As You Like It

Banished from her uncle's court on a tyrant's whim, Rosalind does what Shakespeare's cleverest heroines do: she puts on a disguise and gets on with it. Dressed as a young man called Ganymede, she flees to the Forest of Arden with her devoted cousin Celia, where she promptly runs into Orlando, the young man she loves, who is papering the trees with terrible poems about her. Rather than reveal herself, Rosalind-as-Ganymede offers to cure him of love by pretending to be Rosalind. The tutorial does not go as planned, for either of them.

As You Like It is Shakespeare at his most relaxed and generous: a forest full of exiles, philosophers, shepherds, and fools, the melancholy Jaques musing that all the world's a stage, and at the center the wittiest wooing in the language, a woman teaching the man she loves how to love her properly. Sunlight from start to finish.

At roughly 25,400 words, As You Like It runs about 3 hours at 1x narration speed. That figure is an estimate based on a typical narration pace. The exact length depends on the voice and the playback speed you choose.

The edition linked here is available from Project Gutenberg under its US public-domain listing. Check the edition, translation, completeness and copyright rules where you live. LoudReader lets you browse and download Gutenberg books; they are not all stored on installation. To listen:

1. Install LoudReader on iPhone or iPad, or its iPad app on a compatible Apple Silicon Mac.
2. Search for “As You Like It” in the built-in catalog and add it to your library.
3. Press play. A natural offline voice reads the book while each word highlights on screen, and your place is saved between sessions.

Speech is generated locally without uploading the book for narration. Download the book and check your chosen voice before travelling offline. Available voices depend on your device; check the in-app voice list. Try every available voice for your first 8 hours of listening. Afterwards, keep a free English voice selection and unlimited book listening. No LoudReader account or word quota.