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).
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Notes
David Bevington, “Appendix I: Canon, Dates, and Early Texts,” The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington, 5th edition (New York: Pearson/Longman, 2004) A1–A22, esp. A6.
Mary Hamer, “Shakespeare’s Rosalind and Her Public Image,” Theatre Research International 11.2 (1986): 105–18, esp. 107–8.
Arthur McGee, The Elizabethan Hamlet (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1987); Eric S. Mallin, Inscribing the Time: Shakespeare and the End of Elizabethan England (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995); James Shapiro, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, 1599 (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
Louis Adrian Montrose, “‘The Place of a Brother’ in As You Like It: Social Process and Comic Form,” Shakespeare Quarterly 32 (1981): 28–54; Richard Wilson, “‘Like the old Robin Hood’: As You Like It and the Enclosure Riots,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 1–19; A. Stuart Daley, “Calling and Commonwealth in As You Like It: A Late Elizabethan Political Play,” The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal 14 (1994): 28–46; Marcia McDonald, “The Elizabethan Poor Laws and the Stage in the Late 1590s,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 7 (1995): 121–44, esp. 128–32; and Andrew Barnaby, “The Political Conscious of As You Like It,” Studies in English Literature: 1500–1900 36 (1996): 373–95. Also see Robert B. Schwartz, “Puritans, Libertines and the Green World of Utopia in As You Like It,” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch (Weimar) 123 (1987): 66–73.
James P. Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (New York: Columbia UP, 2001) 24, 113–14.
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© 2008 Maurice A. Hunt
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Hunt, M.A. (2008). Introduction: Late Elizabethan As You Like It. In: Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230610187_1
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