As You Like It Summary: Shakespeare's Forest Comedy Explained
What As You Like It is about
As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1599 and first published in the First Folio in 1623. It begins at a court that has gone wrong. Duke Frederick has usurped the duchy from his older brother, Duke Senior, who now lives in exile in the Forest of Arden with a band of supporters. Rosalind, Duke Senior's daughter, has been allowed to stay behind at court only because she is the closest friend of Frederick's own daughter, Celia.
Two things break that fragile arrangement. Orlando, a young gentleman persecuted by his older brother Oliver, falls in love with Rosalind on first sight and is then forced to flee his home. Frederick, in a fit of anger, banishes Rosalind from court. Rather than lose each other, Rosalind and Celia leave together, taking the court fool Touchstone with them. Rosalind disguises herself as a young man called Ganymede and Celia poses as a poor girl named Aliena, Latin for stranger.
Everything after that happens in Arden. The forest is where exiles, lovers, shepherds and fools all end up in the same few fields, and where the rules of the court stop applying. Orlando arrives with his old servant Adam, joins the exiled Duke's company, and starts pinning simple love poems to Rosalind on the trees. Rosalind, still in disguise, meets him and offers to cure him of love by having him practise his courtship on Ganymede, who will stand in for Rosalind. She is counselling the man she loves on how to woo her, while he has no idea who he is talking to.
The main characters
Rosalind is the centre of the play and one of Shakespeare's largest female roles. She is quick, funny and in control of nearly every scene she enters, and the disguise gives her a freedom of speech the court never allowed her. Celia is her cousin and her constant, the one who chooses exile over comfort rather than be separated from her.
Orlando is the honest, slightly plodding romantic lead, good-hearted and better at wrestling than at verse. Touchstone, the fool, provides the sharp commentary and a comic courtship of his own with the dull-witted shepherdess Audrey, seeing off a rival shepherd named William with a threat to kill him a hundred and fifty ways.
Then there is Jaques, the melancholy traveller, who is often the reason people remember the play. He is introduced weeping over the slaughter of a deer, and he spends the comedy observing, disputing and refusing to be cheered up. He speaks one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches, the one beginning "All the world's a stage", and acts as a deliberate counterweight to everyone else's happiness. The countryside is filled out by Corin, an impoverished tenant whose master's cottage Rosalind and Celia buy, the lovesick shepherd Silvius, and the shepherdess Phebe, who ignores Silvius and falls hopelessly in love with Ganymede.
The themes
Identity runs through the whole play. Rosalind in disguise is not simply hiding; she is testing what she can say and do when she is read as a man, and the comedy keeps asking whether love attaches to a person or to a role. Phebe's infatuation with Ganymede makes the question funnier and sharper.
Freedom is the other engine. Court life in the play is a place of usurpation, envy and sudden banishment. Arden is the opposite, a loose and tolerant space where a duke lives like a woodsman and a fool can marry a shepherdess. Shakespeare is not sentimental about it. Corin's poverty is real, the weather is hard, and Jaques is always on hand to point out what the pastoral mood conveniently leaves out.
Love is treated as several different things at once: Orlando's earnest poetry, Silvius's devotion, Phebe's self-deception, Touchstone's blunt appetite, Oliver's sudden change of heart. The play lines them up side by side and lets the audience compare.
How it ends
Stop here if you would rather not know. The four tangled lovers are brought together in an argument about who will have whom. Ganymede promises to sort it, extracting a promise from Orlando to marry Rosalind and from Phebe to marry Silvius if she cannot have Ganymede. Meanwhile Orlando finds Oliver in the forest and saves him from a lioness, which makes Oliver repent his cruelty. Oliver then meets Aliena and they agree to marry.
Four couples wed in the final scene: Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver and Celia, Silvius and Phebe, and Touchstone and Audrey. News arrives that Frederick has repented, restored the dukedom to his brother and taken up a religious life. Jaques declines the invitation to return to court, preferring to stay in the forest and adopt a religious life himself. Rosalind closes the play with an epilogue addressed directly to the men and women in the audience.
Why it still matters
Critical opinion has never been settled. Some critics rate the play very highly, others place it below Shakespeare's strongest work. What is not in doubt is its life on stage and beyond it: the play has been adapted for radio, film and musical theatre, and "All the world's a stage" has long outgrown the scene it belongs to. For readers, the draw is Rosalind, who drives the plot, controls the jokes and gets the last word.
