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How many children had Lady Macbeth?

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Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#11

Post by trealira »

Jun8 wrote: post #9
egypturnash wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To modern ears it sounds like a word order chosen by someone whose first language is completely outside of the Romance/Germanic language families that English straddles. Usage is king though, if a few major influencers started choosing this format on a regular basis then it could probably become normalized in a few years. You'd go from bristling to reluctantly using it to not thinking about it any more.

This type of usage is archaic. AFAIK the "have you any wool" formation sounds quite natural in German ("Hast du Wolle?"), though.

Archaic English bears other similarities to other modern European languages. For example, the verb "like" used to be similar to the Spanish verb "gustar" in that the person that's pleased is the grammatical object and the thing is the subject.

For example, this is Shakespeare's Two Gentleman of Verona, Scene 2, Act 4:

  Host. How now! are you sadder than you were before? How
        do you, man? the music likes you not. 

  Julia. You mistake; the musician likes me not.
In modern English, it would mean "You don't like the music" and "I don't like the musician."

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#12

Post by vundercind »

egypturnash wrote: post #8
Jun8 wrote: post #4

This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others): * Do you have any wool? * Have you got any wool? Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter. Anybody else sha…

To modern ears it sounds like a word order chosen by someone whose first language is completely outside of the Romance/Germanic language families that English straddles. Usage is king though, if a few major influencers started choosing this format on a regular basis then it could probably become normalized in a few years. You'd go from bristling to reluctantly using it to not thinking about it any more.

Outside the Romance languages?!

My French is very rusty, but that’s one of a few normal ways to construct a question.

Avez-vous de la laine?

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#13

Post by AlbertCory »

jfengel wrote: post #7
gumby wrote: post #2

> Shakespeare’s plays, according to Knights, were first and foremost “dramatic poems,” works of literary art unified through metaphor and language, rather than a record of interactions between characters. To treat Macbeth as the final episode in the life of Macbeth was to confuse literature and history, to take the figures of drama for real persons, with biographies that reached back before the beginning of the play…

It's hard to take Macbeth seriously as a history... what with the witches and all. His source is a piece of propaganda that makes Richard III look like a documentary. As a drama, the fact that the Macbeths appear to have zero children is very important. Fathers and sons are recurring themes -- Duncan's rebuff of Macbeth as the next King, Macduff and his son, Siward and Young Siward, etc. The absence of a descendant f…

I tend to agree. It's not a meaningless question but definitely not one that the actor playing Lady Macbeth needs to answer for herself.

As for "having multiple children leads to downward mobility" -- I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'd like to see some actual data on that. I thought the pattern was more "first son inherits, second son goes into the Army or Navy, third et al go into the clergy." And a clerical life was not bad at all, until 1850 or so.

For multiple daughters: well, if they don't all have great dowries, then they don't get high born husbands. They still get married.

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#14

Post by actionfromafar »

trealira wrote: post #11
Jun8 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of usage is archaic. AFAIK the "have you any wool" formation sounds quite natural in German ("Hast du Wolle?"), though.

Archaic English bears other similarities to other modern European languages. For example, the verb "like" used to be similar to the Spanish verb "gustar" in that the person that's pleased is the grammatical object and the thing is the subject. For example, this is Shakespeare's Two Gentleman of Verona, Scene 2, Act 4: Host. How now! are you sadder than you were before? How do you, man? the music likes you not. Julia.…

That analysis doesn't sound right to me.

"the music likes me not"

To my ear, it's more similar to modern day "me likes", as in "I like".

Keep in mind archaic English retains more of the Scandinavian structure. "Likes" would in that case be active, i.e. the person doing the liking.

If my hunch is right, it's a play on words going from that more archaic structure in what the host says to the more modern structure in how Julia says it. Playing with the ambiguity of language.

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#16

Post by trealira »

actionfromafar wrote: post #14
trealira wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Archaic English bears other similarities to other modern European languages. For example, the verb "like" used to be similar to the Spanish verb "gustar" in that the person that's pleased is the grammatical object and the thing is the subject. For example, this is Shakespeare's Two Gentleman of Verona, Scene 2, Act 4: Host. How now! are you sadder than you were before? How do you, man? the music likes you not. Julia.…

That analysis doesn't sound right to me. "the music likes me not" To my ear, it's more similar to modern day "me likes", as in "I like". Keep in mind archaic English retains more of the Scandinavian structure. "Likes" would in that case be active, i.e. the person doing the liking. If my hunch is right, it's a play on words going from that more archaic structure in what the host says to the more modern structure in ho…

"The music likes me not" - "The music" is the grammatical subject, so the third-person singular conjugation "likes" is used. "Me", being the object form of the first-person pronoun, is the object of the sentence.

It's comparable to how in Spanish, you'd say "Me gusta la música" and not "Yo gusto la música" - the person that does the liking is the grammatical object, and the thing that the person likes is the grammatical subject.

Except, in English, unlike in Spanish, it used to be in free variation which things were the grammatical subject and object. You can even see how, in Old English, the person who liked was put in the dative case[0].

Translated into modern English, the lines would be:

  You don't like the music.
  You're wrong. I don't like the musician.
Another verb this happened to was "to think." The word "methinks" is a archaism/holdover from when "think" had the meaning "to seem" and so "me thinks" came from Old English "mē thyncth," which had the first-person in the dative case.

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lician#Old_English

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#17

Post by dctoedt »

karencarits wrote: post #10
Jun8 wrote: post #4

This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others): * Do you have any wool? * Have you got any wool? Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter. Anybody else sha…

> "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The word order matches the Scandinavian languages exactly ("Bæ, bæ lille lam, har du noe ull?"), so I guess it would be what a Scandinavian child would write when first learning English

French, too: Avez-vous de la laine?

Re: How many children had Lady Macbeth?

#18

Post by o11c »

gumby wrote: post #2

> Shakespeare’s plays, according to Knights, were first and foremost “dramatic poems,” works of literary art unified through metaphor and language, rather than a record of interactions between characters. To treat Macbeth as the final episode in the life of Macbeth was to confuse literature and history, to take the figures of drama for real persons, with biographies that reached back before the beginning of the play…

For the lazy:

The historical Lady Macbeth had a son from her prior marriage, Lulach, who was accepted as heir by her husband and succeeded him to the throne. But he was a weak king and got killed within a year.

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