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As You Like It
by William ShakespearePrescribed for HSC English 2024–2027 (NESA) · Last reviewed As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare, written around 1599-1600 for the newly built Globe. Following Rosalind, Orlando and their fellow exiles into the transforming Forest of Arden, it is studied in HSC English Extension 1's elective on natural worlds.
Summary
As You Like It is a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare, written around 1599-1600 for the newly built Globe. Following Rosalind, Orlando and their fellow exiles into the transforming Forest of Arden, it is studied in HSC English Extension 1's elective on natural worlds.
Written around 1599-1600 for the newly built Globe, As You Like It is built on the "green world" pattern of Shakespearean comedy: a corrupt court, a transforming forest, and a renewed society returned to order. The play opens on dispossession. Orlando, kept in near-servitude by his elder brother Oliver, wins a rigged wrestling match and the heart of Rosalind, daughter of the banished Duke Senior - but the usurping Duke Frederick banishes Rosalind too. His own daughter Celia refuses to be parted from her, and the two flee to the Forest of Arden, Rosalind disguised as the young man "Ganymede", taking the jester Touchstone with them.
In Arden, the banished Duke praises the sweet life of exile while his melancholy follower Jaques mourns a hunted deer and delivers the famous seven-ages speech, "All the world's a stage". Orlando hangs bad love poems on the trees, and the disguised Rosalind offers to "cure" him of his love by letting him woo her as if she were Rosalind - a game that lets the play test every convention of romantic love while its heroine remains helplessly in love herself.
The forest transforms everyone who enters it. Oliver arrives repentant, saved by Orlando from a lioness, and falls for Celia; Rosalind reveals herself and four couples are married under Hymen's blessing; Frederick, marching on the forest, meets an old religious man and is converted, restoring the dukedom. Only Jaques refuses the ending, and Rosalind steps out of the play entirely to speak the Epilogue.
Context
Shakespeare adapted the play from Thomas Lodge's prose romance Rosalynde (1590), writing at the height of the English pastoral vogue - a literary fashion inherited from Virgil's Eclogues and Theocritus, in which sophisticated urban writers imagined shepherds leading contented lives in an idealised countryside. The pastoral was always a court genre pretending to be a country one, and Shakespeare knew it. He also wrote at a moment when the English landscape was being visibly remade: the enclosure of common land, the felling of ancient forests and a growing population were turning the greenwood from a lived reality into a nostalgic idea even as the play was staged. Arden is at once a real place - the Warwickshire woodland of Shakespeare's childhood, the Arden his mother was named for - a literary convention, and a psychological green world. The play also inherits a culture that read nature as a book written by God, then subjects that comforting theory to sceptical interrogation.
Themes and Techniques
As You Like It is the great double-minded pastoral: it builds the fantasy of a benign, restorative nature and simultaneously takes it apart. The exiles "fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world", and Duke Senior perfects the fantasy - "Sweet are the uses of adversity" - but Shakespeare surrounds the idyll with deflations. Touchstone punctures it on arrival, "Ay, now am I in Arden; the more fool I; when I was at home, I was in a better place", and the forest itself has "the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the winter's wind", real weather that will not flatter.
The play stages a debate about what nature is for. The Duke reads Arden as legible scripture, finding "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones and good in every thing", a chain of metaphors that turns every feature of the forest into a lesson addressed to a human audience. Against him stands Jaques, who reframes the exiles' hunt as invasion: the banished lords are "mere usurpers, tyrants and what's worse, / To fright the animals and to kill them up / In their assign'd and native dwelling-place". The political vocabulary reads today like an early ecological conscience - the forest as a home we invade, not a sermon written for us.
The green world loosens identity. Rosalind's disguise is not a costume but a licence: as Ganymede she can mock, correct and instruct Orlando in ways a duke's banished daughter never could, offering to cure him - "I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind" - while dismantling the Petrarchan myth that lovers die: "men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love". Her wit is not cynicism but clear-eyed tenderness, refusing to let Orlando love a fiction of her.
Yet the play will not pretend the forest suspends mortality. Jaques's theatrum mundi reduces the human span to seven scripted parts ending in "mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything", and when the dukedom is restored the philosopher of "good in every thing" turns for court without a backward glance. Corin, the one true labourer - "I earn that I eat, get that I wear" - simply remains, tending sheep, outside the comedy's resolution.
Key Quotes
"tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones and good in every thing"
- Technique
- Metaphor, anaphora
- Idea
- The forest read as scripture addressed to human improvement - the anthropocentric idyll the play questions
"we / Are mere usurpers, tyrants and what's worse, / To fright the animals and to kill them up / In their assign'd and native dwelling-place"
- Technique
- Political metaphor
- Idea
- The hunt reframed as invasion - the exiled victims of usurpation become usurpers of the forest's own inhabitants
"All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players"
- Technique
- Extended metaphor
- Idea
- The human span reduced to scripted performance - no green world outruns mortality
"men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love"
- Technique
- Anti-Petrarchan realism, bathos
- Idea
- Rosalind corrects the death-for-love convention with a brute natural fact
"the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the winter's wind"
- Technique
- Personification
- Idea
- Even the idealist must concede the forest's real harshness - nature granted teeth, not just sermons
Frequently Asked Questions
- Which module is As You Like It studied in for the HSC?
- It is set for HSC English Extension 1 in the elective on natural worlds, which asks how texts imagine the relationship between people and the non-human world.
- When did Shakespeare write As You Like It?
- Around 1599-1600, for the newly built Globe theatre, adapting the plot from Thomas Lodge's 1590 prose romance Rosalynde.
- What is As You Like It about?
- Banished from a corrupt court, Rosalind flees to the Forest of Arden disguised as the young man Ganymede, where debates, disguises and wooing games transform everyone who enters, ending in four marriages and a restored dukedom.
- What are the main themes of As You Like It?
- The pastoral fantasy of a benign nature built and dismantled in the same breath, exile and transformation, love and its conventions punctured by Rosalind's wit, and mortality that no green world outruns.
- What should students focus on when studying As You Like It for Extension 1?
- Focus on the play's doubleness - how Shakespeare constructs Arden as idyll and hard weather at once - and argue a personal thesis about our place among other lives and landscapes rather than summarising the comedy.
Studying As You Like It for the HSC?
As You Like It is studied in HSC English Extension 1 in the elective on natural worlds, which asks students to argue how a text imagines the relationship between people and the world that is not people - the pastoral offered and dismantled in the same breath. BTA's expert English tutors work with students one-on-one on exactly that skill - find out more about English tutoring at BTA or explore our HSC English resources.
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