As You Like It

In the play As You Like It by William Shakespeare, there is a quote which refers to our busy but temporary lives here on earth. The quote reads "they have their exits and entrances, and one man in...

The song is split into three sections interspersed between dialogue in Act II, scene 5 of As You Like It. In the first section, Amiens, a courtier, sings: Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lie...

The meaning of "and then the lover sighing like furnace" in William Shakespeare’s “The Seven Ages of Man” from his comedy As You Like It is that the passion and expression of love can be akin to...

The seven ages of man that Jaques describes are the stages of life: from birth and childhood to adulthood, old age, and finally extreme old age. When a person is "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste,...

William Shakespeare's As You Like It is seemingly set in two worlds: the court of Duke Frederick and the Forest of Arden, which serves its role as a place of temporary respite from the troubles of...

The famous "Seven Ages of Man" speech is spoken by Jaques (pronounced "JAY-kweez") in act 2, scene 7, of Shakespeare's pastoral comedy, As You Like It. Jaques is a contradictory character who is...

This theme of the seven ages of man dates back to antiquity. In classical literature, though, descriptions of these seven ages were generally encomiastic, praising the virtues appropriate to each...

This quotation comes from Jaques's famous speech, beginning "all the world's a stage." The speech describes the so-called "seven ages of man," moving from infancy through youth and adulthood to the...

Phebe, a shepherdess, makes this statement to Silvius in Act III, scene 5 of the play. The statement applies to Phebe herself, as she tells Silvius, who is madly in love with her, "the time was...

Oliver dislikes his attractive, talented, and physically stronger younger brother Orlando. When Orlando comes to him demanding the thousand crowns he is owed as his inheritance, becoming physically...

The tyrannical Duke Frederick has decided to banish his niece Rosalind from the ducal court. There is no good reason for this outrageous action; Frederick is only doing it because he's insanely...

Women's roles in Shakespeare's time were quite limited, despite the fact that a woman ruled England at the time of William Shakespeare. The Elizabethan society was highly patriarchal, and women...

Shakespeare employs apostrophe in this poem. Apostrophe is when the speaker addresses someone or something that cannot respond. In this case, the speaker directly addresses the winter wind in the...

"The Seven Ages of Man," as the character Jaques tells it, is a poem about the stages of life that we all go through if we live out a long life. He starts out comparing life to a play on a stage...

Pastoral plays were a common genre during the Renaissance period. They idealized country life and presented this world as almost Edenic in its innocence. As such, these stories were less interested...

A simile is a figure of speech that makes a comparison between two different things using the words "like" or "as." Jacques, the speaker, uses several similes throughout the speech "The Seven Ages...

Pastoral literature pits the corruptions of the city against the innocence of a natural setting. The natural world depicted in pastoral literature is not realistic. It is a dream world, a utopic...

The speech known as Jaques' "The Seven Ages of Man Speech," at the end of Act 2, Scene 7, contains many different metaphors as well as similes. For starters, the speech itself is an extended...

This comedy is pastoral in that it is written in the tradition of many works at the time that sought to compare the simplicity of country life to the complex and stressful life of cities and towns....

The simile that Shakespeare uses here is entirely appropriate in that a furnace is a place of extreme heat, as is the heart of a young man overburdened with love. The lover's heart is burning with...

The fact that Jacques recites these lines in "As You Like It" may have no special significance. I suspect that Shakespeare wrote out many short speeches and sololiquies extemporaniously as the...

Shakespeare is said to not have heroes in his comedies because of the significant role the lead female characters play (this may not be as easily asserted for his tragedies and histories,...

Rosalind and Celia have grown up together and have formed a strong attachment. Rosalind has the much stronger character. She is more intelligent than Celia and also more self-reliant,...

Shakespeare certainly does portray many different types of love in As You Like It with varying types of intensity. Rosalind and Orlando's love for each other certainly is one example of intense...

William Shakespeare was an English playwright who lived from April 26, 1564 to April 23, 1616. His pastoral comedy, As You Like It, was first published in 1623. It is an account of Rosalind and...

