Comedy plays; Exiles -- Drama; Fathers and daughters -- Drama; Pastoral drama
ROSALIND.
There is none of my uncle’s marks upon you. He taught me how to know a
man in love, in which cage of rushes I am sure you are not prisoner.
ORLANDO.
What were his marks?
ROSALIND.
A lean cheek, which you have not; a blue eye and sunken, which you have
not; an unquestionable spirit, which you have not; a beard neglected,
which you have not—but I pardon you for that, for simply your having in
beard is a younger brother’s revenue. Then your hose should be
ungartered, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe
untied, and everything about you demonstrating a careless desolation.
But you are no such man. You are rather point-device in your
accoutrements, as loving yourself than seeming the lover of any other.
ORLANDO.
Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love.
ROSALIND.
Me believe it? You may as soon make her that you love believe it, which
I warrant she is apter to do than to confess she does. That is one of
the points in the which women still give the lie to their consciences.
But, in good sooth, are you he that hangs the verses on the trees,
wherein Rosalind is so admired?
ORLANDO.
I swear to thee, youth, by the white hand of Rosalind, I am that he,
that unfortunate he.
ROSALIND.
But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak?
ORLANDO.
Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much.
ROSALIND.
Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark
house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so
punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers
are in love too. Yet I profess curing it by counsel.
ORLANDO.
Did you ever cure any so?
ROSALIND.
Yes, one, and in this manner. He was to imagine me his love, his
mistress, and I set him every day to woo me; at which time would I,
being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing
and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of
tears, full of smiles; for every passion something and for no passion
truly anything, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this
colour; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then
forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my
suitor from his mad humour of love to a living humour of madness, which
was to forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook
merely monastic. And thus I cured him, and this way will I take upon me
to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep’s heart, that there shall
not be one spot of love in ’t.
ORLANDO.
I would not be cured, youth.
ROSALIND.
I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind and come every day
to my cote and woo me.
ORLANDO.
Now, by the faith of my love, I will. Tell me where it is.
ROSALIND.
Go with me to it, and I’ll show it you; and by the way you shall tell
me where in the forest you live. Will you go?
ORLANDO.
With all my heart, good youth.
ROSALIND.
Nay, you must call me Rosalind. Come, sister, will you go?
[_Exeunt._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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