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.
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.
I've had this monologue in my pocket since high school, and it's still my go-to when I need something fast. I like Rosalind because she's openly feisty and clever, unlike many of Shakespeare's women, and she is vastly under-rated. This isn't the most emotional or earth-shaking monologue, but it is a sweet one.
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