What Rosalind Likes Pastoral, Gender, and the Founding of English Verse
Shows how the character called Rosalind, who features in works by Spenser, Lodge, and Shakespeare, can be considered as a single and unifying character whose textual appearances lead us to reconsider important aspects of Renaissance literature: prosody, the influence of Virgil and of pastoral poetry, and the position of women.
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What Rosalind Likes begins with the strange ferocity of Elizabethan responses to poetry: a woman named Rosalind expresses scorn for a shepherd's poems, and a character in a play loses his temper and storms off stage at the sound of a blank verse line. What are these people so angry about? Thus begins a journey into a world where the details of poetic form and vagaries of Latin translation are caught up in the dynamics of gender, sexuality, class, and race, and power, where too much alliteration, for example, could destabilize your gender or pose a threat to national security. Situated in the crucial final two decades of the sixteenth century, What Rosalind Likes takes three figures named "Rosalind" in works by Spenser (The Shepheardes Calender), Lodge (Rosalynde), and Shakespeare (As You Like It) to create a new approach to literary history and feminist criticism.
