alphabet meme: Apricots - Flapjacks
I am talkative enough that I am going to break this up into pieces. Because I know you care enough about what I think to draw it out. ;)
Apricots: writerwench wanted to know about why the Duchess of Malfi was jonesing for them while pregnant (if you have not read the play, smarmy man-about-court Bosola tries to prove that she is sekritly knocked up by giving her apricots). Apparently this was a stereotypical pregnancy craving in the early modern period? At least this is what my note-checking and googling turns up. It is also entirely possible, nay, likely (pace a professor I studied with) that there is some punnery going on. As longtime readers of this journal (as well as dirty-minded early modernists) will know, the early modern name for this fruit is apricock, which is basically a Portuguese loan-word, according to the glosses in the Arden Richard II (which also features notable if anachronistic apricocks. Young dangling apricocks, in fact, and the scene goes downhill from there). So the scene Bosola sets up is one that re-enacts the process of the Duchess' pregnancy: her eager consumption of apricocks leads to her "swelling," and then it's during that scene that her contractions arrive and she rushes offstage to give birth. NB that "cock" as a term for "penis" was available as early as the fourteenth century, so I am not just talking out my hat here.
Badger Ben: is actually Ben Jonson (a long story; you should ask Moi if you want to know). According to John Dryden, he was the Pirate King: "He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them: there is scarce a poet or historian among the Roman authors of those times whom he has not translated in Sejanus and Catiline. But he had done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him." He was also the subject of my MA thesis, which was about Volpone and antitheatricality. I like him a lot because he is a cantankerous old bastard and a Malum Matrem-FaciorTM, and his sense of cantankerous bastardity comes through in his works, and I have a weakness for writers with forceful personalities like that (see also: Milton). I also have a weakness for writers who have a deeply ambivalent relationship to their own craft, as Jonson did with the theater; he is constantly slagging it off in both his dramatic and nondramatic works, and yet he is also interested enough in the power of the theater to spend a considerable amount of time trying to reform it (mostly by way of telling audiences that they will like what he tells them to like). Also, he has the same birthday as me (June 11), and I have a nasty burn scar on my thumb just like he did, except mine was an accident. (He got his after being branded for killing a fellow actor in a duel; he managed to avoid the gallows by demonstrating his literacy, because you could do that back then. It was a holdover from the days in which most literate people were clergy.)
Coney-catching is one of those things I will have to explain for the non-early-modernists out there: it's basically Elizabethan slang for a con game. It's significant because it was a popular text for socially-concerned pamphlet writers like Robert "Shake-scene" Greene and Thomas Dekker, who use the framework of exposing confidence practices to get at various social problems. Which is always interesting: I am very fond of Elizabethan social criticism, and especially of the sort that turns it back on TPTB. I call it the Pirate King model (not Ben Jonson this time). I am afraid I don't have a lot to say about coney-catching, though, because it's not a topic I've worked much with, though I am certainly familiar with Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl, which is part of the same sort of cultural conversation. Moll Frith, the eponymous Roaring Girl, is familiar with the underworld and serves as a guide to it for the bland well-to-do citizen heroes, and is kind of what we might call a liminal figure. And that's cool because you rarely see women as liminal figures in early modern drama.
Doctorate: hodsthorn wanted to know why I decided to pursue one and how I came to pick my field. Well, I knew pretty early on that English lit was my thing: by the time I was in tenth grade I figured out that that was what I was really into, thanks to having been immensely impressed by Chaucer in my high school Brit lit survey (at my high school, English 9 was contemporary American lit and English 10 was a Brit lit survey) -- I couldn't wait to get back to class and learn more about it. I mean, I always loved reading, but that was the first thing that made me really excited about studying literature. And I think doing a PhD felt like a natural career choice; I never really struggled much with that because the only thing I loved a comparable amount was theater and I don't think I was/am good enough at acting to pursue it seriously. I thought about journalism but didn't enjoy it enough, and so I decided that clearly academia was it for me, because I loved analyzing texts and I loved explaining them to other people, and I wanted to do that on a level more in-depth than the sort of thing you do in high school. There wasn't really anything else I could see myself doing. It all sounds really facile laid out like that and if I wrote it in an application essay I'd get rejected right away, but I don't have major regrets about my career choice. It really is a vocation of sorts (heh, I am not sure you would know that to read my lj given how much I complain and procrastinate).
