As You Like It

A gorgeous summer evening, lying on a blanket with a picnic dinner under the dappled light of trees in the arboretum of Cornell University, upstate New York, I watched a great production of Shakespeare's "As You Like It" tonight - and for the first time the gender twisting antics of his comedy struck me as utterly post-modern!

It was a traditional period production, put on by the Ithaca Shakespeare Company on a lovely in-the-round stage outside and surrounded by woods. The choice of costume was what one expects of a small budget but serious

Shakespearean theatre company, with layers of lacy skirts and corsets for the women and knee-high socks, knickerbockers and waistcoats for the men. In many of Shakespeare's comedies, mistaken identity and women disguising themselves to their lovers by cross-dressing tickles audiences as much today as in the 17th century. Which is why the period costume lends itself to turning gender assumptions upside down.

The men wore high heels, wigs with long curls and pony tails, lacy cuffs and collars, tights and puffy pants or knickerbockers. Extremely effeminate.

And when the leading woman, Rosalind, disguises herself as a man, she looks more masculine than the men do, with her own hair tied back and her legs firmly placed on the ground.

Meanwhile there are many quips about how Rosalind and her cousin Celia share a love "dearer than the natural bond of sisters", intimating a lesbian bond between them. And at one stage a peasant girl falls for Rosalind, incognito under the name Ganymede, despite Rosalind's protests that she loves "no woman". Yet all the while Rosalind, in her male alter ego, befriends Orlando who is in love with Rosalind but doesn't know he is speaking to her, and makes him pretend she IS Rosalind in order to test his love for her. So while Orlando believes he is playing out feigned love scenes with another man, there are homo-erotic and cross-gender, pansexual undertones.

She has her male suitor woo her while she is disguised as a man pretending to be a woman. Confused yet? Good. This is what started to strike me throughout the performance as Shakespeare's ultra modern gender bending politic.

Jokes are made about the so-called "weaker sex", yet the women carry the entire narrative and are the stronger characters by far. And the peasant girl who falls for Rosalind/ Ganymede is a dominant, rough and rude woman, who is pursued by a truly submissive man for whom she has no respect - but who loves her all the more for it.

In the end all is restored to "normalcy" as Rosalind emerges in feminine flowing finery to marry Orlando, the peasant girl realises her amour was directed at a woman who would never have her and instead accepts the hand of the submissive man, and there are 8 heterosexual marriages to conclude the play just in case we should have been led down the path of believing this cross dressing and gender bending was anything but comical...

But this is not the only play of Shakespeare's in which these cross dressing antics appear (Much Ado About Nothing), or in which he played outright with stereotypes of "the weaker sex" (the daughters in King Lear), the changeable feminine emotional nature (The Taming of the Shrew), the corruption of man by the shadow side of the feminine (Macbeth), the shadow side of the masculine (Richard III, The Merchant of Venice) the relationship between the feminine and nature or magic (A Midsummer Night's Dream, the witches in MacBeth), the expectations of the masculine leader (Hamlet).

Considering he wrote at a time when women were not allowed to appear on stage, Shakespeare wrote a lot of very strong female roles, and challenged gender stereotypes both contemporary

and timeless. The fact that boys would have played these roles makes the cross-dressing and gender-bending aspect even more of a visual and cognitive challenge and delight! This is one of the reasons Tom Stoppard's film "Shakespeare in Love" was such a clever re-telling of Shakespeare's stories. The women, including Queen Elizabeth played to perfection by Judi Dench, are all strong characters standing where the audience and characters expect men to stand and challenging not only gender stereotypes but perhaps also heterosexist assumptions. There are male-to-male love scenes and Gwenyth Paltrow looked particularly sexy dressed in finery

but still sporting her fake moustache and goatee beard.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced the bard was a postmodernist, anti-essentialist writer a few centuries before his time!