1 - Prologue

Summary

A play which announces itself ‘As You Like It ‘ to all appearances sets out to please its audience. It also gives away no clues as to its subject matter: no exciting history, no pathos-inducing representation of the fall of a great man. All ‘plays’, of course, promise pleasure of a sort, otherwise we would not pay out good money to see them; but comedies depend for their attractiveness less on their subject matter and more on the simple guarantee of a good time in the theatre.

William Shakespeare, as a playwright and shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company of the Globe Theatre, was committed to fulfilling that guarantee: that much, at least, we can infer about the man who spent his working life in London and then retired to his birthplace of Stratford-upon- Avon as a prosperous ‘gentleman’. Although there is no record of As You Like It 's performance during Shakespeare's lifetime (or, indeed, for over a century after), it was printed among his comedies in the First Folio of 1623, and scholars have confidently assigned the probable year (1599) and casting of the major male roles in its first production. Rosalind, one of the longest roles in the Shakespearean canon, would have been played by an adolescent boy, as would all the other female parts.

Was As You Like It performed to an Elizabethan or Jacobean audience? Did it please? Since the play is demonstrably aware of its own theatricality, my analysis of it works with the hypothesis of its being written for a 1599 Globe audience, but it must be stressed that this is no more than an exercise in historical imagination. This book depends on an ‘if …’ (though, as Touchstone says, ‘much virtue in If ‘ (5. 4. 102)). My views as to how the play might have affected its first audience are based on close reading of the text informed by the current (late twentieth-century) state of historical scholarship and theory concerning the play.