Certain New Elucidations of Shakespeare 51 



This, with Grant White's running comments on As You Like 

 It, in Studies in Shakespeare, seems to the writer the most edify- 

 ing part of all the literature — so far as known to him — that has 

 grown up about the play. Quiller-Couch does not much con- 

 cern himself in this lecture with how the thing was done. That 

 inquiry might well be postponed until some of the more serious 

 dramas have been considered. The dramatic scheme in this one 

 is as bald as might be expected in a children's novel. The 

 author returns, in his last division (p. iii), to the matter of 

 Shakespeare's borrowings, and the extent to which he has im- 

 proved upon his originals : 



The play is — as j^ou like it— a woodland play treated courtly-wise, or a 

 courtly play treated woodland-wise. It plainly derives, through Love's 

 Labour's Lost, from John Lyly; whose polite comedies, highly artificial, 

 but in one way or another a wonderful artistic advance, held the ear of 

 Court and of City at the moment when Shakespeare set up as a play- 

 wright. ... if we would understand Shakespeare's workmanship in the 

 early comedies, .and trace how Love's Labour's Lost grew into As You 

 Like It, we must study Lyly's Campaspe, his Endymion, and his Galatea. 

 The main point to grasp is that As You Like It, however much improved 

 by genius, belongs to the Lyly line of descent and to the order of the 

 court-pastoral. 



The " pastoral " being granted, we may recognize excellent workmanship 

 in the Silvius and Phebe episode. To have garbed Rosalind as a boy with- 

 out making a girl fall in love with him would have been to miss a plain 

 opportunity — as plain a one as the sight of the bloody cloth at which 

 Rosalind faints. It doubles the intrigue, and it provides with due irony 

 one of the most charming quarters in all Comedy : 



Phebe. Good shepherd, tell this youth what 't is to love. 

 Silvius. It is to be all made of sighs and tears : 



And so am I for Phebe. 

 Phebe. And I for Ganymede. 

 Orlando. And I for Rosalind. 

 Rosalind. And I for no woman. 



and so on, and so on. The genre and the convention of It granted, nothing 

 could be prettier than the inter-chime and the counter-chime. It is Lyly 

 carried to the nth power. 



Quiller-Couch ends his chapter on As You Like It with this 

 paragraph : 



153 



