AS YOU LIKE IT.

The Comedy of As You Like It was registered at the Stationers’, in London, on the 4th of August, 1600.  Two other of Shakespeare’s plays, and one of Ben Jonson’s, were entered at the same time; all of them under an injunction, “to be stayed.”  In regard to the other two of Shakespeare’s plays, the stay appears to have been soon removed, as both of them were entered again in the course of the same month, and published before the end of that year.  In the case of As You Like It, the stay seems to have been kept up; perhaps because its continued success on the stage made the theatrical company unwilling to part with their interest in it.

This is the only contemporary notice of the play that has been discovered.  As it was not mentioned in the list given by Francis Meres in 1598, we are probably warranted in presuming it had not been heard of at that time.  The play has a line, “Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?” apparently quoted from Marlowe’s version of Hero and Leander, which was published in 1598.  So that we may safely conclude the play to have been written some time between that date and the date of the forecited entry at the Stationers’; that is, when the Poet was in his thirty-sixth or thirty-seventh year.  The play was never printed, that we know of, till in the folio of 1623, where it stands the tenth in the division of Comedies.  The text is there presented in a very satisfactory state, with but few serious errors, and none that can fairly be called impracticable.

Before passing from this branch of the subject, perhaps I ought to cite a curious piece of tradition, clearly pointing to the play in hand.  Gilbert Shakespeare, a brother of William, lived till after the Restoration, which occurred in 1660; and Oldys tells us of “the faint, general, and almost lost ideas” which 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, that he was forced to be 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 could have been none other than the “goold old man” Adam, in and about whom we have so much noble thought; and we thus learn that his character, beautiful in itself, yet more so for this circumstance, was sustained by the Poet himself.

In regard to the originals of this play, two sources have been pointed out,—­The Cook’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 Legacy.  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 ever did:  one point there is, however, that