As You Like It - the Play Essay Example for Free

As You give care It the Play EssayAs You Like It is considered by gentlemany to be one of Shakespeares greatest comedies, and the heroine, Rosalind, is praised as one of his most stir characters and has more lines than any of Shakespeares female characters. Rosalind, the daughter of a banished duke falls in love with Orlando the disinherited parole of one of the dukes friends. When she is banished from the court by her usurping uncle, Duke Frederick , Rosalind switches genders and as Ganymede travels with her loyal cousin Celia and the jester Touchstone to the Forest of Arden, where her fuss and his friends live in exile. Observations on life and love follow (including love, aging, the natural world, and death) friends are made, and families are reunited. By the plays end Ganymede, once again Rosalind, marries her Orlando. Two other sets of lovers are also wed, one of them Celia and Orlandos mean cured brother Oliver . As Oliver becomes a gentler, kinder young man so the D uke conveniently changes his ways and turns to religion and so that the exiled Duke, father of Rosalind, can rule once again.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 As You Like It (Act II, Scene VII). Can one desire too much of a good thing? . As You Like It (Act IV, Scene I). True is it that we have seen better days. As You Like It Act II, Scene VII). For always and a day. As You Like It (Act IV, Scene I). The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.(Act V, Scene I). The play is fictitious, but shakespeare is said to have taken the traits if rosalind from Rosalynde by doubting Thomas lodge. One of Shakespeares early plays, As You Like It (1598-1599), is a stock romantic comedy that was familiar to Elizabethan audiences as an exemplar of Christian comedy. Although the play does include two offstage spiritual conversions, the Christian nam ing does not refer to religion itself.Instead, it denotes the restoration and regeneration of society through the affirmation of certain Christian values such as brotherly love, marital union, tolerance for different viewpoints, and optimism about life at large. The plot is very simple the resolution of the dramatic problem in the warped poses of two shabbiness brothers toward good brothers, and related obstacles to marriage for several couples in the play (most notably Rosalind and Orlando) are easily overcome, and a happy ending is never in doubt.On one level, the play was clearly intended by Shakespeare as a simple, diverting amusement several scenes in As You Like It are basically skits made up of songs and joking banter. But on a somewhat deeper level, the play provides opportunities for its main characters to talk over a host of subjects (love, aging, the natural world, and death) from their particular points of view.At its center, As You Like It presents us with the respec tive worldviews of Jaques, a chronically melancholy pessimist preoccupied with the negative aspects of life, and Rosalind, the plays Christian heroine, who recognizes lifes difficulties but holds fast to a positive attitude that is kind, playful, and, above all, wise. In the end, the enjoyment that we receive from the plays comedy is reinforced and validated by a humanist Christian philosophy gently woven into the text by a benevolent Shakespeare.