How many children had Lady Macbeth?

Post by eru » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 1:14 AM UTC

AlbertCory wrote: post #13

jfengel wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

Post by arduanika » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 2:13 AM UTC

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…

Post by eru » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 3:28 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #22

eru wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. At the time of the historical Macbeth the pattern would have perhaps been similar, but would not have involved the Navy. Especially not for a king of Scotland. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadet_branch

Back in the days of the kingdom of Alba no such convention existed — it was feudal.

Post by AlbertCory » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 4:05 AM UTC

eru wrote: post #25

gumby wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the days of the kingdom of Alba no such convention existed — it was feudal.

Which convention do you mean? If you have primogeniture in feudalism, you still need to figure out you do with the other offspring.

Post by actionfromafar » Wed, Jul 24, 2024, 9:01 AM UTC

trealira wrote: post #16

actionfromafar wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 grammati…