With its explorations of sexual ambivalence, As You Like It speaks directly to the twenty-first century. Juliet Dusinberre
demonstrates that Rosalind’s authority in the play grows from new ideas about women and reveals that Shakespeare’s heroine reinvents herself for every age. But the play is also deeply rooted in Elizabethan culture and through it Shakespeare addresses some of the hotly debated issues of the period.

"This will be the definitive edition of As You Like It for many years to come" - Phyllis Rackin, University of Pennsylvania


Table of contents
List of illustrations

General editors preface

Preface

INTRODUCTION
A brief view of the play

Fictions of gender
- Rosalind and the boy actor
- Later Rosalinds
- Celia
- Orlando
- Phoebe and Audrey

Date

The Forest of Arden
- Well, this is the Forest of Arden
- The hunt
- Robin Hood and his Merry Men
- Staging the Forest of Arden

Early foresters
- The Earl of Essex
- Thomas Morley

Realms of Gold
- Shakespeare and Thomas Lodge
- Shakespeare and Sidney
- Harrington, Ariosto and Rabelais
- Golden Worlds

Pastoral
- Genre: entertainments for Elizabeth
- Corin and Touchstone
- Borderlands: love and politics
- A wise man and a fool: Jaques and Touchstone

A speaking picture: readers and painters

Text
- The staying order
- The Folio text: provenance and editorial practices
- Text and performance

Epilogue: All the worlds a stage

AS YOU LIKE IT

Appendix 1: A court epilogue, Shrovetide 1599
Appendix 2: Casting and doubling
Appendix 3: Ben Jonson, As You Like It and the War of the Theatres
Appendix 4: The Douai manuscript
Appendix 5: Political after-lives: Veracinis opera Rosalinda (1744) and Charles Johnsons Love in a Forest (1723)