The play is set in a duchy in France, but most of the action takes place in a location called the 'Forest of Arden.'

Frederick has usurped the Duchy and exiled his older brother, Duke Senior. The Duke's daughter Rosalind has been permitted to remain at court because she is the closest friend and cousin of Frederick's only child, Celia. Orlando, a young gentleman of the kingdom who has fallen in love at first sight of Rosalind, is forced to flee his home after being persecuted by his older brother, Oliver. Frederick becomes angry and banishes Rosalind from court. Celia and Rosalind decide to flee together accompanied by the jester Touchstone, with Rosalind disguised as a young man and Celia disguised as a poor lady.

Rosalind, now disguised as Ganymede ("Jove's own page"), and Celia, now disguised as Aliena (Latin for "stranger"), arrive in the Arcadian Forest of Arden, where the exiled Duke now lives with some supporters, including "the melancholy Jaques," who is introduced to us weeping over the slaughter of a deer. "Ganymede" and "Aliena" do not immediately encounter the Duke and his companions, as they meet up with Corin, an impoverished tenant, and offer to buy his master's rude cottage.

Orlando and his servant Adam (a role possibly played by Shakespeare himself, though this story is apocryphal), meanwhile, find the Duke and his men and are soon living with them and posting simplistic love poems for Rosalind on the trees. Rosalind, also in love with Orlando, meets him as Ganymede and pretends to counsel him to cure him of being in love. Ganymede says "he" will take Rosalind's place and "he" and Orlando can act out their relationship.

The shepherdess Phebe, with whom Silvius is in love, has fallen in love with Ganymede (actually Rosalind), though "Ganymede" continually shows that "he" is not interested in Phebe. Touchstone, meanwhile, has fallen in love with the dull-witted shepherdess, Audrey, and tries to woo her, but eventually is forced to be married first. William, another shepherd, attempts to marry Audrey as well, but is stopped by Touchstone, who threatens to kill him "a hundred and 50 different ways".

Finally, Silvius, Phebe, Ganymede, and Orlando are brought together in an argument with each other over who will get whom. Ganymede says he will solve the problem, having Orlando promise to marry Rosalind, and Phebe promise to marry Silvius if she cannot marry Ganymede.

Orlando sees Oliver in the forest and rescues him from a lioness, causing Oliver to repent for mistreating Orlando (some directors treat this as a tale, rather than reality). Oliver meets Aliena (Celia's false identity) and falls in love with her, and they agree to marry. Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver and Celia, Silvius and Phebe, and Touchstone and Audrey all are married in the final scene, after which they discover that Frederick has also repented his faults, deciding to restore his legitimate brother to the dukedom and adopt a religious life. Jaques, ever melancholy, declines their invitation to return to the court preferring to stay in the forest and to adopt a religious life. Rosalind speaks an epilogue to the audience, commending the play to both men and women in the audience.


In As You Like It, when we meet Duke Senior, a man banished to the Forest of Arden by his usurping younger brother, we are given a spoken exchange that may be the most central statement to understanding Shakespeare's comedy. The Duke speaks one of the play's most cherished lines: "Sweet are the uses of adversity." He means that, unless he and his court had been ousted, they would never have known the full joys of country life. The Duke continues this idea by further extolling how good the Forest is as opposed to the pomp of court.

The Duke's courtier Amiens responds with a slightly court-like compliment:
        Happy is your Grace
        That can translate the stubbornness of fortune
        Into so quiet and so sweet a style.

The Duke answers Amiens with a suggestion that strikes a chord of ironic displacement:
        Come, shall we go and kill us venison?
        And yet it irks me the poor dappled fools,
        Being native burghers of this desert city
        Should in their own confines with forkéd heads
        Have their round haunches gored.

Another attendant courier responds and deepens the irony:
        Indeed, my lord,
        The melancholy Jaques grieves at that,
        And in that kind swears you do more usurp
        Than doth your brother that hath banished you.

Over the course of these twelve lines, Shakespeare clusters for us the ideas that animate the play's attitudes toward the traditional dichotomy 'of court vs. country or urban vs. pastoral. If Arden is wholesome and good, why does the Duke call it a 'desert city' and its native deer 'burghers,' city dwellers? Are the literal horns of the dappled fools' a metaphorical sneer at the deer being betrayed in their own  'confines'? And what about Jaques' grief and accusation that the Duke, like the Duke's younger brother, is also taking what does not belong to him? The 12 lines blur the traditional distinction that posits that the natural world-the Forest of Arden-is better and purer than the artificial world of the court, which is rife with betrayal and irrational orders of    exile. Shakespeare borrowed ideas from the Robin Hood literature that dates back several centuries before As You Like It, and that literary tradition allows for no blurring. The men in Sherwood Forest are an honest, affectionate, loyal and caring group of men and their families. The Robin Hood tradition makes the Forest almost Edenic, a paradise without strife. When opposed to the world of the court, Sherwood Forest is an alternative reality. There is no conscious blurring, but Shakespeare seems to have understood the necessity for ambiguity when invoking the Arcadian ideal.

That blurring runs like a long line of gold ore throughout the play. The most loyal and disloyal acts in the play occur at court: the abiding friendship between Celia and Rosalind was engendered and nurtured at court; the younger Duke usurped his older brother's power at court, spewed hatred and venom at Rosalind and Orlando and banished both. Similarly, for the sake of the court, Orlando's own brother Oliver betrays him in a move that shocks even the venomous, usurping Duke, who calls Oliver a 'villain.'
On the other hand, the world outside the court is filled with absurdity. Shakespeare parodies pastoral literary conventions in the bumpkinish persons of shepherds and shepherdesses and a vicar. However, one of those shepherds, Corin, matches wits with the wittiest of courtiers, Touchstone. In like regard, the shepherd Silvius manages to word his wooing far more poetically than Orlando, who infuses his poetry with literary learnedness that lacks both wit and urbanity.
As You Like It makes plain that we cannot take the traditional dichotomy between court and country at face value. Nor may we take traditional gender roles as static. When Rosalind becomes a man, she loses none of her womanly attributes and is loved in a masculine friendship with Orlando while being pursued by Phebe for attributes surprising in a man: his reds lips and cheeks, for example.
Perhaps, Rosalind explains the blurring of all these categories as an element of time:
Men are April when they woo, December when they wed; maids     are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they     are wives.

Change is a function of time. When Jaques gives his seven stages of man speech, Shakespeare undermines any full and serious acceptance of the speech in just the way he undermines the Duke's sweetness of
adversity. Jaques claims that "one man in his time plays many parts." He enumerates those parts: the 'mewling' and 'puking' infant; the 'whining schoolboy'; the lover 'with a woeful ballad'; the soldier, 'quick in quarrel'; the magistrate, 'fat,' 'severe' and 'formal'; then the old man; and finally the elderly child "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing."

The center of Jaques speech is the constant self-interestedness of a person in each of the stages. But the speech is given in the context of Orlando saving his servant from starvation, Orlando not eating anything until his servant is fed first—this 80-year-old servant who gave the young Orlando his life's savings.

Shakespeare undermines Jaques' stages even though the play also shows how much they may be taken as true. Infants do mewl; schoolboys whine. But they cannot be reduced to a single attribute; nor can the virtues of country life simply offset the rigors of country life. The same may be said for the court. We must take each way of life as we like it.