Are fantastic, made-up tales an accurate depiction of the societies in which they are set?

[james_davis_nicoll]

No.


In compensation, have a music video.

"" (Watch on YouTube)

Comments

[zeborah]

...

Have music videos improved since then, or is it just that, having immersed myself in the genius of fanvids, I've lost all appreciation for what is ultimately a lesser artform?

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

I Am Not A Shakespeare Scholar (hmm... that produces an unfortunate acronym): is it possible that Shakespeare's Juliet was so young because he was trying to tie her to a known, historical figure? Or a known, literary figure? Is it possible he was basically going "knudge, knudge, just like Catherine de' Medici, you know"?

Just a thought, and probably not at all supportable by evidence or careful study.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

I used to be a Shakespeare scholar and am still close friends with several, and the short answer is that I have never heard of any such theory in the slightest.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

It's pretty obvious why Juliet is so young -- it's a play about teenagers being stupid and their parents being too caught up in other things to notice. How anyone can think Romeo and Juliet represent normal behavior for the time period is beyond me.

Also, while the article refutes the notion that an unmarried twenty year old was considered a spinster in the Middle Ages, that doesn't necessarily contradict the "old enough to bleed, old enough to breed" notion. The average age of menarche has been decreasing for over a century, probably in relation to nutritional improvements. For example, here's the average age of menarche in France:



It's entirely possible that a girl in her late teens in the Middle Ages had only just reached menarche. Which would actually make depictions of teenage brides in fantasy even more problematic.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

John Lackland married Isabella of Angouleme in 1200 when she was 12. Her first pregnancy didn't occur until 1207 (she had 5 children eventually with John). King John was besotted with her and did not wait until she was older to bed her. This was not only scandalous, but yet another proof that John was unfit to be a ruler. Moreover, Isabella had been betrothed to someone else; John essentially kidnapped her, yet another scandal and problem for the kingdom.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

You also can't use diplomatic (or undiplomatic, as in this case) marriages of kings as normative; those were about solemnizing access to troops and taxes *and* not generally subject to anyone being able to tell the king what to do.

The normative marriage customs would hinge on "when can you expect to support a family?" questions (which is why the grooms are substantially older than the brides) which are diluted for the nobility. The corresponding nobility issues weren't around money, as such, but "what if this alliance is a mistake?" They were entered into carefully and cautiously for the most part.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Grooms were not substantially older than the brides in Shakespeare's time in England as a matter of course. Marrying in the early to mid-twenties was, if memory serves, the norm for both men and women (excluding, of course, nobility, whose marriages, as you note, about statecraft and property--most people didn't have enough property to have to worry about such things).

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

My recollection is that if the average age of first marriage was, say, 25, for the brides, it would be 28 or so for the grooms. I perhaps should not have called that "substantial" but there does seem to be an "older groom" bias.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Oh, agreed. There's a consistent difference; it's just usually not very big.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair to me, the point I was trying to make was that even when Kings bedded non-menstruating wives, it was frowned upon by his peers and the nobility as unseemly, gross and creepy, indicating bad character.

:)

[catsidhe.livejournal.com]

Yebbut... anything John did would have been taken as an indication of bad character. (He got up late in the morning? Lazy and indolent! He got up early in the morning? Why? Couldn't he sleep? Too much on his conscience, maybe? He didn't pray very much? Irreligious! He prayed too much? Guilty conscience again!)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

"King John was not a good man,
And no good friends had he.
He stayed in every afternoon…
But no one came to tea."
-A.A.Milne

[anzhalyumitethe.livejournal.com]

Googling around I found:

We often think that young women married at an early age in colonial America, but that wasn’t true. On average women married in their late teens or early twenties. Among the lower classes in Virginia, the average age of brides was 23, with grooms averaging 26. Any free white person over the age of 21 could marry, provided they obtained a license or had banns published by their church. Those under the age of 21 could not marry without the consent of a parent or legal guardian, and anyone serving an indenture or apprenticeship had to get permission from their master or mistress.

http://colonialquills.blogspot.com/2011/05/wedding-in-colonial-america.html

And other sources cite Albion's Seed as stating pretty much the same thing. The idea of marrying at 13/14 was uber rare.

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

In the pre-industrial times in the U.S. and large parts of Europe, another reason women married much later than the fantasy writer seems to believe, particularly in the non-noble classes without any expectation to marry into crowns, thrones and kingdoms, but still with fair expectation of decent prosperity, is that these women had a great deal of agency, and part of that was making their own trousseau, and even raising their own flocks of sheep, herds of cattle, and so on, accumulating her own wealth, which made her a valuable marriage prospect, as well as providing for her and her children if the husband died or failed or whatever.

