As the audience hears the opening lines of As You Like It – ‘As I remember, Adam, it was upon this fashion …’ – they will mentally settle back with the comfortable sense that this will, indeed, be a play as they like it: they have heard this story, or one very similar, innumerable times before. It is the folktale of the Youngest Brother, the young man who, deprived of anything but his native wit, strength, and innocence, after many adventures wins riches, renown, and the hand of the fairest lady in the land. Some part of the original Elizabethan audience of the play – the part that could read, and afford to buy books – would have been familiar with Thomas Lodge's popular romance novel Rosalynd, first published in 1590 and republished in 1592, 1596, and 1598; this is the immediate origin of the plot of Shakespeare's play. But most audiences – whether Elizabethan, Victorian, or modern; whether English, European, or Asian – will respond as Celia does in 1. 2. 110 to Le Beau's enthusiastic gossip about the ‘old man and his three sons’: ‘I could match this beginning with an old tale’.

That the play takes a 180-degree swerve from being ‘Orlando's story ‘ to being, so emphatically, Rosalind's play, is simply the first of the many subversive delights that it offers. If Orlando speaks the opening words, claiming our attention to his situation, we might expect him to end the story. The Royal Shakespeare Company's production in 1989 played with just this expectation: Orlando stepped forward to speak the Epilogue, had a fit of stage-fright, and Rosalind came to his rescue – speaking lines presumably very different from the formal conclusion Orlando would have uttered. And even before the astonishing postscript of the Epilogue, Orlando is silenced earlier than Rosalind is in the main body of the play. His last line is ‘If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind’ (5. 4. 118) – an acknowledgement of the power of the ‘magic’ she has brought about. After this he quietly takes his place in the social hierarchy which enjoins silence before the more powerful male figure, Duke Senior.