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    As You Like It
    As You Like It
    As You Like It
    Audiobook9 minutes

    As You Like It

    Written by William Shakespeare and Edith Nesbit

    Narrated by Josh Verbae

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    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.

    This edition is an adaptation of Shakespeare's eponymous comedy, narrated in plain modern English, capturing the very essence and key elements of the original Shakespeare's drama. Read in English, unabridged.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherInteractive Media
    Release dateFeb 15, 2018
    ISBN9781787244252
    Author

    William Shakespeare

    William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, on England’s Avon River. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children—an older daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died in childhood. The bulk of Shakespeare’s working life was spent in the theater world of London, where he established himself professionally by the early 1590s. He enjoyed success not only as a playwright and poet, but also as an actor and shareholder in an acting company. Although some think that sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare retired from the theater and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616, others believe that he may have continued to work in London until close to his death.

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    Reviews for As You Like It

    4/5

    1,211 ratings28 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is a great collection, worthy of a place in the library of any Shakespeare-phile. Rather than just being a glorified book of excerpts, or one of those tacky dimestore books that collect some basic "love" quotes from the Sonnets, 'Shakespeare As You'd Like It' is more like a compendium of phrases and speeches from the Bard's work. The breadth of the collection should be evidenced by the fact that Kennedy has picked 3000 quotes from 15 plays - that's 200 per play on average. Quotes range from entire speeches to phrases and clever retorts, and includes many that are at first elusive or opaque, which means that even the most pretentious intellectual will find some new material to add to their repertoire. Whether you're using this to sound intelligent in conversation or just to have a laugh, this is the way to go.

