LiBRAPV '^ UNIVERSITY Oi CAUFO NA SAN DIEGO J ^^ /^7 Euphues Golden Legacic, Found after his death in his Cell at Silexedha. Bequeathed coPhilavtvs SonneSj nurjedtif "^ith their Father in ENGLAND lotprintcd at Londonfor I,hnSmethw',ckf,ind aretobefoMathk fltof ta Saint X)«/»/?4«jChittch-y3rd in FJccimectc j> I'acsimilk (jf Title-Page, Euphues Golden Legacie, ]{lack-Letter Edition Reproduced from the copy in the IJoslon Public Library Entered at Stationers' Hali. Copyright, 1880 By henry N. HUDSON Copyright, 1906 By GINN and COMPANY Copyright, igo8 By KATE W. HUDSON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED tgbe fltftenacum greg< CINN AND COMl'ANY- }'1{0- FKIHTORS • UOSTON • U.S.A. PREFACE Exclusive of changes in spelling, punctuation, and stage directions, only seven variations from the text of the First Folio occur in the text of this edition of As You Like It. These variations are such corrections as were made either in the later seventeenth century Folios or in Rowe's octavo editions of 1709 and 17 14. These corrections and varia- tions, with the more important suggested emendations of later editors, are indicated in the textual notes. The only omissions are such passages as are out of place in a school edition. The spelling and the punctuation of the text are modern, except in the case of verb terminations in -ed, which, when the e is silent, are printed with the apostrophe in its place. This is the general usage in the First Folio. Modern spelling has to a certain extent been followed in the text variants ; but the original spelling has been retained wherever its peculiarities have been the basis for important textual criticism and emendation. With regard to the general plan of this revision of Hudson's Shakespeare, Professor W. P. Trent, of Colum- bia University, has offered valuable suggestions and given important advice. September i, 1906 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Page I. Sources vii The Main Story vii The Tale of Gamel yn vii Robin Hood Ballads and Plays . . . viii Lodge's Rosalynde ix "All the World's a Stage" xiii " Seven Ages " xiv The Title xv II. Date of Composition xvii External Evidence xvii Internal Evidence xviii III. Editions xx IV. Dramatic Structure xx V. Diction and Versification xxi Prose xxi Blank Verse xxii Rhyme xxii VI. The Characters xxiii Orlando xxiv The Banished Duke xxvi Touchstone xxvii Jaques xxix Rosalind and Celia xxx VII. General Characteristics xxxiii Chronological Chart ... xl VI CONTENTS THE TEXT Page Act I 3 Act II 34 Act III 64 Act IV 104 Act V 124 Index of Words and Phrases 149 INTRODUCTION Note. In citations from Shakespeare's plays and nondramatic poems the numbering has reference to the Globe edition, except in the case of this play, where the reference is to this edition. I. SOURCES The story-theme of a quarrel between brothers leading to strange and unexpected results is common to all literature. The story of Cain and Abel, with unending variations, is universal. An interesting modification of this theme — when a jealous elder brother keeps a younger out of his inheritance, and the younger becomes prosperous in the teeth of all difficulties and obstacles — is in the ancient Egyptian Tale of Two Brothers ^ and in the Genesis narrative of Joseph and his brethren ; it is, with significant changes, the framework of the parable of the Prodigal Son. As You Like It is a variant and a development of this world-old and universal story-theme, with elements and color that come from the soil and atmosphere of the England of Robin Hood ballads and Elizabethan pastoral. The Main Story I. The Tale of Gamelyn. The earliest form of the As You Like It story in English literature is The Tale of Ga?nelyn, a vigorous ballad-epic of nine hundred and two 1 For similar stories in different literatures, see A. Lang's ATyth^ Ritual, and Religion. vii viii THE NEW HUDSON SHAKESPEARE lines in northern dialect. This poem, which philology and story-development connect with the Anglo-Danish cycle of legends to which Havelok the Dane and Hamlet belong, seems to have been in Chaucer's possession, and it was probably his plan to work it over for use in The Canterbury Tales. After his death it was found inserted among manu- scripts of The Canterbury Tales immediately after the frag- ment of The Coke's {Cook's) Tale. *'Alate hand, in the Harl. MS. 7334, has scribbled above it — 'The Coke's Tale of Gamelyn'; whence the blunder arose of connecting it with the Cook." — Skeat. In The Tale of Gatnelyn are many of the incidents of As You Like It. The story turns upon the neglect and abuse of a youngest brother by an eldest ; and a violent quarrel, a wrestling match, the rescue of the youngest brother by an old retainer called Adam, and an escape to forest depths are inwoven, but there is no thread of love in the weaving. 