As You Like It is considered to be a romantic pastoral comedy, one of Shakespeare's most light-hearted plays. It is a romantic comedy in that it ends in multiple marriages: Rosalind and Orlando; Celia and Orlando's brother Oliver; the shepherd Silvius and the maid Phebe; and Touchstone and his milkmaid Audrey. It is pastoral because it extols the virtues of life in the country, in the peace of Nature, as opposed to the life of the courtier. Shakespeare's party of royals, banished to the Forest of Arden, surrounded by farms and happy, simple folk, discover that they are much happier in these simpler surroundings than they ever were at court. The pastoral was a kind of nostalgic, sentimental representation of country life that really did not reflect reality, but was set up to be a kind of ideal. Shakespeare plays with this ideal in As You Like It.
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