      I'm not sure whether the promised Volume II (to cover the remaining majority of Shakespeare's canon) was ever released, but I hope so. There are a couple of issues here - I sometimes take argument with Kennedy's footnotes, which I don't think are always accurate in their translation - but for the most part this is a collection far more worthy than you might think at face value.
    • 5/5
      So great! Absolutely love it!
    • 3/5
      I haven't either read or seen this play.
    • 2/5
      I fear I'm really not a Shakespeare fan: I can never 'get into' his plays. I certainly didn't 'get into' As You Like It. Studying it, so perhaps I'll come to appreciate it more.
    • 3/5
      I think if I read this with less interruption and maybe a little more sleep, I would have enjoyed it more. As it was, I found it a little challenging to follow who was jumping into a scene and speaking.
    • 4/5
      Lots of familiar quotations and saying we still use today to note, a rather tiresome amount of Touchstone the clown, and a couple of people experiencing moral/religious conversions off-stage/page in a way that is very helpful for the resolution of the plot. Fun though.
    • 3/5
      This. like The Tempest, is a play about exiles, perhaps not in a wood, but those who feel not quite in their parent society. Orlando, is in exile inside his family, Rosalind, is a woman with her own agenda, which is relatively rare in the Comedies, and the Duke is legally banished. They claim, to some degree their places, by the closing curtain. This is the play with "The Seven Ages of Man.".
    • 4/5
      I struggled with the language
    • 4/5
      I recently ordered this L.A. Theater Works audio production for work and couldn't resist the temptation of having James Marsters reading Shakespeare in my ears. The production is excellent and while the physical comedy that comes with cross-dressing is obviously missing, the actors do an excellent job of conveying the comedy using just their voices. An excellent way to revisit the Bard.
    • 4/5
      Given as part of the course-work for BADA Summer 1999 in Oxford. The (very useful and well-researched) introduction is almost as long as the play itself! Loads of footnotes to help comprehension for the lay-reader.
    • 5/5
      I've been made aware that modernists like to write fiction that is basically plot-free, where the point is to entertain with beautiful, glorious language, not to excite or inform. One modernist, John Barth, has argued that what he is doing is more reactionary than modern, that he was merely returning to what masters like Cervantes and Rabelais did. Or, in this case, Shakespeare. He had already written one nearly meta-fictional play, Love's Labour Lost, where witty people did nothing but talk wittily about life. He revised and improved the idea for this play, where a group of people hide in the Forest of Arden and do little but discourse of love and life. I loved it all, but especially the typically plucky heroine and the two polar opposite clowns.
    • 3/5
      More of Shakespear's drag king fetish; to hetero audiences, light entertainment only notable as the source of the "all the world's a stage" quote.
    • 4/5
      Fabulous language. "All the world's a stage" is just one of many quotable quotes. Very much a fairy tale, but the wonderful Rosalind and the beautiful words of Shakespeare has made it one of my favorite of his comedies thus far.
    • 3/5
      I liked this play, which I had thought was something else when I first started it! I found the comedy to be of the milder type of making me smile rather than laugh but still fun. There are several famous speeches, most memorable being the one about the seven stages of life.
    • 4/5
      I liked "As You Like It" quite a bit. It has similarities to other works by Shakespeare -- characters in disguise and falling in love at the first glance. But it's also very charming and a nice little story, making for a fun read. Lots of familiar quotes in this one too!
    • 5/5
      “As you Like It” is a beloved Shakespeare play. it is easier to follow and understand as some his other works. There is the reintroduction of Rosalind and Orlando, who are deeply in love, but Orland does not recognize her because she is a boy. The story tells of a series of marriages and infidelities and mixed with love. In the story Rosalinda is so realistic when dressed as a boy because of he exile, that a young shepherdess is a bit taken with him/her). As usual, this volume is filled with quotes we will recognize and more than a bit of tongue and cheek humor. It is a light play for Shakespeare, and very enjoyable. This is a good piece for young people to read if they are not familiar with Shakespeare. There are also fairly good video productions of the play.I have the Pelican library of Shakespeare books and find them extremely easy to follow. With the introductions and foot notes well developed, it makes the reading more enjoyable and understandable for me personally.
    • 4/5
      A strange play, but a very lovable one.Why strange, you ask? Let me catalog its oddities. Both of the villains undergo sudden changes of heart ... offstage. Both leading couples fall in love ... on their first meeting. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s other comedy set primarily in a forest, such happenings are explained as the results of magic, the maneuverings of mischievous fairies. The only supernatural figure in As You Like It is Hymen, who, in one of the play’s oddest turns, appears at the end to explain everything and bless the four marriages. It’s unclear exactly why he is needed; Rosalind seems to have orchestrated everything perfectly up until then.And why lovable? In a word: its heroine. Rosalind is the true gem of the piece, and is probably the closest Shakespeare came to writing a female role comparable Hamlet, although of course this is in a completely different genre.* She has more lines than any other woman in the canon, but it’s not sheer quantity that makes her material so winning. She’s charming in a quicksilver fashion, and it’s clear from her scenes with Orlando that she enjoys make-believe playacting. But lest you think she is a mere trickster, I must stress has wonderful moments of vulnerability, too.As far as Shakespeare’s young swains go, Orlando comes off pretty well. He doesn’t threaten to rape the woman who loves him (a la Demetrius in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), he isn’t an opportunistic adventurer (as Bassanio is in The Merchant of Venice), and he doesn’t listen to slurs against his lady (unlike Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing). He writes awful poetry, it’s true, but in prose he is almost as witty as his beloved Rosalind, and I picture him as having an easy smile and laugh. Of the other characters, Jacques is the standout—a melancholic personality who cannot find a place in the play’s the happy ending.I’ve watched two video versions of this play, each very different from the other. The 1978 BBC adaptation looks as if an enterprising child filmed it in his backyard using a camcorder, somehow enlisting the aid of some of Britain’s finest actors. Richard Pasco steals the show as an unkempt and bleary-eyed Jacques—I really didn’t understand the character until I watched his performance—while Helen Mirren makes a statuesque Rosalind and roguish Ganymede. I didn’t care for the more recent Kenneth Branagh film when I first saw it on account of its Japanese setting, but now that I’ve studied the play in an academic environment and noticed just how strongly the theme of usurpation figures in the plot, I understand what he was going for. And I like how he tries to smooth out the creases of this admittedly problematic play; for instance, he actually stages the lion attack, making Oliver’s reformation a bit more believable.Read As You Like It and go on a holiday in a verdant wonderland. Ignore some of the oddities and focus on your guide, one of Shakespeare’s greatest heroines.* Looking at Wikipedia’s chronology, I see that As You Like It and Hamlet may have been written back-to-back, so perhaps the similarity is not coincidental. Shakespeare must have had fabulous at his disposal during this period, considering the virtuosic parts he wrote for them!
