'As You Like It'

Play Title: As You Like It, Act III, Scene 2

Playwright: Shakespeare

Style: Classical, Comedy

Character: Rosalind, F

Background: Rosalind is speaking to Orlando, her would-be lover. The two are meeting in the forest after Rosalind's exile drove her to hide out there disguised as a man and Orlando still lives nearby and has been plastering the woods with confessions of his love for Rosalind. During this monologue, Rosalind, disguised as a male page (Ganymede), tries to convince Orlando to pretend that she is his Rosalind so that she can teach him how to be a good suitor.

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.

I have cured one 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.

Why, Hello!

As a theatre major and long-time Thespian, I have been in many acting classes and seminars. I've prepared for hundreds if not thousands of auditions, and I really do just enjoy buckling down and perfecting my scene work. There is something pure and moving about a scene between two people - it was, after all, the only form of theatre that existed for a very long time, and I truly believe that you need to learn to listen to one other person onstage before you can act well in a larger group. Even monologues, which are so often required for classes, auditions, speech competitions, and the like, are small scenes in which one of the participants happens to be visible only to the actor. Duet scenes and monologues are the bread and butter of an actor's repertoire and are essential exercises for every actor, no matter what their level of experience may be.

Despite their importance, good duet scenes and monologues can be difficult to find. Oh, sure, you could fill a library (or at least a large book shelf) with the books compiling scenes and monologues for various groups of people - men, women, young people, college students, volunteer zookeepers, etc. etc. etc, but what amazes me is how much of the content in these books is misleading or just not useful to acting students. As I've said, a good monologue should be a conversation between two people, just that one of them should be invisible. While this doesn't always apply (I'm told that speech and debate operates a little differently), I prefer to use monologues that come from real plays and are intended to be conversations between real characters living in that story.

Finding these monologues is often more difficult than just picking up a random book though. There is a lot of good information out there, in books and online, and this blog is only adding to that massive amount of available data, but my main goal in this is to make the scenes that I have picked out and typed up available to you, dear actor. I try to keep and collect good scenes and things like that, and I don't see why they shouldn't be shared with the world, so I hope you enjoy these scenes and monologues. Feel free to share any insights you have about the scenes - your own stories or experiences with the pieces, and, most importantly, keep creating!