As You Like It

work by Shakespeare

Written by

David Bevington

Fact-checked by

Britannica Editors

History

As You Like It, five-act comedy by William Shakespeare, written and performed about 1598–1600 and first published in the First Folio of 1623. Shakespeare based the play on Rosalynde (1590), a prose romance by Thomas Lodge.

Quoting the Dead Shepherd (Act III, Scene 5)

The play includes a direct quotation from Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. The shepherdess Phoebe, smitten by Rosalind’s male alter ego, Ganymede, remarks on her sudden infatuation in an aside:

Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might:

“Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”

“Dead shepherd” is a reference to Marlowe’s poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” with the adjective “dead” acknowledging Marlowe’s death in 1593, before As You Like It is supposed to have been performed. The line “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?” is from Marlowe’s narrative poem Hero and Leander.

The play has two principal settings: the court that Frederick has usurped from his brother, the rightful duke (known as Duke Senior), and the Forest of Arden, where the Duke and his followers (including the disgruntled Jaques) are living in exile.

Plot

Conflict at court

Rosalind, the Duke’s daughter, who is still at court, falls in love with Orlando, who has been denied by his older brother Oliver the education and upbringing that should have been Orlando’s right as a gentleman. To escape Oliver’s murderous hatred, Orlando flees to the Forest of Arden with his faithful old servant Adam. Soon Rosalind is banished, too, merely for being the daughter of the out-of-favor Duke. She flees to Arden, accompanied by her cousin Celia and the jester Touchstone.

Forest of Arden sequence

“All the world's a stage”Jaques delivers the most famous monologue of the play, which begins with “All the world's a stage” (Act II, scene 7). Performed by John Gielgud; from a recording made about 1930.

Orlando, desperate to find food for himself and Adam, accosts the Duke’s company in the forest and is surprised to be welcomed. The Duke’s ensuing remark on human suffering, comparing the world to a theater, prompts one of his noblemen, Jaques, to muse:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

Cross-Dressing and the Role of Rosalind

Female roles in plays in England before 1660 were performed by boys whose voices had not yet deepened. The character of Rosalind, then, would have been portrayed by a boy playing a woman who disguises herself as a man and pretends to be a woman for part of the play, creating a layered comedy that hinges on the use of cross-dressing as a theatrical convention and plot device.

Disguised as a young man named Ganymede, Rosalind encounters Orlando, lovesick for his Rosalind, and promises to cure him of his lovesickness by pretending to be that very Rosalind, so that Orlando will learn something of what women are really like. Oliver appears in the forest intending to kill Orlando, but when Orlando saves his brother from a hungry lioness and a snake, Oliver experiences deep remorse. He then falls in love with Celia, who had been disguised as a peasant. The revelation of the young women’s true identities precipitates a group wedding ceremony. When word arrives that Frederick has repented, the Duke’s exile comes to an end.

A group of forest inhabitants—William, Audrey, Silvius, and Phoebe—and the courtier Le Beau round out the cast of characters, and an abundance of song complements the play’s amorous theme and idyllic forest setting. The play is considered one of Shakespeare’s “great” or “middle” comedies.

For a discussion of this play within the context of Shakespeare’s entire corpus, see William Shakespeare: Shakespeare’s plays and poems.

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