Gender in Translation: English and French Versions of As You Like It and their Offshoots

The multiple gender shifts in Shakespeare’s As You Like It offer a special challenge to French translators. In the standard translation, Comme il vous plaira, the first-person speeches of Rosalind have to be continually adapted in their grammatical mode to match the gender masks of the role as it develops. In addition, the linguistic changes in the French version seem to reach into a deeper dimension of the figure than the mere cross-dressing game of the original. This inspired Théophile Gautier to create the complex Rosalind figure of the novel Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1834. His psychological interpretation might, in turn, have contributed to Patricia Duncker’s novelistic version of a case of transvestism, also associated with Shakespeare’s Rosalind, in her biographical fiction James Miranda Barry (1999). Again, the English texts of both novels present more playful versions of the gender change than their essentializing French analogues.