I could write a great deal about this play, but will try and limit myself to a single section of non-eighteenth-century matters. After all, this play is rather special: there weren’t many of Shakespeare’s comedies performed during Garrick’s tenure at Drury Lane, as tragedies, as they are now, were the hot ticekts. Nevertheless both As You Like It and Much Ado were performed fairly often, so much that Garrick was famous for his Benedick and Sheridan seems to be quoting As You Like It in many of his plays.

Of course, the As You Like It of Drury Lane or Covent Garden in the 1750s was fairly different from the play we now watch. The editor of the third Arden edition (Juliet Dusinberre) points out, for example, two passages that would not have made it to the stage back then. The first occurs near the start of the play when Celia asks Rosalind if all her apparent concern is for her father and Rosalind (already thinking of Orlando) replies, “No, some of it is for my child’s father.” As Dusinberre puts it, such a blunt revelation of infatuation was “Often cut as improper after the advent of women actors”. In the third act, another passage is cut for less salacious reasons; Touchstone’s attempt to marry Audrey was left out since the jokes at the expense of Oliver Mar-text (depending to some extent on knowledge of the Elizabethan Marprelate controversy) were considered incomprehensible. Unfortunately, this means cutting a great many other fine lines, including Touchstone’s definition of the role of truth in poetry: “the truest poetry is the most feigning”.

Enough with the cuts. Another thing that would have been different about this play in the eighteenth century is what the French would call the ‘points forts’ of the production. Having now read a fair bit of theatre criticism from the period, it is striking how little the Dukes, the Rosalind-Celia relationship, and even Orlando are mentioned. Much attention was given (as it still is) to the ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech, but two other areas, one at least now somewhat neglected, are also picked out for praise. The first passage I have in mind is Rosalind’s epilogue, which, while well known nowadays, was appreciated most in the eighteenth century as the moment when the actress Hannah Pritchard overcame her timidity and proved her worth. John Hill tells the story in The Actor (1755), and I won’t repeat it here. The second scene I want to talk about is Adam’s speech to Orlando in the second act. I was chatting to an actor about this speech, who remarked on how he always felt a little surge of emotion when he spoke Adam’s offer of “five hundred crowns / The thrifty hire I saved under your father”. That actor’s observation was not a new one, and praise of the ‘sensibility’ shown in the character of Adam is all over eighteenth-century writing about the theatre. John Hill (in 1750 this time) even goes so far as to say that an actor guided only by feeling with no help from understanding could perform the scene, since Shakespeare has loaded it with so much emotion.

So those are my eighteenth-century observations. I’ll conclude with a little point that, despite my having read this play many many times, had never occurred to me before. Early on, just before the wrestling match, the fool Touchstone is amusing Rosalind and Celia with the story of a knight who, although he “swore by his honour” that some excellence mustard and pancakes were “naught”, was not forsworn since he had no honour to swear by. It’s a short bit of wit, but the logic of it is interesting: the knight was able to do something he would not otherwise have been able to do (i.e. lie) because he was deprived of one of the qualities of a knight, namely honour. This way of rephrasing Touchstone’s joke suggests a connection between it and Orlando’s later speech to Rosalind, begging her not to call off his bout with Charles: “if I be foiled there is but one shamed that was never gracious, if killed one, but one dead that is willing to be so.” Of course, Orlando goes on to win: he, like the knight, had nothing to lose. Now, I don’t know if this logic of using what one has (or is) not as a lever can serve as a platform for reading the rest of the play, but even as I write this it occurs to me that such a way of thinking is part of the power of Arden: “sweet are the uses of adversity” says the Duke who is wise for having lost so much, and (perhaps a better fit) Rosalind woos Orlando as Ganymede, working from a position where everything she says depends on her being not what she seems. I suppose, though, that while Orlando and Touchstone’s knight benefit from their position by having nothing to lose, Rosalind, by the time she sees the handkerchief stained with Orlando’s blood, has lost this protective aspect of her subterfuge. It is no bad thing, though, that she does.