When a couple is contradicting expected gender roles in Western society, socially ignorant folks often ask the question 'who wears the pants in that relationship?' Those pants, particularly in the trouser roles of William Shakespeare's great works, have cause caused a shift in the public's perception of the gender binary. This binary is also being questioned by social, biological, literary, and cultural scientists. However, these recent analyses of the gender binary hardly consider early literary influences when discussing the presence of gender nonconformity, even though Shakespeare's characters are the most amply examples of gender nonconforming behavior. In the play As You Like It (AYLI), the characters Orlando and Rosalind portray correlations to gender non-conformity, and provide a framework in which gender non-conformity can be perceived as a character advantage. This presentation will discuss how Orlando and Rosalind's behaviors can be perceived as successful, in that they escape the confines of binary gender behavior, thus progressing the conceptualization of what it means to be a successful man/woman/human.
