SOURCE: Slights, Camille Wells. “Changing Places in Arden: As You Like It.” In Shakespeare's Comic Commonwealths, pp. 193-215. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Slights evaluates As You Like It as a social drama essentially concerned with the attempts of its principal characters to renew the disrupted social order.

‘one man in his time plays many parts’ 

(II.vii.142)

While in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado About Nothing the tranquility of provincial communities is disrupted by visitors from outside, in As You Like It and Twelfth Night trouble is native born. Rather than having to resist seduction and domination by socially and politically superior outsiders, the protagonists must confront conflicts generated within their own social groups. In both plays, erosion of social cohesion is well under way when the dramatic action begins. Reminders of death in the early scenes introduce societies that...