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.”
As You Like It— Summary & Analysis
by William Shakespeare · published 1599 · 80 pages · Renaissance / Elizabethan
A user-friendly study guide for As You Like It by William Shakespeare (1599): a high-level plot summary, full chapter-by-chapter analysis, theme breakdowns, character profiles, and 30 essay questions designed for high-school, ap-english, college readers. Unlike a stock summary, sumsumsum.com adds a diction analysis drawn from William Shakespeare’s actual text, the 4 documented AP Literature exam appearances of this book, and reading-difficulty guidance (Easy, 3/10) so students, teachers, and lifelong readers know what they are walking into.
“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.”
Short 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.
Detailed Summary
The play begins at the court of Duke Frederick, who has banished his older brother Duke Senior and seized power. Duke Senior now lives in the Forest of Arden with a band of loyal followers, living a rustic life that the play presents as both genuinely attractive and slightly ridiculous. Orlando de ...
Chapter-by-Chapter Analysis
If you liked As You Like It, read next
Start with The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde — Wilde's comedy of double identities and performed sincerity is the direct descendant of Shakespeare's disguise comedies. Both plays argue that performance and authenticity are inseparable — you can be most yourself when pretending to be someone else..
For comparative essays, pair As You Like It with
The strongest comparative pairing is Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) — Elizabeth Bennet is Rosalind's literary descendant — a heroine who is smarter than every man in the room, who uses wit as both weapon and diagnostic tool, and who insists on being loved as a full person rather than an idealized image. Austen acknowledged Shakespeare's comedies as a primary influence..
Each of these pairings opens a clean thesis path on shared themes, period diction, or formal influence — useful for AP Lit / IB / first-year college comparative essays.
More from William Shakespeare and the scholars who study Shakespeare
Other works by William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream (1596, 80 pages), Hamlet (1600, 120 pages), Henry V (1599, 90 pages), Julius Caesar (1599, 90 pages). Reading two or three of these in sequence reveals William Shakespeare’s recurring obsessions and stylistic signatures more clearly than any single book can.
The standard scholarly entry points to William Shakespeare’s work: Stephen Greenblatt (Harvard, Cogan University Professor) — Will in the World (2004); Harold Bloom (Yale, Sterling Professor) — Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998); James Shapiro (Columbia, Larry Miller Professor) — 1599: A Year in the Life of Shakespeare (2005). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching William Shakespeare.