Page:As You Like It (1919) Yale.djvu/135



The source of As You Like It is, without doubt, a novel, or pastoral romance, by Thomas Lodge, the title-page of the first edition of which runs as follows:

'Rosalynde. / Euphues Golden Le- / gacie: found after his death / in his Cell at Si- / lexedra. / Bequeathed to Philautus sonnes / noursed vp with their / father in Eng- / land. / Fetcht from the Canaries. / By T. L. Gent. / LONDON, / Imprinted by Thomas Orwin for T. G. / and John Busbie. / 1590.'

The possibility that Shakespeare may have made use of an earlier play by some other author from the same source has been advanced by Furness to account for certain minor inconsistencies in Shakespeare's comedy. There is, however, no actual evidence of the existence of an earlier play.

Modern scholars have confirmed the discovery, made by Dr. Zachary Grey in 1754, that the source of Lodge's romance was in turn The Tale of Gamelyn, a narrative poem of unknown authorship which had been interpolated into many manuscripts of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The Tale of Gamelyn is not to be found in any printed copy of the Canterbury Tales before Urry's edition of Chaucer in 1721, where it appeared as The Coke's (Cook's) Tale. Of course, it is possible that Shakespeare, as well as Lodge, had read this story in one of the manuscript versions. The chief resemblances between As You Like It and The Tale of Gamelyn occur in the first two hundred and fifty lines of the latter. Gamelyn is abused by his brother, emerges victorious from the wrestling match; and then, later in the poem, flees into a forest to join