“As You Like it presents an image of human life, not as an arena for heroic endeavour, but as a place of encounters.” Consider some of the encounters presented in the play, and their significance to its insight into human life. “Man in his Time plays many parts , his Acts being seven ages.” Here we are given two different worlds, with colourful characters ranging from “the Lover sighing like Furnace with a woeful Ballad” to the “Last scene of all” when Man revert to their “second Childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans Eyes, sans Taste, sans everything.” The stage in the Courts and Forest of Arden served not to dish out mere swashbuckling heroes or heroines . In fact, we