Amorous fictions and As You Like It

Abstract

The date of As You Like It is usually accepted as 1599, although the play’s direct source, Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde, had been first published as long ago as 1590 and so too had the finest pastoral romance of all in English, Philip Sidney’s Arcadia. As You Like It, which was almost certainly completed in 1599, the year after the works of Lodge and Sidney were reprinted, contains like Henry V allusions to the new Globe Theatre. At first sight Shakespeare’s title for the play, As You Like It, emphasizes style only to disarm critics as they enter the theatre. So As You Like It is even more like an old tale than is the prose narrative of Rosalynde on which it is based. In As You Like It the direct physicality of performance gives present tense to the pastoral action, sometimes stilled so that Ovidian allusion may be foregrounded.