365 Days of Shakespeare.

As You Like It.

I had forgotten how much I love this play. Every line is pure joy.

Here are my favourites from today. They are all short and pithy and entirely delightful to my eyes:

O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful

wonderful! and yet again wonderful, and after that,

out of all hooping!

I found him under a tree, like a dropped acorn.

I am he that is so love-shaked: I pray you tell me

your remedy.

Then there is this little exchange, which must be I think, where the expression ‘rhyme nor reason’ comes from:

ROSALIND

But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak?

ORLANDO

Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much.

I just looked up rhyme nor reason and in fact it was first used by John Russell in The Boke of Nurture in 1490. So Shakespeare gleefully pinched it and made it his own.

And then, to finish, there is an excellent goat joke. I’m not certain that there are many writers who manage to get goats and Ovid and the Goths into one sentence so effortlessly. I watch, as always, in awe and wonder:

I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most

capricious poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths.