Audition Info!!!

Please prepare one of the following monologues for your audition. All the selections are from As You Like It. The act and scene the monologue can be found in is listed at the end of the monologue so you can understand the context.

Guys

Orlando: Hang there my verse, in witness of my love.
And thou, thrice-crowned queen of night, survey
With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,
Thy huntress' name that my full life doth sway
O Rosalind, these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I character,
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue everywhere.
Run, run, Orlando, carve on every tree
The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she. (act 3, scene 2)

Silvius: Sweet Pheobe, do not scorn me. Do not, Phoebe.
Say that you love me not, but say not so in bitterness.
The common executioner,
Whose heart th' accustomed sight of death make hard,
Falls not the axe upon the humbled neck
But first begs pardon. Will you sterner be
Than he that dies and lives by bloody drops? (act 3, scene 5)

Adam: O unhappy youth,
Come not within these doors. Within this roof
The enemy of all your grace lives.
Your brother - no, no brother - yet the son -
Yet not the son, I will not call him son -
Of him I was about to call his father,
Hath heard your praises, and this night he means
To burn the lodging where you use to lie,
And you within it. If he fail of that,
He will have other means to cut you off.
I overheard him and his practices.
This is no place, this house is but a butchery.
Abhor it, fear it, do not enter it. (act 2, scene 3)

Guys or Girls

Touchstone: He, sir, that must marry this woman.
Therefore you clown, abandon - which is in the
Vulgar "leave" - the society - which in boorish
is "company" - of this female - which in the common is "woman";
which together is, abandon the society of this female, or, clown,
thou perishest; or to thy better understanding, diest; or to wit, I kill thee,
Make thee away, translate thy life into death,
thy liberty into bondage. I will deal in poison with thee,
or in bastinado, or in steel. I will bandy with thee in faction.
I will o'errun thee with policy.
I will kill thee in a hundred and fifty ways.
Therefore tremble and depart (act 5, scene 1)

Girls

Celia: Rosalind lacks then the love
Which teacheth thee that thou and I are one.
Shall we be sundered? Shall we part, sweet girl?
No, let my father seek another heir.
Therefore devise with me how we may fly,
Wither to go, and what to bear with us,
And do not seek to take your charge upon you,
To bear your griefs yourself and leave me out.
For, by this heaven, now at our sorrows pale,
Say what thou canst, I'll go along with thee. (act 1, scene 3)

Phoebe: I would not be thy executioner.
I fly thee, for I would not injure thee.
Thou tell'st me there is murder in mine eye.
'Tis pretty, sure, and very probably
That eyes, that are the frail'st and softest things,
Who shut their coward gates on atomies,
Should be called tyrants, butchers, murderers.
Now I do frown on thee with all my heart,
And if mine eyes can wound, now let them kill thee.
Now counterfeit to swoon, why, now fall down;
Or if thou can'st not, O, for shame, for shame,
Lie not to say mine eyes are murderers. (act 3, scene 5)

Rosalind (as Ganymede): You foolish shepherd, wherefore do you follow her,
Like foggy south puffing with wind and rain?
You are a thousand times a properer man than she a woman.
'Tis such fools as you that makes the world full of ill-favored children.
'Tis not her glass, but you that flatters her,
And out of you she sees herself more proper
Than any of her lineaments can show her. -
But, mistress, know yourself. Down on your knees
And thank heaven, fasting, for a good man's love,
For I must tell you friendly in your ear,
Sell when you can; you are not for all markets. (act 3, scene 5)