He was more original than the originals. He breathed upon dead
bodies and brought them into life. – Walter Savage Landor, 1846
The detection of [Shakespeare's sources] has its own fascination
and is useful in so far as they illustrate the workings of
Shakespeare's imagination, but the most notable feature of the
play is the dramatist's inventiveness, brilliantly fusing
scattered elements from legend, folklore and earlier books and
plays into a whole that remains as fresh and original now as
when it was composed. – R.A. Foakes, 1984 Watching one of
Shakespeare's plays come to life on stage is exciting,
especially when we stop to consider that we are watching a drama
penned four centuries ago. And while the words the actors speak
are old, the stories that unfold are even older. Scholars
tentatively agree that As You Like It was written in 1599, but
Shakespeare's drama is based on another work published a decade
earlier. That work in turn was based on a fourteenth-century
story, and so, in a way, the story of As