I have no words. The bard has leached them from me. He leaves me dry. He leaves me wandering a desert unable to articulate my feelings. It's too easy to borrow from him; it's too easy to quote of the age of second childishness than describe age and loss and collapse in my own words. Why speak of the absurdity of love when I can point to poems nailed to trees and the beloved's name carved among the hawthorns?

I love the imagery in this play. I love that they speak of being in a desert, when they a More...

The fun of Shakespeare's comedies isn't in the plots but in the pure genius of his language. Many of his best lines have become such staples of common usage that most people aren't even aware they're quoting Shakespeare. If they DO know, you can forget about asking them which plays the lines come from.

I find an intensely perverse pleasure in Shakespeare's inventive insults. I can only DREAM of thinking up such clever quips and comebacks in the heat of an argument. And if I could think them up, More...

Just saw this last night at the Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta. So, naturally, here's...

As You Like It, abridged:

OLIVER: Hi everyone, I'm Oliver and I'll be your designated jackass for the evening.
ORLANDO: Hey bro! So, remember how you got me to wrestle that unbeatable guy and were all like, "he's so gonna kill you, mwahaha"? Well, I totally kicked his ass AND met this hot chick Rosalind. Man, it's great to be me!
OLIVER: OMG IMMA KEEL YOU!
ORLANDO: *runs*
ROSALIND: Hey Celia, your uncle just bani More...

Click here for William Shakespeare Disclaimer

As You Like It by William Shakespeare wasn't as satisfying as I thought it would be. It started out in good form, similar to Much Ado About Nothing, my favorite Shakespearean play thus far, but then quickly fell flat for me. I thought it would be a little more about the Duke getting banished, but really this was just a side note for the various romances going on. I did enjoy the Rosalind dressing like a man and fooling her lover, as well as the wit a More...

When it comes to reading/viewing Shakespeare, I usually like mine cooked on the tragic side. I love a dark, brooding hero. I love Shakespearean angst. And it doesn't quite feel like Shakespeare if there aren't a few dead bodies strewn about the stage by the end of the fifth act.

Yet it is oh so hard to resist Rosalind and the entire comedic premise of As You Like It. Instead of dark brooding, Rosalind offers jest and wit and freedom. She never whines or is somber, at least not for very long. She More...

As in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Hamlet" amd "Antony and Cleopatra," Shakespeare in "As You Like It" is able to join disparate elements in unusual proportion into a unified whole of tone and mood which may be rationalized but never completely explained. What I love about this play is the way in which it develops a conventionally suspenseful plot--complete with goodies and baddies, action-packed scuffles and wrestling matches, lovers "meeting cute," etc.--at breakneck speed for all of the firs More...

I watched a version of this play set in 19th century Japan recently. I don't know why it was set in 19th century Japan since all the principals remained European and they all ended up in the Forest of Arden dressed like...well, 19th century Europeans.

But it did prompt me to reread the actual play, and I found I enjoyed it much more on the second go around.

(And despite my reservations about the setting, the video was pretty good, too.)

I received this as a LibraryThing Early Reader book, in exchange for an honest review. The review and rating are specifically for that edition, to wit: As You Like It: A Frankly Annotated First Folio Edition.

(Warning – pretty much all the language I generally avoid in reviews up to now shows up here, en masse.)

Now, see, they teach this stuff in school. In high school. And the kids sit there bored out of their minds in class. Little do they know.

The idea behind this edition of Shakespeare's com More...

This play, one of my favorites, is an exploration of love using the contrasts between court and country, artifice and nature, guile and innocent simplicity. Various pairs of lovers are contrasted, the most important protagonist being Rosalind. The norm is blank verse, usually unrhymed. Gender roles are explored and exploited; for example, Rosalind, played of course in Elizabethan drama by a boy, masquerades in the play as a man with whom a woman falls in love and whom a man allows to pretend tha More...

I know I know!!!!! Who really reads shakespeare in their independent time. Well that person is me, I had to read a comedy for one of my afterschool activity groups. This book had kind of faced me to give it a high rating but instead I decided to be honest and give the grade I thought it deserved. Now for a 15 year old Im sure reading this later in life will allow me to increase the grade that I have given it. But for now I will judge on/with the experience I do have. This book was about two cous More...

