“Thrice welcome”: The power of three in As You Like It

We all know that Shakespeare loved twins, but less talked about is how much he adored triplets. From the three weird sisters in Macbeth, to King Lear’s three daughters, to the rhetorical majesty of “Friends, Romans, countrymen,” Shakespeare understood well the power of three and deployed it, perhaps most unexpectedly, in his popular comedy As You Like It.

Shakespeare’s multiples of three was first suggested to me by my daughter Daisy, who in Independent Shakespeare Company’s 2024 production of As You Like It in Griffith Park in Los Angeles doubled as LeBeau and (proud dad alert!) a scene-stealing Audrey. Daisy told me that when wrestling with the sheer number of characters in the play, she began to see a pattern. “It’s not just about twins, but about triplets,” she told me. “It’s not just one set of three brothers, but two. It’s not about two clowns and two shepherds, but three of each.”

Once suggested, the patterns began to announce themselves. There are three pairs of characters with the same name (two Dukes, two Olivers, two Jaques). Orlando and Oliver have a third brother— “the second son of old Rowland”—who has the same name as the melancholy lord Jaques, he of “All the world’s a stage” fame. There’s a sense in which this Jaques is also a kind-of third brother to both Dukes, not only in the extraordinary license Duke Senior grants him—and how he assumes the status to “bequeath” Senior’s “former honor” to him—but the fraternal way in which he joins Duke Frederick in religious exile at the end of the play.

Rosalind, of course, as a female character who dresses up as a man (and was originally written to be played by a boy actor) represents the triple levels of disguise Shakespeare used in so many of his plays. This also happens in Twelfth Night, when Viola’s disguise as “Cesario” leads to not just one but two romantic triangles. As You Like It also showcases two romantic triangles: between Rosalind (disguised as “Ganymede”), Orlando, and Phoebe, and between Audrey, Touchstone, and William. As Juliet Dusinberre asks in her introduction to the 2006 Arden edition of the play, does Orlando “fall in love with Rosalind, or did he fall in love with Ganymede, or was it some subtle admixture of the two?” Orlando calls Ganymede “fair youth,” the phrase often applied to the unnamed young man Shakespeare refers to in Sonnet 20 as “the master mistress of my passion.” Was Shakespeare describing a third gender? As Dusinberre points out, “The role of Rosalind nurtures sexual multiplicity,” a kind of androgyny that appears throughout Shakespeare’s work, crossing “the boundaries of the heterosexual and homosexual” into a third “queer space.”

There’s even a third location in As You Like It. Much is made of the contrast between the French court and the Forest of Arden, but there’s always also the actual theater in which the play is being performed. This meta reality is present in all of Shakespeare’s plays, and as his characters directly address the audience throughout—and Rosalind becomes the only female character in the canon to recite a play’s epilogue—audiences become not just consumers and spectators, but active participants. Indeed, in Shakespeare’s hand, the Forest of Arden itself assumes a triple identity: real, romanticized, and also fantastical, filled with imaginary non-indigenous elements like a palm tree, lions, and snakes.

As You Like It | Folger Theatre, 2026

There’s a greatest-hits quality to As You Like It, which features more songs than in any other Shakespeare play and many of the same kinds of characters—shepherds and lovers and clowns, oh my!—that it feels like the playwright wanted to give every actor in his company something to do. Recent scholarship suggests the first recorded performance of As You Like It was on February 20, 1599, at Richmond Palace, a largely rural retreat for the Queen and her Court west of London, the perfect setting for a play about nobility finding refuge in a forest. (“Are not these woods / More free from peril than the envious court?” Duke Senior asks his fellow lords-in-exile.) But February 1599 was also less than two months after Shakespeare and his company tore down the Theatre and several months before they rebuilt it and named it the Globe, so the overstuffed nature of As You Like It makes sense. I can easily imagine Shakespeare writing many multiples of fun characters for his actors to play during this period of uncertainty. “Sweet are the uses of adversity,” Duke Senior continues in the same speech—contained within a play—that celebrates the power of performance (while subtly advertising the new playhouse being built), sees value everywhere, and “finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in everything.”

Shakespeare deploys the power of three in his language all the time. In addition to Mark Antony’s speech in Julius Caesar, Malvolio’s famous line “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ‘em,” expresses a simple idea in an aphoristically powerful and memorable way. Even Hamlet’s famous “to be, or not to be” declares a purely binary notion in three rhetorically powerful iambic phrases. You’ll quickly notice many other examples throughout the canon once you begin to think about it.

As You Like It gains some of its power—and over 400 years of popularity—by giving audiences, as its title suggests, exactly what they want, and in copious amounts. As if to further illustrate Daisy’s observation, three major productions of As You Like It are scheduled to open this year: the current (universally praised!) production at the Folger, this summer’s staging at Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and this fall’s Royal Shakespeare Company‘s all-male interpretation in Stratford-upon-Avon (with Tony winner Jonathan Groff as Rosalind). Hang on…there’s also these other productions in 2026 at Hudson Valley Shakespeare, Flagstaff Shakespeare Festival, Virginia’s American Shakespeare Center, the Public Theater’s Mobile Unit across all five boroughs of New York City, Wisconsin’s American Players Theatre, and the five-person Actors From the London Stage version that ran earlier this year at Shakespeare Notre Dame.

Nine productions (at least) of As You Like It in 2026 alone. “Three times thrice,” indeed.