2. Robin Hood Ballads and Plays. Story, treatment, and nomenclature connect The Tale of Gamelyn also with the Robin Hood ballad cycle, Gamelyn being in all probability identical with 'Young Gamwell' of the ballad Robin Hood Newly Revived : " But thou art a cousin of Robin Hood's then ? The sooner we should have done " : "As I hope to be sav'd," the stranger then said, " I am his own sister's son." Compare also " Gamble Gold of the gay green woods " in the ballad 2Vie Bold Pedlar and Robin Hood. Apart from The Tale of Gamelyn as a link between Robin Hood lore and As You Like It, we find Shakespeare himself giving a significant source-hint in I, i, 105-107 : "They say he is INTRODUCTION ix already in the forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him ; and there they live hke the old Robin Hood of Eng- land." There is evidence that from the beginning of the fifteenth century Robin Hood, Maid Marian, and their com- panions were the subject of popular dramatic performances and rustic pageants,^ and thus pastoralism and the wild wood atmosphere grew up with the English drama, and towards the close of the sixteenth century found expression in such plays as The Downfall of Robert, Earl of Huntington, by Anthony Munday, The Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingto7i, by Munday and Henry Chettle, and George-a- Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield, often attributed to Robert Greene. 3. Lodge's Rosalynde. The Tale of Gamely n was not printed until the eighteenth century, but there is no doubt that manuscript copies were in circulation in the sixteenth ; and upon the story as found in one of these manuscript ver- sions, Thomas Lodge founded his prose romance, Rosalynde. Euphues Golden Legacie : foimd after his death in his Cell at Silexedra. Bequeathed to Philautus sonnes noursed up with their father in England. Fetcht frofn the Canaries. By T. L. Gent. Lo?idon, Imprinted by Thomas 0?'win for T G. and fohn Busbie. iSQO. The popularity of Lodge's Rosalynde is shown by its having been reprinted again and again between 1590 and 1640, some of the later editions omitting 'Rosa- lynde ' from the title. ^ This success was due to the skill 1 See " Robin Hood Plays " in Manly's Speciviens of the Pre- Shakespearean Drama, I, 279-288, Ginn & Company, 1900. See also Gayley's "An Historical View of English Comedy," XL-XLI, Representative English Comedies, The Macmillan Company, 1903. 2 See the facsimile of the title-page of the black-letter copy in the Boston Public Library given as the frontispiece of this edition. X THE NEW HUDSON SHAKESPEARE with which Lodge in his redaction of the sturdy old story combined the euphuistic diction and manner that Lyly had made fashionable from 1580 to 1590 and the courtly pas- toralism which the genius of Spenser and Sidney made so strong a literary influence during the next decade. After the posthumous publication of the Arcadia in 1590, pastor- alism became the very breath of the English court and lit- erary life ; it influenced every one. " The mere fact that a man was writing verse was sufificient to metamorphose him for the time into a shepherd, and the persons about him into shepherds and shepherdesses. The very name 'shep- herd ' became a synonym for ' poet.' " — Masson. While it is a disputed question, and likely to remain so, whether Shakespeare ever read The Tale of Gamelyn,'^ it is beyond a doubt that Rosalyjide is the immediate source of the plot of As You Like It. In the play linger a few char- acteristic euphuisms in the form of classical allusions, * pul- pit employment ' of fictitious natural history as in II, i, 12-14, alliteration and antithesis in the sentence structure ; and we have certain artificial pastoral conventions of the Renaissance in the wooing of Silvius and Phebe, the disguise of Rosalind, the hunting scene, etc., though these are blended with the bracing air of English country life under the greenwood tree. But it is in the incidents of the narrative that Shakespeare appropriated so much from Rosalynde, and to appreciate fully his use of this material, it is necessary to compare the romance and the drama scene by scene. '^ Only in this way 1 See articles by Delius {Shakespeare /a/irbtich, VI, 226), Zupitza (Shakespeare Jahrbiich, XXI, 69), and Stone (New Shakspere Society Transactions, 1SS0-1886, p. 277). 