Rosalind Shakespeare's immortal heroine

Actress Vanessa Redgrave found the launching point for her career in the role of one of Shakespeare's most dauntingly complex characters: Rosalind of As You Like It. But as Thirlwell chronicles the cultural history of this elusive character, she identifies Redgrave as just one of a remarkably long line of figures who have found creative inspiration in a female who assumes a masculine identity to pursue her love. Readers meet the scandalous eighteenth-century actress Peg Woffington, whose stage presence in breeches stunned playgoers almost as much as her lawless love life; nineteenth-century American thespian Charlotte Cushman, whose unacknowledged lesbianism supercharged her Rosalind; and twenty-first-century Shakespearean director Blanche McIntyre, who hopes her troupe's version of the character gives young women in the audience guidance in negotiating their own gender identity. Offstage, Thirlwell detects Rosalind's influence on creative writers as diverse as Jane Austen, J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Madox Ford, as they have rethought the male-female boundary. Current ferment on gender issues ensures a sizable readership.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2017 Booklist

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. Agent: Felicity Bryan, Felicity Bryan Associates (U.K.). (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Thirlwell (William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis) here undertakes a unique project-to write a full-blown biography of a theatrical character. Like any real-life biographical subject, Rosalind, the heroine of William Shakespeare's As You Like It, undergoes the same rigorous attention to family history. Thirlwell examines ancestors: Homer's Athena, Ovid's Iphis, and Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde; Shakespearean sisters: Beatrice, Juliet, Portia, Rosaline, Viola, and Imogen; and literary descendants: Jo March in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, Gwendolen Harleth in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, etc. In addition to placing Rosalind in the context of her literary/dramatic family tree, Thirlwell also examines in detail the theatrical productions in which she has come alive for the past 400-plus years. Thirlwell gathers masses of interviews with the actors and directors who have created parts of Rosalind's ongoing life story. For this reviewer, these conversations are among the most valuable elements of the book. -VERDICT All Shakespeare fans will be eager to see what actors (e.g., Rebecca Hall, Adrian Lester, Vanessa Redgrave) and directors (e.g., Michael Attenborough, Kenneth Branagh, Greg Doran) have to say about Shakespeare's greatest female character in this novel biography.-Paul A. D'Alessandro, Brunswick, ME © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.