Paul J. Hecht: What Rosalind Likes: Pastoral, Gender and the Founding of Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022.

• Sebastian Straßburg

Paul Hecht’s monograph presents the reader with a “double biography” tracing the development of the character ‘Rosalind’ and the development of poetical form through three works from the late sixteenth century, namely Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579), Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde: Eupheus Golden Legacie (1590), and William Shakespeare’s As You Like It (first performed 1598–1600). The book connects the two by advancing the claim that “because Elizabethans conflated sex and aesthetics, their writing projects could simultaneously address both”. Hecht endeavours to connect the success of the character ‘Rosalind,’ particularly in the Shakesperean version, with the poetic evolution leading up to it. While each of the works and their poetics are treated in their own right, separately and in detail, the underlying assumption of the book is that As You Like It presents both the most fully formed and engaging ‘Rosalind’ and poetry.