Orlando sticks his rhymes up in the forest, like a bill-poster of
Radway's Ready Relief, deforming the sturdier oaks. Rosalind goes
about pulling them down, and is in the best of spirits when Touchstone
declares that he could "rhyme you so, eight years together; dinners,
and suppers, and sleeping-hours excepted:" his verses have the regular
butter-woman's jog-trot. She was never so nearly berhymed to death
since she was an Irish rat in the time of Pythagoras. But, for all
that, she is full of bliss to discover that this fancy-monger of rhymes
is Orlando; and she is dying to know "what did he? What said he? How
look'd he? Wherein went he? What makes he here? Did he ask for me?
Where remains he? How parted he with thee? And when shalt thou see
him again? Answer me in one word." To be sure, she wears a double
disguise of wit and male attire; so when Orlando says to her, "Fair
youth, I would I could make thee believe I love," it is easy for her to
reply, "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 when, pretending to ridicule his emotion, she
tells him that "men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten
them, but not for love," he protests that Rosalind's frown might kill
him. "By this hand," she says, "it will not kill a fly." So all the
exuberant frolic of these fine women is the sparkle of healthy brains:
the heart's-blood of love does not trickle through hepatic sentiment,
but is briskly pumped through the lungs up into the head, flashes from
the eye, and becomes a ruddy zest upon the tongue.
Benedick complains that the Lady Beatrice said he was the prince's
jester, that he was "duller than a great thaw; huddling jest upon jest,
with such impossible conveyance, upon me, that I stood like a man at a
mark, with a whole army shooting at me. While she is here, a man may
live as quiet in hell as in a sanctuary; and people sin upon purpose,
because they would go thither."
When, however, she overhears Hero giving her wit a bad character for
scorn and inhumanity, her woman's heart revolts at the suggestion, and
her self-communion runs thus tenderly:--
"What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemn'd for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!
No glory lives behind the back of such.
And, Benedick, love on, I will requite thee;
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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