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It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue, but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs no bush, ‘tis true that a good play needs no epilogue. Yet to good wine they do use good bushes, and good plays prove the better by the help of good epilogues. What a case am I in then that am neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! I am not furnished like a beggar; therefore to beg will not become me. My way is to conjure you, and I’ll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women—as I perceive by your simpering none of you hates them—that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.
(Epilogue, lines 1–22)
The epilogue was a standard component of Elizabethan drama, in which one actor would remain onstage after the play has ended to ask the audience for applause. As Rosalind herself notes, however, it is odd that she has been chosen to deliver the epilogue, as that task was usually assigned to a male character. By the time she addresses the audience directly, Rosalind has discarded her disguise and is again a woman. Yet because women were forbidden to perform onstage in Shakespeare’s England, Rosalind—even in her female form—would have been played by a man. Thus, the fluidity of gender explored throughout As You Like It continues even after the play has formally concluded. Shakespeare includes a cheeky joke about this ongoing gender play when he has Rosalind say, “If I were a woman.” Here, Rosalind adopts the same hypothetical “if” she put to such impressive use during the play. Now, however, the “if” has a metafictional power, drawing attention to the sex of the real actor who has been playing Rosalind, who has in turn played a character named Ganymede, who then pretended to be “Rosalind.”
For an Elizabethan audience, all this gender fluidity would have been both amusing and unsettling. It was all right for gender boundaries to blur in Arden, a space of fantasy where the norms of society may be temporarily suspended. But now that all the characters have been restored to their “actual” sex and have paired off in appropriate heterosexual unions, the time for gender play should have come to an end. Yet Rosalind’s epilogue clearly prolongs it in a destabilizing way. One explanation for this might be that Rosalind’s epilogue carries forward the trope of life itself as a theatrical performance. Another might be that Shakespeare wished to leave the audience with one last touch of Rosalind’s playful spirit. After all, it is precisely Rosalind’s gender play that has, perhaps counterintuitively, ensured that all the characters end up in an ideal love match. In this regard, Rosalind’s epilogue, despite continuing to foreground gender instability, does effectively normative gender boundaries. Hence Rosalind’s separate appeal to the “women” and “men” of the audience to applaud, and to recognize the affection they each hold for the “opposite” sex.
