Rosalind: A Biography of Shakespeare’s Immortal Heroine

Into the spotlight steps Rosalind, the actor-manager of As You Like It.

She’s alive. She’s modern. She’s also a fiction.

Played by a boy actor in 1599, she’s a girl who gets into men’s clothes to investigate the truth about love.

Both male and female, imaginary and real, her intriguing duality gives her a special role.

What is a man? What is a woman?

We are all Rosalind now.

This book is for everyone who has ever loved Shakespeare. In April 2016, his quatercentenary makes Shakespeare more alive than at any time since his death in 1616. Like Rosalind, his most innovative heroine, he can never die. She too is timeless. There is no clock in the Forest of Arden where Rosalind finds herself and applies her mercurial wit to teach her lover, Orlando, how to become her perfect partner, issues which consume men and women today.

This highly original ‘biography’ of Rosalind contains exclusive new interviews with Adrian Lester, Ronald Pickup, Juliet Rylance, Sally Scott, Janet Suzman, Juliet Stevenson, Michelle Terry and award-winning director Blanche McIntyre, as well as insights from Michael Attenborough, Michael Billington, Michael Boyd, Kenneth Branagh, Alan Cumming, Greg Doran, Ian McKellen, Jodie McNee, Pippa Nixon, Vanessa Redgrave, Fiona Shaw, Meera Syal and Harriet Walter.

Angela Thirlwell explores the fictitious life and the many after-lives of Rosalind, Shakespeare’s progressive new heroine, and her perennial

influence on drama, fiction and art. The book ranges widely across Tudor history, theatre history, sexual politics, autobiography, art history and filmography.