ROSALIND and CELIA AUDITION PIECE

SCENE II. Lawn before the Duke's palace.

Enter CELIA and ROSALIND

CELIA

I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry.

ROSALIND

Dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am mistress of;  and would you yet I were merrier? Unless you could  teach me to forget a banished father, you must not  learn me how to remember any extraordinary pleasure.

CELIA

Herein I see thou lovest me not with the full weight  that I love thee. If my uncle, thy banished father,  had banished thy uncle, the duke my father, so thou  hadst been still with me, I could have taught my  love to take thy father for mine: so wouldst thou,  if the truth of thy love to me were so righteously  tempered as mine is to thee.

ROSALIND

Well, I will forget the condition of my estate, to  rejoice in yours.

CELIA

You know my father hath no child but I, nor none is  like to have: and, truly, when he dies, thou shalt  be his heir, for what he hath taken away from thy  father perforce, I will render thee again in  affection; by mine honour, I will; and when I break  that oath, let me turn monster: therefore, my  sweet Rose, my dear Rose, be merry.

ROSALIND

From henceforth I will, coz, and devise sports. Let  me see; what think you of falling in love?

CELIA

Marry, I prithee, do, to make sport withal: but  love no man in good earnest; nor no further in sport  neither than with safety of a pure blush thou mayst  in honour come off again.

ROSALIND

What shall be our sport, then?

CELIA

Let us sit and mock the good housewife Fortune from  her wheel, that her gifts may henceforth be bestowed equally.

ROSALIND

I would we could do so, for her benefits are  mightily misplaced, and the bountiful blind woman  doth most mistake in her gifts to women.

CELIA

'Tis true; for those that she makes fair she scarce  makes honest, and those that she makes honest she  makes very ill-favouredly.

ROSALIND

Nay, now thou goest from Fortune's office to  Nature's: Fortune reigns in gifts of the world,
not in the lineaments of Nature.

Enter TOUCHSTONE