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.)

Cos, y'know

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.

Which doesn't seem to contradict my point that it is about love as madness - defying the families in the context of the time is madness. It is not totally madness only because the feud is also madness.

Thanks for the example, Angus!

In neither case, incidentally, would this behaviour preclude the participants also having sex with women.

Because there wasn't a social drive towards monogamy? Or because sex with a man wasn't 'real' sex? Or was there some sort of balance, where marriage as an institution encouraged monogamy but the 'patronage' system allowed this specific kind of sex not to break the marriage vows?

(I may be wrong, here, but I was under the impression that the Greeks (in their status as founders of the modern world and inventers of all that is right and proper) were as keen on marriage as the next country. They must have had it as an institution, at least.

I've read one story which played Frodo/Sam as eros rather than agape and managed it beautifully, and I do see it can be done. What I don't buy is the idea that Sam's love is founded on the wish to get into Frodo's pants.

If I understand you correctly, I have to agree. Extending "I want to make Mr. Frodo happy" to include "Mr. Frodo wants a blow job-- here goes" is one thing; changing the basis from "I want to make Mr. Frodo happy" to "I want to fuck Mr. Frodo through one of these nice soft elven mattresses" is another.

Definitely? Because my understanding is that Tudor ladies had pretty lively sex lives - Kathryn Howard, afiak, had a good number of liaisons prior to marrying Henry VIII (including noisy sex with one of the servants, iirc - possibly a music teacher, I forget) and it's not that much later than Chaucer was writing about the Wife of Bath and the Miller's tale and so forth.

That's a good point, Fay. It had sort of occured to me, but I couldn't think of the relevent examples.

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.

That would make sense to me: if you approach it from that angle, "from forth the fatal loins of these two foes/ A pair of starcrossed lovers take their lives" actually looks logical.

(I love this thread.)

Pederasty was (and this is incredibly complicated) part of the interzone between childhood and adulthood - you're no longer a kid, and you have all these dangerous but valuable urges, so you get a mentor to help you reach a plateau of adulthood. He also gets, as a sort of fringe benefit, to bugger you senseless. It's the derivation of the fag/fagmaster relatioship in English public shools.