SOURCE: "Mixed Gender, Mixed Genre in Shakespeare's As You Like It" in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, edited by Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Harvard University Press, 1986, pp. 189-212.

In the following essay, Bono offers a feminist analysis of As You Like It and contends that the play "represent(s) both the masculine struggle for identity and a female 'double-voiced' discourse"—the latter implying that the feminine simultaneously adopts and derides the conventions of a dominant male culture.

Does Shakespeare's preoccupation, especially in the comedies, with strong female characters and an underlying complex of "feminine" concerns—sexuality and familial and domestic life—provide evidence for what Juliet Dusinberre calls a "feminism of Shakespeare's time"?¹ Or does the same evidence indicate male projections of what women must be, what Madelon Gohlke terms a "matriarchal substratum or subtext within the patriarchal text" that "is not feminist," but rather "provide...