This brief interlude functions as a pastoral pause between the plotting of Act V's earlier scenes and the grand comic resolution to come. Its placement is deliberate: Shakespeare uses the scene to suspend dramatic time, allowing the audience to breathe within the festive atmosphere of impending multiple marriages. The pages' song, with its insistent refrain and celebration of carpe diem, reinforces the play's overarching argument that love and joy belong to the present moment — "take the present time" — and that nature's cycles (spring, flowering, harvest) mirror the rhythms of human desire.Touchstone's response to the song is characteristically double-edged. His complaint that "the note was very untuneable" is immediately countered by the First Page's sharp rejoinder: "we kept time, we lost not our time." This exchange pivots on the pun on 'time' — musical time versus lived time — and Touchstone's final retort, that he "count it but time lost," extends the wordplay while revealing his habitual deflation of sentiment. The fool who is about to marry for love (however cynically conceived) dismisses a love song: the irony is pointed and self-aware.The pages themselves are minor but symbolically significant figures. As representatives of the banished Duke's court transplanted into...
Act V, Scene 3
Scene Summary
On the eve of his wedding to Audrey, Touchstone encounters two of the banished Duke's pages in the forest. At Touchstone's invitation, the pages perform a song celebrating lovers in springtime, dispensing with any apologetic preamble and launching directly into their performance.
After the song concludes, Touchstone dismisses it as both lyrically trivial and musically out of tune. The pages defend themselves, insisting they kept perfect time. Touchstone retorts that the time spent listening was itself wasted, bids them farewell with a sardonic blessing on their voices, and departs with Audrey.
"To-morrow is the joyful day, Audrey; to-morrow will we be married." — Touchstone (5.3)
"I hope it is no dishonest desire to desire to be a woman of the world." — Audrey (5.3)
"Shall we clap into't roundly, without hawking or spitting or saying we are hoarse, which are the only prologues to a bad voice?" — First Page (5.3)
"How that a life was but a flower" — First Page and Second Page (5.3)
"And therefore take the present time, / With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino; / For love is crowned with the prime" — First Page and Second Page (5.3)
"You are deceived, sir: we kept time, we lost not our time." — First Page (5.3)
"By my troth, yes; I count it but time lost to hear such a foolish song." — Touchstone (5.3)
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