AS YOU LIKE IT. Sidney Lee

good parts, a secret and villainous contriver against me his natural brother: therefore use thy discretion: I had as lief thou didst break his neck as his finger. And thou wert best look to’t; for if thou dost him any slight disgrace, or if he do not mightily grace himself on thee, he will practise against thee by poison, entrap thee by some treacherous device, and never leave thee till he hath ta’en thy life by some indirect means or other: for, I assure thee, and almost with tears I speak it, there is not one so young and so villainous this day living. I speak but brotherly of him; but should I anatomize him to thee as he is, I must blush and weep, and thou must look pale and wonder.

       CHARLES

       I am heartily glad I came hither to you. If he come tomorrow I’ll give him his payment. If ever he go alone again I’ll never wrestle for prize more: and so, God keep your worship!

       [Exit.]

       OLIVER

       Farewell, good Charles.—Now will I stir this gamester: I hope I shall see an end of him: for my soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more than he. Yet he’s gentle; never schooled and yet learned; full of noble device; of all sorts enchantingly beloved; and, indeed, so much in the heart of the world, and especially of my own people, who best know him, that I am altogether misprised: but it shall not be so long; this wrestler shall clear all: nothing remains but that I kindle the boy thither, which now I’ll go about.

       [Exit.]

      SCENE II. A Lawn before the DUKE’S Palace

       [Enter ROSALIND and CELIA.]

       CELIA

       I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry.

       ROSALIND

       Dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am mistress of; and would you yet I were merrier? Unless you could teach me to forget a banished father, you must not learn me how to remember any extraordinary pleasure.

       CELIA

       Herein I see thou lov’st me not with the full weight that I love thee; if my uncle, thy banished father, had banished thy uncle, the duke my father, so thou hadst been still with me, I could have taught my love to take thy father for mine; so wouldst thou, if the truth of thy love to me were so righteously tempered as mine is to thee.

       ROSALIND

       Well, I will forget the condition of my estate, to rejoice in yours.

       CELIA

       You know my father hath no child but I, nor none is like to have; and, truly, when he dies thou shalt be his heir: for what he hath taken away from thy father perforce, I will render thee again in affection: by mine honour, I will; and when I break that oath, let me turn monster; therefore, my sweet Rose, my dear Rose, be merry.

       ROSALIND

       From henceforth I will, coz, and devise sports: let me see; what think you of falling in love?

       CELIA

       Marry, I pr’ythee, do, to make sport withal: but love no man in good earnest, nor no further in sport neither than with safety of a pure blush thou mayst in honour come off again.

       ROSALIND

       What shall be our sport, then?

       CELIA

       Let us sit and mock the good housewife Fortune from her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally.

       ROSALIND

       I would we could do so; for her benefits are mightily misplaced: and the bountiful blind woman doth most mistake in her gifts to women.

       CELIA

       ‘Tis true; for those that she makes fair she scarce makes honest; and those that she makes honest she makes very ill-favouredly.

       ROSALIND

       Nay; now thou goest from Fortune’s office to Nature’s: Fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in the lineaments of Nature.

       CELIA

       No; when Nature hath made a fair creature, may she not by Fortune fall into the fire?—Though Nature hath given us wit to flout at Fortune, hath not Fortune sent in this fool to cut off the argument?

       [Enter TOUCHSTONE.]

       ROSALIND

       Indeed, there is Fortune too hard for Nature, when Fortune makes Nature’s natural the cutter-off of Nature’s wit.

       CELIA

       Peradventure this is not Fortune’s work neither, but Nature’s, who perceiveth our natural wits too dull to reason of such goddesses, and hath sent this natural for our whetstone: for always the dullness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.— How now, wit? whither wander you?

       TOUCHSTONE

       Mistress, you must come away to your father.

       CELIA

       Were you made the messenger?

       TOUCHSTONE

       No, by mine honour; but I was bid to come for you.

       ROSALIND

       Where learned you that oath, fool?

       TOUCHSTONE

       Of a certain knight that swore by his honour they were good pancakes, and swore by his honour the mustard was naught: now, I’ll stand to it, the pancakes were naught and the mustard was good: and yet was not the knight forsworn.

       CELIA

       How prove you that, in the great heap of your knowledge?

       ROSALIND

       Ay, marry; now unmuzzle your wisdom.

       TOUCHSTONE

       Stand you both forth now: stroke your chins, and swear by your beards that I am a knave.

       CELIA

       By our beards, if we had them, thou art.

       TOUCHSTONE

       By my knavery, if I had it, then I were: but if you swear by that that is not, you are not forsworn: no more was this knight, swearing by his honour, for he never had any; or if he had, he had sworn it away before ever he saw those pancackes or that mustard.

       CELIA

       Pr’ythee, who is’t that thou mean’st?

       TOUCHSTONE

       One that old Frederick, your father, loves.

       CELIA

       My father’s love is enough to honour him enough: speak no more of him: you’ll be whipp’d for taxation one of these days.

       TOUCHSTONE

       The more pity that fools may not speak wisely what wise men do foolishly.

       CELIA

       By my troth, thou sayest true: for since the little wit that fools have was silenced, the little foolery that wise men have makes a great show. Here comes Monsieur Le Beau.

       ROSALIND

       With his mouth full of news.

       CELIA

       Which he will put on us as pigeons feed their young.

       ROSALIND

       Then shall we be news-crammed.

       CELIA

       All the better; we shall be the more marketable.

       [Enter LE BEAU.]

       Bon jour, Monsieur Le Beau. What’s the news?

       LE BEAU

       Fair princess, you have lost much good sport.

       CELIA

       Sport! of what colour?

       LE BEAU

       What colour, madam? How shall I answer you?