![]() ![]() In the midst of Jaques’ self-defensive response, Orlando comes charging into the group, his sword drawn, proclaiming that no one of the group can eat until “necessity be served” (II.vii.89). He tells a tale of meeting a fool in the forest–Touchstone, perhaps? Jaques then goes on to wax rhapsodic on how he would love to be a fool, as well, but the duke tells him that he would make an awful one, as he would “disgourge” “embossed sores and headed evils (II.vii.69, 67) onto the world. The duke and one of his followers talk of another member of their group, one who was “merry, hearing of song” (II.vii.4), and before we have to think too hard on his identity, Jaques arrives, even merrier. The seventh and final scene of Act Two takes us back to Duke Senior’s camp. While Orlando feels that Adam’s “conceit is nearer death than (his) powers” (II.vi.7-8), he leaves the old man to find him food. He “can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs” (II.v.9-10) and those are his own words.Īnd in the even shorter Scene Six, we find a companion piece to Scene Four as Orlando and Adam enter the woods and Adam is on his last legs like Celia: “O, I die for food” (II.vi.1-2). In the short Act Two, Scene Five, we find Jaques and some of the duke’s men, singing songs, and the Jacques is the happy melancholic that was described to us back at the beginning of the act. This, of course, gives Rosalind her opening: if Corin will show them his master’s land, and they like it, they will buy it from him. Plus, his master is about to sell his properties, and so he doesn’t have anything to spare. He cannot help them, as he is but a servant and his “master is of churlish disposition” (II.iv.78). Now, while Silvius has exited, Corin in still there, and they ask him for a “place to rest (them)selves and feed” (II.iv.71). And as the young man leaves, Rosalind sees a kindred spirit “this shepherd’s passion // Is much upon my fashion (II.iv.56-7), as she, too, is in love. Silvius is in love with a woman named Phebe, and his attempts to woo her are not going well… so “not well” as to have the older man tell him “this is the way to make her scorn you” (II.iv.19), but Silvius believes that the old man cannot possibly know anything about love. ![]() She “could find in (her) heart to disgrace (her) man’s apparel, and to cry like a woman” (II.iv.4-5), but she she won’t, and she urges on her cousin–even if Celia “cannot go no further” (II.iv.9).Īs they rest for the moment, they overhear the conversation between two inhabitants of the woods, Corin and Silvius. Rosalind’s spirits are “merry” (II.iv.1) though her traveling companions are “weary” (II.iv.3). When we return to the Forest of Arden in the fourth scene of the act, we see a familial connection between Duke Senior and his daughter: a sense of optimism. Only he is old, eighty (“fourscore” ) and nearing the “last gasp with truth and loyalty” (II.iii.69) but Orlando is willing to take him on. The old man then asks Orlando to take him with him, even though he may “look old… (he is) strong and lusty” (II.iii.47). Adam has a solution for that: he has five hundred crowns, which he will give to Orlando, as long as Orlando leaves. Orlando refuses, saying that he will not leave without his inheritance, forcing him to take on “a thieving living on the common road” (II.iii.33). ![]() Learning that both Celia and Rosalind had been speaking highly of Orlando, Frederick demands, The second scene takes us back to the court of Duke Senior’s younger brother and a real usurper, Duke Frederick, and he is not a happy man: he cannot believe that both his daughter and Rosalind have fled the court and “no man saw them” (II.ii.1). Of course, his reservation is nothing compared the that of “the melancholy Jaques” (II.i.26), an absent member of the duke’s party, who is so brokenhearted over the killing of a stag that he “stood on th’ extremest verge of the swift brook, // Augmenting it with his tears” (II.i.42-3), going as far as to accuse (like in a campaign for PETA) the duke and his followers of being “mere usurpers, tyrants…to fright the animals and kill them” (II.i.61-2). He calls for a deer hunt, and almost immediately finds regret in the death of the wood’s native inhabitants. And there’s even a bit of foreshadowing here, when he speaks of “find(ing) tongues in trees” (II.i.16), as we will when Orlando comes to hanging his love poems on the trees of the forest. He expounds on the idyllic nature of their current state, a wonderful statement of optimism (though bordering on Pollyanna-ism). The second act of As You Like It takes us to where Rosalind and Celia are heading: the Forest of Arden.Īnd who do we find? Rosalind’s pops, of course: Duke Senior, and he’s holding court (sort of) with his “co-mates and brothers in exile” (II.i.1). ![]()
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