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Concerning Juliet’s age
I find a big stumbling block that comes with teaching Romeo and Juliet is explaining Juliet’s age. Juliet is 13 - more precisely, she’s just on the cusp of turning 14. Though it’s not stated explicitly, Romeo is implied to be a teenager just a few years older than her - perhaps 15 or 16. Most people dismiss Juliet’s age by saying “that was normal back then” or “that’s just how it was.” This is fundamentally untrue, and I will explain why.
In Elizabethan England, girls could legally marry at 12 (boys at 14) but only with their father’s permission. However, it was normal for girls to marry after 18 (more commonly in early to mid twenties) and for boys to marry after 21 (more commonly in mid to late twenties). But at 14, a girl could legally marry without papa’s consent. Of course, in doing so she ran the risk of being disowned and left destitute, which is why it was so critical for a young man to obtain the father’s goodwill and permission first. Therein lies the reason why we are repeatedly told that Juliet is about to turn 14 in under 2 weeks. This was a critical turning point in her life.
In modern terms, this would be the equivalent of the law in many countries which states children can marry at 16 with their parents’ permission, or at 18 to whomever they choose - but we see it as pretty weird if someone marries at 16. They’re still a kid, we think to ourselves - why would their parents agree to this?
This is exactly the attitude we should take when we look at Romeo and Juliet’s clandestine marriage. Today it would be like two 16 year olds marrying in secret. This is NOT normal and would NOT have been received without a raised eyebrow from the audience. Modern audiences AND Elizabethan audiences both look at this and think THEY. ARE. KIDS.
Critically, it is also not normal for fathers to force daughters into marriage at this time. Lord Capulet initially makes a point of telling Juliet’s suitor Paris that “my will to her consent is but a part.” He tells Paris he wants to wait a few years before he lets Juliet marry, and informs him to woo her in the meantime. Obtaining the lady’s consent was of CRITICAL importance. It’s why so many of Shakespeare’s plays have such dazzling, well-matched lovers in them, and why men who try to force daughters to marry against their will seldom prosper. You had to let the lady make her own choice. Why?
Put simply, for her health. It was considered a scientific fact that a woman’s health was largely, if not solely, dependant on her womb. Once she reached menarche in her teenage years, it was important to see her fitted with a compatible sexual partner. (For aristocratic girls, who were healthier and enjoyed better diets, menarche generally occurred in the early teens rather than the later teens, as was more normal at the time). The womb was thought to need heat, pleasure, and conception if the woman was to flourish. Catholics might consider virginity a fit state for women, but the reformed English church thought it was borderline unhealthy - sex and marriage was sometimes even prescribed as a medical treatment. A neglected wife or widow could become sick from lack of (pleasurable) sex. Marrying an unfit sexual partner or an older man threatened to put a girl’s health at risk. An unsatisfied woman, made ill by her womb as a result - was a threat to the family unit and the stability of society as a whole. A satisfying sex life with a good husband meant a womb that had the heat it needed to thrive, and by extension a happy and healthy woman.
In Shakespeare’s plays, sexual compatibility between lovers manifests on the stage in wordplay. In Much Ado About Nothing, sparks fly as Benedick and Beatrice quarrel and banter, in comparison to the silence that pervades the relationship between Hero and Claudio, which sours very quickly. Compare to R+J - Lord Capulet tells Paris to woo Juliet, but the two do not communicate. But when Romeo and Juliet meet, their first speech takes the form of a sonnet. They might be young and foolish, but they are in love. Their speech betrays it.
Juliet, on the cusp of 14, would have been recognised as a girl who had reached a legal and biological turning point. Her sexual awakening was upon her, though she cares very little about marriage until she meets the man she loves. They talk, and he wins her wholehearted, unambiguous and enthusiastic consent - all excellent grounds for a relationship, if only she weren’t so young.
When Tybalt dies and Romeo is banished, Lord Capulet undergoes a monstrous change from doting father to tyrannical patriarch. Juilet’s consent has to take a back seat to the issue of securing the Capulet house. He needs to win back the prince’s favour and stabilise his family after the murder of his nephew. Juliet’s marriage to Paris is the best way to make that happen. Fathers didn’t ordinarily throw their daughters around the room to make them marry. Among the nobility, it was sometimes a sad fact that girls were simply expected to agree with their fathers’ choices. They might be coerced with threats of being disowned. But for the VAST majority of people in England - basically everyone non-aristocratic - the idea of forcing a daughter that young to marry would have been received with disgust. And even among the nobility it was only used as a last resort, when the welfare of the family was at stake. Note that aristocratic boys were often in the same position, and would also be coerced into advantageous marriages for the good of the family.
tl;dr:
Q. Was it normal for girls to marry at 13?
A. Hell no!
Q. Was it legal for girls to marry at 13?
A. Not without dad’s consent - Friar Lawrence performs this dodgy ceremony only because he believes it might bring peace between the houses.