First of all, Rosalind and Orlando are not "it." They are human characters in Shakespeare's play As You Like It. In Act I, they meet when Orlando is in a wrestling match against a much bigger...

At the beginning of As You Like It Oliver and Orlando hate each other. Orlando is resentful because Oliver, his older brother, refuses to help him improve his education but treats him like a...

Orlando is the ideal romantic hero for a play like As You Like It. He makes an excellent match for the heroine Rosalind, because they are both intelligent and strong individuals. Orlando has to...

The scene you need to look at is Act I scene 3, when Celia and Rosalind plan to go to the Forest of Arden together because Celia's father has banished Rosalind from court, just as he has already...

The theme of disguise is central to As You Like It, as two of the main characters spend most of the play disguised as other people. More generally, the idea of artifice contrasted with authenticity...

Shakespeare apparently was highlighting the fact that he was presenting a play with the ingredients he knew his audiences would like. The play contains ingredients that are still very popular with...

As You Like It is considered to be a romantic pastoral comedy, one of Shakespeare's most light-hearted plays. It is a romantic comedy in that it ends in multiple marriages: Rosalind and Orlando;...

One way to answer this question is to compare the outward affect of the characters, and approach the question as a director or actor might. The two characters are sisters, but it is necessary to...

"Sweet are the uses of adversity" is the beginning of a famous speech by the exiled Duke Senior in Shakespeare's As You Like It." He is expressing a truth which may seem paradoxical but which has...

As You Like It is a pastoral, in that it conforms to the conventions of the pastoral. It is a satire of the pastoral, in that it calls attention to the artificiality of the pastoral ideal. The...

Shakespeare uses an extended metaphor in his poem commonly referred to as "The Seven Ages of Man" from As You Like It. Beginning with "All the world's a stage," the speaker compares the world to a...

The definition of comedy has changed considerably over time. The Ancient Greeks, who had no specific genre for satire (the only literary form invented by the Romans), tended to produce satirical...

Jaques' essential point in his "seven ages of man" speech found in Act 2, Scene 7 is essentially to assert that life is rather arbitrary. He compares life to a play with all of humanity...

The soliloquy of Jacques in As You Like It is not symbolic but metaphorical. The extended metaphor has two main parts. In the first part he is saying that everybody in the world is an actor on a...

In Shakespeare's As You Like It, Touchstone is a fool, or jester, in Duke Frederick's household. Duke Frederick is a serious, no-nonsense, villainous character in the play, and this might explain...

Personification is the attribution of human characteristics to non-human things. An example of personification occurs in character Jaques’s soliloquy in Act II, Scene 7 of As You Like It lines 18...

Jacques's monologue from As You Like It is an example of dramatic poetry, and as such, repetition of words and ideas is employed for emphasis and to intensify effect. Here are some examples of this...

In Act III, scene i, we learn that Duke Frederick wants revenge against Orlando. He orders Oliver to seek out Orlando and return him to the court. If Oliver fails, Frederick will dispossess him...

It possibly as simple as typical sibling rivalry. In 'As You Like It' Shakespeare is taking a theme which is so common in very many families and expanding it to encompass and magnify that on a huge...

Shakespeare considers the nature and manifestation of Love in all of his comedies. Love was a big issue in his day, because the idea of marrying someone for love (rather than to create an alliance...

Shakespeare certainly does portray spontaneity of love as a theme in As You Like It, and Celia and Oliver falling in love certainly is one example of a spontaneous romance.Oliver appears to have...

Given that the two brothers are never on stage together, what we know about their relationship comes from what they say to others and what others say about them. We first hear about Frederick and...

When the play opens, Rosalind is living with her cousin, Celia and uncle, Duke Frederick, who has banished her father, Duke Senior. She meets Orlando at a wrestling match and is smitten with him....

Pastoral elements in literature contain idealized conventions of a rustic or rural life. Various descriptions of landscape and nature come into play as well as participants in country life (like...

The famous monologue of the pessimistic character Jaques, who contemplates the invariableness and futility of life, comes in Act II, Scene 7 of Shakespeare's As You Like It. For, he declares, in...