Aspinall provides wonderfully cogent summaries of critical responses to As You Like It and its chief characters, placing those responses in a wider historical and intellectual context so as to illuminate how central the play has been to arguments over how to read Shakespeareand, indeed, how to read at all. * Laurence Publicover, University of Bristol, UK * This erudite but accessible book navigates scholars and undergraduates through the critical reception of As You Like It. Aspinall deftly traces the characters and themes, and the interpretive and performative challenges, that have fascinated audiences for generations. * Rebecca Lartigue, Springfield College, USA *