The Students' Series of English Classics. SHAKESPEARE'S COMEDY OF AS YOU LIKE IT EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY KATHARINE LEE BATES WELLESLEY COLLEGE "Music and poesy use to quicken you." HARVARD 0444219 COPYRIGHT, 1896, TYPOGRAPHY BY C. J. PETERS & SON, BOSTON. PRESSWORK BY BERWICK & SMITH. PREFACE. THIS School edition of As You Like It has been preceded, in The Students' Series of English Classics, by like editions of The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer-Night's Dream. In the Introduction to The Merchant of Venice may be found a brief sketch to Shakespeare's life, and of the antecedent growth of the English drama, with references, and a condensed account, with references, of Elizabethan copyright and the history of Shakesperian criticism. The Introduction to As You Like It is confined to the play in question. The notes, as before, are placed in three groups, textual, for the use of more advanced classes, that are interested in seeing how far the play they read is the play originally printed; grammatical, for the use of students who would familiarize themselves with Elizabethan idiom; and literary; this third group of notes being, in the judgment of the editor, more fruitful and appropriate, especially for beginners, than the two technical divisions. In classes where textual and grammati cal work is done, it is believed better to separate these special lines of investigation from the essential study of the play. It must be confessed that annotation and comment of any sort whatever, in case of the sweetest wildwood fantasy that poet ever penned, sometimes strike the mind as more incongruous than the melancholy Jaques in Arden. Yet even Jaques, though saucy youth may take him for "either a fool or a cipher," has his function, if but to "moralize this spectacle." KATHARINE LEE BATES. WELLESLEY COLLEGE, September, 1896. |