I have finished AS YOU LIKE IT and must agree with DR Elmore that it's not my favorite Shakespeare comedy. Just as when I was taking a Shakespeare course in college, I would not have gotten through just reading - listening helped a great deal. Forty years ago, I'd go to the listening lab in the library and use LPs and huge headsets. Tonight, I used a 2-CD version and the Sennheiser earphones that I bought at Tekserve in NYC.
I love As You Like It. I read it in the seventh grade and it was the play that turned me on to Shakespeare in a serious, never-look-back way. I had read Romeo and Juliet in the second grade and had no problem with the language. I grew up in a household that still reads the King James Bible, so the verbiage of a previous generation is not that far away.
Still, I picked up As You Like It a few years later and never looked back. I loved the comedy then and still thrill at the scene when all declare their misbegotten love, with Rosalind ending with "And I for no woman."
I wish I could take you back to the early 1970s and a life that has been differently lived since then so you could understand what that kind of comic mayhem would cause.
It also helped that the year I read the play, I discovered a free Shakespeare in the Park that was presenting As You Like, Macbeth (which I also read that year because it was short) and Measure for Measure, which I hadn't read. The free part intrigued my parents, and we continued to go throughout my high school and some of my college years. They loved it, but they would never go without me. Somehow that made me sad.
