Everyman, Lusty Juventus, Mundus et Infans, and such like endless moralizings on the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, were more to his taste. THE SCENE OF ACTION The locality of the play is "the Forest of Arden,” i. e. "Ardennes," in the north-east of France, "between the Meuse et Moselle," but Shakespeare could hardly help thinking of his own Warwickshire Arden, and there can be little doubt that his contemporaries took it in the same way. There is a beautiful description of this English Forest in Drayton's Polyolbion (Song xiii), where the poet apostrophizes Warwickshire as his own "native country which so brave spirits hast bred." The whole passage, as Mr. Furness admirably points out, probably serves to show "the deep impression on him which his friend Shakespeare's As You Like It had made." Elsewhere Drayton refers to "Sweet Arden's Nightingales," e. g. in his Matilda and in the Idea: "Where nightingales in Arden sit and sing THE TITLE OF THE PLAY The title As You Like It, was evidently suggested by a passage in Lodge's Address to the Gentlemen Readers:"To be brief, gentlemen, room for a soldier and a sailor, that gives you the fruits of his labors that he wrote in the ocean, where every line was wet with the surge, and every humorous passion counterchecked with a storm. If you like it so; and yet I will be yours in duty, if you be mine in favor." It was formerly believed (by Tieck and others) that the title alluded to the concluding lines of Ben Jonson's Cynthia's Revels: "I'll only speak what I have heard him say, But Shakespeare's play must have preceded Jonson's dramatic satire, which was first acted in 1600. DURATION OF ACTION The time of the play, according to Mr. Daniel's Analysis (Trans. of New Shakespere Soc., 1877-79), may be taken as ten days represented on the stage, with necessary intervals: Day 1. Act I, i. Day 2. Act I, ii and iii, and Act II, i. [Act II, iii.] Day 3. Act II, ii [Act III, i]. An interval of a few days. The journey to Arden. Day 4. Act II, iv. Day 5. Act II, v, vi, and vii. An interval of a few days. Day 6. Act III, ii. An interval. Day 7. Act III, iii. Day 8. Act III, iv and v; Act IV, i, ii, and iii; and Act V, i. Day 9. Act V, ii and iii. Day 10. Act V, iv. The scenes in brackets are out of their actual order. "The author seems to have gone back to resume these threads of the story which were dropped while other parts of the plot were in hand." 8 D INTRODUCTION By HENRY NORMAN HUDSON, A.M. As You Like It, along with two other of Shakespeare's plays and one of Ben Jonson's, was entered in the Stationers' Register August 4, 1600, and that opposite the entry was an order "to be stayed." In regard to the other two the stay appears to have been soon removed, as both were entered again, one on the fourteenth, the other on the twenty-third, of the same month, and were published in the course of that year. Touching As You Like It, the stay seems to have been kept up, perhaps because its continued success on the stage made the company unwilling to part with their interest in it. The play was never printed, so far as we know, till in the folio of 1623, where it stands the tenth in the division of Comedies, with the acts and scenes regularly marked. This is the only contemporary notice of As You Like It that has been discovered. The play is not mentioned by Meres, which perhaps warrants the inference that it had not been heard of at the date of his list. And in Act V, sc. iii, is a line quoted from Marlowe's version of Hero and Leander, which was first printed in 1598. So that we may perhaps safely conclude that the play was written in the latter part of 1598, or in the course of the next year. One thing more there is, that ought not to be passed by in this connection. Gilbert Shakespeare, a brother of the Poet, lived till after the Restoration; and Oldys tells of "the faint, general, and almost lost ideas" the old man had of having once seen the Poet act a part in one of his own comedies, "wherein, being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping, and unable to walk, that he was forced to be 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." This, of course, could have been none other than the "good old man" Adam, in and about whom we have so much of noble thought; and we thus learn that his character, beautiful enough in itself, yet more beautiful for this circumstance, was sustained by the Poet himself. In regard to the originals of this play, two sources have been pointed out, namely, The Coke's Tale of Gamelyn, sometime attributed to Chaucer, but upon better advice excluded from his works, and a novel by Thomas Lodge entitled Rosalynd: Euphues' Golden Legacie. As the Tale of Gamelyn was not printed till more than a century later, it has been questioned whether Shakespeare ever saw it. Nor, indeed, can much be alleged as indicating that he did: one point there is, however, that may have some weight that way. An old knight, Sir Johan of Boundis, being about to die, calls in his wise friends to arrange the distribution of his property among his three sons. Their plan is, to settle all his lands on the eldest, and leave the youngest without any thing. Gamelyn being his favorite son, he rejects their advice, and bestows the largest portion upon him. Shakespeare goes much more according to their plan, Orlando, who answers to Gamelyn, having no share in the bulk of his father's estate. But this suits so well with the Poet's general purpose, and especially with the unfolding of Orlando's character, that we need not suppose him to have had any hint for it but the fitness of the thing itself. A few other resemblances may be traced, wherein the play differs from Lodge's novel, but none so strong but that they may well enough have been incidental. Nor, in truth, is the matter of much consequence, save as bearing upon the question whether Shakespeare was of a mind to be unsatisfied with such printed books as lay in his way. We would not exactly affirm him to have been "a hunter of manuscripts"; but we have already seen indi cations that he sometimes had access to them: nor is it at all unlikely that one so greedy of intellectual food, so eager and apt to make the most of all the means within his reach, should have gone beyond the printed resources of his time. Besides, there can be no question that Lodge was very familiar with the Tale of Gamelyn: he follows it so closely in a large part of his novel, as to leave scarce any doubt that he wrote with the manuscript by him; and if he, who was also sometime a player, availed himself of such sources, why may not Shakespeare have done the same? Lodge's Rosalynd was first printed in 1590, and its popularity appears in that it was republished in 1592, and again in 1598. Steevens pronounces it a "worthless original"; but this sweeping sentence is so very unjust as to breed a doubt whether he had read it. A graduate of Oxford, Lodge was evidently something of a scholar, as well as a man of wit, fancy, and invention. Compared with the general run of popular literature then in vogue, his novel has much merit, and is very well entitled to the honor of contributing to one of the most delightful poems ever written. A rather ambitious attempt, indeed, at fine writing, pedantic in style, not a little overloaded with the euphuism of the time, and occasionally running into absurdity and indecorum, nevertheless, upon the whole, it is a varied and pleasing narrative, with passages of great force and beauty, and many touches of noble sentiment, and sometimes informed with a pastoral sweetness and simplicity quite charming. The work is inscribed to Lord Hunsdon, and in his Dedication the author says, "Having with Captain Clarke made a voyage to the islands of Terceras and the Canaries, to beguile the time with labor I writ this book; rough, as hatch'd in the storms of the ocean, and feathered in the surges of many perilous seas." It has been lately republished in Mr. Collier's Shakespeare Library. We will endeavor such an abstract from which the nature and extent of the Poet's obligations in this quarter may be pretty fairly gathered. Sir John of Bordeaux, being at the point of death, called |