As You Like It

• 1. Introduction

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  As You Like It, William Shakespeare's pastoral comedy believed written in 1599, opens not with a grand battle or a royal proclamation but with a wrestling match. A young man named Orlando steps into that ring carrying nothing but his desire to prove himself, and in that moment he catches the eye of a duke's daughter named Rosalind. What follows is one of Shakespeare's most layered explorations of disguise, desire, and what it means to belong somewhere. The play asks whether court life, with all its power and cruelty, is truly preferable to exile in the forest. It puts a woman at the center of the action and then goes further, letting her control the story while hiding in plain sight. And it gave the world one of the most quoted speeches in all of literature, delivered not by a hero but by a self-described melancholy traveler named Jaques. How did a play rooted in a prose romance from 1590 become one of Shakespeare's most frequently performed comedies? That question leads deep into Elizabethan London, an ancient English forest, and a stage whose motto echoed one of the play's own most famous lines.

• 2. Sources and Dating

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  Thomas Lodge Jr published Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie in 1590, and that work is the direct and immediate source for As You Like It. Lodge himself had drawn from an older tale known as "The Tale of Gamelyn," so by the time Shakespeare shaped this material the story had already traveled through at least two hands.

  Pinning down exactly when Shakespeare wrote the play has occupied scholars for a long time. The strongest external evidence is an entry in the Register of the Stationers' Company on the 4th of August 1600, listing the play as a work "to be stayed" - meaning publication was blocked until ownership of the copyright was settled. Thomas Morley's First Book of Ayres, published in London in 1600, contains a musical setting for the song "It was a lover and his lass" from the play, confirming it existed before that date in some form.

  The absence of the play from Francis Meres's catalogue Palladis Tamia, which surveyed Shakespeare's work up to 1598, suggests it had not yet been written by that point. The new Globe Theatre opened in the summer of 1599, and tradition holds that its motto was Totus mundus agit histrionem - "all the Globe's a stage" - a phrase that echoes Jaques' famous line from the play. Scholars working from both the external and internal evidence have generally concluded the play was composed somewhere between the end of 1598 and the middle of 1599.

  Internal clues add texture to that range. In Act III, the character Phebe quotes a line from Christopher Marlowe's Hero and Leander, a poem published posthumously in 1598. Another passage, in which Touchstone speaks about a "great reckoning in a little room", has been read as a possible allusion to the circumstances of Marlowe's death in 1593 - killed in a brawl over a bill, in a room in Deptford, in a house owned by the widow Eleanor Bull. The 1598 publication of Hero and Leander would have brought renewed attention to those events. A reference in Rosalind's speech to "Diana in the fountain" may point to an alabaster image of Diana set up in Cheapside, London, in 1598. None of these clues is conclusive on its own, but together they point toward the late 1590s as the play's moment of composition.

• 3. The Forest of Arden

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  At the heart of As You Like It sits a forest that refuses to stay in one place. Shakespeare called it the Forest of Arden, a name his source, Thomas Lodge, had already used, but the name carries several histories at once.

  The Arden edition of Shakespeare notes that the name may draw on both the classical region of Arcadia and the biblical Garden of Eden, given the play's interplay of classical and Christian philosophies. Shakespeare also likely had the French Arden Wood in mind, a location from the Italian Orlando epics Orlando Innamorato and Orlando Furioso, which have other connections to the play. In the Orlando mythos, that forest contains Merlin's Fountain, a magic spring that makes anyone who drinks from it fall out of love. The Oxford Shakespeare edition takes a different angle, treating "Arden" as an anglicisation of the forested Ardennes region spanning parts of southeast Belgium, western Luxembourg, and northeastern France.

  But the forest also conjures something closer to home. The English Forest of Arden was a vast ancient woodland stretching across a wide band of Middle England, bounded by the Roman roads of Icknield Street to the west, the Salt Road to the south, Fosse Way to the east, and Watling Street to the north. It extended as far north as the River Trent and as far south as the River Severn, taking in much of Warwickshire along with parts of Shropshire, Staffordshire, the West Midlands, and Worcestershire. Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden, was born and raised on a farm at Wilmcote, just outside Stratford-upon-Avon, on land belonging to the Arden family - a dominant Anglo-Saxon family who had retained power after the Norman Conquest and whose main quarters by the 16th century were at Park Hall, Solihull. The playwright carried that forest's name in his own family tree.

• 4. Rosalind's Disguise

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  When Duke Frederick banishes Rosalind from court, she and Celia do not simply flee. Rosalind puts on the costume of a young man and takes the name Ganymede - "Jove's own page" - while Celia becomes Aliena, a name derived from the Latin for "stranger." The court fool Touchstone accompanies them.

  In the Forest of Arden, Rosalind as Ganymede encounters Orlando, who is posting love poems for her on the trees, unaware she is standing in front of him. She persuades him to play-act a courtship in which Ganymede impersonates Rosalind. A boy actor in Shakespeare's day would therefore have been playing a girl disguised as a boy impersonating a girl. The epilogue makes this layering explicit: Rosalind's final speech to the audience states that the actor playing her is not a woman.

  Scholars have long examined what the disguise does to gender and power. Penny Gay, in her book As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women, argues that Rosalind's demanding emotional tone toward Orlando contradicts the conventions of femininity associated with qualities like "graciousness, warmth... and tenderness." Rosalind's own view, expressed in the play, is that "the wiser the woman is, the waywarder" she is. By contrast, other scholars have noted that the play's ending reasserts patriarchal structures. Kay Stanton argues that both Orlando and Rosalind share a nostalgia for a benevolent patriarchy of the past, and she points out that Celia - who across much of the play images a world shaped by female solidarity - is entirely silent during Act 5.

