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.”
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As You Like It
William Shakespeare (1599) · 80pages · Renaissance / Elizabethan · 4 AP appearances
Summary
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.
Why It 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 charac...
Themes & Motifs
Diction & Style
Register: 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
Narrator: As a play, there is no narrator — but Rosalind functions as the play's controlling intelligence. She narrates her own...
Figurative Language: Moderate
Historical Context
Elizabethan England, 1599 — late Renaissance, pastoral literary vogue, the Globe Theatre's opening year: The play is impossible without the Elizabethan convention of boy actors playing women. Rosalind's disguise as Ganymede is not just a plot device — it is a theatrical event that exploits the audienc...
Key Characters
Talking Points
- Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede and then has Orlando court her-as-Ganymede-as-Rosalind. How many layers of identity and performance are operating in their wooing scenes? Map each layer and explain what each one reveals about the nature of love.
- Jacques says 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.' Immediately after this speech, Orlando enters carrying old Adam on his back. How does Orlando's entrance undercut or complicate Jacques's philosophy?
- Rosalind tells Orlando: 'Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.' Is she right? What is she trying to teach Orlando, and why does she need the Ganymede disguise to teach it?
- Compare the four marriages at the end of the play: Orlando-Rosalind, Oliver-Celia, Silvius-Phebe, Touchstone-Audrey. What does each marriage represent about a different kind of love? Are they all equally convincing?
- The Forest of Arden is often described as a utopia — a perfect alternative to the corrupt court. But is it? Find evidence that the forest is imperfect, uncomfortable, or morally complicated.
Notable Quotes
“O, what a world is this, when what is comely / Envenoms him that bears it!”
“Now go we in content / To liberty, and not to banishment.”
“Were it not better, / Because that I am more than common tall, / That I did suit me all points like a man?”
Why Read This
Because Rosalind is the smartest person in Shakespeare. She is funnier than Beatrice, more self-aware than Viola, more in control of her plot than any of the tragic heroes, and she does it all while disguised as someone she is not. The play reads ...