STATE OF THE TEXT, AND CHRONOLOGY, OF AS YOU LIKE IT.

As You Like It was first printed in the folio collection of 1623. There appears to have been an intention to publish it separately, for we find it entered in the registers of the Stationers' Company, together with Henry V. and Much Ado About Nothing. There is no exact date to this entry, but it is conjectured to have been made in 1600.* The text of the original folio is, upon the whole, a very correct one. In a few instances the second folio of 1632 has slightly altered this text with advantage; in other instances the changes in this second edition are capricious, or have arisen out of an attempt to modernise what was little more than a quarter of a century old. These variations are pointed out in our foot-notes. The original is divided into acts and scenes.

The exact date of this comedy cannot be fixed, but there is no doubt that it belongs to the first or second year of the seventeenth century. It is not mentioned in the list published by Meres in 1598; and there is an allusion in the comedy which fixes the limits of its date in the other direc

See Introductory Notice to Much Ado About Nothing, p. 69.

tion: "I will weep for nothing," says Rosalind, "like Diana in the fountain." The cross in West Cheap, originally erected by Edward I., was reconstructed in the reign of Henry VI., and converted to the useful purpose of a conduit. The images about the cross were often broken and defaced, probably by the misdirected zeal of the early reformers; and so the heathen deities were called in, and in 1596, according to Stow, was set up an alabaster image of Diana, and water conveyed from the Thames prilling from her breast." Stow gives us this information in 1599; but in 1603, when the second edition of his 'Survey of London' was published, the glories of Diana were passed away; her fountain was no longer "prilling." "The same is oft-times dried up, and now decayed," says Stow. There can be no doubt that Diana was included in the popular hatred of this unfortunate cross; for although Elizabeth, on the 24th September, 1600, sent a special command to the city respecting" the continuance of that monument," in accordance with which it was again repaired, gilded, and cleansed from dust, "about twelve nights following the image of our Lady was again defaced by plucking off her crown, and almost her head." When Rosalind made the allusion to Diana in the fountain, we may be pretty sure that the fountain was not “ dried up."

SUPPOSED SOURCE OF THE PLOT.

If we were to accept the oracular decisions of Farmer and Steevens, as to the sources from which Shakspere derived the story of As You Like It, we might dismiss the subject very briefly. The one says, with his usual pedantic insolence, "As You Like It was certainly borrowed, if we believe Dr. Grey and Mr. Upton, from the 'Coke's Tale of Gamelyn,' which, by the way, was not printed till a century afterward, when, in truth, the old bard, who was no hunter of MSS., contented himself solely with 'Lodge's Rosalynd,' or 'Euphues' Golden Legacye,' quarto, 1590."* Thus "the old bard," meaning Shakspere, did not take the trouble of doing, or was incapable of doing, what another old bard (first a player, and afterwards a naval surgeon) did with great care-consult the manuscript copy of an old English tale attributed, but supposed incorrectly so, to Chaucer. In spite, however, of Dr. Farmer, we shall take the liberty of looking at the Tale of Gamelyn,' in the endeavour to find some traces of Shakspere. Steevens disposes of Lodge's 'Rosalynd' in as summary a way as Farmer does of Gamelyn. "Shakspeare has followed Lodge's novel more exactly than is his general custom when he is indebted to such worthless originals, and has sketched some of his principal characters and borrowed a few expressions from it. The imitations, &c., however, are in general too insignificant to merit transcription." All this is very unscrupulous, ignorant, and tasteless. Lodge's 'Rosalynd' is not a worthless original; Shakspere's imitations of it are not insignificant. Lodge's novel is, in many respects, however quaint and pedantic, informed with a bright poetical spirit, and possesses a pastoral charm which may occasionally be compared with the best parts of Sydney's Arcadia.' Lodge most scrupulously follows the 'Tale of Gamelyn,' as far as that poem would harmonise with other parts of his story, which we may consider to be his own invention. But he has added so much that is new, in the creation of the incident of the banished king, the adventures of Rosalynd and Alinda (Celia) in the forest, the passion of Rosader (Orlando), and the pretty mistake of Phebe arising out of the disguise of Rosalynd, that it is nothing less than absurd to consider Shakspere's obligations to him as insignificant. It is remarkable that in the two instances where Shakspere founded dramas upon the novels of two contemporary English writers, the 'Rosalynd' of Lodge, and the 'Pandosto' of Greene, he offered a decided homage to their genius, by adopting their incidents with great fidelity. But in the process of converting a narrative into a drama he manifests, we think, even in a more remarkable way than if, using the common language of criticism, we might call the As You Like It and the Winter's Tale his own invention—especially in the exquisite taste with which he combines old materials with new, narrates what is unfit to be dramatically represented, represents what he finds narrated, informs the actors with the most lively and discriminating touches of character, and throws over the whole the rich light of his poetry and his philosophy-he manifests the wonderful superiority of his powers over those of the most gifted of his fellow-poets. We believe that our readers will not, in this point of view, consider the space Essay on the Learning of Shakspeare,' Boswell's Edition, p. 214.

*