#rosalind

In the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2013 production of As You Like It, Rosalind, portrayed by Pippa Nixon, when assuming the disguise of Ganymede, takes on a male appearance. With hair cut short and styled with gel to one side and a collared blue shirt, Ganymede looks as though he is a boy, perhaps a preppy boy rather than traditionally masculine, but a boy nonetheless. Because of this, her romantic interactions with Orlando (Alex Waldmann) come across as very homoerotic.

In Act 3 Scene 2, Rosalind/Ganymede sits closely next to Orlando as they converse about Orlando’s poems that he so abuses the trees with, his lovesickness, and Ganymede’s supposed cure. As they do this, they share what is presumably a blunt. This act, particularly in this context, has some undeniable phallic implications. Staged so close to each other as they interact with each other and even touch one another, from the viewpoint of the audience that is far less close to the actors as the camera that has filmed the scene, Orlando and Ganymede appear to be a gay couple. When Rosalind/Ganymede asks Orlando if he is truly in love with Rosalind, he responds “Neither rhyme nor reason could express how much” and despite speaking these things about the woman he is in love with, he looks at Ganymede with a look of such adoration that he might as well be declaring his love to Ganymede rather than Rosalind, though it would happen that he is actually doing both.

While Nixon and Waldmann’s portrayals of these characters have obvious sexual tension, when Rosalind/Ganymede directs Orlando to call her “Rosalind”, this is not only a man imploring another man to call him by the name of a woman, but specifically the woman the two characters have just discussed in great length that Orlando loves. Not only this, but Ganymede suggests Orlando aim to woo him as Rosalind. While it is her under this guise, Orlando does not know this and is agreeing to engage in flirting (more so than he already has been doing) with another man. He is very clearly interested in Ganymede as more than a friend and does little to hide this. During the time in which the play was written, there were no labels to be put on sexualities like heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or anything else and instead, sexuality was related more to actions in a single moment of time than any identity and who Orlando feels attraction to is demonstrably fluid. When Nixon’s Rosalind asks Orlando to show her where in the forest he lives, the simultaneous hesitancy and eagerness she displays make the interaction almost resemble a contemporary exchanging of cell-phone numbers. Thus, in this RSC production, Orlando and Ganymede are very clearly framed as two boys flirting with one another, clearly interested in one another and clearly queer.