Know
of your youth, examine well your blood,
Whether,
if you yield not to your father’s choice,
You
can endure the livery of a nun,
For
aye to be in shady cloister mew’d,
To
live a barren sister all your life,
Chanting
faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.
-Theseus
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act I, Scene i, Line
69
This is Thesus’s answer to Hermia when she asks what her
fate will be if she disobeys her father by not marrying Demetrius. She’ll be
sent to the convent. Well that’s a real boot in the seat of the pants, isn’t it?
But just for the record, ‘ol Thesus here is painting a
pretty glum picture of the convent with phrases like ‘barren sister’ and ‘cold
fruitless moon.’ I don’t know about you, but there are definitely times when I’ve
daydreamed about the life of a cloistered monk where I’d be removed from all
the worries of the world and just have to worry about my meditations and my
little string bean garden. Sometimes that doesn’t seem half bad. I would
probably use phrases like ‘restful life’, ‘beautiful, beckoning moon’, and ‘wonderful
little string beans’. But that’s just me.
And maybe I’d have friends like this little guy who was in
our garden last year. Yeah, I can definitely see an upside to this.
