It is remarkable that As You Like It, one of Shakespeare’s greatest and best-loved comedies, should – as William Winter, in his history of Shakespeare on the Stage, put it – have ‘sunk into abeyance and remained for a long time unused’ after the closing of the theatres. It was not until December 1740 that it was presented at Drury Lane, the playbill for that production declaring that it had not been acted for forty years. John Genest’s comment on this, that it had probably been unperformed since the Restoration, is taken by that other great stage-historian, C. B. Hogan, to be ‘almost certainly correct’.

Comedy never has been as popular as tragedy, it is true, and the gradual revival of interest in it amplified only after 1740 with an increased demand for the original texts. Nevertheless, many Shakespearian comedies were always available in various forms: briefly but successfully, so was As You Like It.