On the importance of getting back to tradition...

You know, the modern fashion of having women act the women's roles in Shakespeare means that some of the humour in these plays is lost.

Take As You Like It. The big joke of the play is that Rosalind is a woman pretending to be a man. The play is chock full of double entendres, and in-jokes that the audience gets while the characters are clueless.

But if you remember that Rosalind is being played as by a boy -- since women weren't allowed onstage in England until 44 years after Shakespeare's death -- then you realize the double-entendres are actually triple-entendres, and the whole thing is a lot funnier.

To top it all off, Rosalind takes the name Ganymede. Ganymede, ferzeussakes!

For those of you who don't know, Ganymede was the beautiful teenage Phrygian boy that the Greek god Zeus fell in love with, and kidnapped to to his penthouse apartment atop Mount Olympus.

(Mythology does not record the outcome of the story, but I strongly suspect that he was reduced to a Phrygian-boy-sized bloodstain by dinnertime, as Zeus's violently jealous wife Hera did not like to have rivals.)

In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a ganymede was yet another word for "passive homosexual" -- intriguingly, the English Renaissance had a lot of words for that -- so Rosalind's nom-de-drag may as well be "What-a-fabulous-window-treatment."

I also hope I live long enough to see a major-motion-picture production of Romeo and Juliet where Juliet is played by a man, the way Shakespeare intended.

(no subject)

Okay, so I've been tagged for a meme, and I'm bad about answering these things, so I'll do it right away.

List 6 random things about yourself then tag 6 people to do the same in their journal. No tag backs.

1. rougemacabre's predicament reminded me how when I was a very small child, the family got severely food-poisoned by a fast-food joint called Mr. Mike's. From that time on, whenever we went camping, my sister and I would burn all the paper plates and called the decaying black mass of charcoal "dinner at Mr. Mike's."
   
   
2. I wrote my first novel when I was 5 -- it had 12 pages, and was in the fantasy genre. I didn't seriously try to write another one until after age 25.
   
   
3. I arrived in Montreal on Christmas Day, 1995, without an apartment lined up, without knowing anyone here, without even a place to stay -- just money for two months rent/bills/groceries. I apartment-hunted and found one sublet in my range, but someone else wanted it, too. I think I got it because I correctly identified the flag of Trinidad on the wall of the guy I was subletting from.
   
   
4. I read Middle English fluently and like the sound much better than modern English.
   
   
5. I have an interest in astrology and can even cast a chart, though I rarely talk about this except with close friends because it tends to make me a magnet for the kind of people who live in a van and believe they were Egyptian aliens in a past life.
   
   
6. I've kept every (paper) letter ever sent to me, and every journal I've ever written. I'm keeping a great many emails, too, that will probably never leave my inbox.