As You Like It is Love: The Language of Love The most obvious concern of As You Like It is love, and in particular attitudes and language appropriate for young romantic love. This is evident from the relationships between Orlando and Rosalind, Silvius and Phoebe, Touchstone and Audrey, and Celia and Oliver. The action of the play moves back and forth between these couples, inviting us to compare the different styles and to recognize from those comparisons some important facts about young love. Here Rosalind's role is decisive. Rosalind is Shakespeare's greatest and most vibrant comic female role. She is clearly the only character in the play who possesses an intelligent, erotic, and fully grounded sense of love, and it becomes her task in the play to try to educate others from their false notions of love, especially those notions that suggest that the The real business of love lies in adopting an exaggerated Petrarchan language and the appropriate attitude that follows. Rosalind falls in love with Orlando at first sight (as is standard in Shakespeare), becomes erotically energized, and remains so throughout the play. She is delighted and excited by the experience and is determined to live it fully moment by moment. One of the great pleasures of watching Rosalind is that she always celebrates her passionate feelings for Orlando. He doesn't deny them or try to play with his emotions. She's aware that falling in love has made her subject to Celia's gentle ridicule, but she won't pretend not to be totally thrilled by the experience just to save herself from being ridiculed (she even laughs at herself, while taking enormous pleasure in the behavior which prompts... half of the article... anet Lloyd Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993.McFarland, Thomas Shakespeare's Pastoral Comedy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.Marsden, Jean I. The Text Reimagined. : Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Eighteenth-Century Literary Theory Lexington, Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 1995. Odell, George CD Shakespeare from Betterton to Irving Vol. 2 : Dover Publications, 1966. Russell, Anne E. "History and Real Life: Anna Jameson, Shakespeare's Heroines and Victorian Women." Victorian Review: The Journal of the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada 17.2 (Winter 1991): 35-49. Shakespeare, William, As You Like It. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin Society, 1974 Terry, Ellen. Four lessons on Shakespeare. New York: Benjamin Bloom, Inc., 1969.