William Shakespeare: As You Like It

ACT III. 2. SCENE II. The Forest of Arden. (continued)

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.