Ganymede

In this extract from Shakespeare’s “As you like it”, act 4, scene 3, Rosalind, posing as Ganymede, receives a letter from a love-struck yet scolding Phoebe, delivered by her Petrarchan lover, Silvius. This pivotal scene it is the pinnacle of the disordered society in “As you like it”, due to the topsy-turvy gender dynamics. At the end of this passage, Rosalind instructs Phoebe to marry Silvius, to whom she is better suited, for Silvius loves her, despite her lack of beauty (QUOTE) and he is of the same social standing. This order marks the beginning of a return to Elizabethan conformity; by the end of the play, the characters have married partners that would have been thought of as suitable owing to their class or gender.
Gender roles are tangled and blurred in this scene. The female Rosalind, posing as the male Ganymede, is the dominant force throughout this extract and is fully immersed in her role as a man, somewhat demonstrated by the change in her tone when reading the letter from Phoebe. Furthermore she displays more …show more content…
She speaks in prose, unlike most nobles in Shakespeare’s plays, showing further how she wishes to present herself as the lower class Ganymede and her emotions are conveyed by the use of vocabulary. There is a clear change is Rosalind’s mood as she reads the letter and as the passage progresses; depending on the actor’s interpretation, her feelings could be said to span from disbelief, shown by her outburst when reading the letter, (“can a woman rail thus”), anger, directed at Silvius (“he deserves no pity”) and Phoebe (“mark