2 The complete text of Rosalynde is given in Ilazlitt's Shake- speare's Library, Vol. II, 1875. INTRODUCTION xi can be understood the judgment and art with which Shake- speare used the borrowed matter. In no one of his comedies indeed has he borrowed more freely ; nor is there any wherein he has enriched his borrowings 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 romance. In that work we find no traces of Jaques, Touchstone, Audrey, William, Dennis, Le Beau, Amiens, Sir Oliver Martext ; nothing, indeed, that could yield the slight- est hint towards those characters. It scarce need be said that these superaddings are enough of themselves to trans- form the play into a new creation, pouring through all its veins a free and lively circulation of the most original wit and humor and poetry. And by a judicious indefiniteness as to persons and places, Shakespeare has greatly idealized the work, throwing it at a romantic distance and weaving about it all the witchery of poetical perspective, while the whole is in such harmony 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 sup- pose that Shakespeare could have been really indebted to Lodge 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 a 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 xii THE NEW HUDSON SHAKESPEARE heroine, 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 romance. And it is significant that, though Shakespeare here borrows so freely, there is no sign of any borrowing in the work itself : we can detect no foreign influences, no secondhand 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, Shakespeare generally preferred to make up his plots and stories out of such materials as were most familiar to his audience. Of this we have many examples, but the fact is too well known to need dwelling upon. Though surpass- ingly rich in fertility and force of invention, he was not- withstanding singularly economical and sparing in the use of it ; which aptly shows how free he was from everything like a sensational spirit or habit of mind. Nature was every- thing to him, novelty nothing, or next to nothing. The true, not the new, was always the soul of his purpose. Than this notliing could better approve the moral healthiness of his genius ; hence, in great part, his noble superiority to the intellectual and literary fashions of his time. He understood these perfectly, but he deliberately rejected them, or rather struck quite above or beyond them. We rarely meet with anything that savors of modishness in his workmanship. Prolxibly the best judgment ever pronounced upon him is Ben Jonson's, " He was not of an age, but for all time." For even so it is with the permanences of our intellectual and imaginative being that he deals, and not with any transiencies of popular or fashionable excitement or pursuit. And as he INTRODUCTION xiii cared little for the new, so he was all the stronger in that which does not grow old and which lives on from age to age in the perennial, unwithering freshness of truth and nature. To be carried hither and thither by the shifting mental epidemics of the day is but a tacit confession of weakness or disease ; it only proves that one has not strength of mind enough to *' feel the soul of nature," or to live at peace with the solidities of reason. And because the attractions of mere novelty had no force with Shakespeare, because his mind dwelt far above the currents of intellectual fashion and convention, his dramas stand " exempt from the wrongs of time " ; and the study of them is a wholesome disciphne in those forms and sources of interest which underlie and outlast all the flitting specialties of mode and custom — Truths that wake, To perish never; Which neither hstlessness, nor mad endeavour, Nor Man nor Boy, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy ! "All the World's a Stage" The thought in the metaphor with which the famous speech of Jaques, II, vii, 138, begins, seems to be as old and as universal as the art of acting. It is found in the Greek anthology and in Latin literature. Lucian works out the idea elaborately ; to Petronius is attributed Non duco contentionis funem, diim constet inter nos, qiiod fere totiis miindiis exerceat histrioniam,^ which, in the form, Totiis ^ "Petronius had not been translated in Shakespeare's time." — Douce. xiv THE NEW HUDSON SHAKESPEARE mundus agit histrionem, is said to have been the motto on the Globe Theatre, built in 1599 by Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert, where, as Shakespeare himself was one of the shareholders, it is extremely probable that As You Like It was one of the first plays given. Elizabethan lit- erature abounds in expressions of the same general idea of this world being but a stage "and all the men and women merely players." Some of the best known, for example that of Thomas Heywood in The Author to His Booke, or Ben Jonson's in The New Inn (I, i, "When I consider all the world 's a play "), were written after As You Like It. But in Sidney's Arcadia (written probably 15 78-1 580, first printed 1590) we have, "She found the world but a wearisome stage to her, where she played a part against her will." So, too, in Richard Edwardes's ' tragical comedy,' T>a?non and Tithias (licensed 1566, and first printed apparently in 157 1) : Pythagoras said, that this world was Hke a stage, Where