Edward IV: was the Jack Harkness of the fifteenth century. I have taken more of an interest in him than I previously had thanks to lareinenoire, who argues that he is often given insufficient credit by historians and novelists other than Sharon Kay Penman (whom I dislike, but that's all right). Also, depictions of him in the Elizabethan period are consistently hilarious although they are exactly the kind of thing lareinenoire is talking about. Thomas More totally hints that he was having it off with Lord Hastings; I approve. Logically this means Edward/Jane Shore/Hastings is an OT3. Also, Thomas Heywood's play about him (which is pretty much actually about Jane) totally ships Edward/Jane/Elizabeth. Also good. He is one of the few English kings to be in a Child ballad, along with Richard I, John, Edward I, Edward III, Henry V, and Richard III. Oh, and Henries VII (in the same ballad as Richard III) and VIII. And Edward VI. And Elizabeth. And James I although most of the ballads that involve him and have to do with real events are about things that happened before he was king of England, but I think he still counts. Okay, so there were a lot of kings in the Child ballads. Anyway, Edward IV. I am using my icon of him for this post.
Flapjacks: "Opinions, mention of them in Pericles, baking tips: all welcome!" says stagbeetle. I do not think there are any mentions of them in Pericles (though there is a reference to trifles: not that kind of trifles, but so what?). Although The Shoemaker's Holiday includes many references, since the end of the play happens at Shrovetide, and pancakes were and are traditional eating for Shrovetide: the idea was originally to get rid of your milk and eggs before Lent, since in the old days Catholics basically went vegan at Lent (except for fish). As the Orthodox still do, I believe? Or at least I had an Orthodox classmate in junior high who did. At any rate (not being Orthodox) I am glad this is no longer practiced. I am extremely fond of the humble pancake in all its forms, but I have never been able to get them to come out right; they always come out all flat and chewy when I make them. So I haven't got any really good advice. I do, however, despite being about as goyische as a person can probably be, make really good potato latkes. Which do not count as "flapjacks," I don't think, but they are in the same basic family. I work well with potatoes, I guess.
ETA that apparently flapjacks are something totally different in England. I did not know that until just now.
Apricots: writerwench wanted to know about why the Duchess of Malfi was jonesing for them while pregnant (if you have not read the play, smarmy man-about-court Bosola tries to prove that she is sekritly knocked up by giving her apricots). Apparently this was a stereotypical pregnancy craving in the early modern period? At least this is what my note-checking and googling turns up. It is also entirely possible, nay, likely (pace a professor I studied with) that there is some punnery going on. As longtime readers of this journal (as well as dirty-minded early modernists) will know, the early modern name for this fruit is apricock, which is basically a Portuguese loan-word, according to the glosses in the Arden Richard II (which also features notable if anachronistic apricocks. Young dangling apricocks, in fact, and the scene goes downhill from there). So the scene Bosola sets up is one that re-enacts the process of the Duchess' pregnancy: her eager consumption of apricocks leads to her "swelling," and then it's during that scene that her contractions arrive and she rushes offstage to give birth. NB that "cock" as a term for "penis" was available as early as the fourteenth century, so I am not just talking out my hat here.
Badger Ben: is actually Ben Jonson (a long story; you should ask Moi if you want to know). According to John Dryden, he was the Pirate King: "He was deeply conversant in the ancients, both Greek and Latin, and he borrowed boldly from them: there is scarce a poet or historian among the Roman authors of those times whom he has not translated in Sejanus and Catiline. But he had done his robberies so openly, that one may see he fears not to be taxed by any law. He invades authors like a monarch; and what would be theft in other poets, is only victory in him." He was also the subject of my MA thesis, which was about Volpone and antitheatricality. I like him a lot because he is a cantankerous old bastard and a Malum Matrem-FaciorTM, and his sense of cantankerous bastardity comes through in his works, and I have a weakness for writers with forceful personalities like that (see also: Milton). I also have a weakness for writers who have a deeply ambivalent relationship to their own craft, as Jonson did with the theater; he is constantly slagging it off in both his dramatic and nondramatic works, and yet he is also interested enough in the power of the theater to spend a considerable amount of time trying to reform it (mostly by way of telling audiences that they will like what he tells them to like). Also, he has the same birthday as me (June 11), and I have a nasty burn scar on my thumb just like he did, except mine was an accident. (He got his after being branded for killing a fellow actor in a duel; he managed to avoid the gallows by demonstrating his literacy, because you could do that back then. It was a holdover from the days in which most literate people were clergy.)
