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. 1. 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 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 plays Much 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
surreptitiously and in a highly
corrupt form.

2 Dead shepherd, now I find

thy saw of might; Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?'

(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,2 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.
2 Love in a Forest.

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 Il vous Plaira (1856). instructive preface.

Cf. her

with a freedom not unwarranted
in her case.

She adapts

had loved to disturb the shepherd's piping with the alarms of war, and rarely allowed his readers to forget that Arcadia marched with Sparta. And Lodge, a soldier and a sailor, who wrote his romance 'in ocean, when everie line was wet with a surge,' was not the man to let the tradition die. He drew his secluded Arden with one eye upon the Arcady of literature, and the other upon the Sherwood of Robin Hood. Sidney transports us on the first page into the shepherdworld: Lodge lingers, with evident gusto, over the preliminary exploits and perils of his hero. These he took from the rude fourteenth-century romance of Gamelyn, handed down in several MSS. of the Canterbury Tales as the Tale of the Cook, and possibly intended by Chaucer as material for the Tale of the Yeoman. It is a lay of family feud, artless in form, but full of hearty English vigour and the relish of hard blows. Gamelyn's elder brother, bent on getting rid of him, persuades him to challenge a famous wrestler. Gamelyn is victorious, and proceeds, by way of vengeance, to lay siege to his brother's house with an armed band. At first successful, he is taken prisoner, but released by an old servant, Adam Spenser, with whom he flies to the forest. This opening adventure Lodge takes over with little change, and sets in a romantic framework of his own. Rosader (Gamelyn) and his brother Saladyn have a counterpart in the banished king Gerismond and the usurper Torismond. Rosader wrestles before Torismond, slays the king's wrestler, and wins the love of Rosalind. Torismond presently, on a trifling pretext, banishes Rosalind from court, and when Alinda, his daughter, takes her part, she is banished too. Both fly, like Rosader, to the paradise of exiles in Arden. But Arden has its own inhabitants also; some of them of the pure Arcadian breed,-Montanus who laments,