I'm not going to go into the complicated plot on this one, but it's the one with Rosalind and Orlando, where Rosalind, for her own mysterious reasons, pretends to be a boy and flirts with Orlando, who is extremely dense, and never figures out that she is a girl.

Forget about whether this is believable or not. (It's not.) In fact, the whole plot is pretty darn farfetched. It is, however, funny in some places and thoughtful in other places. Like all Shakespeare, it's much better on stage than on paper, but it was still a fun read.

What I really enjoyed about the edition I read is that it had photos from the Royal Shakespeare Academy and others of the play, including a very young Alan Rickman as Jaques and a ludicrously costumed Kenneth Branagh as Touchstone. Very funny! ( )

This has some really cute lines, especially from Touchstone, but it is not one of Shakespear's best works in my opinion. Although it probably would be much better to see on stage rather than to read. ( )

Saw this in Boston Common in Summer 2008. It was fun! Some great lines -- which is so unusual for Shakespeare...err...

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1144179.ht...

I very much liked it, and I regret that I have never seen it on the stage. It concerns Rosalind, daughter of the deposed Duke and niece of the usurper, who flees to the forest of Arden, and Orlando, who falls in love with her, plus a couple of memorable supporting characters - the clown Touchstone and the sardonic Jaques. Rosalind herself, along with Portia and Beatrice, is one of the great Shakespearean female roles; she does her best to seize control of the situation, even if it means disguising herself as a man (and she gets to deliver the epilogue). Events off stage ensure that there is a happy ending, but that isn't really the point; once Shakespeare has got them all to the forest, we just watch the characters interact, and it is fun. As occasionally happens, I had a thouught about how I would stage this, which is that I would imply the Rosalind / Celia relationship to be somewhat Sapphic, and see how that affects the rest of the play.

It would be more fun on stage, and despite the generally good Arkangel production, I think this is one play where you really need the visuals. Niamh Cusack is great as Rosalind (who twice appears to refer to herself as Irish, so that is a neat touch, though if you think about it too much you start wondering why the rest of the ducal family aren't also Irish).

Jonathan Bate's book, which I was reading at the same time, has a couple of interesting points to make about As You Like It. He points out that the plot is basically plundered wholesale from Thomas Lodge's novel Rosalynd of 1590, but that the bits people tend to remember - Jacques (with his Seven Ages of Man), Touchstone, and Rosalind's impersonation of herself - are all Shakespearean additions. He also speculates that William, the thick country lad, is Shakespeare's own self-deprecatory portrait. I can't help but play the autobiography game myself: there are two sets of feuding brothers in this play (and likewise there were feuding brothers in Much Ado About Nothing); was this written at the time when Shakespeare's younger brother Edmund moved to London to try his luck in the theatre? He would have been 19 in 1599.

Anyway, this was better than I had anticipated. ( )

This is a comedy with many different characters such as
Orlando, Rosalind, Toushstone, Jaques, Phoebe, and Silvius. This play is composed of many clever personalities, including a boy named Oliver who will not share his father’s recently inherited wealth with his brother Orlando. Other characters include Duke Senior, usurped of his throne, Rosalind, Touchstone, and Jaques. ( )