Rosalind: Shakespeare’s Immortal Heroine

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.)