Rosalind, banished from court, disguises herself as a young man named Ganymede and flees into the Forest of Arden — and then, in one of Shakespeare’s most audacious comic conceits, ends up coaching her own unwitting suitor Orlando on how to woo ‘Rosalind,’ while disguised as a boy pretending to be the very woman she is.
It gave the Globe’s original boy actors a triple layer of gender performance (a boy playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl) that modern productions still find dizzying to stage, and it gives Rosalind more lines than any other female character Shakespeare ever wrote — roughly as many as Hamlet has. She is, by any measure, the wittiest and most in-control character in the play, male or female.
The forest itself functions the way Shakespeare’s wild spaces always do — a place outside court hierarchy where identity becomes fluid enough to be tested, much as the enchanted wood does in Midsummer Night’s Dream.
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