51Zoia Alexanian

the playas much as you will, out of the love you feel for men. The men, however, are not

told to simply decide how much of this play has pleased them; rather, the speaker asks

"that between you and the women the play may please," thrusting the play into the divide

between the two genders. The statement is an implicitly sexual one, and hints that

pleasure results only when the space constructed between men and women, truth and

fiction, lack and its absence, is shifted, blurred, multiplied, erased-filled with all that the

play has to offer. Otherwise-why come to the theater, particularly this theater, so often?

This, this is as you really likeit-perhaps the only way you can like it.

It is a statement that Shakespeare's audience was unwilling to argue, for to argue

against it would have required acknowledging it. In a play where truth is as flexible and

porous as theater itself, this truth was too startling to consider. To Orgel, Renaissance

theater always implies a certain danger and liminality; it is "the great Other functioning

withinsociety as both a threat and a refuge" (Orgel, 12). The threat was of boundless

sexuality, as decried by the Puritans and tacitly ignored by audience members. But what

was so threatening about the boyish bride standing on the stage? Shakespeare had

explored the odd liminality of boys dressed as women acting as boys in other plays, and

none had prompted in his audience a refusal to respond. Then again, in other plays this

liminality was not presented with such permanence-here, it is the final image; a

conclusion left forever teetering on a threshold. Garber notes that at the end of As You

Like It, "what lingers, like the smile of the Cheshire cat, is precisely that residue, that

supplement: Ganymede" (Garber, 75). The image brings to mind Foucault's famous

introduction to the memoirs ofthe hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin: "One has the

impression [...] that everything took place in a world of feelings [...] where the identity

52Zoia Alexanian

of the partners and above all the enigmatic character around whom everything centered,

had no importance. It was a world in which grins hung about without the cat" (Foucault,

xiii). Identity is erased; all that remains is the desire, conceived not as a link between two

people but as that which can exist without links, without reason or structure.

But can this erasure ever be complete? Butler, for one, does not believe that

gender and desire are as easily divorced from their subjects as Foucault purports:

"Gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of free-floating attributes, for we have seen

that the substantive effect of gender is performatively produced and compelled by the

regulatory practices of gender coherence [...] Gender is always a doing, though not a

doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed" (Gender, 33). The cat comes

into existence at the same time as his grin, and the grin proves inescapable if he hopes to

remain "coherent." Rosalind/Ganymede feels no compunction to establish an internal

coherency in terms of gender-unlike with Viola/Cesario, there are no self-reproving

speeches attempting to order his/her identity. But Rosalind/Ganymede has something that

Viola/Cesario lacks: an external ordering system, allowing the figure to wander and

explore at will without needing to worry about straying too far.

This external ordering system is one which Butler sees as operating upon

Herculine, and upon any figure who threatens to subvert the law of heterosexuliazed

gender:

S/he is 'outside' 'the law, but the law maintains this 'outside' within' itself. In

effect, s/heembodies the law, not as an entitled subject, but as an enacted

testimony to the law's uncanny capacity to produce only those rebellions that it

can guarantee will-out of fidelity-defeat themselves and those subjects who,

utterly subjected, have no choice but to reiterate the law of their genesis."

(Gender, 135)