As You Like It: Act 3, Scene 4 Summary & Analysis

Rosalind confides to Celia that she feels like weeping. She is upset that Orlando did not come to meet with Ganymede (i.e. Rosalind in disguise) that morning as he had promised to. She alternates between speaking adoringly of Orlando, and expressing how devastated she is by his absence. Celia plays along, both supplementing Rosalind’s adulations and nursing her sense of injury.

Rosalind then tells Celia of having met with Duke Senior the day before and of him laughing at her claim that she was of a parentage as good as his own. But immediately after, Rosalind suggests that they need not talk about fathers when they can talk instead about Orlando. At Rosalind’s provocation, Celia concedes that Rosalind’s lover is brave but reasons that “all’s brave that youth mounts and folly guides.”

Corin then enters and invites Celia and Rosalind to come witness the "pageant" of Silvius, whose helpless love Rosalind had been so touched by earlier, try to win over his beloved, the scornful shepherdess Phebe. Rosalind agrees to come and watch, and vows not just to watch, but in fact to intervene.