Rosalind
A Biography of Shakespeare's Immortal Heroine
-
- £17.99
-
- £17.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this animated hybrid of scholarship and creative nonfiction, Thirwell offers a sensitive portrait of one of Shakespeare's most complex female characters, and a sweeping assessment of her cultural legacy. The character of Rosalind in As You Like It who dresses like a boy and, like all of Shakespeare's female characters, was originally played by a man proves complicated and captivating. She is, in Thirwell's words, a "gender buster," not simply surpassing or breaching boundaries but bursting them open entirely. Similarly, Thirwell's work seeks to move beyond the borders of one particular character; her discussion reaches to other characters in the play as well as literary and historical figures well before and beyond Shakespeare's time. Thirwell has a particular strength for portraying history with dramatic flair, as in a chapter on Queen Elizabeth I. A later chapter about "Rosalind's daughters" is a little too wide-ranging; Rosalind comes to seem like a symbol for any female character with agency. And when writing about plays, Thirwell spends too much time on detailed summary. But just as this book ends with an injunction to prize questions over answers, so too will Thirwell's expansive discussion lead curious minds toward creative, boundary-blasting inquiry.
