Voice, Ideology, and Gendered Subjects: The Case of As You Like It and Two Gentlemen

Abstract

JN AS YOU LIKE I1, JAQUES 'S GLOOMY, URBANE SPEECH on the seven ages of life, lending with the body teeth, sans eyes, sans everything (2.7.139-66), is answered-silently-by Orlando's act of carrying in the starving Adam, a vassal-like servant who has given up his home and life savings to rescue his young master.1 He is to be honored with the first food at supper in the forest of exile. Like a plate of eucharistic bread himself, this redeemer is held aloft-so faire, and yet so old (to borrow an Augustinian phrase about God from Aemilia Lanyer).2 A voiced utterance then anti-voiced iconic response have occurred. Old is transubstantiated into a new Adam in an act that also transmutes the young nobleman into a sacredly right and proper aristocrat, upholder of his people and lands. This interaction is alien to most modern academics and theater people, the likely readers of this essay. Yet we feel it marking some point of value keyed to the world of the play's first production, as it consummates the relationship between master and servant that has evolved from their duologue scenes. After this, vanishes from the plot as if he had ascended bodily into heaven. If we want to make contact with this moment of Shakespeare's own theater, we should touch base with this point of valorizing: think of a from the sci-fi film Blade Runner, with implanted memory and a life expectancy of four adult years, no aging, then sudden death. What would a replicant say about the subjectivity here enacted? What would Slavoj Zizek say, out of his Hegelian fascination with the replicants and their unpredicted full subjectivity?3 I might ask, am I more like a replicant or more like the viewer-subject called into being by this scene in the forest, soaked in feudal traditions of sacral aristocratic maleness? I might be just enough the latter to feel how a whole household could dote on their lord's boy, the longed-for heir, emerging from puberty with male thighs and voice, and gracefully accepting an manservant's loyalty. How did the members of an Elizabethan audience, male and female, speak and perceive themselves as subjects? I will pursue this question both practically and theoretically. As for the elevating of Adam, its iconic action is akin to that in the Book of Judges, as studied by the Dutch semiotic feminist Mieke Bal. For instance, in the story where a man travels with his patrilocal wife from her father's house and stops over in a town where a gang demands him as victim for group rape, their host instead sends out the wife, whom they rape and beat to death. In the morn-