On a practical level, what's up with the cross-dressing?

"I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind and come every day to my cote and woo me" (As You Like It, III.ii.45).

Let's talk about dramatic suspense.

At first, suspense occurs as the audience worries about the fate of Orlando with a crazy Duke and Oliver coming after him, but I'm not going to talk about that. Once we get past that, we find suspense as Rosalind forms this weird plan in her mind to . . . I'm not really sure I understood her methods throughout the play. I mean, she got what she wanted in the end, but I feel like there must have been an easier way to do it than cross-dressing.

My point is that Rosalind knows how she's going to end up with Orlando and even how she's going to get three other couples to get married by the play's end. We, as the audience, don't know what exactly is going to happen because while we get a lot of information from Rosalind, we can't read her mind like we can in some literature. There's a discrepancy between what Rosalind knows about her plan and what the audience knows about her plan, and since the audience increasingly learns more and more details of Rosalind's scheme, suspense is created.

Let me point out one more suspenseful thing, here. "Let your wedding be tomorrow" (V.ii.69). "To-morrow meet me all together" (V.ii.71). "To-morrow is the joyful day, Audrey; to-morrow will we be married" (V.iii.72). With the repetition of the word "tomorrow" (with or without a hyphen), I got pretty excited about tomorrow. And I think that tomorrow lived up to all the hype -- the ending was very happy. A little too happy for me, maybe. The real question is . . . did Avatar live up to the hype? Man, I'm full of Parks and Rec references tonight.