depiction of the unrequited lover is not always true.
Rosalind continues to doubt the sincerity of Orlando’s love, but Orlando persists that he loves so greatly that neither “rhyme nor reason can express how much” (358). Orlando’s rhymes or poetry do not truly reveal the extent of his love. And, of course, his love is not reasonable. Shakespeare once again sets up the conflict between Reason and Emotion. Whenever a person experiences a truly powerful emotion – and love is one of the most powerful – that person becomes unreasonable or irrational. That person becomes mad.
Rosalind then immediately defines love in the context of this conflict:
Love is merely a madness, and I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do. (359-60)
During the Renaissance no one understood madness or insanity, and many superstitious people believed that devils or evil spirits possessed the bodies of mad people. Thus, unfortunately, they thought the cure for their insanity was to place them in dark rooms and whip them in order to drive away these evil spirits. Shakespeare did not share this common superstitious belief of his countrymen. He knew that all people are subject to fits of madness upon occasion. However, as Rosalind relates, the person who acts madly out of love is not regarded as mad by the general public because most of them share this same madness.