SOURCE: "The Gender of Rosalind," in The Gender of Rosalind: Interpretations: Shakespeare, Buchner, Gautier, Northwestern University Press, 1992, pp. 11-40.

In the following essay, Kott probes the structural, thematic, and historical components of Rosalind's ambiguous gender in As You Like It.

On the Elizabethan stage the roles of young girls and even mature women were played by fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boys, always of course before their voices changed. The boy actor must have been like the onnagata in the traditional Kabuki. In the Japanese theater the convention is never bared onstage or the illusion abruptly suspended. In Shakespeare's theater, however, at least on two occasions the convention is suddenly unveiled for a brief moment; dramatic illusion is transformed into "theater in the theater," and as in Brecht's alienation effect theatrical time for that moment becomes audience time, and the performer who represents the role is not the he, or...