ABSTRACT
Shakespeare's As You Like It was first performed, Juliet Dusinberre has argued, on 20 February 1599 at Richmond palace court. Hence, it would also have been a most suitable play to stage on Shrove Tuesday, 1599, at Richmond Palace, before Elizabeth and Essex, immediately prior to the latter's Irish campaign at the head of a pan-Celtic army. There are two direct references to Irishness in As You Like It. Shakespeare's Rosalind complains that the euphuistic repetitions of the sets of lovers around her in Act 5 Scene 2 remind her of 'the howling of Irish Wolues'. The heretical 'Syrian' provenance of the equivalent wolves in Lodge's romance is thus brought closer to home. Shakespeare's Rosalind acknowledges this earlier incarnation, when she behaved like a rat, and ratted on her devotees. However, she has since been reincarnated, having learned her lesson, is now presumably full of grace, and, in Counter-Reformation guise, comes to re-educate those wayward former devotees.
