As You Like It
William Shakespeare (1599)
“Shakespeare's wittiest heroine disguises herself as a man, teaches her own lover how to love her, and dismantles every romantic convention while building the greatest comedy in the English language.”
At a Glance
Rosalind, daughter of the banished Duke Senior, is exiled from court by the usurping Duke Frederick. She disguises herself as a young man named Ganymede, flees to the Forest of Arden with her cousin Celia and the fool Touchstone, and discovers that Orlando — the man she loves — is also hiding there, pinning love poems to trees. As Ganymede, Rosalind convinces Orlando to practice his courtship on her, creating a layered game of identity in which she is simultaneously the object, the teacher, and the critic of romantic love. In the Forest, multiple couples form, the melancholy Jacques philosophizes about human futility, and pastoral life is tested against courtly reality. The play resolves with Rosalind shedding her disguise, four marriages, and a reformed Duke Frederick who abandons his usurpation after a religious conversion in the forest.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
As You Like It contains Shakespeare's most fully realized comic heroine, his most famous statement about theater and human identity ('All the world's a stage'), and the English language's most sophisticated exploration of gender as performance. Rosalind has more lines than any other female character in Shakespeare and controls the play's plot more completely than any other comic protagonist. The play essentially invented the romantic comedy structure — meet, obstacle, disguise, revelation, marriage — that Western storytelling has been using for four centuries.
Diction Profile
Unusually prose-heavy for Shakespeare — the Forest of Arden operates in prose as the language of freedom, wit, and fluid identity, with verse reserved for court scenes, pastoral convention, and ceremonial moments
Moderate