in which I’ll be reading various Shakespeare plays, along with the Harold Bloom commentary from his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and providing my thoughts/reactions.**

The Performance:

On cue, here is my weekly plug for Digital Theatre, which offered 3 different performances for this play. I watched the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2009 production, directed by Thea Sharrock.

Why bother burying the lead? Naomi Frederick as Rosalind was brilliant. She’s large and in charge, she’s small and adorable, she’s smart, she’s scary… you get the point. But most of all, she’s charming. She perfectly captures (dare I say, elevates?) the charm of Shakespeare’s most lauded heroine.

I shouldn’t be so effusive, having only seen this single production of the play, but I can confidently Frederick is a top-tier Rosalind. Her performance is an entirely pleasant barrage of charm, of alternating waves of masculine and feminine beauty–nothing could be more critical to the success of the play, as I’ll expound below.

Jack Laskey’s Orlando mimics our delight and, in many ways, embodies in single character the experience of the audience as we find ourselves more and more seduced by Rosalind’s wit and power.

The production was performed and filmed in Shakespeare’s Globe theater, a 1999 recreation of the original Globe, located only 750 feet from the original theater where the Bard himself performed. As someone with no background in theater history, I really enjoyed seeing how different the Globe setup was than most modern theaters. Some noticeable differences included:

• A circular open-air amphitheater
• A thrust stage
• Standing room for “groundlings” in the yard
• Wooden benches in the galleries
• Traditional construction materials (oak frame, lime plaster, water reed thatching)

Highly recommended, though I’m sure there are many great performances of this play on record, as it seems to be an extremely popular one to produce.

The Play:

Look, it’s not all about Rosalind, but it is mostly about her. The point, as far as I can tell, of As You Like It is to sit back, relax, and enjoy yourself (N.B. that this doesn’t seem to be the point of very many Shakespeare plays); and we’d be utterly unable to do so were we not in Rosalind’s benevolent hands.

There is a comfort, a magnetism, to this character that is hard to capture in words. One is better served by simply enjoying it. But if one must analyze this charm, as Bloom and I both insist, it is better to speculate as to its causes than to its effects, which can be quite variable and subjective.

I find my thinking evolving on this character daily, but my current take is that we love Rosalind for her playfulness. Never has a character seemed so sturdy, so self-sufficient, and yet so imaginative. She manages to make light of life while still taking it seriously, and her drive is unburned by jealousy or bitterness.

Among the things she plays at so deftly are gender roles–but it’s more than just the “roles” that Rosalind challenges. She seems to be equally made of both masculine and feminine energy.

In discussing with friends, I have called her presentation “Ship-of-Theseus-Femininity”. We begin the play with a Rosalind that is the picture of courtly femininity–a lovely and well-mannered spectator at a wrestling match, wooed by the gallantry of the victor. As the play moves on, we see more of Rosalind, as she (quite literally) hides feminine parts of her self and displays (again, literally) a more traditionally masculine energy–headstrong, assertive, aggressive. And yet, despite presenting an ever-shifting array of masculine features and attitudes, we never lose the sense of Rosalind as a woman–or, at least, as one possessing all the same feminine virtues with which she was endowed from the start.

More impressively, this all seems to happen so seamlessly, so surreptitiously, that we as viewers take no heed of it at first. We are simply swept along by her grace, her strength, her poise. The confusion only comes when we leave Arden forest–the place where the duality of opposites collapses–and re-enter the world of explanations, conventions, and expectations. When we try to put Rosalind back into the box from which we took her, we find she doesn’t fit.

We are left only with the pleasant problem of trying to figure how a work of art can provide such a strange and yet decidedly positive experience. That is the mystery and the joy of As You Like It.

The Bloom:

Bloom is at his best in this essay, especially concerning his love for Rosalind. However, it must be said that while he knows Rosalind’s virtues well, he knows little of their source. Bloom pays no attention at all to the gender dynamics of the play (in fact, he seems openly disdainful of those who do), and so he passes over entirely the most fruitful grounds for analysis of this work. His analysis of her, while proficient, is technical and a bit dry. He seems enthralled by Rosalind, but one almost suspects him of being unwilling to look behind that dark curtain and understand why.

That said, I’m not sure that a male professor at Yale in the 1970s, particularly of the ideological bent Bloom seems to have preferred, is the right scholar to be unpacking the role of gender in As You Like It with any revelatory capability anyway. But the absence of an attempt is a gaping hole in an otherwise wonderful analysis.

On the technical side, Bloom is absolutely correct that part of Rosalind’s power over the audience follows from her ability to always stay one step ahead:

Rosalind is unique in Shakespeare, perhaps indeed in Western dram, because it is so difficult to achieve a perspective upon her that she herself does not anticipate or share. A stage play is virtually impossible without some degree of dramatic irony, that is the audience’s privilege. We enjoy such an irony in regard to Touchstone, Jaques, and every other character in As You Like It, except for Rosalind. – Bloom, 204

While still a mere character, Rosalind also seems to be writing the play as we go. Her will is absolute but benevolent, and her resolve is firm but cheerful. It is by her grace that the play advances, and it is by her love that a happy ending is achieved.

Bloom is also astute in deciphering the youthful but never naïve–quality of Orlando and Rosalind’s love:

Many critics rightly note that Rosalind and even her Orlando (to a lesser extent) have remarkably few illusions about the nature of the high Romantic passion that they share. The do not merely play at love, or at courtship, but they are careful to entertain play as a crucial element in keeping love realistic. – Bloom, 207

Bloom misses a chance to support this point with the story’s most obvious example, which is the play between Orlando and Rosalind when she is disguised (however convincingly, we must speculate) as Ganymede, a delicate flirtation and interplay that plays hopscotch between the hetero-erotic and the homo-erotic.

Beyond his analysis of Rosalind, Bloom is excellent on Jaques and Touchstone (two of the best clowns in any Shakespeare play I’ve read so far), the setting (excellent analysis of Arden as a place and time), and the minor character Adam.

Overall, I really liked this essay. Its omissions were obvious, but the arguments it did advance were novel, compelling, and well-supported by the text. While incomplete, I felt that his commentary really enhanced my appreciation for the play, which is really my goal in reading the secondary literature.

Rating: 9/10