As You Like It

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

As You Like It is an unusual title for a Shakespearean play, which are generally named after their protagonists. This may still be the case, however, if the answer to the question, “as who likes it?” is Rosalind. If it is her, the title is fitting, as no one else in the play or perhaps any of Shakespeare’s plays sees so clearly and so playfully in completing its action. The follow-up question, “as who likes what?” necessarily involves her too.

Separated from her father by her uncle and later exiled by him, Rosalind finds her way to the Forest of Arden, an enchanted place where anything is possible. Here, the politics that govern human relations, gender roles, and most playfully, love, all undergo revision (primarily at her doing). Power is redistributed, and love, as emblematic of that revision, becomes more egalitarian and pragmatic. for all couples involved. Less transactional in an economic sense and less idealised, love (perhaps paradoxically) becomes a vehicle for grounded and sensible realisation between all the couples involved.

Even the sublime Rosalind who deftly interprets what those around her need rather than what they desire, and who seems infinitely more suited to an independent life than a marital one, ultimately chooses the latter, and Orlando. She does not exempt herself from her own dictates.

As You Like It is a lot of fun. The mixture of light and dark that informs so many of Shakespeare’s other plays is weighted more toward the light in this one. Although it spotlights social and individual failures in the form of power imbalances, corruption, and gender stereotyping, it does so without the heaviness that such serious themes might ordinarily carry.

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

Rosh