As You Like It by William Shakespeare
Published 1600 · 23,096 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Drama, Comedy
How hard is As You Like It to read?
As You Like It scores 53 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 70 out of 100
- Pastoral vocabulary mixed with courtly wit; Touchstone's wordplay and Jaques's melancholy register add range.
- Sentence structure: 68 out of 100
- Rosalind's prose is syntactically nimble; the verse passages are relatively accessible.
- Abstraction: 60 out of 100
- Jaques's philosophical speeches and the play's self-conscious examination of pastoral convention raise the abstraction level.
- Information density: 65 out of 100
- Minimal plot; the play is driven by character interaction and thematic variation rather than narrative density.
- Narrative indirection: 38 out of 100
- Rosalind's double disguise — a woman playing a man playing a woman — creates layered dramatic irony.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- The Forest of Arden as green world, the wrestling match, and the pastoral setting all function symbolically.
- Ironic distance: 72 out of 100
- Rosalind ironizes romantic convention even while participating in it; Touchstone parodies the pastoral from within.
- Resolution withholding: 25 out of 100
- Four marriages in the finale; Rosalind's epilogue breaks the fourth wall but withholds nothing narratively.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Loose, episodic structure organized around parallel courtships rather than tight plot mechanics.
How As You Like It is regarded
As You Like It holds a literary regard score of 91 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.