That my Nerissa shall be sworn on, is, INTRODUCTION ΤΟ AS YOU LIKE IT. IN our Introduction to Much Ado about Nothing we have seen that As You LIKE IT, along with two other of Shakespeare's plays and one of Ben Jonson's, was entered in the Stationers' Register August 4, 1600, and that opposite the entry was an order "to be stayed" In regard to the other two the stay appears to have been so noved, as both were entered again, one on the fourteenth, the other on the twenty-third, of the same month, and were published in the course of that year. Touching As You Like It, the stay seems to have been kept up, perhaps because its continued success on the stage made the company unwilling to part with their interest in it. The play was never printed, so far as we know, till in the folio of 1623, where it stands the tenth in the division of Comedies, with the acts and scenes regularly marked. This is the only contemporary notice of As You Like It that nas been discovered. The play is not mentioned by Meres, which perhaps warrants the inference that it had not been heard of at the date of his list. And in Act v. scene 3, is a line quoted from Marlowe's version of Hero and Leander, which was first printed in 1598. So that we may perhaps safely conclude that the play was written in the latter part of 1598, or in the course of the next year. One thing more there is, that ought not to be passed by in this connection. Gilbert Shakespeare, a brother of the Poet, lived till after the Restoration; and Oldys tells of "the faint, general and almost lost ideas" the old man had of having once seen the Poet act a part in one of his own comedies, "wherein, being to personate a decrepit old man, he wore a long beard, and appeared so weak and drooping, and unable to walk, that he was forced to be supported and carried by another person to a table, at which be was seated among some company, who were eating, and one of them sung a song." This of course could have been none other than the "good old man" Adam, in and about whom we have sc much of noble thought; and we thus learn that his character, beautiful enough in itself, yet more beautiful for this circumstance, was sustained by the Poet himself. But In regard to the or11als of this play, two sources have been pointed out, namely, The Coke's Tale of Gamelyn, sometime attributed to Chaucer, but upon better advice excluded from his works, and a novel by Thomas Lodge entitled Rosalynd: Euphues' Golden Legacie. As the Tale of Gamelyn was not printed till more than a century later, it has been questioned whether Shakespeare ever saw it. Nor, indeed, can much be alleged as indicating that he did: one point there is, however, that may have some weight that way. An old knight, Sir Johan of Boundis, being about to die, calls in his wise friends to arrange the distribution of his property among his three sons. Their plan is, to settle all his lands on the eldest, and leave the youngest without any thing. Gamelyn being his favourite son, he rejects their advice, and bestows the largest portion upon him. Shakespeare goes much more according to their plan, Orlando, who answers to Gamelyn, having no share in the bulk of his father's estate. this suits so well with the Poet's general purpose, and especially with the unfolding of Orlando's character, that we need not sup. pose him to have had any hint for it but the fitness of the thing itself. A few other resemblances may be traced, wherein the play differs from Lodge's novel, but none so strong but that they may well enough have been incidental. Nor, in truth, is the matter of much consequence, save as bearing upon the question whether Shakespeare was of a mind to be unsatisfied with such printed books as lay in his way. We would not exactly affirm him to have been "a hunter of manuscripts;" but we have already seer indications that he sometimes had access to them: nor is it at all unlikely that one so greedy of intellectual food, so eager and apt to make the most of all the means within his reach, should have gone beyond the printed resources of his time. Besides, there can be no question that Lodge was very familiar with the Tale of Gamelyn he follows it so closely in a large part of his novel, as to leave scarce any doubt that he wro with the manuscript by him; and if he, who was also sometime a player, availed himself of such sources, why may not Shakespeare have done the same? Lodge's Rosalynd was first printed in 1590, and its popularity appears in that it was republished in 1592, and again in 1598. Steevens pronounces it a "worthless original;" but this sweeping sentence is so very unjust as to breed a doubt whether he had read it. A graduate of Oxford, Lodge was evidently something of a scholar, as well as a man of wit, fancy, and invention. Compared with the general run of popular literature then in vogue, his novel has much merit, and is very well entitled to the honour of |