DUKE FREDERICK AUDITION PIECE

Enter DUKE FREDERICK, with Lords

DUKE FREDERICK

Mistress, dispatch you with your safest haste  And get you from our court.

ROSALIND

Me, uncle?

DUKE FREDERICK

You, cousin , within these ten days if that thou be'st found  so near our public court as twenty miles,  Thou diest for it.

ROSALIND

I do beseech your grace,  Let me the knowledge of my fault bear with me:
If with myself I hold intelligence or have acquaintance with mine own desires,
If that I do not dream or be not frantic,-- As I do trust I am not--then, dear uncle,
Never so much as in a thought unborn Did I offend your highness.

DUKE FREDERICK

Thus do all traitors:  If their purgation did consist in words,  they are as innocent as grace itself:  Let it suffice thee that I trust thee not.

ROSALIND

Yet your mistrust cannot make me a traitor:  Tell me whereon the likelihood depends.

DUKE FREDERICK

Thou art thy father's daughter; there's enough.

ROSALIND

So was I when your highness took his dukedom;  So was I when your highness banish'd him:
Treason is not inherited, my lord; Or, if we did derive it from our friends,
What's that to me? My father was no traitor: Then, good my liege, mistake me not so much
to think my poverty is treacherous.

CELIA

Dear sovereign, hear me speak.

DUKE FREDERICK

Ay, Celia; we stay'd her for your sake,  Else had she with her father ranged along.

CELIA

I did not then entreat to have her stay;  It was your pleasure and your own remorse:
I was too young that time to value her; But now I know her: if she be a traitor,
Why so am I; we still have slept together, Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together,
And wheresoever we went, like Juno's swans, Still we went coupled and inseparable.

DUKE FREDERICK

She is too subtle for thee; and her smoothness,  her very silence and her patience
speak to the people, and they pity her. Thou art a fool: she robs thee of thy name;
And thou wilt show more bright and seem more virtuous when she is gone. Then open not thy lips: Firm and irrevocable is my doom which I have pass'd upon her; she is banish'd.