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William Shakespeare - As You Like It

ISBN: 1904271227

"Come woo me, woo me, for I'm in a holiday humour and
like enough to consent."

Rosalind's wonderful line is one of my favourite
moments in literature, and 'As You Like It' is a
glorious play. Of course, a 'holiday humour' is what
the play is about - holiday not just as a temporary
step outside some hideous normalcy, but a
re-vivifying, healing place and time. Holiday can
infuse the workaday world, returning it to sanity. The
place, Arden forest, is my ideal of England: a place
of good humour, magnaminity and generosity. Rosalind
is returned to herself here - and such a self!
Funny, intelligent, without illusions but ready for
love, she is irresistible. The education she gives that
amiable goof Orlando is one of the high points of
English literature. The concluding marriage,
officiated by the mask of Hymen, renders the play's
great spirit into something mythic: marriage joining
the couple to the world's possibilities which have
been re-discovered in the forest.

Reviewed By: Mark Wrigley

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