Even if you're one who, like me, can't truthfully say you ever find Shakespeare an easy first-time read – here's a way you can make sheer joy out of As You Like It. First, accept that the Bard's plays weren't meant primarily to be read at all. Rather, they were meant to be seen performed onstage. My method calls for doing just that, but not until you've put a little prep time into the text. The user-friendly twist I recommend is that you read only the first three acts – just enough to get some f More...

Alex Scoolis

As You Like It by William Shakespeare Book Review

It is often said that many of Shakespeare's works tell the same story slightly differently over and over again– So similar in fact that the Reduced Shakespeare Company combined them all into about 5 minute performance. While I don't necessarily believe this to be the case with As You Like It, it surely follows the fold. Like a hefty majority of his comedies, this 5 act play is focused around, in all of it's cliché glory, the trials of More...

I can't give Shakespeare less than five stars because... come on. It's Shakespeare. No matter what I thought, he's a classic.

This is possibly the worst love story ever written. Shakespeare seems to have a double standard against men who aren't in love with a certain woman. It's fine and dandy if a woman isn't in love with a guy in his plays. A woman choosing to marry the man she loves as opposed to the one that was chosen for her is the foundation of Shakespeare's plays. Yet here, and in a midsu More...

While As You Like It has Shakespeare's usual wit and eloquence, I think it's one of his weaker plays. The story feels hastily thrown together, as possibly evidenced by the many gaping plot holes. Plenty of Shakespeare comedies have unbelievable plots (e.g. "The Comedy of Errors"), but in this case it seems like lazy writing rather than dramatic license.

While the play's prose is vivid as usual, I'd also say that it's relatively weak in comparison to his other plays. There are some incredibly wri More...

One of my favorite's of Shakespeare.

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players....

And one of my favorite scenes.... After Rosalind finds all of the love notes Orlando has written for her and attached to trees all over the forest. Touchstone is hilarious :-D

TOUCHSTONE
I'll rhyme you so eight years together, dinners and
suppers and sleeping-hours excepted: it is the
right butter-women's rank to market.

ROSALIND
Out, fool!

TOUCHSTONE
For a taste:
If a hart do lack a hind,
Let him se More...

I've not yet read all of Shakespeare's plays, but I do not seem to care much for his plays about love, including Romeo and Juliet. So far, the only two exceptions to this have been The Taming of the Shrew and Love's Labour's Lost.

The problem I have with Shakespeare's love plays is that they are almost all too cloying, too simpleminded and simplistic, and they almost seem like juvenile depictions of love. Shakespeare can do the darker emotions like hate, jealousy, revenge, vanity, murderous ambit More...

The story was fun, the characters often funny, but there were so many plot holes.

*SPOILERS*

I don't understand how Oliver and Celia fell in love. And they married each other right away after seeing each other once.
I didn't see anything special between the two when they first met either, so Oliver's declaration of this love to Orlando was really abrupt.

The Duke Frederick suddenly banishing Rosalyn was too abrupt too. It just came out of the blue, I couldn't believe it.

About Duke Senior and his men More...

I think that this story is a very lovely piece of work by Shakespeare, who expresses each and every character very well. Throughout the play Shakespeare expresses the love and hatred between the different characters. He also differentiates between the two lifestyles of the people who are from the court and have experienced royalty just the way it is and the people who live in the country and spend a simple life as as a shepherd and not know about the proper behavior as a courtier would know. The More...

I read "As You Like It" because we will be reading it in seminar this Fall, and the Villanova Theatre Dept. will stage it in November. - Despite the obligation to read it, I am glad that I did; it is a wonderful, enjoyable play. The sexual and gender confusion is fun - males and females falling in love with characters who are females playing males standing in for females (in the case of Rosalind, beloved of Orlando and Phebe). In general I dislike the "clown" characters in Shakespeare's plays, b More...

O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man´s eyes

The pursuit of happiness, the search for the princess, is full of challenges. Sometimes you´re rocking life, sometimes it´s rocking you, and so it goes. Funny that I finish a play that celebrates the ridiculousness of love as my world begins to turn upside down. This play celebrates the absurdity of love, the theatre of life, and the mystique of places outside the confines of society all themes which are screaming in m More...

“Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?” This famous line essentially becomes the main theme of this play. Several young characters in the play are linked by this common thread, but that’s not to say that there aren’t consequences to their actions. Like Shakespeare’s other comedies mistaken identities, cross-dressing and unrequited love fuel the plot—all of which causes mishaps and mischief along the way.

Yet, As You Like It doesn’t rely as much on amusing anecdotes to drive the plot as More...

As You Like It was most likely written around 1598–1600, during the last years of Elizabeth’s reign. The play belongs to the literary tradition known as pastoral: which has its roots in the literature of ancient Greece, came into its own in Roman antiquity with Virgil’s Eclogues, and continued as a vital literary mode through Shakespeare’s time and long after. Typically, a pastoral story involves exiles from urban or court life who flee to the refuge of the countryside, where they often disguise More...

I overheard an English professor yesterday say during his lecture that he doesn't like Shakespeare. Although he said it was considered almost sacrilegious for an English professor to say, his reasons were that Shakespeare relied heavily upon conventional settings and plot, neither of which this professor found imaginative, and because he felt Shakespeare's plays lacked emotional or intellectual depth. As You Like It is a play that uses similar settings as, for example, A Midsummer Night's Dream. More...

Eh. And I never thought I'd eh about Shakespeare. The play's dialogue is witty with Shakespeare's trademark puns, the identity confusion makes for some good laughs, and some of the quotes are famous. However. The play seemed like a rehashing of Twelfth Night only not as good. I also found the characters lacking in common sense and any motivation that can be associated with human behavior. The evil characters are evil because...just because. Young women run into the woods and for whatever reason More...

I'm more drawn to the Hamlet side of Shakespeare than his comedies. His writing is very clever and often funny, but bang for your buck entertainment is more likely to be found in his darker materials. That said, when reviewing a Shakespeare play, it's hard to rate anything under four stars unless you were simply bored out of your skull. In English literature there's Shakespeare...and then there's everything else. The fluidity of his writing, depth of theme, etc. is just so far above and beyond t More...

This is the classic story of As You Like it by Williams Shakespeare simplified and put into graphic novel form. While Orlando and Rosalind still end up together and all of the characters and plot line are the same, it looses a lot of the literary quality. All of the language is updated to modern day language and much is lost in the translation. The idea of a woman pretending to be a man is present in literature and history throughout time, so it is believable. However, it does seem dated in this More...

Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” is a hip, fantastical play that uses metafictional technique to lavish the theme of quizzical love and romance in those times, adorned with deeper, complex characters than other plays while showing-off the strange qualities of love and how people play this out. Metafictional elements include dialogue that exposes roleplaying in a play, metaphysical or mystical inclusions, and portrayals of characters channeling out a message directly to the audience exposing the il More...

As my first reading of any playscript, this was most entertaining, and it's far better to begin with a comedy. The character of Rosalind is very peculiar, because of the abrupt mood shifts; there is a version on Youtube with Helen Mirren playing Rosalind that is well done but a little unconvincing. How do you disguise a woman to look like a man consistently for an entirely play?



There is also the character of Touchstone, whose lines are often deliberately overdone and showy, and I don't believe More...

Shakespeare's romantic comedies tend to have young couples meeting and falling for each other very quickly and getting married within a day or so their time, usually with an obstacle and a couple of oddballs hanging around. As You Like It is certainly no exception, but for two things that really make the play stand out. The first is the setting. With most of the play set in the seemingly magical forest of Arden, where exiled Dukes and their various and sundry followers just seem to live content More...

It may be just a passing enthusiasm, but I found on this reading of AS YOU LIKE IT that it's one of Shakespeare's best efforts, with echoes of many other plays. Its setting, for example,The Forest of Arden is not a part of society but yet not totally detached from its turmoils either. It reminds you of the woods of MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM's, Prospero's island in THE TEMPEST, and even in its darker moments of folly, the blasted heath of KING LEAR.
This play balances optimism and pessimism, givin More...