As You Like it: A Guide to the text and its Theatrical Life Lesley Wade Soule One of Shakespeare's most frequently performed plays, As You Like It is usually called a 'Romantic Comedy', but it is much more than that - more complex, diverse and surprising. This handbook accompanies the reader on a journey through this remarkable play: first surveying its surroundings (contemporary plays and theatrical conditions), then moving into the interior of the text, exploring in detail the variety of the play's imaginative and performative action and discovering that the world where As You Like It happens isn't the faraway, 'magical' Forest of Arden at all, but a more ordinary place full of much greater wonders: a theatre. There are also brief and helpful chapters on other people's explorations of the play, including descriptions and summaries of recent influential performances and criticism. Lesley Wade Soule is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Performance Arts at the University of Exeter, where she teaches directing and acting in the M.F.A. in Staging Shakespeare Programme. Her publications include Actor as Anti-Character: Dionysus, the Devil and the Boy Rosalind (2000), and she is co-editor of the journal Studies in Theatre and performance