Shakespeare was great. No contest.

But in my opinion, his best comedy is As You Like It. It is an amazing play, where all the characters end up falling in love and getting married because of one person: a teenage girl named Rosalind. She wants to find out if the guy she likes really loves her, so she dresses up like a guy and offers to give her crush love lessons.

In this play there are two jesters, two shepherds, two peasant girls, two rich cousins, two brothers, and two dukes. It is an amazing play. No one in the play seems to want to do much with court life. Half of them are banished to the forest of Arden (Robin Hood’s supposed forest) and they spend their time having fun. It is thought Shakespeare pretty much wrote this play to show off, because it has no real morals. The entire point of the play is to give people love advice and show them how stupid lovers can be. One of my favorite quotes that Rosalind says is, “Love is merely a madness, and I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punish’d and cur’d is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.” 3:2

I know a lot of you are probably thinking “Shakespeare… Romeo and Juliet… Olden sounding words like thee and whilst… Dead chicks like Ophelia and Juliet. Not fun.” But if you enjoy rom-coms, this is just an olden day version. You can even look up the SparkNotes summary before you read it, just in case. But please, don’t knock it ’til you try it.

-Becka O., 8th grade