As You Like It

Try our quiz about Shakespeare’s As You Like It, from its characters, words, and music to its exploration of the great outdoors.

As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s festive comedies, but there are also heavier themes in the play. We asked Folger Director Dr. Farah Karim-Cooper for her take on Shakespeare’s beloved comedy.

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 Jaques 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…