“And browner than her brother”: “Misprized” Celia's racial identity and transversality in As You Like It

Abstract

Shakespeare's As You Like It has become a centrepiece in feminist and/or queer discussions concerning early modern English gender and sexual prescriptions and the theatre's role in contesting or reconsolidating a patriarchal and/or heteronormative social structure. Focused primarily on Rosalind and her wooing of a man while in man's attire, such criticism has generally ignored Rosalind's cousin Celia and the racial and social-class parameters of her forest identity. This essay first surveys this Rosalind-centric critical tradition and then utilizes Bryan Reynolds's transversal theory and historiography of early modern English criminal culture to assess the subversive potential of Celia's dissident court behaviour and of her engagement in a popular criminal practice Reynolds refers to as “becoming gypsy”. This reading of Celia in and out of her transversally empowered, “‘browner’” (4.3.89) Aliena identity will consider how Celia/Aliena, unlike Rosalind/Ganymede, functions to transgress then dominant and intersecting conceptualizations of race, social class, nationality, gender, and sexuality circulating off stage and colouring the landscape of Arden.

Keywords:

• Aliena
• becoming gypsy
• becomings-other
• criminal culture
• feminist criticism
• gender
• gypsy sign
• official culture
• official territory
• nationality
• queer criticism
• race
• sexuality
• social class
• sociopolitical conductors
• state machinery
• subjective territory
• subjunctive space
• transversal movement
• transversal power
• transversal territory
• transversal theory
• transvestism

Notes

1. Jan Kott and Louis Montrose both consider the play in relation to issues of social class, but neither considers the play's discourse on race. Kott recognizes that Arden “is ruled by the capitalist laws of hire” (329), but he misidentifies Rosalind-Ganymede as the proprietor who transforms the forest “into landed property” (329), when it is Celia-Aliena who offers to “mend” Corin's “wages” (2.4.93) and whom Corin identifies as his employer (3.2.84–85). Montrose discusses Orlando's social mobility through marriage and the “cultural fiction” it offered to the largely youthful, male audience in attendance (58), but does not consider either Rosalind's or Celia's social-class transvestism. Like Kott, Montrose mistakenly assigns Rosalind-Ganymede the role of head of the “household within the forest” (60), although it is Celia-Aliena who is deemed the “mistress” of the house (3.2.84–85).

2. For a critique of feminism's delimited focus on gender at the exclusion of its intersections with class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and religion, see, among other works, Butler.

3. With the exception of the use of “Arden” instead of “Ardenne”, all quotations from As You Like It are taken from the 2005 Clarendon Press second edition (Shakespeare). In reference to the spelling of the play's forest setting, I choose to follow the Arden Shakespeare editions of As You Like It, rather than the Oxford edition of the text. Arden editors Latham, and Dusinberre, follow the spelling found in the play's first printing, while the Oxford editors deviate from the First Folio in their choice of “Ardenne” for “Arden”. The prefatory remarks to the Oxford version imply that the deviation is consistent with the playwright's initial conception of the play's location: “There are many indications that Shakespeare thought of the action as taking place in the Ardenne area of France, as in Rosalynde, even though there was also a Forest of Arden in Warwickshire” (655). Dusinberre, on the other hand, suggests that “the playwright must have expected audiences to identify an English setting for the Forest” (“Introduction” 48). Steering away from arguments concerning authorial intent, I find that the first printing's use of “Arden” instead of “Ardenne” or “Ardennes” is consistent with the play's overall attempt to anglicize the pastoral action. This project is initiated at the first mention of “the forest” (1.1.109), when Charles likens its inhabitants to “the old Robin Hood of England” (1.1.111).

4. An important exception to this critical trend is Calvo. Unlike the present study, Calvo only focuses on Celia's “sophisticated exploitation of conversational strategies” (114).

5. Both Steve Mentz and Melissa Mowry take issue with Reynolds's coinages in their respective reviews of Reynolds's Becoming Criminal. Mentz suggests that Reynolds's invention of “a new theoretical language” can be interpreted as an entrepreneurial effort “to assert and promote his new critical project” (76). Mowry complains that “Reynolds's terminology is an annoying distraction”, and specifically critiques the term “state machinery” as evidence of Reynolds's “inability to sort through the contingencies of his terminology” (180). See Note 15 for a detailed explication of and response to Mowry's reading of “state machinery”.

6. Mowry faults Reynolds for neglecting “most recent work on early modern subaltern identities by historians and literary scholars” and for not addressing “the multiple contingencies of early modern identity formation—both dominant and subaltern” (181). Nesvet similarly critiques Reynolds for “[f]ailing to support with evidence many of his speculative conclusions” (par. 4) regarding early modern England's criminal culture in her review of Becoming Criminal. Unlike Nesvet, Mowry appreciates the “intellectual adventurousness” of Reynolds's project (181). In his review of Becoming Criminal, Mentz also applauds its intellectual ambitions, particularly its “free interplay between material and conceptual claims” (74); however, Mentz finds that such methodological “interplay” at times “leads [Reynolds] to make stark empirical claims in areas in which archival historians believe such claims are dubious” (74). Mentz asserts that while “at times [Reynolds] runs ahead of material evidence, especially regarding the activities of real criminals as opposed to literary constructs, he willingly courts the dangers of conflating literary and historical evidence with his materialist-cum-poststructural approach” (77) that offers a refreshing alternative to the once-dominant New Historicist model.

