48Zoia Alexanian

soon enough is speaking as Rosalind would. The first disguise is mainly comprised of

Ganymede's manner of speech, and it is not entirely foolproof. Orlando comments that

"your accent is something finer than you could purchase in so removed a dwelling"

(AYLI, IILii.329-30), as though speech is a finery that can be bought and worn like velvet.

Ganymede invents a magician uncle to explain it away-but this invention becomes

oddly real by the end of the play. When Jaques de Boys describes the "old religious man"

(AYLI, V.iv.158) who converts Duke Frederick, it seems as though Ganymede's fictitious

uncle might actually exist. And how else can Hymen appear in the Forest, if not through

some sort of magic?

If Ganymede can speak an uncle and a god into existence, might not Rosalind

perhaps be able to do the ·same for Ganymede? If nothing else, Rosalind's creation of

Ganymede (and Ganymede's of Rosalind) primarily through speech upsets the standard

operation by which language engenders gender. As stated earlier, Butler, Foucault, and

Irigaray all agree that "sex appears within hegemonic language as a substance" and that

"this appearance is achieved through a perforinative twist of language and/or discourse

that conceals the fact that 'being' a sex or a gender is fundamentally impossible"

(Gender, 25). But Ganymede's linguistic twists and turns accomplish the opposite, by

making it impossible for Ganymede to "be" one (and only one) sex.

In a play where speech both determines and undermines identity, who actually has

the last word? Rosalind's reappearance in the play is not without its ambiguity. Hymen

states that "Hymen from heaven brought her, / Yea, brought her hither, / That thou

mightstjoin her hand with his" (AYLI, V.iv.llO-3). Viola's reappearance necessitates a

complicated set of requirements that are never fulfilled; Rosalind's is no less contrived,

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despite its successful execution. And this success is partial at best-in the Folio edition of

the play, Hymen says "his hand" rather than "her hand," an oddity regarded as an error by

the majority of the play's editots. But given the way in which hands have been portrayed

in this play-as ultimately boyish and therefore liminal-perhaps Hymen can be forgiven

for misspeaking.

As much as "his" hand ~onfounds Rosalind's reappearance, her subsequent

disappearance is even more unsettling. Critics have long noted the peculiar nature of As

You Like It's epilogue: "As Orgel, rloward, Phyllis Rackin and Catherine Belsey all

intimate, the effect of [the epiMgue] is to highlight the constructedness of gender and the

flexibility of erotic attraction at precisely the point when the formal impulse of comedy

would be to essentialise and fix both gender and eroticism" (Traub, 104). But the

epilogue does more than "highlight" gender constructions and expose the variability of

desire. It points to the roots of these constructions, and unsettles the very dichotomy of

subject/object in desire. Most critics read the epilogue' as a process of undressing:

Rosalind comes out to speak to the audience, and the boy actor playing her part slowly

emerges frorri beneath her costume. But there is no indication in the text itself that the

figure's physical appearance changes in any way; again, speech decides identity--except

this figure's speech refuses to decide. The epilogue begins with an apology: "It is not the

fashion to seethe lady in the Epilogue, but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord

the Prologue" (Ep, 1-3). A joke: manners dictate that ladies should always precede lords.

Yet at the time, this joke could evoke only uncomfortable laughter at best. After all, such

manners have no place on the stage, for the ladies are merely lords in disguise. Moreover,

the "proper" gender of the speaker ofthe prologue or epilogue is dictated entirely by

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"fashion"-and to Shakespeare, "fashion" decrees not who actually appears before us,

but who we choose to "see."

Ironically, many critics choose to follow fashion and see a male figure conclude

the play. But the epilogue never explicitly identifies the figure as male. Identity is, once

more, dependent on an "if': "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had

beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me and breaths that I defied not" (Ep, 16-

9). The figure is male only if a male is the negative of a conditional female-its

masculinity exists only in its lack of~emininity. And what happens if the conditional is

fully negated? Earlier, "Rosalind" states that "I am not furnished like a beggar, therefore

I

to beg will not become me" (Ep, 9-1P). Even here, actions are meant to at least somewhat

conform to costume, and the speake~ is dressed in female wedding attire. To s.peak

against this costume is, within the cdnstmcts of the theater, a way of un-becoming. The

play itself becomes un-constructediin addressing the audience directly with an

I

ambi valent voice, the speaker of the lepilogue collapses the distinction between the

watcher and the watched, the actor and the role. Free from any concrete self to enact, the

I

speaker states that "my way is to corijure you, and I'll begin with the women. I charge

you, 0 women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this playas please you.

And I charge you, 0 men, for the love you bear to women [...] that between you and the

women the play may please" (Ep, 10-6).

"My way is to conjure you"-a trace of the magical Ganymede remains-and

who is to say, really, whether the conditional negative of "if I were a woman" is not

Ganymede? The speech alludes as easily to a further fiction as it does to any "truth."

Whoever the speaker is, s/he leaves the women with relatively simple instructions: like