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Shakespeare's fanciful play, filmed at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival before a live audience.


Roberta Maxwell ... Rosalind
Rosemary Dunsmore ... Celia
Nicholas Pennell ... Jaques
John Jarvis ... Silvius
Mary Haney ... Phebe
Andrew Gillies ... Orlando
William Needles ... Duke Senior

directed by John Hirsch

...the very strong instant desire that Phoebe finds for Rosalind/Ganymede, which seems at first not unlike the feelings Orlando has for Rosalind. Phoebe, of course, abandons her love as soon as she learns that Rosalind is a woman, but the play confronts us with the question about the validity of those feelings. If a set of men's clothes is the only thing distinguishing conventional sexual arrangements from alternatives, we are invited (at least) to wonder somewhat about the extent to which conventional arrangements do not exhaust the erotic possibilities.

The play, of course, in its closing scene celebrates conventional heterosexual marriages. But by that time it has offered us, at least by powerful suggestions, some erotic alternatives, without condemning such possibilities as inherently unnatural. And, depending upon how some of these key scenes are played, a production of As You Like It can evoke in the audience some very interesting and (perhaps) ambivalent feelings about mature sexuality.

This point seems to be emphasized in the epilogue spoken by the newly married Rosalind, where the boy actor playing the role calls attention to the fact that he is not a woman, as if to remind us (maybe) that the happy union of Orlando and Rosalind in which we take such delight has explored other possibilities than heterosexuality. This point can be underscored strongly if Orlando is present with Rosalind during this epilogue (say, holding her in his arms) and the actor playing Rosalind is removing his make up (e.g., wig). And, of course, if the actor playing Rosalind has made some erotic connections with the audience, then his final revelation in the Epilogue will force the audience member to confront some of his own feelings about gender attachments.

As I say, it's rare to see Rosalind nowadays played by a boy, although there have been all-male productions in modern times. And so the epilogue is often omitted or edited. As it stands, the boy actor's offer to kiss the desirable grown men in the audience ("If I were a woman") gives the last words of the play an ironic and erotic resonance that challenges gently the heterosexual weddings we have just celebrated.

-- from a lecture prepared by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College