Order It: Jaques's "All the world's a stage"
“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.
Speaking what we feel: Shakespeare’s plague plays
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?
Up Close: A 'Seven Ages of Man' painting
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.”
Better than laughing: Renaissance melancholy
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…
Excerpt — ‘Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy’ by Paula Marantz Cohen
“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…
Outdoor Shakespeare: The pioneers of a summer tradition
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…
5 things to look for when you watch "As You Like It"
What should you watch for in a production of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It?” We asked some friends what they look for in this classic play.
Rosalind: Shakespeare's Immortal Heroine - an excerpt
Read an excerpt from “Rosalind: Shakespeare’s Immortal Heroine” by Angela Thirlwell, in which she traces the performance history of “As You Like It” and interviews famous actresses who have played this role onstage.
Love letters in Shakespeare: As You Like It, Hamlet, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona
We look at three instances of love letters in Shakespeare’s plays: Orlando’s love poems to Rosalind in As You Like It, Hamlet’s passionate missive to Ophelia in Hamlet, and Proteus’s romantic letter to Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.
Play scripts as you like them
Promptbooks help stage managers and actors keep their, er, act straight. Explore these ‘As You Like It’ promptbooks from the Folger collection.
As You Like It in Esperanto: Washington, DC, 1910
Folger Finds delivers delightful and insightful moments with the Folger collection. Sarah Hovde, a cataloger at the Folger Shakespeare Library, shares the story behind a 1910 Esperanto edition of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Heard any Esperanto lately? Designed by…