Love, C.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

No one here, AFAICT, is saying that sort of thing never happens. It is, however, far from the norm, and the linked blog post is an argument to that effect. Of the twenty noblewomen SMG listed, three were sixteen or younger when they married; it's not as though *she's* saying it doesn't happen.

[elusis.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Captain Anecdote.

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I've always liked that song. Glad I missed the video, though it probably didn't look so bad, back in the day.

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

But but but *betrothal* happened young. Isn't Juliet betrothed to Tybalt - and Juliet insists on marriage before nudge nudge? I'm pretty sure Romeo would have gone for nudge nudge right on the dance floor at her dad's party.

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

Only if you were nobility and there was some political/financial advantage to it.

Tybalt is Juliet's cousin, and they're not betrothed. Juliet's dad wants to marry her to Paris.

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

Sorry - Tybalt should be Paris, yes. But isn't it still betrothal, and not actually immediate nuptials?

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

On the flip side, in looking up Anne of Cleves (I'd wondered if all the ages given were ages of *first* marriage), I found

"At the age of 11 (1527), Anne was betrothed to Francis, son and heir of the Duke of Lorraine while he was only 10.[7] Thus the betrothal was considered unofficial and was cancelled in 1535."

So engaging young children wasn't unhead of, though this example also has the engagement unfulfilled by age 19, then cancelled.

Catherine Howard had a relationship with her music teacher when she was 13, I note in passing.

Catherine of Aragon was betrothed at 3; she did marry him at 16. Then became "the first female ambassador in European history." She sounds pretty interesting in general.

[awesomeaud.livejournal.com]

Juliet's situation is what gets her married so young. Actually, her marriage to Romeo is of dubious legality, considering her age and that she married him without her father's consent.

R & J are just two young kids who think that their love is like no other, and they will die without each other - just like any early teens today think. If they had been able to date like modern teens, they would have likely broken up by the end of high school. But the Friar decides this situation could be exploited to bring peace between the two powerful and wealthy families by marrying the two. If that whole Mercutio/Tybalt incident hadn't happened, the two would have consummated their marriage and announced it the next day, making it a fait accompli. Whether it would have brought peace is another matter.

The second thing that derails the story is Juliet's father deciding to marry her to Paris. The article stated that the wealthy and aristocratic got married earlier, and the Capulets were definitely wealthy and ambitious. Yes, she was young, but her father badly wanted the political connection, and didn't care how much a dick he had to be to get it.

And in the overly dramatic way with teens everywhen, they both think death is better than living without each other.

Does anyone really think that the Prince's entreaty to the families to bury the hatchet will have any lasting effect? I give it less than a week before the two families are screaming blame at each other for the whole mess.

Blah blah blah blah....I could probably go on, but I'm sure you're already thinking this post is too long....

[keithmm.livejournal.com]

That's unfair to her father. This is the first exchange with Paris:

Capulet: She hath not seen the change of fourteen years,
Let two more summers wither in their pride,
Ere we may think her ripe to be a bride.

Paris: Younger than she are happy mothers made.

Capulet: And too soon marr'd are those so early made.
The earth hath swallow'd all my hopes but she,
She is the hopeful lady of my earth:
But woo her, gentle Paris, get her heart,
My will to her consent is but a part;
An she agree, within her scope of choice
Lies my consent and fair according voice.

Capulet isn't willing to be that much of a dick, since he initially tells Paris it will be two more years (when she turns 15) before he'd agree to any marriage, and Paris has to get Juliet's approval.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Though Paris's line implies young marriage wasn't unheard of either, despite the drawbacks Capulet notes.

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

Anything there's a law against isn't unheard of. (Laws are very rarely made against hypothetical conduct.)

That might be intended as an indication that Juliet is so hot everybody's judgement fails; it might be intended as Paris characterization as skeevy, besotted, eager for some consequence of the potential alliance, or maybe it's a trope for an Elizabethan crude joke.

Or, you know, Shakespeare; could be all of the above.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

(Laws are very rarely made against hypothetical conduct.)

Let's talk about how when Alan Rock discovered nobody in Canada was actually importing the serial killer cards he wanted to Do Something About, his reaction was to double down and increase the scope of what he wanted to ban.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

And somewhere, a pedo cries himself to sleep.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Like many of Shakespeare's plays, this one is set in a place and milieu that would have been exotic to the audience. I doubt he was going for a high degree of social realism.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Didn't early modern Europeans tend to portray imagined foreign cultures as rather like Europeans, only with funny hats and an idol in back of the house?

[vschanoes.livejournal.com]

R&J are Europeans--the play is set in Verona, in, I believe, contemporary times. That said, yeah, the idea of an "authentic" representation of the setting would not have developed yet.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

That's Italy for you. *grin*