Q. Was it normal for fathers to force girls into marriage?
A. Not at this time in England. In noble families, daughters were expected to conform to their parents wishes, but a girl’s consent was encouraged, and the importance of compatibility was recognised.
Q. How should we explain Juliet’s age in modern terms?
A. A modern Juliet would be a 17 year old girl who’s close to turning 18. We all agree that girls should marry whomever they love, but not at 17, right? We’d say she’s still a kid and needs to wait a bit before rushing into this marriage. We acknowledge that she’d be experiencing her sexual awakening, but marrying at this age is odd - she’s still a child and legally neither her nor Romeo should be marrying without parental permission.
Q. Would Elizabethans have seen Juliet as a child?
A. YES. The force of this tragedy comes from the youth of the lovers. The Montagues and Capulets have created such a hateful, violent and dangerous world for their kids to grow up in that the pangs of teenage passion are enough to destroy the future of their houses. Something as simple as two kids falling in love is enough to lead to tragedy. That is the crux of the story and it should not be glossed over - Shakespeare made Juliet 13 going on 14 for a reason.
Always thought a fun horror piece would be a twilight-zone style narrated horror series where the Rod Serling figure is both diegetic and also very clearly trying to help out the protagonists without getting caught; raising his voice at an opportune moment to distract the characters from something dangerous to look at, taking plot critical documents out of a desk and putting them in plain view in the background of shots, moving around an office during the opening Serling Speil unlocking all the doors and windows, and in the climax the protagonists are able to crawl out a previously locked window. In the final episode the freak of the week notices he’s there, goes, “oh, this asshole again,” and abandons their pursuit of the nominal protagonist in order to kill the narrator who (and this is crucial) spends the whole chase sequence moving at the exact same measured pace, speaking in the exact same measured, overprepared monologue, as the antagonist blunders into carefully-prepared environmental hazard after environmental hazard. This is the narrator’s house. You’re visiting, but he lives here, and now he’s decided that he’s the story he’s narrating is Home Alone.
Pop culture reduces It's a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn't exist and a little girl saying, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.
But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.
That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.
This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.
Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.
If this movie has light and hope, it's not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It's just about as realistic as it gets.
Mario creepypasta fundamentally doesn't work because you know what Mario would actually do if we saw some dimension-warping hundred-handed cosmic horror? He wouldn't lose his mind; he'd take one look at that Shin Megami Tensei looking fucker, pull out his dorky little mushroom-shaped cell phone, hit the fourth number down on his contact list, and go "hey, Kirby, I think-a one-a your boys got lost".
the implications of tiny kid mob seeing spirits and not understanding how Horrifying it would be to a normal person is so freaking funny I just picture like
shigeo, nine years old: look!! i drew you this!!
reigen: aw that’s nice let me see
the drawing: crayon kid-penmanship of reigen sitting at his desk with a massive Eldritch Horror of a spirit looming over his shoulder
reigen, white-knuckling it: oh! ……. how nice! Is that behind me, then?
shigeo, nodding: yeah!! it likes you!
reigen: o h ! that’s great mob!
reigen internally: h oohohhlly sh i t
Ed meets Mary and he's extremely jealous of her at first. And he doesn't know how to behave himself around her, cause he doesn't understand if she's really being nice to him or if she's just passive aggressive.
But he quickly realizes that Mary likes him and they become friends.
Cut to a terrified Stede, watching his ex-wife and current boyfriend become besties.
In Leverage Redemption when Parker pretends to be FBI she doesn't use the agent Hagen alias anymore. Now this could have a simple explanation like the alias being blown and no longer useful. However there is an infinitely funnier option.
Agent Hagen is a legitimate FBI agent now, and therefore cannot be part of any illegal business.
I mean, look, it's been eight years and over the course of the original show agent Hagen was pretty good at her job! At some point McSweeten either found out agent Hagen wasn't really an agent and made some corrections or someone working administration found out agent Hagen wasn't getting a paycheck and fixed that problem.
I'm particularly fond of the idea that McSweeten knows that Parker, legendary thief, is agent Hagen but also figures she's helped out so much that he might as well give her a job. Maybe some sort of special investigator position where no one will question that agent Hagen never shows up at the office. Sometimes he finds out about fake FBI agents from the other leverage crews and just... adds them to Hagen's team.
