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The Gender of Rosalind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Jan Kott
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Abstract

In this issue, we present two contrasting views on the issue of gender in Shakespeare – specifically, the gender of the heroine-hero of As you Like It, Rosalind-Ganymede. Both articles relate the character to conventions of acting and of sexuality in Shakespeare's England and our own: but in this first essay Jan Kott connects the play also with another ‘historic moment’ when androgyny became a recurrent theme, the period following the Revolution and the Restoration in nineteenth-century France – notably as reflected in Gautier's novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, in which an amateur performance of As You Like It, and the sex of its leading player, assume a central significance. Jan Kott has been an advisory editor of Theatre Quarterly and of NTQ since the journals began publication, and a regular contributor to both – most recently, on the current preoccupations of Grotowski, in NTQ23. Since the seminal publication of Shakespeare Our Contemporary in 1965, he has been a leading exponent of a critical approach which links the study of drama, the practice of performance, and the forms of culture in which both have their roots.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 7 , Issue 26 , May 1991 , pp. 113 - 125
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

Notes and References

1. ‘Woman's part: innuendo of pudendum, part also innuendo of penis and testicles’, Henke, James T., Courtesans and Cuckolds: a Glossary of Renaissance Dramatic Bawdy, 1979Google Scholar. It seems that in the subtext of eros the Duke describing Viola/Cesario oscillates between the anatomy of a girl and a boy.

2. ‘Perfect (bot.): having all four whorls of the flower.’ ‘Youth: novelty, sexually curious, amorous’, O.E.D.; ‘perfect in lying down, apt in love making’, Partridge, Eric, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 1937Google Scholar; ‘Come, Kate, thou art perfect in lying down’ (Henry IV, Part I, III, i, 226–8); often in Shakespeare, ‘a youth with its sexual curiosity and amorous ardour’ (as Provost on the pregnant Juliet: ‘a gentlewoman of mine, / Who falling in the flaws of her own youth …’; and see also Merchant of Venice, V, iii, 222). ‘Fancy: a fancy woman, Kept woman, ‘fancy man’ or ‘fancy Joseph’, harlot protector’, Partridge, op. cit. ‘Fancy house: brothel’, Albert Barrére and Charles G. Leland, eds., A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon, and Cant, reprinted 1967. ‘To take in a fancy work: to be addicted to the secret prostitution’, Farmer, John S. and Henley, W. E., eds., Slang and Its Analogues: Past and Present, 1890–1904Google Scholar.

3. Shakespeare's choice of names is symptomatic. In Christian art from the later Middle Ages through the Renaissance until the late Baroque, Sebastian (along with Adam) was the only male allowed to be shown in the nude. With his girlish face and body almost resembling that of a young girl, as seen in paintings by Guido Reni and Lorenzo Costa, Sebastian clad only in a loincloth, pierced with arrows, whose smile in suffering seems close to ecstacy, has always been the favoured sign for homosexuals. Antonio, too, seems to be a significant name: not without reason Shakespeare so named his Merchant of Venice, Bassanio's platonic friend ready for every sacrifice. And Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona (in some respects a first version of Twelfth Night) chooses the name Sebastian when she disguises herself as a boy. Sebastian and Antonio appear to be signifying signs.

4. ‘Queene: a male homosexual, especially the effeminate partner in a homosexual relationship’, from 1924, O.E.D. In the Renaissance, ‘effeminate mannere’. The absence of slang notations from earlier periods does not necessarily mean they did not exist. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ‘queen’ was often denoted by the spelling ‘queene’ or ‘quean’. From the early Middle Ages (tenth century), a term of abuse, a hussy, a harlot, a strumpet (especially in sixteenth-seventeenth centuries), O.E.D. In Shakespeare, as an almost disparaging term: ‘A witch, a quean, an old cozening quean!’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor), and, more vivid, ‘a scolding quean’ (All's Well That Ends Well); in the seventeenth century, ‘All spent in a Taverne amonst a consort of queanes and fiddlers’ (Nashe, Almond for Parrat); the most interesting and chronologically close to Shakespeare: ‘A certain paultry Quean in mans apparel, that would pass for a Lady’ (1670); and a ‘quean's evil’ is gonorrhoea (A Trick to Catch the Old One, V, ii, 214), Henke, op. cit.

5. See Paran, Janice, ‘The Amorous Girl-Boy’, in Essays, V, 1 (1981)Google Scholar.

6. In England women first appeared on the stage in the Restoration period. The roles most coveted by young actresses were those of girls disguised as boys in Shakespeare's comedies, called ‘breeches parts’. For the first time it was possible for women to display their legs on stage. That was one of the reasons for the popularity of Shakespeare's comedies. See, for example, Pepys's Diary, 28 October 1661.

7. Gautier, Théophile, Mademoiselle de Maupin, trans. Rascoe, Burton (New York: Knopf, 1923)Google Scholar. All quotations are from this edition.

8. A line from Byron's Don Juan, written in 1823, ‘this modern Amazon and a quean of queans’, seems to fit perfectly George Sand as seen in the portrait by Delacroix.

9. Quoted in Honoré Balzac, L'Histoire des Treize, ed. P. G. Castex.

10. Barthes, Roland, S/Z, trans. Miller, Richard (1975)Google Scholar; Johnson, Barbara, The Critical Difference (1980)Google Scholar; Jameson, Frederic, The Political Unconscious (1981)Google Scholar; Petrey, Sandy, Realism and Revolution: Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, and the Performances of History (1988)Google Scholar. The final part of my essay is much indebted to Petrey's book, its analysis and quotations.

11. Freud, Sigmund, Essais de psychoanalyse appliquée (Paris, 1933)Google Scholar, quoted in Felman, Shoshana, La Folie et la chose littéraire (Paris, 1978), p. 69Google Scholar.