As You Like It by William Shakespeare

As You Like It, first performed in 1599, offers wonderful opportunities for student performers, and starting points for conversations about gender, sexuality, and the environment. Moving from the cold, threatening court to the liberating Forest of Arden, the play invites us into a magical world where the normal rules of society do not apply. In this realm our heroine Rosalind can woo Orlando, the villainous Oliver can be converted to goodness, and the gods can be summoned at a moment's notice to officiate weddings. It's also a play full of familiar lines, from Jaques' ‘all the world's a stage’ to Phoebe's ‘who ever loved that loved not at first sight’.

Language

Despite some of the text feeling familiar, students may find the language tricky to navigate. In addition to an introduction specific to the play, the Arden edition includes a robust ‘Series Introduction’ that walks the reader through the basics of navigating Shakespeare's language as a performer; supplementing these is ‘A Note on Metre’, which provides an introduction to Shakespeare's use of poetic metres. This is an enormously helpful tool for performers and is worth the investment of time to help students understand and appreciate the text further.

The Arden edition further includes a table of the historical and mythological figures mentioned in the play, with a pronunciation guide and a brief description of their significance; these are figures that would have been familiar to Shakespeare's original audiences, but might not be known to students today. Finally, facing-page notes offer concise clarifications of words and phrases that may be difficult for students to parse.

Casting

In terms of casting, As You Like It requires a strong ensemble, and there are plenty of smaller speaking roles to help accommodate a large cast. Conversely, if you have a smaller cast, there are also many opportunities for doubling roles: the two dukes are often played by the same actor in professional productions, for example. Rosalind is Shakespeare's largest female character in terms of lines. In fact, the play offers four excellent roles for women as written: Rosalind, her cousin Celia, the shepherdess Phoebe, and the goat-herd Audrey. As You Like It’s playful approach to gender encourages cross-casting, too: recent major productions have cast women in roles such as Jaques, Silvius, and Orlando, for example.

Music

As You Like It contains a high number of songs, creating great opportunities for student musicians to flex their muscles. Depending on the makeup of your cast and the aesthetic of your production, you might ask students to compose their own music to accompany the play's many songs, or make use of resources such as Bryan N.S. Gooch and David's Thatcher's A Shakespeare Music Catalogue, which offers ninety pages of music associated with the play. The latter includes Thomas Morely's madrigal version of It was a lover and his lass (Act 5, Scene 3), which may have been that song's first theatrical setting. You may also wish to include the traditional jig at the end of the performance: an exuberant dance by the entire cast that sends the audience away in a jolly mood.

Set

The play also offers exciting challenges to student designers, with its movement from the court to the forest and back again in the first and second acts. To simplify matters, many productions adjust the order of scenes in the first half of the play, so that all of the scenes at court take place before the action moves to the Forest of Arden, where it remains until the end. There is a more detailed description of this potential change and its implications in the Introduction to this edition.

Simplification

Shakespeare tells us that brevity is the soul of wit, but his plays often need to be cut for performance. As You Like It has plenty of scope for internal cuts—that is, cuts within scenes and speeches that shorten them without removing them entirely. The play is full of word play, some of which would have been arcane even in Shakespeare's own time—one joke requires knowledge of both Pythagoras's philosophical beliefs and a proverb about hunting rats. Don't be afraid either to cut or update them, so that they make sense to modern students. Some of the longer speeches, which may be challenging for students to learn, are also ripe for cutting. Rosalind's speech castigating Phoebe in Act 3, Scene 5, or her addresses to Orlando in Act 5 Scene 2, for example, could easily be shortened.

As You Like It can be a wonderful introduction to Shakespeare and Renaissance drama for students. The topsy-turvy world of the Forest of Arden gives a young cast many opportunities to stretch themselves creatively, from music and dance to set and costume design, and its playful, comic tone can be a breath of fresh air in turbulent times.

As You Like It is available in the Arden Performance Editions series. Inspection copies are available to request through Bloomsbury.com and you can also enjoy 20% off by applying discount code AYLI20 at checkout until 28 February 2022.