Introduction: Late Elizabethan As You Like It

Abstract

John Heminge and Henry Condell published As You Like It in the First Folio (1623), seven years after Shakespeare’s death near the end of King James’s twenty-two-year reign (1603–1625). No earlier quarto edition of this play had appeared. Editors of Shakespeare’s As You Like It have dated the composition and first performance of this pastoral comedy more confidently than they have fixed those of most of the dramatist’s other plays. Unknown dates either later in the year 1599 or early in 1600 almost certainly include the days for these two events. On the one hand, the title of the play does not occur in Francis Meres’s listing in his Palladis Tamia of the plays Shakespeare had written by September 1598. Moreover, certain verses in As You Like It, to be discussed later in this volume, possibly depend for meaning upon Archbishop John Whitgift and Bishop Richard Bancroft’s June 1, 1599 order banning the publication of satires and the public burning of specified books of verse satire three days later; and upon the new Globe Theatre, built in the Spring of 1599 and ready by June of that year (AYLI, 1.2.82–84, 2.7.139).