Note to As You Like It, 3.2.111-112: "He that sweetest rose will find / Must find love's prick and Rosalind"


Return
to
As You Like It,
Act 3, Scene 2, lines 111-112.
He that sweetest rose will find / Must find love's prick and Rosalind: —Touchstone is having a lot of fun playing with words and ideas. 1) Shakespeare probably thought that the root meaning of the name "Rosalind" was "sweet rose." 2) A rose, in its beauty, symbolizes the pleasures of love, and a rose, with its thorns (which prick the lover and make him bleed), symbolize the pains of love. 3) And then there's the obvious sexual innuendo of "prick."