‘As You Like It’ — HISTORY OF THE PLAY

"As You Like It" may have been written expressly for the first season of the Globe Theater, in the autumn of 1599. Though the exact date of performance is unsure, it was registered in August of 1600 when Shakespeare's Lord Chamberlain's Men registered it with the Stationers' Company as a play "to be stayed"-that is, not to be published. This was a safeguard against piracy and usually applied only to new plays, thereby suggesting that "As You Like It" was a recent play.

"As You Like It" was not published in Shakespeare's lifetime. It first appeared in the First Folio, which was published by two of Shakespeare's actors in 1623 from the promptbooks used in rehearsals. Therefore, the First Folio is the only authoritative text of the play.

The first recorded production of "As You Like It" was staged at London's Drury Lane theater by Charles Johnson in 1723, but was renamed "Love in a Forest." Johnson deleted the characters of Touchstone, Phoebe, Audrey, William, and Martext then added text from "Much Ado About Nothing," "Twelfth Night," and even "Richard II." Finally, at the wedding of Jaques and Celia (instead of Oliver and Celia) a play of "Pyramus and Thisbe" is performed from "A Midsummer Night's Dream." This reworked production flourished for many years afterward.

The play in its original form was popular throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Famous Rosalinds have included Ada Rehan (1890), Edith Evans (1936), Katherine Hepburn (1950 on Broadway), Vanessa Redgrave (1961), and recently, Gwenyth Paltrow (summer of 1999 at Massachusetts's Williamstown Theater Festival).