This outline, as far as it goes, almost describes, word for word, the course and order of events in the play.  And so it is, in a great measure, through the other parts and incidents of the plot; such as the usurper’s banishment of his niece, and the escape of his daughter along with her; their arrival in the Forest of Arden, where Rosalynd’s father has taken refuge; their encounter with the shepherds, their purchase of the cottage, and their adventures in the pastoral life.  So, too, in the flight of Rosader to the same Forest, taking along with him the old servant, who is called Adam Spencer, his carving of love-verses in the bark of trees, his meeting with the disguised Rosalynd, and the wooing and marrying that enrich the forest scenes.

Thus much may suffice to show that the Poet has here borrowed a good deal of excellent matter.  With what judgment and art the borrowed matter was used by him can only be understood on a careful study of his workmanship.  In no one of his comedies indeed has he drawn more freely from others; nor, I may add, is there any one wherein he has enriched his drawings more liberally from the glory of his own genius.  To appreciate his wisdom as shown in what he left unused, one must read the whole of Lodge’s novel.  In that work we find no traces of Jaques, or Touchstone, or Audrey; nothing, indeed, that could yield the slightest hint towards either of those characters.  It scarce need be said that these superaddings are enough of themselves to transform the whole into another nature; pouring through all its veins a free and lively circulation of the most original wit and humour and poetry.  And by a judicious indefiniteness as to persons and places, the Poet has greatly idealized the work, throwing it at a romantic distance, and weaving about it all the witchery of poetical perspective; while the whole falls in so smoothly with the laws of the imagination, that the breaches of geographical order are never noticed save by such as cannot understand poetry without a map.

No one at all competent to judge in the matter will suppose that Shakespeare could have been really indebted to Lodge, or to whomsoever else, for any of the characters in As You Like It.  He merely borrowed certain names and incidents for the bodying-forth of conceptions purely his own.  The resemblance is all in the drapery and circumstances of the representation, not in the individuals.  For instance, we can easily imagine Rosalind in an hundred scenes not here represented; for she is a substantive personal being, such as we may detach and consider apart from the particular order wherein she stands:  but we can discover in her no likeness to Lodge’s Rosalynd, save that of name and situation:  take away the similarity here, and there is nothing to indicate any sort of relationship between the heroines of the play and the novel.  And it is considerable that, though the Poet here borrows so freely, still there is no sign of any borrowing in the work itself:  we can detect no foreign influences, no second-hand touches, nothing to suggest that any part of the thing had ever been thought of before; what he took being so thoroughly assimilated with what he gave, that the whole seems to have come fresh from Nature and his own mind:  so that, had the originals been lost, we should never have suspected there were any.