As You Like It

Banished from the court of her usurping uncle, young Rosalind escapes into the Forest of Arden disguised as a boy named Ganymede, together with her loyal cousin Celia and the court jester Touchstone. In the forest she finds Orlando, a young man who has also fled persecution and is hanging bad love poems to her on the trees, and in her disguise she offers to 'cure' him of his love by letting him woo her as if she were Rosalind. Around them gather shepherds, a melancholy philosopher named Jaques, and her exiled father, the Duke, with his little court.

Written around 1599, the comedy contains Jaques's famous speech on the seven ages of man, beginning 'All the world's a stage'. Rosalind, witty and wise, has one of the longest parts for a woman in Shakespeare. Like many of the plays, it was first printed in the First Folio of 1623, whose text this edition follows. Read also A Midsummer Night's Dream, and see Shakespeare's life.

William Shakespeare (1564–1616), born in Stratford-upon-Avon, actor, playwright and shareholder of a London company, wrote about thirty-seven plays and 154 sonnets.

The tragedies Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello and King Lear, and comedies such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, are here in full, with hundreds of editions and studies from HathiTrust.