As You Like It

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare's finest romantic comedies, variously lyrical, melancholy, satiric, comic and absurd. Its highly implausible plot generates a profusion of love-lorn men, a resourceful heroine in disguise, sexual ambiguity, melancholy philosophising and finally a multiplicity of marriages.

The ironic medley of pastoral artifice, romantic ardour and quizzical reflection has helped to make As You Like It perennially popular in the theatre.

The text of this edition is taken, by arrangement, from the Cambridge University Press ‘New Shakespeare’, edited by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson.