The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare

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As You Like It

As You Like It
One of the best loved of Shakespeare's mature comedies, As You Like It was entered in the Stationers' Register in 1600: the fact that it is not mentioned in Francis Meres's list of Shakespeare's works in September 1598, coupled with its high proportion of prose and the precise frequency with which its verse uses colloquial contractions, has inclined most scholars to date the play in 1599–1600, just after Henry V (with which it shares some unusual vocabulary) and Julius Caesar. Although it may pre-date the play, the publication of ‘It was a lover and his lass’ (sung in 5.3) in Thomas Morley's First Book of Airs in 1600 would appear to support this dating.

Text

Despite the Stationers' Register entry of 1600 the play was not printed until the First Folio appeared in 1623. The Folio supplies a generally reliable text which, lacking distinctively authorial spellings and errors, was probably set from a...

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