In the Library
As You Like It
William Shakespeare, 1623
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 23
- Length
- Length 23k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players;
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Orlando
Virginia Woolf
Woolf's Orlando, who shares a name with Arden's lovesick poet, lives Rosalind's game for real, waking up a woman and finding wit and love unchanged.
£1.99
The Tempest
William Shakespeare
The Tempest is Shakespeare's other play of exile in a wild place, where a wronged duke and his daughter, like Arden's banished court, find love and set things right.
£1.99
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Elizabeth Bennet steers her own courtship by wit the way Rosalind does, testing a man's love with sharp talk until both of them are ready for it.
£1.99
About the book
There's no clock in the forest, Orlando says, and that is Arden: a green place outside time where a banished duke keeps court beneath the trees and everyone driven out of the world arrives to find it remade. Rosalind, exiled and travelling as the boy Ganymede, comes upon the man who loves her and cannot see her, then does the one thing love makes possible: she offers to cure him of Rosalind by playing Rosalind. What follows is the wittiest courtship in English, a woman conducting her own wooing from behind a disguise, teaching a man what he feels while standing close enough to hear his heart change. Jaques hangs at the edge, counting the seven ages of man, sour about the whole business; the play lets him be right and loves the lovers more. Arden is where Shakespeare put everything he believed about how people mend: by exile, by weather, by song. Even its bitterest music forgives the weather before it forgives us: blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude.