As You Like It

Summary

As You Like It begins with two households divided by envy. Orlando, youngest son of the late Sir Rowland de Boys, complains to the old servant Adam that his elder brother Oliver keeps him like a peasant and denies him the education his father willed him. Oliver, who hates Orlando without knowing why, encourages the court wrestler Charles to break his neck. At the court of Duke Frederick, who has usurped the dukedom and banished his elder brother, Duke Senior, to the Forest of Arden, Orlando throws Charles in front of the court. Rosalind, Duke Senior's daughter, kept at court only for the love of her cousin Celia, falls in love with him at first sight and gives him a chain. Frederick soon banishes Rosalind as well. Celia refuses to be parted from her: Rosalind disguises herself as a youth named Ganymede, Celia becomes his sister Aliena, and with the clown Touchstone they flee to Arden. Warned by Adam that Oliver means to burn his lodging, Orlando also flees, and the old man gives him his life's savings and goes with him. In the forest Duke Senior praises the sweet uses of adversity, while the melancholy lord Jaques weeps over a wounded deer and moralizes on the seven ages of man. Orlando, near starving, draws his sword on the Duke's feast and is welcomed with courtesy; he carries the fainting Adam in to eat. Orlando hangs love poems to Rosalind on the trees. Meeting him, Ganymede offers to cure his love if he will come every day and woo Ganymede as if he were Rosalind, and the mock courtship becomes the heart of the play: Rosalind teases, tests and instructs Orlando in what love and marriage really ask. Around them other lovers mirror and parody the central pair: the shepherd Silvius pines for the scornful shepherdess Phoebe, who falls in love with Ganymede; Touchstone courts the goatherd Audrey and nearly marries her before the hedge-priest Sir Oliver Martext. Oliver, sent by Frederick to hunt his brother down, arrives in the forest, where Orlando, finding him asleep with a snake about his neck and a lioness waiting, saves his life and is wounded. Oliver repents, tells the story to Ganymede, who faints at the bloody napkin, and falls in love with Celia. Rosalind promises to set everything right, and in the last scene the god Hymen brings her in as herself: four couples are married, Rosalind and Orlando, Celia and Oliver, Phoebe and Silvius, Touchstone and Audrey. News arrives that Duke Frederick, marching on the forest, met an old religious man and was converted, restoring the dukedom to his brother. Jaques leaves the dance to join the convert, and Rosalind speaks the Epilogue. The play was probably written in 1599, was entered in the Stationers' Register in August 1600 to be stayed from printing, and was first published in the First Folio of 1623.

Top Lessons

• Adversity as a teacher

  Duke Senior opens Act 2 by thanking the winter wind for telling him the truth that courtiers never did. Exile strips away flattery and leaves the exiles with friendship, music and plain food. Shakespeare does not pretend the forest is comfortable; Adam nearly starves there. But he shows how a good man can find good in everything without denying that the cold bites.

• Love that can bear the truth

  Disguised as Ganymede, Rosalind lets Orlando court her while she mocks the poses of lovers: that men die for love, that wives stay as sweet as on the wedding day. Her teasing does not kill his love but tests whether it is real. The play suggests that love worth marrying on can survive honest speech about time, temper and human weakness.

• Old service and new fashions

  Adam offers Orlando his savings and his strength, and Orlando praises him as a servant of the antique world who worked for duty, not reward. Orlando repays him by carrying him to the Duke's table. Loyalty across age and rank is one of the steadiest goods in the play.

• Conversion and restoration

  Two villains are changed in the forest: Oliver, after his brother risks his life for him, and Duke Frederick, after he meets an old religious man. The comedy ends not only with marriages but with repentance and the return of what was stolen. Jaques chooses to go and learn from the convert rather than join the dance.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Written about two decades before Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, the play is a small anthology of Elizabethan ideas about melancholy. Jaques is the stage type of the melancholic traveller: he sucks melancholy out of a song, weeps over a wounded deer, and in Act 4 describes his sadness as a compound of many simples, in the apothecary's language of the day; humoral theory held melancholy to arise from black bile and to be fed by study, travel and solitude. Rosalind's joke that lovers deserve a dark house and a whip reflects how the mad were in fact treated, by confinement and beating, and her offer to cure love by counsel is an early comic picture of talking a patient out of an obsession. Jaques's seven ages describe the senses failing in second childishness, which modern readers may connect with dementia; the play's own answer is old Adam, who credits his vigorous age to a temperate youth. Adam's collapse from hunger, Orlando's wound from the lioness with its bleeding, fainting and binding, and Rosalind's swoon at the bloody napkin round out the bodily detail.

• Act 2, Scene 1 and Act 2, Scene 5

  Jaques weeps over a wounded stag and asks Amiens for more song to feed his melancholy.

• Act 2, Scene 3 and Act 2, Scene 6

  Adam attributes his healthy old age to avoiding hot liquors in youth, then collapses from hunger in the forest.

• Act 2, Scene 7

  The seven ages of man, ending in second childishness and the loss of the senses.

• Act 3, Scene 2

  Rosalind calls love a madness deserving the dark house and whip, and claims to have cured a lover by counsel.

• Act 4, Scene 1

  Jaques's catalogue of the kinds of melancholy and Rosalind's reply.

• Act 4, Scene 3

  Oliver tells how the lioness tore Orlando's arm, how he bled and fainted and had the wound bound; Rosalind swoons at the bloody napkin.