As You Like It

Act I, 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 temper'd
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 prithee, 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.

[Enter TOUCHSTONE]

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?

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?