As You Like It follows its heroine Rosalind as she flees persecution in her uncle's court, accompanied by her cousin Celia to find safety and, eventually, love, in the Forest of Arden.

Secondly the name evokes the Ardennes, a forested region covering an area located in southeast Belgium, western Luxembourg and northeastern France.

Duke Senior's daughter, Rosalind, has been permitted to remain at court because she is the closest friend of Frederick's only child, Celia.

Orlando, a young gentleman of the kingdom who at first sight has fallen in love with Rosalind, is forced to flee his home after being persecuted by his older brother, Oliver.

Orlando and his servant Adam, meanwhile, find the Duke and his men and are soon living with them and posting simplistic love poems for Rosalind on the trees.

Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver and Celia, Silvius and Phebe, and Touchstone and Audrey are all married in the final scene, after which they discover that Frederick has also repented his faults, deciding to restore his legitimate brother to the dukedom and adopt a religious life.

Jaques, ever melancholic, declines their invitation to return to the court, preferring to stay in the forest and to adopt a religious life as well.

The direct and immediate source of As You Like It is Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde, Euphues Golden Legacie, written 1586–87 and first published in 1590.

Thomas Morley's First Book of Ayres, published in London in 1600 contains a musical setting for the song "It was a lover and his lass" from As You Like It.

[14] This line, however, dates from 1593 when Marlowe was killed, and the poem was likely circulated in unfinished form before being completed by George Chapman.

According to the inquest into his death, Marlowe had been killed in a brawl following an argument over the "reckoning" of a bill in a room in a house in Deptford, owned by the widow Eleanor Bull in 1593.

In this play, the universal globe, inhabited by ordinary mortals, is shown at the end as the audience liked it: happy and reconciled by love.

While disguised as Ganymede, Rosalind also presents a calculated perception of affection that is "disruptive of [the] social norms" and "independent of conventional gender signs" that dictate women's behavior as irrational.

In her book As She Likes It: Shakespeare's Unruly Women,[24] Penny Gay analyzes Rosalind's character in the framework of these gender conventions that ascribe femininity with qualities such as "graciousness, warmth ... [and] tenderness".

These songs and music are incorporated in the action that takes place in the forest of Arden, as shown below: Shakespeare uses prose for about 55% of the text, with the remainder in verse.

Act II, Scene VII, Line 139, features one of Shakespeare's most famous monologues, spoken by Jaques, which begins: All the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts The arresting imagery and figures of speech in the monologue develop the central metaphor: a person's lifespan is a play in seven acts.

Shakespeare also used the Pastoral genre in As You Like It to 'cast a critical eye on social practices that produce injustice and unhappiness, and to make fun of anti-social, foolish and self-destructive behaviour', most obviously through the theme of love, culminating in a rejection of the notion of the traditional Petrarchan lovers.

[32] The stock characters in conventional situations were familiar material for Shakespeare and his audience; it is the light repartee and the breadth of the subjects that provide opportunities for wit that put a fresh stamp on the proceedings.

The play, turning upon chance encounters in the forest and several entangled love affairs in a serene pastoral setting, has been found, by many directors, to be especially effective staged outdoors in a park or similar site.

[33] Another performance may possibly have taken place at Wilton House in Wiltshire, the country seat of the Earls of Pembroke, where Mary Sidney is understood to have been running a kind of literary salon, her son William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke hosted James I and his Court at Wilton House from October to December 1603, while Jacobean London was suffering an epidemic of bubonic plague.

6 Florence Wickham wrote the music and lyrics for her opera Rosalind, based on As You Like It, which premiered at the open air Rockridge Theater in Carmel, New York, in August 1938.

In 1942, Gerald Finzi included a setting of "It was a lover and his lass" (V, iii) in his song cycle on Shakespearean texts Let Us Garlands Bring.

Hans Werner Henze, in the first part of his sonata Royal Winter Music, which portraits Shakespearean characters, included "Touchstone, Audrey and William" as its 5th movement, in 1976.

[43] Rush's drummer and composer Neil Peart incorporated the passage "All the world's indeed a stage / And we are merely players / Performers and portrayers / Each another's audience / Outside the gilded cage" into the lyrics for "Limelight" from their 1981 progressive rock album Moving Pictures.

[48] The production included Pippa Nixon as Rosalind, Luke Norris as Orlando, Adrian Scarborough as Touchstone, William Houston as Jaques, Ellie Kendrick as Celia and Jude Akuwudike as Corin.

Made in England and released in 1936, As You Like It also starred director Paul Czinner's wife Elisabeth Bergner, who played Rosalind with a thick German accent.

Still, it's a visual delight with eccentric characters in an enchanting forest rife with animals: sheep, goats, peacocks, storks, a huge snake and skulking lioness.

It stars Bryce Dallas Howard, David Oyelowo, Romola Garai, Alfred Molina, Kevin Kline, and Brian Blessed.

[53] The Seven Doors of Danny, by Ricky Horscraft and John McCullough is based on the "Seven Ages of Man" element of the "All the world's a stage" speech and was premiered in April 2016.

The artist Salvador Dalí worked up and published costume and set designs for the play when it was directed by Luchino Visconti at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome in 1948.