TOUCHSTONE
No, by mine honour, but I
was bid to come for you.
ROSALIND
Where learned you that
oath, fool?
TOUCHSTONE
Of a certain knight that swore by his
honour they
were good pancakes and swore by his honour the
mustard
was naught: now I'll stand to it, the
pancakes were naught and the mustard was
good, and
yet was not the knight
forsworn.
This is actually an
amusing and instructive excerpt that is, in fact, explained a few lines further in the
scene. Touchstone has entered the scene where Rosalind and Celia are engaged in a battle
of wits over Nature's role as opposed to Fortunes role in
life:
CELIA
No? when Nature hath made a fair
creature, may she
not by Fortune fall into the fire? Though
Nature
hath given us wit to flout at Fortune, hath not
Fortune sent
in this fool to cut off the
argument?
Though changing the
subject, Touchstone continues the mental gymnastics--exercise in wit--and talks about
the oath he uses wherewith he swears "by mine honor ...": "No, by mine honour, but I was
bid to come for you." He explains that if a person swears by something a person does not
possess, then the oath sworn is not valid. As an example, he asks Celia and Rosalind to
swear by their beards. Since they have no beards, and thus cannot truthfully swear
anything by their beards, the oaths are both (1) no good and (2) not false
oaths.
Touchstones explains further by saying (in prose, by the way,
not poetry): "but if you swear by that that is not, you are not forsworn:". "Forsworn"
means to go back (renounce) an oath or to swear falsely (commit perjury) or to deny an
oath. What he means is that if you swear by what you don't have, then you cannot
possibly swear falsely--you can swear by trickery, guile and deceit, but not falsely:
you cannot be forsworn.
Now, back to the excerpt. Touchstone is
telling about the incident during which he learned the oath, "by mine honor." He tells
of a knight who swore "by his honor" about the tastiness of pancakes and mustard.
Touchstone, it turns out, had a different opinion of the pancakes and mustard so was
accusing the knight of deception--however--he excuses the knight of the accusation by
saying, in a paraphrase, "Well, he swore by his honor and he apparently has no honor, so
I must forgive him for falsifying his oath because his oath was no good anyway--he has
no honor by which to swear."
As an aside, you can see how
Shakespeare's use of rhetorical word schemes allows him to say the same thing I just
said so much more brilliantly and succinctly than I have done in my
paraphrase.
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