We think that As You Like It was written for the newly opened Globe Theatre and performed first in 1599. Some have pointed to Jaques’s famous speech which begins 'all the world (i.e. the Globe)’s a stage' to support this. It is said that Shakespeare himself played the part of Adam in early performances, though no proof for this survives. In 1603 the play is thought to have been revived for a performance in front of James VI/I at Wilton House in Wiltshire, but again no evidence exists.

Adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays were both common and popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and in many ways were responsible for keeping interest in Shakespeare alive.


We do know that the play was performed at Drury Lane in 1723, when Charles Johnson staged the first of many greatly altered versions. Johnson, a playwright, tavern keeper and freemason called his adaptation Love in a Forest. He omitted Touchstone and some of the lower class characters. He made the melancholy Jaques fall in love with Celia citing some of Benedick’s lines from Much Ado About Nothing. He also substituted a duel with rapiers for the wrestling match between Charles and Orlando, during which they uttered defiant speeches from Richard II.


The first revival of the play with a text close to Shakespeare’s own was staged in 1740, again at Drury Lane. In October 1741, rival productions were staged at Drury Lane and Covent Garden with Hannah Pritchard and Peg Woffington both playing Rosalind. They were rivals in the role for a further nine years. Woffington continued to play the role until 1757, when she suffered a stroke during the epilogue.

The nineteenth century actor/manager William Charles Macready (1793-1873) staged a magnificent production at Drury Lane in 1842, using an almost complete original text.


Since the early 1800s the theatrical history of As You Like It has been dominated by its Rosalinds. Rosalind is the longest part Shakespeare wrote for a woman. It has attracted many of the greatest actresses of each generation.


Perhaps the most famous eighteenth century Rosalind was the greatly admired Dorothy (or Dorothea) Jordan, the Irish born actress and celebrated mistress of the Duke of Clarence - later King William IV - by whom she had ten children. Well known for playing comic tomboy roles, Mrs Jordan played Rosalind from 1778 to 1814.


Sarah Siddons, the greatest tragic actress of her age, was not a great success as Rosalind. She is said to have brought a feminine playfulness to the role but she refused to dress as a man when Ganymede and she lacked the brashness and sauciness audiences had come to expect from the part.


Helen Faucit played Rosalind frequently and successfully from 1845 until her retirement in 1879.


Ada Rehan was a tremendously successful Rosalind in 1890. Almost without exception critics thought her performance was 'perfection'. George Bernard Shaw described her as both 'enchanting' and 'irresistible'.




The early twentieth century saw the appearance of another important Rosalind, Edith Evans. She played the part between 1926 and 1937, when she was 55. She was a witty, romantic, modern Rosalind or, as J.C. Trewin put it, 'Rosalind herself'.


Peggy Ashcroft played 'a warm and light-hearted' Rosalind in Glen Byam’s 1957 revival of his 1952 production in which he presented the action as unfolding in time with the changing seasons. The winter settings of the opening scenes turned to spring as Orlando’s love for Rosalind grew and moved into summer as their courtship developed.


Vanessa Redgrave played Rosalind in Michael Elliott’s production at Stratford in 1961 to outstanding critical acclaim. Bernard Levin wrote: 'The naturalness of her playing, the passionate, breathless conviction of it, the depth of feeling and the breadth of reality – this is not acting at all, but living, being, loving.'


Dorothy Tutin played Rosalind at the RSC in 1967 in a production directed by David Jones.


Eileen Atkins was a contemporary, liberated, intelligent Rosalind in Buzz Goodbody’s production at Stratford in 1973. Buzz Goodbody was the first (and, to-date, last) woman to direct the play at the RSC. She said that she wanted 'to win back the play for women'. Her Rosalind wore tight denim jeans as Ganymede in an abstract Arden full of vast metal tubes.


Maggie Smith (Stratford Ontario, 1977)
Kate Nelligan (RSC, 1977)
Sara Kestleman (National Theatre, 1979)
Susan Fleetwood (RSC, 1980)
Juliet Stevenson (RSC, 1985)
Sophie Thompson (RSC, 1989)
Samantha Bond and Kate Buffery (RSC, 1992-3)
Niamh Cusack (RSC, 1996)
Alexandra Gilbreath (RSC, 2000)


For more information and pictures of past Rosalinds, visit the RSC's Picture and Exhibition Collection.


Jan Kott’s seminal work, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, greatly influenced productions of Shakespeare’s plays after its publication in the UK in 1965. Many critics claimed that Kott’s argument that all-male casting could best demonstrate the sexual ambiguity in As You Like It influenced Clifford Williams’ production for the National Theatre at the Old Vic in 1967 in which Ronald Pickup as Rosalind headed an all-male cast. Williams denied such a suggestion maintaining that he was trying simply to create an atmosphere of sexual purity that would transcend sexuality.

Cheek by Jowl also staged As You Like It with an all-male cast in 1991. The production was directed by Declan Donnellan. John Peter, theatre critic for the Sunday Times, described Donnellan’s attempt to conform to Elizabethan practice as 'not a question of merely transcending sexuality or of being in drag, but of actors reaching out toward a different experience and communicating a different mode of being.'