To what dramatic effect does Shakespeare use disguise in As You Like It?

To what dramatic effect does Shakespeare use disguise in As You Like It?

Shakespeare’s As You Like It employs the use of disguises for the initial purpose of deceit. While the trickery involved with identity bending in the play is used for temporary gain, in the end, the final outcome of such deceit leads to revelations of a higher truth. Thus, while there is obvious deceit, the result leads to the exact opposite. The characters most intimately involved with these instances of deceit generally learn something about themselves by the end of the play and perhaps more importantly, the reader can interpret the play as Shakespeare’s comment on the mutability of personality and character.

Rosalind in As You Like It is one of the most powerful of all the women characters encountered in any of the Shakespearian comedies. In terms of her personality and wit, she seems to be unmatched. One of the reasons she is able to express herself so fully is that she remains disguised as a male for a long portion of “As You Like It“. This allows her to experience her emotions and thoughts outside of the more constrained world of the female and even she remarks in one of the important quotes from “As You Like It”, “Now go we in content, / To liberty, and not to banishment". The use of the term “banishment" here implying that her view of femininity is that of having been expelled from everyday life, exiled somehow from the world by nature of her gender. This realization, as she clearly expresses, allows her to offer her advice and instruction to the males without fear of ridicule or persecution and by the end, when she delivers the epilogue, the reader feels as though she has gained her confidence by living as Ganymede. Her epilogue is delivered with confidence and the reader should keep in mind that during Shakespeare’s time, the only actors (thus epilogue-reciters) were men. Therefore, the gender-bending result of the disguises in this play are two fold since in actuality, the actor playing Rosalind would be a man dressed up as a woman, but then dressed up as a man with womanly characteristics. The result is certainly confusing, but it sheds light on the argument that Shakespeare is using gendered disguises to present higher truths—in this case, the malleability of gender through the use of role-playing and disguise..........................................................................

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Milan Tomic

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