7. While Ewan Fernie praises Reynolds's “self-subverting, self-realizing theory”, along with other “recent work on performativity”, for the critical intervention it makes in early modern English studies, he argues that all such post-Butler, post-new historicist approaches to subjectivity in the field tend to “repeat … the reductive subordination of action to character” (107). A proponent of presentism, Fernie insists that any theory of identity formation which focuses on “performing otherwise and becoming other withdraws attention from the present action” (107).

8. Nesvet concedes in her review of Becoming Criminal that “Reynolds makes a convincing case for the likelihood that England's population of itinerant self-professed ‘gypsies’ were actually indigenous English and Welsh people performing an artificial ‘foreign’ ethnicity, in which nobody believed” (par. 4). Although she is more than satisfied with Reynolds's claims regarding the practice of gypsy forgeries in early modern England, she is unconvinced by “his other discoveries” because, she claims, they are “grounded upon under-evidenced generalization and outright misinformation” (par. 4). For Reynolds's response to Nesvet's review, see Reynolds “Book Review Ethics”. For my defence of Reynolds's methodology, see “Becoming Editorial”. For Nesvet's reply to Reynolds's critique of her review, see “Response”.

9. David Scott Kastan similarly bemoans the lack of critical attention on “the implications of crossdressing for understanding the socioeconomic ordering of Elizabethan and Stuart England” (152). Specifically, Kastan faults Stephen Greenblatt for restricting his discussion of the theatre's transvestite tradition to gender and thereby failing to take into account the theatre's viable “threat to the culture of degree” (154). Kastan's critique of Greenblatt could be extended to include feminist, cultural materialist, and new historicist critics who, in neglecting to address what Kastan refers to as “social crossdressing” and by focusing exclusively on “sexual crossdressing” (152), miss a vital opportunity to explore how the early modern English theatre denaturalized a social-class structure that strove to delimit social mobility.

10. Adelman's contention that the women's disguises allow them to “form the heterosexual couple Ganymede and Aliena” (83) does not take into account the sibling relationship they adopt when in disguise. This feigned relationship is an alteration to the source text, where Rosalynde-as-Ganymede dons the role of Alinda-as-Aliena's page (see Thomas Lodge 123). If, as Adelman contends, their disguises allow Rosalind and Celia to become a “heterosexual couple” that quickly and unproblematically dissolves in the forest (83–84), then their forest roles function to displace their homoerotic relationship onto an incestuous heterosexual one that taints the concluding celebration of heterosexual marriage by suggesting that heterosexuality does not prevent the possibility of incest.

11. Montrose recognizes Orlando's social-class ascent via marriage, which he characterizes as a “symbolic mediation … of discrepancies between the social categories of status and the claims of individual merit” (58). Dusinberre likewise acknowledges Orlando's matrimonial inheritance of a dukedom, which she interprets as a “challenge to primogeniture as a mode of thought and social practice” (“Introduction” 58). Neither Montrose nor Dusinberre take into account the “symbolic” effects Oliver's marriage to the dispossessed Celia may have had on the social-class structure.

12. Traub argues that Rosalind/Ganymede, “a multiply sexual object (simultaneously heterosexual and homosexual)” (Desire and Anxiety 122), functions to deconstruct “the binary system by which desire in subsequent centuries came to be organized, regulated, and disciplined” (124). Celia and her relationship with Rosalind are not discussed in this reading of the play's “lack of commitment” to a heterosexual/homosexual binary (130). Traub does address Celia and Rosalind's homoerotic relationship (“(In)significance”, Renaissance), but argues that the play is indeed committed to a patriarchal rhetoric of compulsory heterosexuality for women.

13. For Traub's insightful readings of early modern representations of the tribade, see Renaissance and “(In)significance”.

14. As will be discussed in the forthcoming section, Celia's spatial-temporal projections constitute her occupation of what Reynolds defines as “subjunctive space” (“Transversal Performance 4–5).

