ABSTRACT
Rosalind has been banished from the court by her uncle Duke Frederick. Shakespeare's As You Like It is an irrepressibly romantic comedy with one of Shakespeare's best heroines. Rosalind, the daughter of the exiled Duke Senior, is cast out of court by the latters usurping brother Duke Frederick. She goes in search of her father to the Forest of Arden. Rosalind's prose speech is full of ironies. She is teaching Orlando the hard facts of wooing. In Rosalind's terms love is like a sickness, a madness. Notice how she resembles a physician diagnosing symptoms and then prescribing a cure. She treats Orlando like a patient, thereby protecting herself from direct involvement in the problems of love. The speech is written as a catalogue of items and you must give a life and an emotional weight to each one of her ideas and images. Her great strength as a character, however, is that she is a realist and not a romantic.
