DRAMATIS PERSONE DUKE, living in banishment. FREDERICK, his brother, and usurper of his dominions. JAQUES, lords attending on the banished duke. LE BEAU, a courtier attending upon Frederick. OLIVER, WILLIAM, a country fellow, in love with Audrey. A person representing Hymen. ROSALIND, daughter to the banished duke. CELIA, daughter to Frederick. PHEBE, a shepherdess. AUDREY, a country wench. Lords, pages, and attendants, etc. SCENE: Oliver's house; Duke Frederick's court; and the DURATION OF TIME The action of the play covers, according to Mr. Daniel's division, ten days, with intervals, thus : An interval of a few days: the journey to Arden. In II. 3. the time recedes to Day 2, and in III. 1. to Day 3. There is inconsistent time-reckoning (or 'double time')— (1) In the date of the Duke's banishment, which in I. I. IOI sq. is quite recent, in I. 3. 69 sq. and II. 1. 2 sq. has lasted for several years. (2) (Perhaps) in Oliver's journey to Arden, which lies between III. 1. and IV. 3. A much longer interval is suggested by the description of him in IV. 3. 107 as a wretched ragged man, o'ergrown with hair.' INTRODUCTION As You Like It was first published in the Folio of Early Liter1623. A quarto edition contemplated in 1600 was a Text. ary History 'staied' before publication, and the inaccuracy of the Folio text favours the view that the printers had nothing but MS. before them,-probably one derived from the stage copy. No plausible reason for this 'staying' has been suggested. Mr. Wright (Clarendon Press edition, preface) dwells upon the marks of hasty execution, the discrepancy about Rosalind's height, the gratuitous ambiguity of the two Jaques, the artless dénoûment, and infers that Shakespeare sought to check the publication of his imperfect work. If he did so, he at least allowed it to remain imperfect. The entry in the Stationers' Register is our one Date of definite indication of the date. The play was prob- Composition ably written within the year preceding the entry (1599-1600); but the evidence is rather circumstantial than cogent. Meres does not mention it in his list (published autumn 1598). The famous allusion to Marlowe 2-Shakespeare's only pointed and direct 1 Stationers' Register, 4th August. Three other playsMuch Ado, Henry V., and Every Man in His Humour – -were stayed at the same time. The embargo on the first two was shortly removed (23rd August), and both were published,- -one from an authentic text, the other 2. Dead shepherd, now I find (iii. 5. 81.) - quotation from a contemporary-is probably, though not necessarily, later than the publication, in 1598, of his splendid version of Hero and Leander, where the dead shepherd's mighty saw is to be found. Closely akin in style to Much Ado and Twelfth Night, and not less blithe, it contains hints more distinct than either of the approach of a graver mood. Certainly, its laughter is less ringing, its humour more subtle and meditative; it is less rich in comic situations, but abounds in the more searching comedy of contrasted characters and views of life, the comedy of Orlando's courtly flyting with Jaques, and Jaques's with Rosalind. The extremely uneventful stage-history of As You Like It shows that neither these qualities nor its exquisite romantic charm were, in general, found to compensate for its inferiority in downright comic power. Rosalind was not reckoned, with Beatrice and Malvolio and Falstaff, among the great comic creations of Shakespeare, which London of the next generation. crowded to see.1 Of early performances no record whatever remains, save the shadowy tradition, reported towards the end of the century by Oldys, that a younger brother of Shakespeare remembered once seeing him play 'a decrepit old man . . . supported and carried by another person to a table, at which he was seated among some company who were eating, and one of them sung a song'; evidently a reminiscence of Adam and Orlando in ii. 4. Apart from this, its history through the entire seventeenth century is a blank, and it probably passed altogether from the stage. When, in 1723, Charles Johnson undertook to revive its faded charms," he took care to reinforce them with stimulating matter from other plays,political speeches from Richard II., misogyny from 1 L. Digges, lines prefixed to Shakespeare's Poems, 1640. Much Ado, unconfessed love from Twelfth Night,and to relieve them of all the pastoral scenes and of Touchstone. The original play was at length approximately restored in 1740; a series of great actresses -Mrs. Pritchard, Peg Woffington, Mrs. Jordan, Mrs. Siddons found their opportunity in Rosalind, while Jaques and Touchstone were equally congenial rôles to Quin. But it remained, on the whole, an actor's play. A finer appreciation of As You Like It, as of other romantic comedies, was reserved for the Romantic criticism of our century. It is interesting to note that, after holding, on the whole, an inconspicuous place among the romantic comedies of Shakespeare, it was singled out by the author of La petite Fadette as a means of introducing the French public to this-'the least popular, though often pillaged-class of Shakespeare's work.1 the Plot. Lodge's Rosalynde, or Euphues' Golden Legacy, Sources of the immediate source of the story of As You Like It, was one of the better specimens of the Pastoral Romances called forth by the vogue of the Euphues and the Arcadia,—a highly artificial and composite genre which already, in 1600, was visibly touched with decay. The ornate Euphuistic conversation which Lodge and Greene put in the mouths of their Arcadians, had yielded in real life to later affectations. The courtly and bookish pastoralism of Sidney and Spenser was passing into a sentiment more akin to the modern delight in nature, and fostering a like watchfulness of natural life, the pastoralism of Drayton and Browne and Wither. Unreal as it was, however, the earlier Elizabethan pastoralism had seldom been strictly Arcadian. Sidney, like his predecessor Montemayor, 1 George Sand, Comme II vous Plaira (1856). instructive preface. Cf. her She adapts with a freedom not unwarranted |