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As You Like It

As You Like It is one of the great comedy plays by William Shakespeare. The heroine, Rosalind, is one of his most inspiring characters and has more lines than any of Shakespeare's female characters. Rosalind, the daughter of a banished duke falls in love with Orlando the disinherited son of one of the duke's friends. When she is banished from the court by her usurping uncle, Duke Frederick , Rosalind takes on the appearance of a boy calling herself Ganymede. She travels with her cousin Celia and the jester Touchstone to the Forest of Arden, where her father and his friends live in exile. Themes about life and love, including aging, the natural world, and death are included in the play. New friends are made and families are reunited. By the end of the play Ganymede, once again Rosalind, marries Orlando. Orlando and Rosalind, Oliver and Celia, Silvius and Phebe, and Touchstone and Audrey all are married in the final scene. Oliver becomes a gentler, kinder young man so the Duke changes his ways and turns to religion and so that the exiled Duke, father of Rosalind, can rule once again. Act II, Scene 7 features a great soliloquy by William Shakespeare which begins:
"All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages..."