GENERALLY BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN WRITTEN IN
1599 or 1600, As You Like It has as its gen-
erally recognized source a prose novel by
Thomas Lodge, Rosalynde, or Euphues' Gold-
en Legacy ( 1590). ¹

Before considering the music of As You
Like It in detail, we may draw several inferences from a compari-
son of the music in Rosalynde and that in Shakespeare's play.
When Shakespeare turned to the novel, he found seven songs
spaced at intervals throughout it. ² These songs, with the excep-
tion of the last one, are "artificial," amorous lyrics whose themes
are slight variations of the plight of the lover forsaken or ignored
by his beloved. The exception is a pseudo-bucolic song in imitation
of a folk type. There is little apparent connection between the
theme of the songs and the theme or moral of the novel, that is,
the weakness of a house divided.

Like Rosalynde, As You Like It contains songs spaced at in-
tervals throughout the play--five of them, to be exact. But there
the similarity ends. The songs used by Shakespeare, whether imi-
tations or genuine folk songs, have, with one exception, the flavor
of the folk and are performed in the play much as like songs
would have been performed by actual rustics. The exception is
the masque song, the hymn to Hymen, which falls in the con-
clusion of the play. The subject of the first two of Shakespeare's
songs is a restatement of the moral of the play, namely, the in-
fluence of nature on man is benign. The next two songs suggest
the joys and simplicity of rural life.

We may therefore draw one general conclusion: the songs in
As You Like It are popular generally, whereas the songs in Rosa-
lynde are euphuistic, for the most part. Lodge deliberately used
an exaggerated literary style in order to appeal to a select circle

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