juushika 's review for:

As You Like It by William Shakespeare

4.0

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It would be disingenuous to call this a dry-run for Twelfth Night, despite the shared conceit which in Twelfth Night is better realized and even more queer, and that Twelfth Night has stronger and more diverse subplots--because As You Like It is strong in its own right: the transformative forest, always a pleasure in Shakespeare and here at its purest and most literal; the tension between the freedoms of the forest and the pressures of external reality, and the parallel interrogation of romance. For me this is most interesting in conjunction with other Shakespeare plays and isn't on its own a personal favorite, but it's an absolute pleasure.