Coney-catching is one of those things I will have to explain for the non-early-modernists out there: it's basically Elizabethan slang for a con game. It's significant because it was a popular text for socially-concerned pamphlet writers like Robert "Shake-scene" Greene and Thomas Dekker, who use the framework of exposing confidence practices to get at various social problems. Which is always interesting: I am very fond of Elizabethan social criticism, and especially of the sort that turns it back on TPTB. I call it the Pirate King model (not Ben Jonson this time). I am afraid I don't have a lot to say about coney-catching, though, because it's not a topic I've worked much with, though I am certainly familiar with Dekker and Middleton's The Roaring Girl, which is part of the same sort of cultural conversation. Moll Frith, the eponymous Roaring Girl, is familiar with the underworld and serves as a guide to it for the bland well-to-do citizen heroes, and is kind of what we might call a liminal figure. And that's cool because you rarely see women as liminal figures in early modern drama.
Doctorate: hodsthorn wanted to know why I decided to pursue one and how I came to pick my field. Well, I knew pretty early on that English lit was my thing: by the time I was in tenth grade I figured out that that was what I was really into, thanks to having been immensely impressed by Chaucer in my high school Brit lit survey (at my high school, English 9 was contemporary American lit and English 10 was a Brit lit survey) -- I couldn't wait to get back to class and learn more about it. I mean, I always loved reading, but that was the first thing that made me really excited about studying literature. And I think doing a PhD felt like a natural career choice; I never really struggled much with that because the only thing I loved a comparable amount was theater and I don't think I was/am good enough at acting to pursue it seriously. I thought about journalism but didn't enjoy it enough, and so I decided that clearly academia was it for me, because I loved analyzing texts and I loved explaining them to other people, and I wanted to do that on a level more in-depth than the sort of thing you do in high school. There wasn't really anything else I could see myself doing. It all sounds really facile laid out like that and if I wrote it in an application essay I'd get rejected right away, but I don't have major regrets about my career choice. It really is a vocation of sorts (heh, I am not sure you would know that to read my lj given how much I complain and procrastinate).
Edward IV: was the Jack Harkness of the fifteenth century. I have taken more of an interest in him than I previously had thanks to lareinenoire, who argues that he is often given insufficient credit by historians and novelists other than Sharon Kay Penman (whom I dislike, but that's all right). Also, depictions of him in the Elizabethan period are consistently hilarious although they are exactly the kind of thing lareinenoire is talking about. Thomas More totally hints that he was having it off with Lord Hastings; I approve. Logically this means Edward/Jane Shore/Hastings is an OT3. Also, Thomas Heywood's play about him (which is pretty much actually about Jane) totally ships Edward/Jane/Elizabeth. Also good. He is one of the few English kings to be in a Child ballad, along with Richard I, John, Edward I, Edward III, Henry V, and Richard III. Oh, and Henries VII (in the same ballad as Richard III) and VIII. And Edward VI. And Elizabeth. And James I although most of the ballads that involve him and have to do with real events are about things that happened before he was king of England, but I think he still counts. Okay, so there were a lot of kings in the Child ballads. Anyway, Edward IV. I am using my icon of him for this post.
Flapjacks: "Opinions, mention of them in Pericles, baking tips: all welcome!" says stagbeetle. I do not think there are any mentions of them in Pericles (though there is a reference to trifles: not that kind of trifles, but so what?). Although The Shoemaker's Holiday includes many references, since the end of the play happens at Shrovetide, and pancakes were and are traditional eating for Shrovetide: the idea was originally to get rid of your milk and eggs before Lent, since in the old days Catholics basically went vegan at Lent (except for fish). As the Orthodox still do, I believe? Or at least I had an Orthodox classmate in junior high who did. At any rate (not being Orthodox) I am glad this is no longer practiced. I am extremely fond of the humble pancake in all its forms, but I have never been able to get them to come out right; they always come out all flat and chewy when I make them. So I haven't got any really good advice. I do, however, despite being about as goyische as a person can probably be, make really good potato latkes. Which do not count as "flapjacks," I don't think, but they are in the same basic family. I work well with potatoes, I guess.
ETA that apparently flapjacks are something totally different in England. I did not know that until just now.