Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
In 2005, The Barenaked Ladies composed the music for director Antoni Cimolino's production of As You Like It (source).
The beginning of the "All the world's a stage" speech is often said to have been inspired by the motto of the Globe Theater, where Shakespeare's company performed: "Totus mundus agit histrionem," or, "The whole world plays the actor" (source: Evans, G. Blakemore, The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., 415).
The name Jaques (pronounced "Jay-kweez") is a pun on "jakes," which means toilet in Elizabethan English (source). Hmm. Does this suggest that Jaques is full of crapola? You decide.
The reduced Shakespeare Company has condensed Shakespeare's plays into a series of "Tweets." Here's their tweet for As You Like It: "Desperate Housewives in Forest of Arden. Moral: U can always get a guy by pretending to be a boy" (source).
Nobel Prize-winning playwright George Bernard Shaw, who thought As You Like It was a cheap crowd-pleaser, wrote the following: "It was in As You Like It that the sententious William first began to openly exploit the fondness of the British public for sham moralizing and stage 'philosophy'" (source).