As You Like It - Dover Thrift Editions: Plays by William Shakespeare Paperback

About the Book

When forbidden romance enters their lives, two noblewomen assume disguises and flee to the Forest of Arden, where they encounter friendly outlaws and wise fools. This comedy features memorable characters and incomparable poetry.

Book Synopsis

This wisely funny comedy, which contains some of Shakespeare's loveliest poetry, contrasts a country's world of envy and rivalry with a forest's world of compassion and harmony. In the Forest of Arden, the banished young heroine, Rosalind, disguised as a gentleman farmer, encounters an extraordinary assemblage of characters, including a fool, a malcontent traveler, her own banished father, and the banished young man she loves. Romantic happiness triumphs, even as we laugh at the excesses of love, at the ways of court and countryside, indeed, at everything, in this masterpiece of comic writing,

From the Back Cover

William Shakespeare's As You Like It provides face to face text and notes, a chronology of Skakespeare's life and times, text derived from the earliest printings, often preserving puns and wordplay otherwise lost, and up-to-date commentary on the structure, atmosphere and content of the play and on its sources and influences.

About the Author

"He was not of an age, but for all time," declared Ben Jonson of his contemporary William Shakespeare (1564-1616). Jonson's praise is especially prescient, since at the turn of the 17th century Shakespeare was but one of many popular London playwrights and none of his dramas were printed in his lifetime. The reason so many of his works survive is because two of his actor friends, with the assistance of Jonson, assembled and published the First Folio edition of 1623.