Naughty Elizabethans
It's not a good thing, I think, to discover that one can write a conference paper in 6 hours, because one is very likely to try it again the next time, if I know one, and next time one might not actually have the ingredients to hand, and discover that indeed, one will not be getting the thing done before one gets on the plane.
Today, all is well, and I've got it together, and not only is the paper ready to go on the plane, but I myself will be able to go cook dinner tonight and actually Pack My Bags, and leave at 0'dark thirty in the morning, WITHOUT staying up all night writing.
But it's a fluke; I don't think I can necessarily do it again. I just happened to have a Bunch O'Stuff in my head, and in files, and in notes, about Cambridgeshire morris dancing.
Here's a lovely picture of Will Kempe, by the way, dancing the morris from London to Norwich, which he did over the course of 9 days in 1600, thus inventing the Marathon Morris. One wonders, "why?"
One does not know. But after that, people did it a LOT, at least in Cambridgeshire. Dancing from town to town. All over the Isle of Ely.
Actually, the morris dancers in Cambridgeshire were sort of boring, which is actually what I'm talking about in my paper -- they're very well behaved, unlike morris dancers all over the rest of the country. I think they just don't care about it much -- they clearly don't think morris dancing is a big deal.
On the other hand, I know of LOTS of Elizabethan citizens of Cambridgeshire who were Very Badly Behaved. Most of them got hauled into the church courts for fornication and adultery -- it's astonishing how deeply tedious fornication seems if you sit and read Elizabethan church court documents long enough -- but many of them are Really Inventive. They drag their neighbors around on poles, whilst throwing grains out of pails (this Means Something, but we don't know what); they dress like men -- if they're women -- or women -- if they're men -- and run away to London; they take off all their clothes and walk naked around the altar in the local church; they steal the minister's vestments, and wear them at the Ely fair while imitating him; they get really really really drunk and go over to some poor grieving widower's house and pretend to be his newly dead wife. (Did Elizabethans pretending to be ghosts wear sheets? Sorry. We don't know.)
Oh, it's worth learning how to read Elizabethan secretary hand and a truckload of Latin abbreviations just to be able to read this stuff, I tell you.
Except you still have to wade through all that fornication.
Anyway. I'll be back sometime Sunday.
Today, all is well, and I've got it together, and not only is the paper ready to go on the plane, but I myself will be able to go cook dinner tonight and actually Pack My Bags, and leave at 0'dark thirty in the morning, WITHOUT staying up all night writing.
But it's a fluke; I don't think I can necessarily do it again. I just happened to have a Bunch O'Stuff in my head, and in files, and in notes, about Cambridgeshire morris dancing.
Here's a lovely picture of Will Kempe, by the way, dancing the morris from London to Norwich, which he did over the course of 9 days in 1600, thus inventing the Marathon Morris. One wonders, "why?"
One does not know. But after that, people did it a LOT, at least in Cambridgeshire. Dancing from town to town. All over the Isle of Ely.
Actually, the morris dancers in Cambridgeshire were sort of boring, which is actually what I'm talking about in my paper -- they're very well behaved, unlike morris dancers all over the rest of the country. I think they just don't care about it much -- they clearly don't think morris dancing is a big deal.
On the other hand, I know of LOTS of Elizabethan citizens of Cambridgeshire who were Very Badly Behaved. Most of them got hauled into the church courts for fornication and adultery -- it's astonishing how deeply tedious fornication seems if you sit and read Elizabethan church court documents long enough -- but many of them are Really Inventive. They drag their neighbors around on poles, whilst throwing grains out of pails (this Means Something, but we don't know what); they dress like men -- if they're women -- or women -- if they're men -- and run away to London; they take off all their clothes and walk naked around the altar in the local church; they steal the minister's vestments, and wear them at the Ely fair while imitating him; they get really really really drunk and go over to some poor grieving widower's house and pretend to be his newly dead wife. (Did Elizabethans pretending to be ghosts wear sheets? Sorry. We don't know.)
Oh, it's worth learning how to read Elizabethan secretary hand and a truckload of Latin abbreviations just to be able to read this stuff, I tell you.
Except you still have to wade through all that fornication.
Anyway. I'll be back sometime Sunday.
<< Home