AS YOU LIKE IT

"As You Like It" was written around 1599–1600, and the dating rests on a few useful clamps. Francis Meres catalogued Shakespeare's comedies in Palladis Tamia (1598) and doesn't mention it, so it comes after that. The play quotes Marlowe's Hero and Leander — Phebe's "Dead shepherd, now I find thy saw of might" — and that poem was only published in 1598. And on 4 August 1600 the play was entered in the Stationers' Register with the note "to be staied," a blocking entry the Lord Chamberlain's Men used to stop rival printers from pirating a script they were still profitably performing. The play was never printed in quarto during Shakespeare's lifetime. It survives only because Heminges and Condell included it in the First Folio of 1623 — one of roughly eighteen plays that would otherwise have been lost entirely.