(And of course, all of this applies to Hardison's FBI alias too.)
chihiro never forgets her time spent in the spirit world, because that’s no fun for anyone. she never forgets her friends, how could she? she holds them all close to her heart, which is where they belong, especially her beautiful white dragon.
haku is hers as far as she’s concerned, but she’s his too, so it’s all nice fair. of course, haku thinks that she doesn’t know he exists, but that’s okay. she’ll go find him again one day.
because chihiro plans to return to the spirit world. but she knows the time isn’t right, that if she just goes darting through every place where the boundary between their worlds runs thin, then nothing will change. as is, she’s just a little girl, just a helpless little girl who will get lost and killed in the world of her friends, of her dragon. so she doesn’t go back.
she could. now that she knows what to look for, she sees entrances to the spirit world everywhere. they’re rarely in the exact same place twice but she knows what to look for, how to find them if she wants to, how to get back to rin and kamaji and zeniba. but she’s not ready yet.
she needs to get stronger.
her family’s not religious, so they’re surprised when she asks to go visit shrines, but maybe it’s for the history or the culture, or, they don’t know, the architecture. it’s a simple thing, and so they go.
chihiro keeps her eyes peeled, because she’s looking for something in particular.
she’s looking for a shrine with a lot of spirits living in it.
oh, because that’s another thing she can do now.
she can see spirits.
not ghosts, not the echoes of the dead. but spirits, nature spirits mostly, but tricksters and guardians, and all sorts, really. so they visit shrine after shrine, and there are sprits there, of course, but never enough, none of them are there for anything but the offerings, and that’s not what chihiro is looking for.
it takes months, and she’s already started school, settling into it easier than she knew she could. after her adventures in the spirit world, human children are nothing. but one day she visits a shrine, and she knows it’s the one. it’s small, nothing impressive, all the way at the top of a long hill.
but she knows she’s found what she’s looking for. someone who can help her.
there’s an old priestess taking care of it all on her own, and all around her dart spirits, some lingering, some running by and doing nothing more than patting her on the shoulder or back, but all of them acknowledging her in some way. she takes one look at chihiro and says, “looking for an apprenticeship, then?”
her parents start to say no, but she interrupts them, says, “yes, i am,” and her parents don’t understand, but they have no reason to deny her, so they don’t.
“it’s been a while since i’ve seen someone else who was spirit touched,” she says the first day that chihiro returns, this time on her own.
“what happened to you?” she asks, and knows the old priestess will understand. those with the ability to interact with the spirit world aren’t born. they’re made.
“a spirit saved my life as a child,” she answers. “you?”
she grins. “a river spirit saved me. once when i was younger, and then again just a few months ago. i’m going to back to him.”
“returning willingly to the spirit world is foolish, and dangerous,” she says, but there’s something like approval in her eyes.
“yes,” she says, “teach me how to survive it.”
so the priestess does. chihiro becomes known to the local spirits, helping them however she can just like the old woman. plenty of guardian spirits offer to attach themselves to her, to mark her as under their protection, but she always refuses. there’s only one spirit who’s mark she’s willing to carry.
years pass, and chihiro grows, from a girl to a young woman. she grows up strong, and beautiful, and thanks to her years under the priestess, she grows up powerful. she learns how to shoot arrows that cut spirits and to write spells on rice paper, she learns every inch of the forests around her home and the spirits that dwell there, and on the day she graduates high school she moves into the temple.
but she’s not planning to stay.
“i hope he’s worth it,” the priestess tells her.
chihiro grins, sharp and eager, and says, “i guess i’m going to find out.”
she walks into the woods and slips through one of the places where the border is too thin, and enters the spirit world once more. she has her bow and her ink, and this time she’s not going to be easy prey, she’s not going to be someone that has to be saved or coddled.
she’s come here for her dragon, and she won’t let anything get in her way. it’s haku, and haku alone, who will be able to turn her away. if he rejects her, she’ll leave. but for no other reason.
it takes her a long time to get to the bathhouse, to fight and bargain her way there, because before it was an obstacle, so it came to her easily, but now it’s a goal, so this world holds it back from her. but she won’t let it stay out of her grasp forever. when she arrives she’s filthy and tired and half her arrows are missing, her clothes are different, and she’s older. by how much she doesn’t know, because time isn’t the same in here, but she’s not the same girl who entered.
the whole realm is talking of her, of the human who walks among them and won’t be chased away, of the girl who marched across the endless marshes until she reached the end, something few ever manage, and then just kept going. who aids those in need and destroys those who stand in her way.
when she walks through the bathhouse doors, haku is there.
“it’s you,” he says, eyes wide, and he looks older too, like breaking free of yubaba’s curse finally allowed him to grow up. “i didn’t think it could be. i didn’t think it was possible.”
she marches forward, grinning, and grips the front of his snow white shirt with her muddy hands. “anything is possible. you taught me that.”
she kisses him, exhausted and filthy and feeling more alive than she ever has. she kisses him like it’s the last thing she’ll ever do, because it just might be, because if she angers him, then he could easily kill her.
he doesn’t kill her.
he kisses her back.
chihiro gets exactly what she wanted – her friends, a place in the spirit world, and a reputation as someone who’s dangerous, even as a human.
and her dragon husband, of course. she gets that too.