Rosalind

A Biography of Shakespeare’s Immortal Heroine

Angela Thirlwell

• Publisher: Oberon Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781786822338
• eBook ISBN:
  9781783198542
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Biografías literarias

The critically acclaimed biography of Shakespeare's most enduring heroine, Rosalind, now in paperback.

Into the spotlight steps Rosalind, the actor-manager of As You Like It.
She's alive. She's modern. She's also a fiction.
Played by a boy actor in 1599, she's a girl who gets into men's clothes to investigate the truth about love.
Both male and female, imaginary and real, her intriguing duality gives her a special role.
What is a man? What is a woman?
We are all Rosalind now.

This book is for everyone who has ever loved Shakespeare. Like Rosalind, his most innovative heroine, he can never die. She too is timeless. There is no clock in the Forest of Arden where Rosalind finds herself and applies her mercurial wit to teach her lover, Orlando, how to become her perfect partner, issues which consume men and women today.

This highly original 'biography' of Rosalind contains exclusive new interviews with Juliet Rylance, Sally Scott, Janet Suzman, Juliet Stevenson, Michelle Terry, award-winning director Blanche McIntyre, as well as insights from Michael Attenborough, Kenneth Branagh, Greg Doran, Rebecca Hall, Adrian Lester, Pippa Nixon, Vanessa Redgrave and Fiona Shaw. Angela Thirlwell explores the fictitious life and the many after-lives of Rosalind, Shakespeare's progressive new heroine, and her perennial influence on drama, fiction and art.

SOURCES AND NOTES

All quotations from As You Like It are from Arden 3 edited by Juliet Dusinberre (London: Bloomsbury, 2006)

PROLOGUE

Enter Rosalind

1 AYLI, 2.5.1-5.

2 Dorothy Jordan as Rosalind in As You Like It by Sir William Beechey, oil on canvas, 762 × 634 mm, Private Collection, shown in ‘The First Actresses’ exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, October 2011 – January 2012.

3 Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, (Fanny Burney) edited by her niece Charlotte Barrett, 7 vol. (London: Henry Colburn, 1842-6), 5, p. 40, Wednesday, July 29^th, [1789].

4 The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt: With Reminiscences of Friends and Contemporaries, 3 vol. (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1850), 1, pp. 148-9.

5 James Boaden, The Life of Mrs Jordan, 2 vol. (London: Edward Bull, 1831) 1, p. 46.

6 W. Fraser Rae, Sheridan: a Biography, 2 vol. (London: R. Bentley & Son, 1896), 2, pp. 12-13.

7 Weds 16^th January 1839, www.queenvictoriasjournals.org

8 W. Fraser Rae, Sheridan: a Biography, 2 vol. (London: R. Bentley & Son, 1896) 2, pp. 12-13.

9 Adrian Lester talking to Mark Lawson on ‘Front Row’, Radio 4, 27 August 2012.

10 Interview by e-mail with Adrian Lester, 9 September 2015.

11 Jonathan Bate and Russell Jackson, eds, Shakespeare: An Illustrated Stage History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 6.

12 Open University video to accompany A 210 Approaching Literature, 1995.

13 AYLI, 3.2.146-8.

14 His sources are Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages by Christopher Dyer, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, revised ed. 1989) p. 316, and The Tudor Tailor by Ninya Mikhaila and Jane Malcolm-Davies, (London: Batsford, 2006) p. 9 – whose figures are for sixteenth-century Londoners. Interestingly, people were taller in Saxon times, and got shorter than the Tudors in Georgian and Victorian times, only becoming taller again towards the end of the twentieth century, according to the chart in The Tudor Tailor.

15 AYLI, 3.2.262.

16 Ibid., 3.5.119–124.

17 Ibid., 4.3.50. in the letter Phebe sends to Ganymede via Silvius.

18 Ibid., 3.5.47-8.

19 This suggestion from Lois Potter, The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), p. 235.

20 Published in The Twelve-Pound Look and other plays by J.M. Barrie, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1921). Broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 3 June 2002.

21 Information from Eileen Page who took ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Writing Rosalind’s Biography
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Prologue: Enter Rosalind
• Act One: In the Green Room – Rosalind’s Ancestors
• Act Two Scene ONE: Rosalind’s Elder Sisters
• Act Two Scene Two: Younger Sisters
• Act Three: Call Me Ganymede – Rosalind Crosses the Border
• Interval: Gloriana
• Act Four: Like the Bay of Portugal – Rosalind’s Love Life
• Act Five Scene One: Celia – Juno’s Swan
• Act Five Scene Two: Orlando – So Much in the Heart of the World
• Epilogue: As You Like It
• Afterlife: A Woman For All Time – Rosalind’s Daughters
• Programme: Family Trees and Cast, Synopsis, Proverbs, Forest of Arden
• Acknowledgements
• Sources and Notes
• Filmography
• Illustrations
• Index