15. Mowry identifies the term “state machinery” as a primary example of Reynolds's “inability to sort through the contingencies of his terminology” (180). She argues that since “an English state did not exist” in the period, “any discussion of government, official culture, or state machinery in early modern England must carefully differentiate between institutions” (180). In her estimation, Reynolds's “sloppy use of ‘state’” (180) “leads him to conflate the different agendas of church, crown, parish, municipality, and guild”, and “reveals a crass understanding of the ways power circulated differentially even among official institutions” (181). While Mowry wisely warns against monolithicizing early modern English state-supporting institutions, her critique does not consider Reynolds's use of “state machinery” in Becoming Criminal (9–10) as an umbrella term for “diverse conductors of state-orientated organizational power” that “work, sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently, to advance the image of and development toward the totalized state” (9). Rather than referencing a conflation of official institutions harmoniously working to achieve the collectively agreed upon goal of establishing a hegemonic state, Reynolds's term is intended to simultaneously account for varying state-supporting apparatuses, their variances, and their respective investments in creating and maintaining the conception of an organized social body and their own positions of power within it (9–10). Reynolds specifies that the expression “should make explicit the multifarious and discursive nature of state power and thus prevent the misperception of the socio-power dynamic as resulting from a conspiracy led by a monolithic state” (9). As such, the term is intended to denote how, as Mowry states, “power circulated differentially” (181) among official and unofficial sociopolitical conductors that were not always mutually supportive. Although Mowry faults Reynolds for “conflat[ing] the different agendas” of competing monarchical, religious, and juridical branches of government (180), Reynolds does address the “contradictions and conflicts” that existed “between and within the courts of Elizabeth and James, the church, Parliament, and other loci of state power”, such as “local constabularies and judiciaries” (10), as they worked not towards a previously articulated and collectively pronounced “agenda”, but consciously or unconsciously towards the realization of a conception of a unified state that, in Reynolds's estimation, “is an impossibility or, at the very least, inaccessible and unobservable by even its most powerful conductors” because such conductors are not static or invulnerable to “natural processes” that engender change (10).

16. As Margo Hendricks mentions in her reading of early modern English dictionary entries for “race”, the term was broad enough to be used to delineate various forms of difference: “because of these types of lexical and semiotic interventions, the word ‘race’ required just enough semantic augmentation to permit the possibility of delineation specific enough to mark a person's class but general enough to allow it to be used for other purposes” (18).

17. G. K. Hunter similarly suggests that religion, not race, was the primary indicator of alien status in Elizabethan England. Hunter argues that early modern English literary representations of foreigners were predicated less on “ethnographic differences” (52) or ostensible racial signifiers than on still prevalent, medieval prejudices against non-Christians. Ania Loomba, however, cautions against such critical tendencies to minimize “the significance of colour” (“Color” 206) by prioritizing religious categories as the period's primary means of demarcating difference, and emphasizes the interrelated association between “blackness” and non-Christianity in early modern England (“‘Delicious Traffick’”). While Loomba, like Boose, argues that in early modern England “races were defined more in social terms of customs, languages and law” than in biologically empirical terms (“‘Delicious Traffick’” 207), she contends that “a biological understanding of race” emerged in Spain with the 1492 and 1502 expulsion of the Jews and Moors and spread to England (“‘Delicious Traffick’” 207–8).

18. As Reynolds’ indicates in Becoming Criminal, The Brave English Gipsy suggests the use of “‘walnut tree’” as a means to “‘paint’” the “‘faire’”-skinned “‘black’”, and Jonson's The Gypsies Metamorphos'd offers a recipe of “‘wall nuttes and hoggs greace’” to achieve the desired gypsy effect (qtd. in Becoming Criminal 47). Celia's use of “a kind of umber” (1.3.111) proposes a more readily accessible concoction. According to Agnes Latham, the editor of the 1975 Arden edition of As You Like It, the “umber” Celia says she will use to “smirch” her “face” (1.3.108) refers to “brown earth such as is used to make the paint called umber” (n. 108). Juliet Dusinberre, the 2006 Arden editor, likewise identifies “umber” as a reference to “‘brown pigment’”, specifically “umber from Umbria in Italy” (n. 109). While both Latham and Dusinberre clarify the reference, neither allows for Celia to appear with a besmirched face. Latham explains that Oliver's “description” (4.3.84) of Celia as “‘browner than her brother’” (4.3.88) “must” refer “to her hair”, since it is “Rosalind's skin” that “was smirched with umber” (n. 88). Dusinberre, on the other hand, argues that the “boy actor playing Celia” would “not in fact be applying brown pigment on entry into the Forest”, but rather removing the white face paint worn on stage to indicate femininity and aristocracy (n. 109).

19. Ania Loomba similarly suggests that gypsy forgeries challenged official culture's racial demarcations of Englishness in her reading of the cultural anxiety over the contaminating potential of blackness engendered by the prevalence of such forgeries. As Loomba notes, the “fear of ‘turning gypsy’”, articulated in such documents as the 1562 Act of Elizabeth, “was most often expressed in relation to English rogues and vagabonds: thus the boundaries of culture are also imagined in class terms. The blurring of boundaries between English people and gypsies is conjured up via images of brown Englishmen rather than white gypsies. Thus blackness (both as a moral quality and as skin colour) can more readily contaminate whiteness rather than itself be washed into whiteness” (“‘Delicious Traffick’” 211).

20. As Reynolds discusses in Becoming Criminal, gypsies were associated in the popular imagination and literature with “[t]ransgressive sexuality” (55), including promiscuity, that defied official culture's prescribed monogamous heterosexuality (55–58). Reynolds suggests that “the popular desire to become gypsy … was at least partially a desirous and concerted endeavor to have sex in new, forbidden, and exciting ways” (56).