# As You Like It — Character guide

> Key figures in As You Like It by William Shakespeare.

- [Rosalind](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/rosalind.md): Rosalind begins the play as the quick-tongued companion of her cousin Celia, trading wit in her usurping uncle's court until his suspicion drives her into exile. In the Forest of Arden she trades her gown for a man's coa
- [Celia](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/celia.md): Celia is the daughter of Duke Frederick, which makes her Rosalind's cousin and, by the play's strange arithmetic, the one person whose loyalty cuts against her own father's interests. When Frederick banishes Rosalind, Ce
- [Orlando](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/orlando.md): Orlando opens the play pinned under his elder brother Oliver's cruelty—kept at home like a farm animal while his education and birthright are withheld. He answers with his body: he wrestles the duke's champion, wins, and
- [Jaques](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/jaques.md): Jaques is the courtier who chose the forest but refuses to be cheered by it, preferring his own compounded sadness to anyone else's joy. He meets a fool in the woods and envies him; he watches a deer die and moralizes; h
- [Touchstone](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/touchstone.md): Touchstone is the licensed fool whose job is to say what courtiers cannot, and he takes that license into the forest like a man carrying a weapon he intends to use. He falls for Audrey, a woman he describes in terms of m
- [Phebe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/phebe.md): Phebe is the beautiful, hard-hearted object of Silvius's devotion, and she treats his love as an inconvenience until she meets a sharper tongue in the forest. When Ganymede mocks her, she mistakes contempt for godhead an
- [Silvius](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/silvius.md): Silvius belongs to the working forest world of Arden, a shepherd whose entire emotional life orbits a woman who will not have him. When Corin advises that his pining only makes Phebe scorn him more, Silvius insists the o
- [Duke Senior](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/duke_senior.md): Duke Senior rules a makeshift court of loyal followers in the forest after his brother seized his dukedom. He greets hardship with philosophy and song, finding the woodland life sweeter than the false flattery of palaces
- [Duke Frederick](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/duke_frederick.md): Duke Frederick holds the throne his brother lost, ruling through suspicion and threat. He cannot tolerate Rosalind's patience and silence, convinced they steal the people's love from his own daughter Celia, and he ignore
- [Oliver](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/oliver.md): Oliver inherits the estate and the power to make his younger brother's life miserable, denying him education and plotting his death. He arrives in Arden hunting Orlando and instead becomes the ragged sleeper beneath the 
- [Adam](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/adam.md): Adam has watched over the house of Sir Rowland since he was seventeen, and his loyalty outlasts the family's good fortune. Overhearing Oliver's plot to burn Orlando in his bed, he warns his young master and presses five 
- [Audrey](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/audrey.md): Audrey is a goatherd of few words and no illusions, drawn into Touchstone's absurd plan to marry her under a tree with Sir Oliver Martext officiating. She parries his jests about beauty and honesty with simple, disarming
- [Corin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/corin.md): Corin belongs to the working countryside of Arden, where he tends sheep, hires out his labor, and speaks for a life of plain dealing against Touchstone's courtly sophistry. His quiet pride — to see his ewes graze and his
- [Amiens](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/amiens.md): A lord attending Duke Senior who sings several songs in the forest.
- [Charles](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/charles.md): The court wrestler whom Orlando defeats in a match.
- [Le Beau](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters/le_beau.md): A courtier who delivers news of the wrestling match to Rosalind and Celia.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/as_you_like_it_se/characters