Peer Reviewed
- Edition: As You Like It
Galathea (Modern)
- Introduction
- Texts of this edition
- Contextual materials
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Fair nymph, are you strayed from your company by chance, or love you to wander solitarily on purpose?
Fair boy, or god, or whatever you be, I would you knew these 86woods are to me so well known that I cannot stray though I would, and my mind 87so free that to be melancholy I have no cause. There is none of Diana's train that 88any can train, either out of their way or out of their wits.
What is that Diana, a goddess? What her nymphs, virgins? What her pastimes, hunting?
A goddess? Who knows it not? Virgins? Who thinks it not? Hunting? Who loves it not?
I pray thee, sweet wench, amongst all your sweet troop is there not one that followeth the sweetest thing, sweet love?
Love, good sir? What mean you by it? Or what do you call it?
A heat full of coldness, a sweet full of bitterness, a pain full 94of pleasantness, which maketh thoughts have eyes and hearts ears, bred by desire, nursed by delight, weaned 95by jealousy, killed by dissembling, buried by ingratitude; and this is love. Fair lady, will you any?
If it be nothing else, it is but a foolish thing.
Try, and you shall find it a pretty thing.
I have neither will nor leisure, but I will follow Diana in the 99chase, whose virgins are all chaste, delighting in the bow that wounds the swift hart in the 100forest, not fearing the bow that strikes the soft heart in the chamber. This difference is between 101my mistress Diana and your mother (as I guess) Venus: that all her nymphs are amiable and 102wise in their kind, the other amorous and too kind for their sex. And so farewell, little god.
Exit.
Diana, and thou, and all thine, shall know that Cupid is a great 104god. I will practice awhile in these woods, and play such pranks with these nymphs that, while 105they aim to hit others with their arrows, they shall be wounded themselves with their own eyes.
Exit.