Our instructor challenged me to rewrite what I'd said after doing some research and finding authorities who backed me up. "Find out what they say about performing Shakespeare," he said, "then try your article again."

     And so I am going to attempt exactly that.

    My big problem with the performance was twofold, first off, that they turned the moody, cynical character, Jacques, into a woman, so he became "Madame Jacques," and then, they turned the Shepherd, Silvius into a Shepherdess(Silvia), basically pushing the lesbian, feminist agenda of our time.

      There are several technical problems with the latter shift, most blatant being that the Shepherdess Phebe whom Silvius loves, scorns him for Ganymede who is actually Rosalind disguised as a boy. In the end, Ganymede convinces Phebe to marry Silvius when she reveals herself as Rosalind and a woman.
       With the Shepherd being a woman, now, there seems no reason for Phebe to marry Silvius, ahem, Silvia, when she finds out Ganymede is a woman.

       One might argue that when the Shepherdess discovers she had actually fallen in love with a woman, she could accept the thought of marrying another woman, but that completely changes the intentions of Shakespeare when he wrote the play, as is evidenced when he has Phebe say upon seeing Rosalind as herself:
                                             "If sight and shape be true,
                                             Why then, my love adieu!"

         One might twist it as he will, but in my rant I went on to make the statement the Shakespeare ought not to be twisted in any such manner, my exact wording was, "leave Shakespeare alone!"
   Sir Ronald Harwood, an An Academy Award-winning screenwriter, author and playwright 
echoes my sentiment when he says that to change something like that is "so disrespectful to the author." Harwood is pretty well known for being opposed to Gender blind casting, "It's a political form of casting," he says, "which I'm deeply against." In other places, Harwood speaks more to this dislike with the statements that the author, be it Shakespeare or anyone else(he used King Lear as an example), creates a character with a gender, and that gender cannot be separated from the character.

           As for my first problem with Jacques becoming a woman, I simply found the character bland as a woman. To me, the part was so obviously meant for a man. This I say at risk of being called a chump once more, but I think Sir Harwood would agree with me here. I know if I wrote a play with five men and  two women, I would be outraged if someone tried to turn one of my men into a woman, or vice-versa. Harwood himself was very particular about not having any cross-genders in his own plays.

         I think  Mike Lawson who is a writer for the Guardian sums it up well when he says,
    
    "cross-dressed or cross-cast Shakespeare seems more likely to be problematic than enlightening. The two best justifications for the practice are a relative shortage of major roles for women and a desire to freshen up overfamiliar texts. Yet, although Peake played Ophelia to Christopher Ecclestone’s Hamlet at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and was Doll Tearsheet in a TV adaptation of Henry IV, she has far from exhausted the female Shakespearean canon. And, if the governing aim of a production is to make the play seem different, perhaps those involved ought to be doing a different play."

    This is true on both counts. There may be more roles for men, but this does not negate the fact that women have plenty of wonderful female roles to choose from in Shakespeare. And I know, if I want to go see something different, I'll do that, but when I go to see Shakespeare I fully expect to see Shakespeare as Shakespeare wrote it, not someone else's concoction of it.

no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no
epilogue; yet to good wine they do use good bushes,
and good plays prove the better by the help of good
epilogues"
                                

           
     In the end, I retract none of what I said in that rant, I simply add a bit more sensible authority to my argument. However, I must remind you that there is little use in argument, when, it seems, this whole kerfuffle is one of sentiment rather than sense. I feel bound to say with Puck, "What fools these mortals be."
   What fools we all are. And yet, God still loves us and takes delight in us anyway. What a glorious prospect!

          ~ Christianna