As You Like it: Collins Classics

Both a witty satire of literary cliche and a tender meditation on the varieties of love, As You Like It continues to be one of Shakespeare's most beloved and widely performed comedies. In the introduction to this new edition, David Bevington traces the complex relationships between the characters in the play, and explores the history of its criticism from Samuel Johnson to the twenty-first century.Illustrations and extended discussions of myth and folklore alluded to in the play are interleaved with the text, and appendices provide excerpts from key sources for the play.

'An Arden editor must present an overview of the play's criticism [and] must also take into account the play's ongoing dissemination through performance on stage and screen. Despite these arduous demands, Dusinberre's edition, with its editorial apparatus, its substantial introduction (142 pages), its notes, and its various appendices, fulfills the above requirements admirably...Dusinberre addresses a theatre history that bears witness to the impact that various social movements, especially feminism and gay/lesbian (and now queer) activism, have had on the performance of one of Shakespeare's most gender-bending plays...It inscribes the feminist, queer, and historicist criticism of the past thirty years into the historical memory of Shakespeare studies.'
'If As you Like It is rich in human feeing, a highly conceptualised Tempest seems to exist in the threshold between walking and dreaming.'
'This is one of Shakespeare's most sophisticated comedies, an ironic fairy tale of love and sex, sincerity and pretension, betrayal and loyalty.'

Leading actor Simon Russell Beale is one of three distinguished Series Editors who have developed the series

Introduction; Photo gallery; List of characters; Act 1; Act 2; Act 3; Act 4; Act 5; Perspectives and themes; Contexts and sources; Characters; The language of As You Like It; As You Like It in performance; Writing about Shakespeare; Writing about As You Like It; Timeline; Acknowledgements.