As You Like It

Synopsis: As You Like it directed by Charles Kent and adapted by Margaret Birch. Rose Coghlan is Rosalind.
Country: United States
Medium: Film
Technical information: Black-and-white / Silent
Year of release: 1912
Recording date: 7 Oct 1912
Duration: 33 mins; c3000 feet

Notes: The copy held by the Library of Congress (the nitrate acquired from the German Bundesarchiv) has German intertitles and extensive nitrate deterioration in reel 3. 2588ft (28min).
General: Rose Coghlan was sixty when she played the role and ‘no amount of make-up or corseting could hide the lines in her face or the dumpiness of her figure’ (Ball, p. 144).

Ball (op cit) notes that James Young (the husband of Clara Kimball Young) played either Le Beau or Sir Rowland de Bois, whose part is written into the script.
Reviews: Ball, Robert Hamilton. Shakespeare on Silent Film: A Strange Eventful History. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968 (pp135, 139-46, 338-9). Ball enumerates the scenes and condemns the film as ‘a ridiculous bore’.

SHAKESPEARE