AS YOU LIKE IT. The joyous and ro mantic comedy, As You Like It,' was never more happily characterized than by Robert Louis Stevenson in one of his letters: °My view of life is essentially the comic; and the romantically comic As You Like It' is to me the most bird-haunted spot in letters. . . . To me these things are the good: beauty, touched with sex and laughter; beauty with God's earth for the background. . . . The comedy which keeps the beauty and touches the terrors of our life (laughter and tragedy in-a-good-humor having kissed), that is the last word of moved representation; embracing the greatest number of elements of fate and character; and telling its story, not with one eye of pity, but with the two of pity and mirth." The tone of the play, its atmosphere, the principal characters, and the genial criti cism of life which pervades their words, are all suggested in these words and scarcely need further comment.
From internal evidence — the quotation of one of Marlowe's lines from the latter's (Hero and Leander,' published in 1598—and from external evidence—an entry in the Sta tioner's register in 1600— the date of the play is generally agreed to be 1599 or 1600. This date fits in admirably with the chronological order of Shakespeare's plays, which would in dicate that at the end of the period of his his torical plays and his comedies and just before he entered on the period of his great tragedies, he found refreshment in this comedy and in 'Twelfth Night' and (Much Ado about Nothing.' It is not fanciful to say that "he turned with a sense of relief and a long ease ful sigh from the oppressive subjects of his tory, so grave, so real, so massive, and found rest and freedom and pleasure in escape from courts and camps to the Forest of Arden." In this play we are conscious of "a sunlight tem pered by forest boughs, a breeze upon his fore head, a stream humming in his ears." For the story in its main outlines and even for much of the language, Shakespeare was in debted to Lodge's 'Rosalynde) (1590). A com parison of the prose romance and the play re veals the fact that the dramatist was indiffer ent as to his appropriation of material; his main idea being to create a play— the play's the thing. To this end he visualized the char acters, arranged them in contrasted groups or types, introduced new characters such as Corin, Touchstone, Audrey and Jaques, and made an organic structure out of what was incoherent and desultory.
The pastoral story or drama had its origin in the tendency— first in Italy and then in England— to escape from the life of the city or court into a sort of Arcadia or ideal world of happiness. The main features of the pas toral drama, the more artificial character of which is parodied in the Sylvius and Phebe scenes, are combined in As You Like IV with the more distinctively English ideals of free and rural life, such as may be found in the Robin Hood ballads and the dramatized forms thereof. The careless, happy life of foresters and freebooters is everywhere manifest. The forest of Arden, despite the presence of trop ical plants and animals, has many of the aspects of the forests in which Shakespeare wandered as a boy; and the figures of an artificial Ar cadia are balanced by the sun-burnt maids and men ot the soil. In a word, he has recurred to the old tale of English outlawry and vengeance which had been modified to suit the demands of the Italian pastoral. One of the chief sources of delight in the play is the three lyrics, "Under the Greenwood Tree," °Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind," and "It was a Lover and his Lass." In no other play does one get a better idea of the wave of melody that swept over England in the Age of Elizabeth—a time when °tinkers sang catches, milkmaids sang ballads and carters whistled." The songs rep resent that perfect blending of poetry and music — the first fine careless rapture of Eng lish song which has never been recaptured. An other feature of the play is the large number of popular quotations such as the Duke's sum ming up of the uses of adversity, the seven ages of man as characterized by the somewhat cynical Jaques, Rosalind's description of the marks of a lover and many other passages and phrases that have become proverbial. But these passages are after all subsidiary to the characters who utter them—all of them drawn to the life. Among all these Rosalind stands out as the entrancing, commanding personality. Her brightness, joyousness, her happy nature, "mount and sing like a bird let loose from a cage." °The wild-wood freedom of the forest is in her heart, its beauty in her eyes, its sum mer in her temper." She is the central figure throughout the play and at the end naturally plays the role of Providence in setting all things right.