ABSTRACT
Recent critical work on Shakespeare's comic disguise plots has centered on resolving the question of whether they destabilize sexual boundaries by engendering cross-dressed heroines who expose the constructedness of gender, or whether they ultimately reinforce those boundaries by operating toward restoring the heroines to socially prescribed sexual identities. This is a question that often occasions considering the theatrical convention of boy actors performing all female roles. Laura Mulvey further proposes that the male star, who is often as much the object of focus as the female, provides an ego ideal for the centralized male viewer. Mulvey's notions seem applicable to Paul Czinner's As You Like It, but they are most so when the gender of the central gaze is reversed. Once inside the forest, the film centralizes Rosalind's gaze while making Orlando a somewhat bumbling, if well-meaning, participant in her games and an object of surveillance.
