Shakespeare's dramatic pastoral raises problems of its own, as the extreme artifice of its construction and style may rebuff a modern audience. Defined as a conversation play, As You Like It is also a motley play which insistently elaborates a discourse on the limits of representation and stylistic appropriation. The play certainly represents Shakespeare's most faithful dramatic adaptation of a narrative source — hence the particular signifiance of such concepts as translation, citation, set speeches, (re)-writing, disguise, narrative and debate.

This volume includes a study of the play's context — Shakespearean and otherwise — essays and commentaries by three Shakespearean scholars, whose approach has mainly been the specific exercises of the agrégation and CAPES (dissertation, commentaire de texte, leçon, explicaiton de texte).