  The shepherdess Phebe falls in love with Ganymede despite Ganymede's clear disinterest, creating a romantic entanglement that Rosalind eventually resolves by revealing herself. Phebe had promised to marry Silvius if she could not marry Ganymede, and so the forest's tangled loves are sorted into four marriages in the final scene.

• 5. Jaques and the Seven Ages

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  Jaques is introduced weeping over the slaughter of a deer. He is a melancholy traveler, a self-styled malcontent who observes the other characters with a detached and often sardonic eye, disputing the hardships of country life even as he refuses to leave the forest.

  Act II, Scene VII, Line 139 contains the speech for which he is best remembered. It begins: "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." The monologue maps a human life onto seven acts, opening with "the infant / Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms" and ending in a "second childishness and mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." The speech's structure - life as a play, humans as actors without real agency - sits in pointed contrast to the festive energy surrounding it.

  The connection between this speech and the Globe Theatre's own motto is not accidental. Totus mundus agit histrionem, traditionally associated with the Globe, translates as "all the Globe's a stage" and echoes Jaques' line directly. The interplay was likely deliberate, and it is one reason scholars date the play to around the time of the new playhouse's opening in the summer of 1599.

  Jaques cuts off a prose dialogue with Rosalind in Act IV simply because Orlando arrives speaking verse, saying "Nay then, God be wi' you, an you talk in blank verse." At the play's end, when the restored Duke invites Jaques back to court, he declines. He chooses instead to stay in the forest and pursue a religious life alongside the newly converted Duke Frederick - a resolution that leaves him the only major figure who does not return to the world the play began with.

• 6. Music, Language, and Craft

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  Shakespeare used prose for roughly 55 percent of As You Like It, a proportion unusual for a play in which many of the central characters are aristocrats. The dramatic convention of the time required courtly characters to speak in verse and country characters in prose, but Shakespeare inverts this. Rosalind, the daughter of a duke, speaks in prose because it is, as the source suggests, the "natural and suitable" way of expressing her directness. The love scenes between Rosalind and Orlando are in prose. By contrast, the shepherd Silvius describes his love for Phebe in verse. George Bernard Shaw praised the prose as "brief and sure," finding it central to the play's appeal.

  The play is also notable for the number of songs woven into it. "Under the Greenwood Tree," sung by Amiens, articulates Duke Senior's view of country life over the comforts of the court. "Blow, blow, thou winter wind," also sung by Amiens, argues that physical suffering caused by cold is preferable to the inner suffering produced by human ingratitude. "It was a lover and his lass" serves as a prelude to the wedding ceremonies, praising springtime and suggesting the rebirth of nature. Thomas Morley, who lived in the same parish as Shakespeare and composed music for his plays, set this song as a lute song; his setting appeared in his First Book of Ayres in 1600.

  The play's songs have attracted composers across centuries. Roger Quilter set "Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind" for voice and piano in 1905. Gerald Finzi included a setting of "It was a lover and his lass" in his 1942 song cycle Let Us Garlands Bring. Donovan recorded "Under the Greenwood Tree" for his 1968 album A Gift from a Flower to a Garden. Neil Peart of Rush drew on the "All the world's a stage" speech for the lyrics of "Limelight," from the 1981 album Moving Pictures.

• 7. Staging and Adaptation

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  There is no certain record of any performance before the English Restoration. Scholars have proposed two possible dates for an early court performance, though neither is confirmed by surviving records. The earlier suggestion is Shrove Tuesday, the 20th of February 1599, at Richmond Palace before Elizabeth I, performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. The later is the 2nd of December 1603 at Wilton House, Wiltshire, the home of Mary Sidney, before King James I by what had by then been renamed the King's Men.

  During the Restoration, the play was assigned to the King's Company by royal warrant in 1669. A 1723 Drury Lane production adapted it under the title Love in a Forest, with Colley Cibber playing Jaques. A production at Drury Lane seventeen years later returned to Shakespeare's text.

  The 1936 film was Laurence Olivier's first Shakespeare film, though he appeared only as an actor playing Orlando rather than in any production role. J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, wrote the treatment. Elisabeth Bergner, wife of director Paul Czinner, played Rosalind with a thick German accent. Olivier himself did not consider the film a success.

  Helen Mirren played Rosalind in the 1978 BBC version directed by Basil Coleman. A 1992 film adaptation by Christine Edzard transposed the action to a modern, bleak urban setting, featuring James Fox and Griff Rhys Jones among its cast. Kenneth Branagh directed a 2006 adaptation set in 19th-century Japan, starring Bryce Dallas Howard, David Oyelowo, Alfred Molina, and Kevin Kline; although made for cinemas, it reached American audiences through its HBO premiere in 2007. Kevin Kline won a Screen Actors Guild Award for his performance as Jaques.

  The longest-running Broadway production starred Katharine Hepburn as Rosalind, Cloris Leachman as Celia, and Ernest Thesiger as Jaques; directed by Michael Benthall, it ran for 145 performances in 1950. Salvador Dalí created costume and set designs when Luchino Visconti directed the play at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome in 1948. Beginning in September 2026, the Royal Shakespeare Company will stage an all-male production with Jonathan Groff as Rosalind and Fisayo Akinade as Celia, directed by Daniel Evans - marking Groff's debut with the company.