Tomorrow we open As You Like It. I should out myself here as a person who, despite having a love for it, is not well-versed in the Shakespeare canon. The only play I have read that was not for an audition is Taming of the Shrew, which I read in eleventh grade with the only English teacher in history who didn’t find me a pleasure to have in class. As You Like It is a weird one. It wanders—loosely held together by the main lovers Rosalind and Orlando—tripping through the forest of Arden where exiled courtiers and resident countryfolk meet and make merry. I play Celia, daughter of the usurping Duke and Rosalind’s devoted, if temperamental, cousin.
Celia marks the third Shakespeare lady I’ve played professionally. As with her predecessors, she invokes a set of questions around love: who or what am I loving? How? Am I being loved in return? What am I sacrificing? I have noticed that in comedies with multiple sets of lovers there is a tension between the love the women have for each other and the love they bear to men. Though all comedies end in marriage, often the bulk of development goes to the women’s friendships forcing the final love plot, as is the case with Celia and Oliver, to a few monologues. Beatrice, Helena, and Celia are all designated “lovers,” but I have always found my way in via their relationships with their women counterparts.
Working on Midsummer last year, I was baffled by Helena’s love. She chases a man through the forest—a man who has broken their engagement to propose to her richer, hotter best friend—begging him for less than crumbs.
Use me but as your spaniel: spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
Girl. I could only approach her through her love for Hermia: a best-friendship so transcendent it renders them “like two artificial gods,” and yet warped by a jealous covetousness on Helena’s part and naive disregard on Hermia’s. This I could understand. The if I can’t have what you have, at least I have you that can creep into the way girls love each other. Beatrice from Much Ado was similarly easy to slip into by way of her relationship with her sweet cousin Hero. Beatrice emotionally blackmails her suitor to challenge his best friend to death for breaking Hero’s heart; I too have publicly threatened to do bodily harm to certain friend’s exes. Where Helena’s love for Hermia was rapacious and for Demetrius determined; and Beatrice’s for Hero was protective and for Benedick inevitable; Celia’s abiding love for Rosalind and love-at-first-sight for Oliver seems more closely tied.
We are told again and again that Rosalind and Celia share an unbreakable bond: “never two ladies loved as they do.” Yet, from Celia’s own mouth there are constant pleas to be loved better, reminders to Rosalind of who they are to each other. I could read her as clingy and move on but that didn’t quite account for the undercurrent of insecurity and, at times, low-grade hostility. Unlike with Beatrice and Helena, Celia was better revealed to me by way of her marriage plot. She falls in love with Oliver (Orlando’s formerly fratricidal brother) on sight. This from a woman who, in response to the question “what think you of falling in love?” answered, “love no man in good earnest.” What would compel that kind of person to fall in love so fast? I considered what she might be lacking—she has love enough from Rosalind, she has status, a hidden princess is a princess nonetheless—but I realized that Celia wants to be a priority in someone’s eyes. Her father loves her, but he chooses his kingdom. Rosalind loves her, but she chooses Orlando. Oliver has abdicated his throne; he’s abandoned ruthless ambition and thus is positioned to love Celia first above all else which is what she has been asking for from the beginning. There are a lot of judgements we can make against that, but it doesn’t make it less true.
While in-process, I try not to psychoanalyze roles any deeper than what is needed to play in the world. So I’ll leave Celia alone and look at myself. There is an assumption, I think, that anything we find out about ourselves that does not stem from a perfectly self-loving, self-sufficient (but not isolationist) root ought to be “fixed;” and that knowledge of something is mastery over it which will eventually lead to the ultimate promise land: optimization. This week I had to reckon with some things about myself (cue my mom recommending a podcast about attachment styles) immutable things that I have sought to stamp out. But perhaps they are just Mia things, not to be used as an excuse to be shitty, but also not things I must continuously try to improve for the sake of being without any trace of personal failing. I love my Shakespeare girls in part because they aren’t preoccupied with bettering themselves. They are jealous and prideful, desperate and clamoring. They weaponize their intelligence. They are very funny. They undergo personal transformation, but as the natural consequence of actively pursuing what they want, not from an anxious obsession with being good.
You make me want to read more Shakespeare and pay more attention to the females!
the best compliment!!