"All the world's a stage," says Jaques famously. What other characters refer to the concept of living life as "acting in a play"? Using specific examples from the text, discuss the extent to which "acting" helps bring about the conclusion of As You Like It.

Acting and artifice are key tenets of As You Like It, a play whose plot is driven by themes of concealment, and whose romances come about as a result of characters adapting, inhabiting, and removing various guises. At the end of the play, we even see a metatextual monologue delivered by the actor playing Rosalind. The character implores the audience to "like as much of this play as it please you," highlighting the fact that the play has been an act. The speaker declares, "If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me," reminding the audience that only their suspension of disbelief has enabled them to see what would have originally been a boy actor as a woman throughout the play. The gender-switching and confusion is famously threefold in As You Like It, which would have originally featured boys-playing-girls-playing-boys, in the case of Rosalind and Celia. Interestingly, Orlando falls for Rosalind first in the guise of Ganymede, and he is confused until she reveals herself to be a woman. This does beg the question: would Orlando have fallen for her if he had not first seen her acting as a boy?
Scholars have suggested that artifice in As You Like It was so prominently foregrounded by Shakespeare because the plot of the play, adapted from a much longer work, requires the audience to imagine vast landscapes—the forest—which could not really be represented with scenery. When Rosalind asks Orlando to "pretend" that she is "Rosalind," we watch a boy playing a girl, disguised as a boy, asking to be treated as a girl. However, in Rosalind's mind, the love between Phebe and Silvius is equally "a pageant truly play'd / Between the pale complexion of true love / And the red glow of scorn" (act 3, scene 4). According to this statement, love and other human relationships necessarily involve an element of pretense and acting. In Phebe's case, Rosalind feels she has acted her part wrongly, and she tells her so.
Rosalind and Celia don masculine clothing for their own "safety" (act 1, scene 3) to protect themselves from potential sexual assault. As a man, she has a greater element of control over her environment and even over herself, as we see when she takes on the "disguise" of Rosalind for Orlando, stating "She will do as I do." Rosalind's play-acting in both forms is what enables her to progress on her journey through the text.