What happens
Touchstone and Audrey celebrate their wedding day tomorrow. Two pages arrive and the group shares a song about lovers in springtime—'It was a lover and his lass.' Touchstone criticizes the pages' singing as off-key, and they defend their performance. The scene ends with Touchstone and Audrey heading off together, ready for their marriage.
Why it matters
This scene serves as a comic interlude that lightens the tone before the final marriages. Touchstone, who has spent the play mocking love and courtship while simultaneously pursuing Audrey, now looks forward to their wedding with simple anticipation. The scene's brevity and lightness contrast sharply with the weightier emotional negotiations happening elsewhere in the forest. The famous song 'It was a lover and his lass' captures the play's central theme: love exists outside time and reason, in the natural world of spring and youth. Touchstone's petty complaint about the pages' singing—his only real contribution—shows him as a man of small concerns, content with his rustic life and his 'poor' Audrey.
The song itself offers the play's most distilled statement about love and time. It speaks of how 'a life was but a flower' and urges lovers to 'take the present time' because 'love is crowned with the prime / In spring time.' This echoes and resolves the earlier meditation on time's passage, suggesting that love and marriage are not escapes from time but fulfillments of it. By placing this song in the mouths of court pages and having Touchstone—the licensed fool—respond with comic literalism about pitch and tuning, Shakespeare suggests that love's beauty exists independent of who sings it or how well. The scene is brief but densely thematic, preparing the audience for the multiple weddings that follow while maintaining the play's tone of gentle comedy and acceptance of love's inevitable, natural triumph.
