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A
s You Like It is one of
Shakespeare’s most
enduringly popular plays.
It forays into the beautiful Forest of
Arden for an interlude full of light
romance and wit, philosophical
speculation, and broad comedy. In
the clever, ardent, playful Rosalind,
who spends her time in Arden
dressed as the boy Ganymede, it
has an engaging central character.
Strangely, though, very little
happens in As You Like It. Two
young people, Rosalind and
Orlando, run away to the Forest of
Arden to escape difficult relatives—
Rosalind fleeing her uncle Duke
Frederick, who usurped the power
of her father (who’s already fled to
the forest), and Orlando from his
brother Oliver, who connives to have
him killed, form a rather paper-thin
plot. In the forest, Rosalind, dressed
as Ganymede, teaches Orlando the
ways of love and meets various folk.
After a few misunderstandings,
Rosalind and Orlando get married,
along with three other couples who
also found romance in the forest, and
all family differences are resolved.
And this is all that happens.AS YOU LIKE IT
Romantic nonsense?
The Irish playwright George
Bernard Shaw thought the play
so flimsy that he dismissed it as
a silly crowd-pleaser. The title
“As You Like It,” Shaw suggested,
was just Shakespeare throwing
back at the audience their taste
for such romantic nonsense. But
although As You Like It has had
a checkered historical reception,
most critics now agree that
Shaw missed the point. It really
is a clever, sophisticated play.
While it is more wholeheartedly
entertaining perhaps than any
other of Shakespeare’s plays, it
is still packed full of ideas and
insights into life and love. The
title, far from being a throwaway,
is perhaps both a celebration of
the joy of theater, and an invitation
to be open-minded. As the Royal
Shakespeare Company put it,
“Gender roles, nature, and politics
are confused in a play that reflects
on how bewildering yet utterly
pleasurable life can be.”IN CONTEXT
THEMES
Love, romance, mortalitySETTING
The French court
and the Forest of
Ardennes (in Belgium)
or Arden (in England)SOURCES
1590 Thomas Lodge’s prose
tale Rosalynde.LEGACY
1603 As You Like It may
have been performed for
King James I.1723 Charles Johnson’s
filleted version, Love in a
Forest, appears, with scenes
from other Shakespeare
plays added.1741– 57 Irish actress Peg
Woffington plays Rosalind on
the London stage for 16 years.1879 A production at
Stratford-upon-Avon features
a freshly killed deer from a
Warwickshire forest.1961 British director Michael
Elliott’s production for the
RSC stars Vanessa Redgrave
as a boyish Rosalind.
1977 German director Peter
Stein stages a large-scale
promenade production in Berlin.1996 Kenneth Branagh’s film
version relocates the action
to a European colony in
19th-century Japan.2013 A contemporary youth
version by Maria Aberg for the
RSC features music by folk
musician Laura Marling.What passion hangs these
weights upon my tongue?
I cannot speak to her, yet she
urged conference.
Orlando
Act 1, Scene 2In 1950, Hollywood star Katharine
Hepburn took on the part of Rosalind.
She said of the role that it is “one of the
great tests of how good an actress you
are, and I wanted to find out.”