many play their parts : the lookers on, the sage Philosophers are, saith he, whose part is to learn The manners of all nations. Shakespeare himself had already made use of the figure in The Merchant of Venice, I, i, 77-79 : I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano, A stage where every man must play a part, And mine a sad one. "Si: YEN Agks" Such a division of human life into certain stages or epochs as Jaques makes, II, vii, 142-165, is found in Greek, Latin, and later Hebrew literature. In some Greek verses attrib- uted to Solon, the life of man is divided into ten ages of INTRODUCTION xv seven years each. Proclus is said to have made the distri- bution into seven ages, " over each of which one of the seven planets was supposed to rule. . . . Hippocrates like- wise divided the life of man into seven ages, but differs from Proclus in the number of years allotted to each period." — Malone. Fourteen periods are given in the Alishna, the body of the * Oral Law ' of the Jews redacted in the third century ; and in the Midrash, the Hebrew exposition of the Old Testament made between the sixth and twelfth cen- turies, the division is into seven periods. A poem upon the ten stages of life was written about the year 1150 by the great Hebrew scholar and exegete Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, the Rabbi ben Ezra of Browning's poem. In Arnold'' s C/ironkle, a famous fifteenth century miscellany, is a chap- ter entitled "The vii Ages of Man living in the World." Henley thinks that Shakespeare took his hint for the famous passage from some of the pictorial representations of the theme which were popular in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. But what Shakespeare found neither in old woodcuts nor in mediaeval lore are the terse expression, supreme artistry in description, and peculiar Jaques cynicism shown in the emphasis put upon the unlovely aspects of human life in each of the seven ages. The Title While, as indicated below under "General Characteristics," the ground idea of the play is indicated by the title As You Like It^ there is strong probability that the title itself 1 Com7?ie il voiis plaira is the title George Sand gave to her French adaptation of the play in which Jaques was made the hero. xvi THE NEW HUDSON SHAKESPEARE was suggested by this passage in Lodge's epistle dedicatory " To the Gentlemen Readers " : Gentlemen, look not here to find anie sprigs of Pallas bay tree, nor to heare the humour of any amorous Lawreate, nor the pleasing vaine of anie eloquent Orator: Nolo altum sapere, they be matters above my capacitie ; the Coblers checke shall never light on my head, N'e sutor ultra crepidam, I will go no further than the latchet, and then all is well. Heere you may perhaps finde som leaves of Vetius mirtle, but heawen down by a souldier with his curtleaxe, not bought with the allurement of a filed tongue. To be briefe Gentlemen, roome for a souldier and a sailer, that gives you the fruits of his labors that he wrought in the Ocean, when everie line was wet with a surge, and every humorous passion countercheckt with a storme. If you like it, so ; and yet I will be yours in duetie, if you bee mine in favour. ^ Tieck conjectured that the title was a kind of rejoinder to Ben Jonson's boasting lines with which the epilogue of Cynthia's Revels closes : I '11 only speak what I have heard him say, " By 't is good, and if you like 't, you may." Apart from such a rejoinder being most uncharacteristic of Shakespeare, the date of the production of Cynthia's Revels is fatal to the Tieck theory. On the other hand, it is quite in keeping with the satire on contemporaries in Cynthia's Revels to read in these lines of the epilogue a covert sneer at the title of Shakespeare's play. 1 This is an excellent specimen of Lodge's euphuistic diction. The orthography is that of the first edition of Rosalynde. INTRODUCTION xvii II. DATE OF COMPOSITION External Evidence I. The Stationers^ Registers. The earliest reference to As You Like It is the following entry in The Stationers' Registers : ^ my lord chamberlens menns plaies Entred 27 may 1600 viz to master A moral of clothe breches and velvet hose Robertes 27 May Allarum to London To hym 4 9tUfl;U6tt As you like yt | a booke Henry the Ffift | a booke Euery man in his humour | a booke The commedie of muche A doo about-nothing a booke 1 -tobestaied^ While As You Like It and the three companion plays have no year attached to the ' 4 August, 'J;here is no question that the year 1600 is implied. Apart from the proximity of ' 1600 ' in the previous entry, we find that later in the same month, with the year 1600 clearly given, Henry the Fifth, Every Man in His Hunioiir, and Much Ado About Nothing are entered again, the ' staying ' having been removed. 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