I'm amazed they could find anybody to do that job. In Edwardian times it was scull or starve. Nowadays, it's scull or live with your mum and eat takeout Indian.

Not difficult, that.

You'll see soon enough why the scullery maid who stays does so. Hint: it isn't the working conditions.

How much did they know before they showed up? Was that girl really extraordinarily stupid? The first one, I mean ... did one of the footmen have anything to do with the second one?

In my opinion, R&J is more about "Look what a pair of nitwits they are!" (a la Anthony and Cleopatra) than about Twoooo Wuuuuuv. Painfully young (even by Elizabethan terms) idiots are carried away by forces they ought to resist.

Crazy nitwits Betsy. I think theme of madness iin R&J is essential. I suspect that to Shakespeare who as a man of his times must have seen passion as an almost physical force, the mad passion of Romeo and Juliet for one another was not a contrast to, but an expression of the mad passionate hatred of the two houses for one another. The philosophy and science of the day was all about balance of humors. I suspect that in Elisabethean times it would seem the most natural thing in the world for an unbalanced, unrestrained hatred between families to express itself in an equally unbalanced unrestrained loved between two dimwitted members of those same families.

ita, supposedly everybody was told, but I think the reality hit everybody pretty hard. Look at how freaked out the second footman was by carrying a chamberpot, even though he'd been warned.

You'll see -- the third scullery maid will be dragged into the kitchen and shown what's up before they let her sign on.

I think Macbeth is less about an antihero and more about the best example of passive-aggresive marital nonsense ever written.

Relieved deb wasn't spying on dh & me, yesterday

We just finished watching the fourth chapter (with two still to go) of Manor House and it's no surprise that the staff is singing Socialist anthems with no little vigor by this point.

We just love the chef, too. Not all that much has changed in cheffing since Edwardian days, methinks.

I read an account from Kenny and/or watched on e of the little diaries on-line about the chef getting rip-roaring drunk, getting locked out of the house, and trying to sleep on the bags of coal.

The lady I work with who is excessively anti-fat keeps going on and on about how fat the kitchen maid is and how could she pooibly do all that work and go up andf down the stairs. It is driving me crazy. The kitchen maid looks like a hefty strong sort of girl-- just the person to do that work.

I so agree. Depending on metabolism, you can carry a lot of weight but also be in really superior physical condition. I had an aerobics instructor who was leading four or five classes a day, so you know she had to be in incredible shape, and another friend of mine was doing upper level dressage plus doing all the care for several horses which included hefting 50 lb bags of feed around. They were both beyond the point where you would call them 'hefty'... but you know, they both looked healthy for all that.

The kitchen maid looks like a hefty strong sort of girl-- just the person to do that work.

Hmph. I'm a stocky sort of person myself, but when I take my (much, much younger) students out hiking I inevitably kick their asses. Why? Because they're mostly slim little people with no muscle tone who haven't eaten protein for a week or two. Slim doesn't mean fit. It doesn't even give you immunity from heart disease.

What I mean by saying that R&J isn't just a heterosexual love story is that to the audience of the time, the question of whether they should disobey their families would have been a real question, not just the fly in the ointment that we tend to see it as nowadays. (The source text in fact comes down on the side of family and tradition.) So it's not a "timeless love story" at all, it's a story about the struggle between a feudal discourse of marriage as a property relation and an emerging modern discourse of marriage based on love and companionship--with the two opposing sides magically synthesised in the end by the reconciliation between the two families.

Oh, and I stand by my statement that sex historically was considered something Person A did to Person B. That doesn't mean that Person B didn't enjoy it or desire it or have any control over it--it's possible after all to enjoy something being done to you. What it means is that up until relatively recently in Western culture, sexual acts, gay and straight, have been divided quite strictly into "active" and "passive" roles. But what I'm referring to is the way sex was talked about and thought about--there's all kinds of room for variation in practice. (Also, obviously there's enormous variation across periods and cultures so I'm only talking in the very crudest historical terms about dominant cultural norms in the West.)