today's poem

[angevin2]

Is not about dildos like I suggested in the comments to my last post it might be, since the ones that spring to mind are Nashe's Choice of Valentines, which is very long (the poem, not the...oh, all right, the poem AND the dildo), and Rochester's "Monsieur Dildo," and I just don't like Rochester very much, because I am profoundly uncool. I suppose

Comments

[ladyshrew]

Heh heh. Melikes.

"Her force is such against her foes
That whom she meets she overthrows."

WIN.

[tree_and_leaf]

I read a MIddle High German treatise like that once. It was a lot longer, though (and aimed at preachers, in order to help pep up their sermons. I'm not convinced it would work).

[angevin2]

what is controversial about Middleton's take on chess pieces?

He used them to represent living royalty -- the play is a satirical take on Anglo-Spanish relations in the early seventeenth century, particularly as regards the future Charles I's attempts to marry the Infanta (which led him, accompanied by the duke of Buckingham, to make a surprise visit to Madrid in 1623). The whole thing got him in a great deal of trouble; everyone involved got fined and the play was shut down, though Middleton escaped further punishment on the grounds that the Master of Revels had licensed the play.

(It also involves castration, porn, buttsex, bed tricks, slutty nuns, and the ghost of Ignatius of Loyola being eeeeeeevil, on which grounds I am surprised nobody in my department has suggested it for a readthrough.)

;)

[kerrypolka]

Wow, I never realized how much chess was like the Henry VIs! *ducks*

[speak_me_fair]

This is one of those incredibly useful poems where 'if looking for a backup quote'...

'The Nature Of The Chess Men' has got to be my ideal section for drawing parallels.

And also, oddly similar to a lot of Kipling. Hmmmm.....