'All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players'
Jaques' speech on the seven ages of man, from mewling infant to second childishness
Shakespeare · Comedies
As You Like It
c. 1599–1600
Comedy — from Thomas Lodge's prose romance Rosalynde (1590)
Banished from a usurping duke's court, Rosalind escapes to the Forest of Arden disguised as the youth Ganymede, taking her cousin Celia and the court jester with her. There she meets Orlando, who is papering the trees with bad love poems about her, and offers to cure him of love by letting him woo 'Ganymede' as if he were Rosalind. Pastoral song, a melancholy philosopher and four weddings close the play.
How to spot them
- ▸A usurped dukedom, and a court in exile in the Forest of Arden
- ▸A heroine disguised as a youth coaches her own suitor in how to woo her
- ▸A courtier hangs love poems on trees
- ▸A melancholy lord who divides a human life into seven ages
- ▸A rare epilogue spoken by the leading woman, who reminds the audience she is played by a boy
Scenes, characters & lines
'Blow, blow, thou winter wind, / Thou art not so unkind / As man's ingratitude'
Amiens' song in the forest
A banished duke finds 'tongues in trees, books in the running brooks'
Duke Senior on the sweet uses of adversity in exile
A court jester marries a goatherd under a tree
Touchstone and Audrey, almost wed by the hedge-priest Sir Oliver Martext
'Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might: / Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?'
Phebe quotes Marlowe's Hero and Leander — the only direct quotation of a contemporary dramatist in Shakespeare
A wrestler is thrown at court by the young man he was hired to maim
Orlando defeats Charles, Duke Frederick's wrestler, in the first act
'The Seven Ages of Man' and a virtue in an 'If'
Touchstone's disquisition on the degrees of the lie, ending with 'Your If is the only peacemaker'
Key ideas
- The forest is a green world where rank, gender and law are suspended, and everyone returns to court changed
- Rosalind, wooed as a boy playing a girl playing a boy, makes the Elizabethan convention of boy actors part of the joke
Quick-fire facts
- •Not printed before the First Folio of 1623, where it appears among the comedies
- •Rosalind has more lines than any other female role in Shakespeare
- •The exiled court includes Duke Senior, Amiens and Jaques; the usurper is his brother Duke Frederick
- •Orlando's faithful old servant is Adam, a part tradition — without evidence — assigns to Shakespeare himself
- •Four couples marry at the end, presided over by Hymen: Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver, Touchstone and Audrey, Silvius and Phebe
- •Arden was both a real Warwickshire forest near Shakespeare's home and the Ardennes of Lodge's source; his mother was Mary Arden
- •The motto 'Totus mundus agit histrionem' is traditionally associated with the Globe playhouse, echoing Jaques' speech
- •Thomas Morley's setting of 'It was a lover and his lass' was published in 1600, the year the play was written
Drill it — 9 cards
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Sources
- Folger Shakespeare Library — As You Like It
- Royal Shakespeare Company — As You Like It