This
day my sister should the cloister enter,
And there receive her approbation:
-Claudio
Measure For Measure Act I, scene ii
Line 175
If I’m not mistaken, we
had another Claudio quote only a few days ago. Oh wait, that was Claudio
in Much Ado About Nothing. Different Claudio, different play. Carry on.
It looks like this is our third visit to this play. We had
the ‘wish him well’ line in sept, and the ‘justice, justice, justice, justice
line’ earlier this month. Okay, so we haven’t really done a thing with context
in this particular play. Well I see no reason to change that today. Besides, as
I noted elsewhere we’ve got about 342 years of material for these posts, and
we’re only on our 79th day of posting, so we’ll have plenty of time
to flesh out Measure For Measure at a later date. Let’s just look at the line
for today.
So he wants his sister to join the convent.
Interesting. I’m really tempted to dive
into this one and find out what’s going on and why Claudio wants his sister to
join the convent. I can certainly tell you that I never had any thoughts about
either of my sisters joining the convent. And they didn’t. They both got
married. In fact I was talking to one the other day because she had been in the
hospital for a week and a half and I didn’t even know it. Do you run into that
kind of stuff with your family? Of course my other sister lives in Phoenix so
that if she was in the hospital for a month and a half I might not ever know
it. But again, the convent? I don’t think so. And this could get us back to
that discussion we were having last week with Prospero’s Tempest line about
fathers putting the daughters’ boyfriends to the test. I was saying then that I
really didn’t relate to that, and if I don’t relate to trying to control what
my daughters are doing then it follows that I’m really not going to relate to
trying to control what my sisters are doing. Ooof. So I guess I’ll just say,
Jean, Marie, you’re free to join the convent if you want, but please don’t
think that I’m advocating it. What our friend Claudio is thinking, well I have
no idea. Moving on…
This is what the sisters in the convent looked like when I was a kid. That's Sister Catherine Marie on the right, my eighth grade teacher. I don't know whether or not her brother had anything to do with her joining the convent. Heck, I don't even know if she had a brother.
No comments:
Post a Comment