As You Like It was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 4 August [1600]. The form of entry is unusual: it is listed ‘to be staied’ on a fly-leaf, along with Henry V, Every Man in his Humour, and Much Ado About Nothing. No stationer is named, and there is no record of any fee having been paid. The other three plays appeared in print shortly afterwards, but As You Like It was not published before it appeared in the First Folio collection of works by Shakespeare (F), which was printed in William Jaggard's shop in 1623.

Many explanations are possible for the non-appearance of the play in print: perhaps the players wanted to prevent unauthorised publication of a play so popular that they were unwilling to put the text into circulation; perhaps the entry is a clerk's memorandum signifying that the entry is to await further consideration; perhaps the text was affected by the decree prohibiting the printing of satires and epigrams published by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London on 1 June 1599. It may have fallen foul of the censors by virtue of containing, in the figure of Jaques, a satirical portrait of the queen's godson Sir John Harington who, in 1596, had published a witty and scatological treatise on his recently invented water-closet, The Metamorphosis of Ajax, and who, in consequence, was referred to as ‘Sir Ajax Harington’. Harington had served under the Earl of Essex in the Irish campaign of 1599, but he and his patron were out of favour with the Queen at the probable time of the play's composition. Whether the mere evocation of Harington, even in an unfavourable guise, was enough to provoke censorship, or whether in these months any form of satire generated an official reaction is unknowable. Neither hypothesis is provable since there is no record of performance before one that may have taken place in 1603– but equally no evidence to suggest that it was not performed – and there is nothing to clinch the identification with Harington.