"Rosalind and Celia as the Victorians Liked Them: Womanly Heroines in the Forest of Arden"

In this essay I discuss a number of narrative remediations of As You Like It written in the Victorian and Edwardian periods, and addressed primarily to female child and teenage readers. I focus primarily on Mary Cowden Clarke’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1850-52) and a selection of narrative adaptations written in the short-story format made popular by the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare (1807). While Cowden Clarke’s prequel depicts a fictional world in which female friendship is both a protection and a trigger for female agency, a world in which men are either authoritarian, distant from or cruel to their wives and sisters, the tales in the Lambs’ tradition are more explicitly tributary to a folktale configuration. They use to great advantage those tropes that are already present in the play: the sibling rivalry, the forest setting, and emphasize the characters’ moral polarization. The Victorian ambivalence between female modesty in the private sphere and independent and vocal womanhood in the public sphere, which was worrying Victorian society to some degree, seems to have been projected and made more acceptable in all these retellings which inevitably end up appearing far more Victorian than early modern in the way female characters combine domesticity with intellectual vivacity, initiative with well breeding, and agency with propriety.