    • 5/5
      As You Like It follows Rosalind, the daughter of a Duke, as she escapes persecution in her Uncle’s court with her cousin Celia. They take refuge in the forest, waiting for a time when Rosalind’s father gains power. Before leaving however, she has just enough time to fall in love with Orlando, who fortunately ends up in the same forest. I loved this one; it reminded me so much of The Tempest. There are two brothers who, just like in The Tempest, are both Dukes. Their daughters are central to the plot, falling in love for the first time, just as Miranda does in The Tempest. The play includes so many of Shakespeare’s finest elements. There are women pretending to be men, women falling in love with those “men” and men confiding their love to those “men” without knowing who they really are. Confused? Don’t be, it’s all good fun. In one section a young man goes on and on about how he’s in love. He tells the older man who is his companion that there’s no way he could possibly understand, because he’s so old. I love how Shakespeare often pokes fun at the naïveté of the young. They believe no one has ever gone through what I’m going through right now. The play also includes the famous “All the world’s a stage” passage. I love reading one of his plays for the first time and stumbling upon one of those wonderful lines. It’s always a treat. I read this just after finishing Othello and it complemented the tragedy so well. It provided the comedic balance, cross dressing, falling in love, and mistaken identities that I craved after reading such a downer. “Do you not know I am a woman? When I think, I must speak.”
    • 3/5
      I think I read this at University...but the fact I can't remember it speaks volumes. I'm currently teaching this and found it quick and easy to read. But Shakespeare was never meant to be read was he? I'd like to see this of course. It would be hilarious. Hopefully soon somewhere in Sydney there will be a production and I look forward to it.I was particurly interested in The Forest of Arden representing how primal and animal selves, the natural world where still a heirachy exists. Shakespeare obviously writing in a Christian country steeped in Pagan lore and practice. A man so far ahead of his time with gender awareness and commentary on social status and abuse of power. Got to love the big William.
    • 4/5
      Orlando's older brother, Oliver, has been trying to kill him, and his newest idea is to have a wrestler take him out. But then Orlando not only wins but catches the eye of the daughter of the banished Duke, with consequences Oliver could never have foreseen.Though I have all of Shakespeare's plays on my "life list" of books I would like to read, I only moved this one in particular up the list because I saw it performed when I was in London a couple of weeks ago. It's a very interesting experience reading a play that I have once seen performed, and it really brings home the fact that plays are meant to be seen rather than read. Overall, while I enjoyed reading the original and imagining the possibilities of alternative interpretations of lines, they're certainly lacking in the personality that the actor/actress brings to the role. Some of the lines that seem confusing reading just make more sense with actions to go with them. It was also interesting to note that while the production really showed me how bawdy some of the lines were, the notes in the play that I read were generally unhelpful in this area (which, depending on your point of view, could be a good thing). I probably wouldn't read the play again, but I would watch another performance
    • 5/5
      When the usurping Duke exiles his niece Rosalind (daughter of the overthrown Duke), she and the present Duke's daughter Celia steal away to the forest of Arden to prevent their separation. Rosalind, newly infatuated with a young wrestling champion named Orlando, disguises herself as Celia's brother, and the two set up household not far from where Rosalind's father holds his Robin Hood-like court in the wilderness. Full of the accidents, cross-dressing, wit and hurried couplings that define so many of Shakespeare's comedies, As You Like It is a delightful play to read.
    • 3/5
      Nice little comedy with lots of mistaken/disguised identities and love interests, which we later saw played in King’s Park. Not 'great' literature, but a good romp. Contains the "all the world's a stage" line. Read January 2008.
    • 4/5
      I'm not going to go into the complicated plot on this one, but it's the one with Rosalind and Orlando, where Rosalind, for her own mysterious reasons, pretends to be a boy and flirts with Orlando, who is extremely dense, and never figures out that she is a girl.Forget about whether this is believable or not. (It's not.) In fact, the whole plot is pretty darn farfetched. It is, however, funny in some places and thoughtful in other places. Like all Shakespeare, it's much better on stage than on paper, but it was still a fun read.What I really enjoyed about the edition I read is that it had photos from the Royal Shakespeare Academy and others of the play, including a very young Alan Rickman as Jaques and a ludicrously costumed Kenneth Branagh as Touchstone. Very funny!
    • 3/5
      This has some really cute lines, especially from Touchstone, but it is not one of Shakespear's best works in my opinion. Although it probably would be much better to see on stage rather than to read.
    • 5/5
      This is a comedy with many different characters such asOrlando, Rosalind, Toushstone, Jaques, Phoebe, and Silvius. This play is composed of many clever personalities, including a boy named Oliver who will not share his father’s recently inherited wealth with his brother Orlando. Other characters include Duke Senior, usurped of his throne, Rosalind, Touchstone, and Jaques.
    • 4/5
      The New Folger Library editions of Shakespeare's works are my favorites. With ample introductory material, long notes at the end, and short language notes on the lefthand pages to match the text on the right, they are easy to read whether you need to check the notes or not.
    • 5/5
      Fun. Rosalind plays the romantics well and Shakespeare made a happy ending even beyond what was necessary. Jaques, Act II: "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."
    • 5/5
      My favorite Shakespeare play of all--for the humor and for Shakespeare's heroine, Rosalind