Rosalind sees a young man, Orlando, fighting in a wrestling match and falls in love. Orlando is equally smitten by her loveliness. Rosalind is banished from the court by her uncle who has usurped the dukedom. Rosalind's cousin, Celia, cannot bear to be parted from her, so the two ladies escape together searching for Rosalind's banished father in the Forest of Arden. Orlando is fleeing for his life, after his own brother has tried to have him killed, and he also escapes into the Forest of Arden. Hilarity ensues.

I always enjoy rereading this play, because a lot of Shakespeare's most famous lines come from this play, such as, "The world is but a stage...". I also enjoy the silly jokes and crazy circumstances of the courtship between Rosalind and Orlando. This play is just hilarious from start to finish!

Rosalind is kind of a nut. Instead of fleeing to her father's side and leaning on him for protection, she continues to dress up as a man, and keeps up the charade of her false identity for as long as she wants. I think maybe she enjoys the freedom of moving through the world as a man, and wants to try her wings a little. I also think she enjoys messing with people who think she is a man. She thinks it's just one big joke!

Rosalind has all the best scenes in this play. She gets Orlando to playact that he is wooing Rosalind to show how he would go about it, and she is going to "pretend" to be Rosalind to show him how fickle and difficult women can be, to supposedly dissuade him from his love. She also gets in the middle of a romance between two shepherds, interfering to encourage this young shepherdess that she should accept the love of this shepherd because she is too ugly to get many offers of marriage. But then the young shepherdess falls in love with Rosalind thinking she is a man! These misunderstandings lead to some of the most hilarious and clever lines in the entire play!

The whole play has a very playful and silly mood. People fall in love at the drop of a hat, they write reams of really bad poetry and sing it to each other, and then they fall just as quickly into melancholy if their love so much as sneezes in their general direction.

The writing is brilliant, of course. There is nothing serious or realistic about the story at all. It's like a weird dream where everything happens really quickly and without explanation. You just have to go with it and not try to make sense of it.

This play is just so witty and fun. It always makes me laugh every time I reread it. The dialogue is snappy and the plot flows along quickly. It is such an easy one to read because it really grabs your attention.