INTRODUCTION

Summary

In As You Like It—the very title is auspicious—an Editor may take holiday and, after winning through. Quarto thicket after thicket obedient to the Folio order, feel that he has earned a right to expatiate, enjoy his while in Arden and fleet the time carelessly. For no Quarto of the copy, entered provisionally by Master Roberts in the Stationers' Register and ‘stayed,’ whatever the reason of the staying, is extant if it ever existed. Our only text is that of the First Folio of 1623, to be considered with a few futile, mostly perfunctory, alterations in the later Folios, and more seriously with a few conjectured emendations by editors who in handling the text of this play have here and there been happy and once or twice convincing. But all this is dealt with in our Note on the Copy and lies apart from our present business.

Just as fortunately, from an Editor's point of view, we have no need to trouble our heads over ‘sources.’ As You Like It plainly derives almost all the plot it has from a novel by Thomas Lodge, Euphues' Golden Legacie, first published in 1590. Lodge derived a part of his story and of its mise-en-scène from The Coke's Tale of Gamelyn, left in MS by Chaucer, doubtless in MS accessible to Lodge and others, but not (so far as we know) actually printed until 1720 and included in some later editions of The Canterbury Tales.