Meet Shakespeare's most dominant woman out in the wild

It’s been a rough summer for Shakespeare’s women on area stages.

In “The Winter’s Tale,” the pregnant Hermione was unfairly arrested for infidelity and her baby was taken overseas and abandoned. In “Much Ado About Nothing,” the lovely Hero was unfairly accused of cheating on her fiancé on the night before her wedding. And don’t get me started on those malevolent daughters of King Lear. Misogyny abounded.

On the other hand, we saw a woman triumphantly play the dumb, deluded King Lear. And in Colorado Springs, we saw a gender-swapped version of “The Taming of the Shrew” that laid bare the general stupidity of men.

And now comes evidence that Shakespeare was ... occasionally … sort of a feminist: The lesser-known “As You Like It” features the most fully realized woman in the Shakespeare canon — and you might be surprised to learn who she is. Not Juliet, Cleopatra or Lady M. No, the largest female role in all of Shakespeare (by line count) is Rosalind of “As You Like It.” (She’s just pretending to be a man through most of it.)

Denver actor Shannon Altner will play Rosalind for a 2-year-old professional company called Shakespeare in the Wild for six (free!) outdoor performances between Aug. 18-27 in a pastoral field near the Goodson Recreation Center in Centennial.

Shakespeare in the Wild was founded by local actor Leigh Miller in 2019 but its launch was long-delayed by the pandemic. It finally bowed last summer with a True West Award-winning staging of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on a makeshift stage in a meadow in DeKoevend Park along the High Line Canal. I wrote that the setting was so perfect for its purpose “you’d swear it was plopped there by the gods.”

Like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “As You Like It” takes place in a forest – but a rather grim one. Rosalind’s father has been banished of his dukedom, and she escapes her murderous uncle by bravely exiling herself to the forest — and dressing like a man. And unlike Arden, this is a forest where all the romantic players pine for partners who pine not back. But it is a comedy, so you can be sure the story ends with four weddings – and no funerals.

Rosalind, with her wit, her pluck and her sense of heart, is without a doubt the engine of the play. For evidence, look no further than the fact that Rosalind gets the final word in “As You Like It” — making her the only female character in the entire Shakespeare canon who gets to deliver the epilogue.

The late Anne Barton, one of the 20th century’s foremost Shakespeare scholars, went so far as to say Rosalind is as central and dominating a figure in her play as Hamlet is in his own.

The director, for the second straight year, is longtime DCPA Theatre Company actor Sam Gregory.