As You Like It
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
The authoritative edition of As You Like It from The Folger Shakespeare Library, the trusted and widely used Shakespeare series for students and general readers.
Readers and audiences have long greeted As You Like It with delight. Its characters are brilliant conversationalists, including the princesses Rosalind and Celia and their Fool, Touchstone. Soon after Rosalind and Orlando meet and fall in love, the princesses and Touchstone go into exile in the Forest of Arden, where they find new conversational partners. Duke Frederick, younger brother to Duke Senior, has overthrown his brother and forced him to live homeless in the forest with his courtiers, including the cynical Jaques. Orlando, whose older brother Oliver plotted his death, has fled there, too.
Recent scholars have also grounded the play in the issues of its time. These include primogeniture, passing property from a father to his oldest son. As You Like It depicts intense conflict between brothers, exposing the human suffering that primogeniture entails. Another perspective concerns cross-dressing. Most of Orlando’s courtship of Rosalind takes place while Rosalind is disguised as a man, “Ganymede.” At her urging, Orlando pretends that Ganymede is his beloved Rosalind. But as the epilogue reveals, the sixteenth-century actor playing Rosalind was male, following the practice of the time. In other words, a boy played a girl playing a boy pretending to be a girl.
This edition includes:
-Freshly edited text based on the best early printed version of the play
-Full explanatory notes conveniently placed on pages facing the text of the play
-Scene-by-scene plot summaries
-A key to the play’s famous lines and phrases
-An introduction to reading Shakespeare’s language
-An essay by a leading Shakespeare scholar providing a modern perspective on the play
-Fresh images from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s vast holdings of rare books
-An annotated guide to further reading
Essay by Susan Snyder
The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, is home to the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare’s printed works, and a magnet for Shakespeare scholars from around the globe. In addition to exhibitions open to the public throughout the year, the Folger offers a full calendar of performances and programs. For more information, visit Folger.edu.
Customer Reviews
A surprisingly good edition, helpful and well worth it
This works a lot better on Apple Books than it does on the Amazon Kindle, which you need a magnifying glass to read because the text is so tiny on Kindle’s smaller display when it doesn’t have line breaks. Folger did a great job with their “Original” typeface and the helpful hyperlinking as well. You don’t often find such careful ebook formatting in many other Apple Books editions and reissues.
Shakespeare is really great stuff. I had been not familiar with this specific play, As You Like It, as it’s not among Shakespeare’s seven or eight (or ten?) works most commonly taught, anthologized, reissued, published, or made into movies. However, I discovered that AYLI has as many famous and memorable quotes as any of Shakespeare’s other plays. With this play more than other Shakespeare plays, it’s more difficult to imagine the comedy, spectacle, and irony that actors can draw and pace out in a live performance. You have to slow down, reread, and read out loud certain passages to better get the gist and the joke. It’s technically a comedy, but I thought it was also a romance (as in a journey into a remote land and a reunification of a family).