[QUOTE=aruvqan]
Could he have used the bones of a really large man for the size, and grown the flesh onto the framework like a homonculous?
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Sure, that isn’t discounted by the text. The text makes some statement to the effect that the creation is, of necessity, oversized in order for Dr. Frankenstein to be able to do his things. Using a large skeleton merely because that’s what is handy doesn’t really fit that. But assuming he made/acquired the large skeleton because it suited his purposes, there’s no real reason it couldn’t be a framework onto which artificial tissue is grown. (As demonstrated.)
[QUOTE=ApallingGael]
Adding to the above, because it’s too late to edit: It always annoys me when the phrase “karma is a bitch” (making nice use of the fact that “karma” has the ring of a girl’s name) is dumbed down to “payback is a bitch”. If you think your audience does not understand “karma”, then look for a different expression entirely.
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Do you have any evidence those phrases are connected? I don’t think the one is a dumbed down version of the other. “____ is a bitch” is a running meme. Think “life is a bitch”, “payback is a bitch”, “nature is a bitch”.
[QUOTE=FriarTed]
Mary Shelley in her 1831 foreword to that edition does suggest some sort of machinery…
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I meant “a mechanism” is in “a means” or “a process”.
??? Perfect, certainly not. But “idealized” or “perfectly beautiful,” then, yeah. A “perfect” romance would have entailed the Capulet and Montague families saying, “Wow, that’s so inspiring! The feud is over, and let’s have a big fancy wedding.”
It was an example of “perfect love.” Each loved the other absolutely, to and beyond death.
Their relationship cut short at least 5 lives - Romeo, Juliet, Mercutio, Tybalt and Paris - and briefly heated up (via Romeo and Tybalt) a conflict that had been cooled (thus probably resulted in the deaths of numerous nameless characters). Their deaths sounded the final death knell for the conflict, but if they’d cooled their heels just a bit - and if Romeo and Tybalt weren’t hotheaded idiots - it could have ended without bloodshed.
Also, if he’d been able to have her, Romeo would likely have cooled to her as quick as he did to Rosalind. The excitement of new romance never got a chance to fade away - there’s no reason to believe it would have been an enduring love if it had been given the chance to be, and plenty to believe otherwise.
It’s a story of the foolishness of teenage romance (and politics), not enduring love.
This is all true, but isn’t relevant to the perfection and purity of their love.
Pardon me, but bull. You have no evidence for this. They were fictional characters, and the writer depicted their love as deep and sincere. They might have gotten sick of each other…or they might have lived to be ninety and more in love every day: only the writer had the ability to say this.
(The characters are in the public domain, of course, so you could entirely legitimately write a story with this as its ending and moral.)
No. It is a story of the ferocity of teenage passion, the fiery depths, the rages, the madness. The story isn’t about enduring love…because the characters die. But they die for love.
(But, yeah, it’s also the story of the folly of excessive political partisanship.)
Deep and sincere, certainly, but also doomed to die quickly.
Romeo’s shown to give his heart quickly, and intensely…then give it to someone else just as quickly, and intensely. He waxes rhapsodic about Rosaline, then drops her like a hot rock the moment he claps eyes on Juliet.
Shortly before that, Capulet has a conversation with Paris, who wishes Juliet’s hand in marriage, where he quite explicitly spells out ‘no, 14 year olds are not ready for long-term commitments’.
Mercutio speaks on the folly of romance.
Juliet, herself, speaks on the same subject in the balcony scene.
It’s a frequent theme. The only character other than Romeo and Juliet themselves to speak well of the relationship is Friar Lawrence - because he wants to unite the families through the marriage, not through any admiration for young love.
And, again, their relationship directly leads to the deaths of Mercutio, Tybalt, and Paris - even assuming Romeo and Juliet’s own suicides are a sign of ‘beautiful love’, the fact that their full-speed ahead, forget what anyone else says attitude causes the violent deaths of multiple other people is more than a counterbalance.
Call it the romantic in me, but I’ve always believed that R & J’s love was meant to be seen as true. There are clues in the quality of language Shakespeare uses…when he talks about Rosaline, Romeo uses very stilted, clichéd language and rhymes, but when he sees Juliet, his language and the images he uses suddenly become richer, more spontaneous, as if to signal this is the REAL thing. There’s also the fact that their first dialogue together forms a perfect sonnet, as if to show that they belong together, complement each other.
As for the idea that the feud was dying out before this…others, including Isaac Asimov, have put forth this idea, but I don’t really buy into it. The “objective” voice of the chorus in the beginning describes the “fatal loins” of “foes”, “new mutiny” from an “ancient grudge”, not a dying-out feud. The heads of the families don’t try to talk sense into their youth during the first brawl…they try to get into it right away though their wives try to hold them back.
There is the fact that Capulet was apparently okay with having Romeo in his house, but that could well be attributed to the fact that the family was already on the Prince’s bad side because of the brawl, and two kinsmen of the Prince were at the party, who could have passed along to the Prince that Capulet was being a good boy and not making trouble. It’s only THEN that Capulet tries to hold Tybalt back…once he knows the Prince has his eye on the family.
That could also explain why Capulet, after saying earlier that Juliet isn’t ready for marriage and that he wants to take her wishes into account, suddenly insists on the marriage with Paris RIGHT AWAY. After Tybalt and Mercutio’s deaths, the Prince is angrier at the families than ever (especially since Mercutio was the Prince’s cousin) and marrying Juliet to the Prince’s other kinsman was a good way to get back in the Prince’s good graces.
tl;dr, I do believe that Romeo and Juliet’s love was meant to be seen as true and that it was a sad case of a love that could have flourished being destroyed by foolish family pride and meaningless violence. Not that the two of them DIDN’T act with youthful impulsiveness on several occasions, but still.
But every bit of meaningless violence in the play after the Prince tells Montague and Capulet to cut that shit out is directly caused by Romeo and Juliet’s relationship.
Romeo and Juliet are not passive victims of circumstance, they’re active participants in the events. They’re in a bad situation, yes, but every move they (particularly Romeo) made made the situation worse. The same pattern can be seen in Hamlet, where Hamlet was both wronged by Claudius, and directly responsible for the bad turn of the play.
Leaving the actual text of the play for a moment, let’s remember that R&J is a tragedy - and the protagonists of Shakespeare’s tragedies always lead to their own downfalls, either by creating the bad situation (King Lear or MacBeth, frex), or by their reactions to the bad situation (R&J or Hamlet, again). If he’d meant for it to be a celebration of true love in the face of adversity, it would have had a happy ending - and probably less death along the way.
