I need help creating a thesis and an outline on As You Like It by William Shakespeare. Prepare this assignment according to the guidelines found in the APA Style Guide. An abstract is required. No matter what or who else changed, Rosalind stayed her own funny, sensible, realistic, intelligent and integrated self, a great heroine. She epitomised the words in Sonnet 116 thus:

The discussion that follows aims to support the contention that while transformation was necessary for some lovers involved, and did indeed strengthen and enrich them, without Rosalind, this would not have occurred. she was a major catalyst.

As the most vital and important character, Rosalind’s love and circumstances deserve to be examined first. Though living on sufferance and in sadness, she had wit and intellect, and her strength of character was evident in the common sense expediency of her response to banishment.

The love at first sight was mutual, but Shakespeare’s Rosalind/Ganymede showed how real, unsentimental true love, transferable over time and place, was more valuable than the silly, stylised concepts that Orlando first held. He was a figure of ridicule, dashing about pinning up poems and defacing the trees with his awful verses. Rosalind, Celia, Touchstone, Jacques, all laughed at his efforts, and Rosalind’s ploy to ‘cure’ him was a way to enlighten him as to the realities of true love, showing him how insincere he appeared. She told him that he seemed

“as loving yourself than seeming the lover of any other” (Act 3 Sc. 2 v. 401)

Once the wooing was agreed, Rosalind’s power was established. Though elements of homoeroticism are often quoted with regard to Orlando’s attraction to Ganymede (Johnston, 2001) and his willingness to engage with the boy as ‘Rosalind’:

“Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love (Act 3, Sc.2, v. 402),

a personal interpretation suggests that on a subliminal level, Orlando recognised Rosalind and acceptance of her ‘cure’ was an opportunity to woo her.

The mock wedding poked more fun at Orlando’s pretentious approach and allowed Rosalind to explain the real meaning of love. She thus expressed her philosophy while moving him towards a mature understanding, the beginning of his transformation.

“men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for

love.” (Act 4, Sc. 5, v. 109)

In driving home the message further, she caused him to question his beliefs in Romantic love, with the ideas of swooning and dying for the beloved, and to look at the reality she believed in.

“..men are April when they woo, December when they wed.