As You Like It

Explore collection items about early 20th-century performances outdoors by the Ben Greet Players, who played college campuses across the US—and eventually the front lawn of the White House, along with designs from the Folger’s 2026 production.

In 1936, Britain’s first feature-length Shakespeare “talkie” premiered: As You Like It featuring Elisabeth Bergner and Laurence Olivier in his first Shakespeare role on screen. Explore the film’s press kits and study guides.

Shakespeare’s beloved pastoral comedy overflows with wit and poetry, including the memorable Seven Ages of Man speech which begins “All the world’s a stage.” Explore some of the play’s most well-known lines, in order of their appearance.

Shakespeare mentions the word “fool” more than 300 times. Here are seven quotes, often spoken by one of his wise—and witty—fools.

Shakespeare’s phrase “sermons in stones” is from a speech in As You Like It. Take this quiz to see if you can correctly order the lines.

As the Folger prepares to reopen, we turn to Shakespeare’s plays for quotations about new beginnings and fresh starts.

“All the world’s a stage,” says Jacques in a famous speech from As You Like It about life and the passage of time. Take this quiz to see if you can correctly order the lines that follow.

How do Shakespeare’s plays reflect a life filled with plague outbreaks, asks Austin Tichenor — and do we see his plays in new ways now?

Take a closer look at a 19th-century oil painting in the Folger collection that depicts all seven ages of man from Jaques’s speech in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.”

The most famous book about Renaissance melancholy, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), celebrates its four hundredth anniversary this year. Though it was published five years after Shakespeare’s death, it gathers together ideas about melancholy from antiquity right through…

“Its sense of empathy for the gendered position—and the pains and difficulties that accompany it on both sides—is at the heart of its comic warmth,” writes Paula Marantz Cohen about Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” in this excerpt from her…

Shakespeare by the sea, on the river, in the park or garden, on the common – in the summertime Shakespeare’s plays are everywhere outdoors! High-profile shows in New York’s Central Park or at Ashland’s Oregon Shakespeare Festival may come to…