SOURCE: Shapiro, Michael. “Layers of Disguise: As You Like It.” In Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages, pp. 119-42. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Shapiro analyzes the device of the cross-gender disguise in Shakespeare's As You Like It, as well as in the plays of some of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

Even more ingenious than adding a second or third heroine in cross-gender disguise, as Shakespeare did in The Merchant of Venice, is having the cross-dressed heroine take on a second cross-gender disguise. It would be as if Balthazar, Portia's disguised male alter ego, adopted female disguise. Such a second cross-gender disguise would reverse the direction of the gender change of the first and intensify what was already a highly reflexive situation, for in representing a woman, the female page would be repeating in the world of the play...