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It is not the fashion to see the lady the epilogue; but it is no more unhandsome than to see the lord the prologue. If it be true that good wine needs 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. What a case am I in then, that am neither a good epilogue nor cannot insinuate with you in the behalf of a good play! I am not furnished like a beggar, therefore to beg will not become me. My way is to conjure you; and I’ll begin with the women. I charge you, O women, for the love you bear to men, to like as much of this play as please you. And I charge you, O men, for the love you bear to women—as I perceive by your simpering none of you hates them— that between you and the women the play may please. If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.
(Epilogue, 1 –19 ).
The Epilogue was a standard component
of Elizabethan drama. One actor remains onstage after the play has
ended to ask the audience for applause. As Rosalind herself notes,
it is odd that she has been chosen to deliver the Epilogue, as that
task is usually assigned to a male character. By the time she addresses
the audience directly, Rosalind has discarded her Ganymede disguise.
She is again a woman and has married a man. Although we may think
the play of gender has come to an end with the fall of the curtain,
we must remember that women were forbidden to perform onstage in Shakespeare’s
England. Rosalind would have been played by a man, which further
obscures the boundaries of gender. Rosalind emerges as a man who
pretends to be a woman who pretends to be a man who pretends to
be a woman to win the love of a man. When the actor solicits the
approval of the men in the audience, he says, “If I were a woman
I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me”— returning
us to the dizzying intermingling of homosexual and heterosexual
affections that govern life in the Forest of Ardenne (Epilogue,
