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Critical commentary on As You Like It over the centuries has tended to focus on two facts: first, that the plot itself is thin and treated perhaps with excessive haste by its author, and, second, that the essence of the play--ruminations on love, time, and nature--is certainly best conveyed in the context of a play that treats the plot in just such an offhand fashion. Different critics, then, have weighed the importance of these two factors differently.

As quoted in The Complete Illustrated Shakespeare, edited by Howard Staunton, the German scholar August von Schlegel perceived the play quite positively, summarily remarking:

Throughout the whole picture, it seems to be the poet's design to show that to call forth the poetry which has its indwelling in nature and the human mind, nothing is wanted but to throw off all artificial constraint, and restore both to mind and nature their original liberty. In the very progress of the piece, the dreamy carelessness of such an existence is sensibly expressed: it is even alluded to by Shakespeare in the title.

As quoted in the same volume, the English scholar Nathan Drake notes, ''Though this play, with the exception of the disguise and self-discovery of Rosalind, may be said to be destitute of plot, it is yet one of the most delightful of the dramas of Shakespeare.'' He goes on to observe:

From the forest of Arden, from that wild wood of oaks, . . . from the bosom of sequestered glens and pathless solitudes, has the poet called forth lessons of the most touching and consolatory wisdom . . . . The effect of such scenery, on the lover of nature, is to take full possession of the soul, to absorb its very faculties, and, through the charmed imagination, to convert the workings of the mind into the sweetest sensations of the heart, into the joy of grief, into a thankful endurance of adversity, into the interchange of the most tender affections.

In his introduction to the play, Albert Gilman notes, ''Some critics have complained of inconsistencies in the plotting,'' as the length of time for which Duke Senior has been banished and the respective heights of Rosalind and Celia are referred to differently in different passages. Also, Shakespeare has perhaps for no good reason given the name of Jaques to both the melancholy philosopher and the brother of Oliver and Orlando. Regarding this fact, Helen Gardner notes:

It seems possible that the melancholy Jaques began as this middle son and that his melancholy was in origin a scholar's melancholy. If so, the character changed as it developed, and by the time that Shakespeare had fully conceived his cynical spectator he must have realized that he could not be kin to Oliver and Orlando. The born solitary must have no family: Jaques seems the quintessential only child.

Gilman adds, ''These bits of carelessness, if that is what they are, are not unusual in Shakespeare and not peculiar to this play.'' Gilman does note that another cause for critical concern is the lack of psychological complexity: ''The motives of the chief characters in As You Like It are as simple and abrupt as the action of the play, and they could surely be put in evidence by those who think the play a piece of indifferent craftsmanship.''

A somewhat comically negative take on the work can be found in George Bernard Shaw's play entitled The Dark Lady of the Sonnets. Gilman quotes a scene in which the character of Will Shakespeare remarks to Queen Elizabeth:

I have also stole from a book of idle wanton tales two of the most damnable foolishness in the world, in the one of which a woman goeth in man's attire and maketh impudent love to her swain, who pleaseth the groundlings by overthrowing a wrestler . . . . I have writ these to save my friends from penury, yet shewing my scorn for such follies and for them that praise them by calling the one As You Like It, meaning that it is not as I like it.

Helen Gardner sums up the appeal of As You Like It by calling it ''a play to please all tastes.'' After citing the simple asset of the romantic aspect of the tale, she observes:

For the learned and literary this is one of Shakespeare's most allusive plays, uniting old traditions and playing with them lightly . . . . As You Like It is the most refined and exquisite of the comedies, the one which is most consistently played over by a delighted intelligence. It is Shakespeare's most Mozartian comedy.

References:

1) Burgess, Anthony, Shakespeare, Knopf, 1970.

2) Gardner, Helen, '''As You Like It,''' in As You Like It, by William Shakespeare, New American Library, 1986, pp. 203-21.

3) Gilman, Albert, ''Introduction,'' in As You Like It, by William Shakespeare, New American Library, 1986, pp. xx-xxxiii.

4) Shakespeare, William, The Complete Illustrated Shakespeare, edited by Howard Staunton, reprint, Park Lane, 1979.

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