As You Like It

As You Like It sends a banished duke's daughter into the forest disguised as a boy, where she immediately runs into the man she has fallen for and decides, rather than telling him, to coach him on how to court her. Rosalind is Shakespeare's longest female role and his most self-possessed.

Court life at the start is unsafe: a usurping duke, a brother quietly plotting against a brother, and two young people exiled within a scene of each other. The forest they escape into is half pastoral idyll and half wet and cold, populated by shepherds, a melancholy nobleman who talks in essays, and a fool sharper than anyone around him. Disguise is what makes honesty possible, and the play keeps finding ways to let people say true things in the wrong voice.

Shakespeare wrote it around 1599, adapting a prose romance by Thomas Lodge, and it holds two of the most quoted passages in the language: the seven ages of man, and an epilogue delivered by a woman who has spent the play pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman. It has been in more or less continuous production for four centuries.

In performance it is light on its feet and unexpectedly sharp. The comedy is generous - everybody is forgiven, several couples marry at once - but the writing is honest about exile, about growing old, about how fast power turns cruel, and about how much easier it is to tell the truth when you are not being yourself.

It rewards a first-time audience and someone who knows it by heart in roughly equal measure. Heard live, the language does most of the building: the forest is made out of speech, and a good Rosalind can turn a room in a single line.