If
I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you
as had beards that pleased me,
complexions
that liked me, and breaths that I defied not:
Rosiland
As You Like It Epilogue Line
18
Okay, I took stock today. There are epilogues in six of the
thirty-seven plays in my compilation. Three are in histories and three are in
comedies. You’d think he might have thrown one or two in the tragedies where we
really could have used and epilogue to tell us what went wrong.
This is also the only epilogue to be spoken by a female
character. Though to be fair, in King Henry The Eighth the speaker of the
epilogue is not named, so I guess that could be a woman as well. The other four
epilogues are given by a dancer, a chorus, a king, and Prospero. So that’s a
pretty wide range of characters.
So I think a lot of this epilogue, like the part that is
today’s Totally Random lines, is pretty meaningless, and the meaning that does
come out on the whole is simply that she hopes you liked the play. That's it. And if
you read the epilogue of The Tempest, that one spoken by Prospero, you’ll find
that its meaning is the same; he hopes you liked the play. So I suppose that
means I should go read the other four epilogues and see if they all say the
same thing. Tell you what, you go read them and let me know.
This is my illustrator (on the left) and his father-in-law. Question: Do you think the beard pleased his father-in-law?
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