No Fear Shakespeare
As You Like It
Get this No Fear to go!
Act 4, Scene 1
Original Text | Modern Text | |
Enter ROSALIND, CELIA, and JAQUES
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ROSALIND, CELIA, and JAQUES enter. | |
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JAQUES
I prithee, pretty youth, let me be better acquainted with
thee.
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JAQUES
Please, pretty young man, I’d like to get to know you better.
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ROSALIND
They say you are a melancholy fellow.
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ROSALIND
They say you are a melancholy fellow.
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JAQUES
I am so. I do love it better than laughing.
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JAQUES
I am. I like it better than laughing.
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ROSALIND
Those that are in extremity of either are abominable fellows
and betray themselves to every modern censure worse than
drunkards.
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ROSALIND
People who are either too serious or too silly are awful. They make themselves targets for ridicule even faster than drunks do.
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JAQUES
Why, ’tis good to be sad and say nothing.
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JAQUES
Well, I think it’s good to be serious and keep quiet.
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ROSALIND
Why then, ’tis good to be a post.
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ROSALIND
In that case it’s good to be a post.
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JAQUES
I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation;
nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s,
which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor
the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice;
nor the lover’s, which is all these, but it is a melancholy of
mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from
many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my
travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most
humorous sadness.
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JAQUES
I’m not a scholar’s kind of melancholy, which is all about impressing one’s peers, or a musician’s, which comes from his passion for his art. I don’t have the proud melancholy of a courtier or the ambitious melancholy of a soldier or the calculated melancholy of a lawyer. My melancholy is not like a lady’s—which is nothing more than an affectation—nor like a lover’s, which combines all of these qualities. My melancholy is purely my own—a compound made from many ingredients. I’m serious because I’ve traveled so much. When I think about all the things I’ve seen, I sink into deep thoughts.
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