Next verse, still more of the first

For those of you trying to keep track of the psychosexual confusions in "act two" of the Arcadia, a scorecard: The father, obsessed by his guest Amazon, is jealous of no one because he's too clueless to notice there's anything between her and anyone else (he even thinks his wife is making up to her out of jealousy). The mother is jealous of her daughter, because she sees what's up there, but not her husband, because she thinks he knows the Amazon's a boy and thus, since her husband isn't slashy, there's no danger there. The daughter paired with the Amazon isn't jealous, just sexually confused (and a little freaked at her father's using her as a go-between); while her sister, paired with the shepherd, is filled with self-loathing because of her sense of honor and station. Both princes have found the drawbacks of disguise in a romantic comedy, namely, that while it can get you closer to your beloved, you can't woo her without Blowing All -- which blows. Shepherd-prince's solution to this is to woo his boss's daughter -- which he does to add verisimilitude to his cover (!) -- only when his real beloved is around, with high-flown rhetoric and double meanings abounding.

Did I mention the princes are teenaged boys?

I have, for the record, read the Arcadia before. Sort of. Tried to, anyway. I was in grad school, and bounced off the Elizabethan prose (which is thorniest at the start, as Sidney moralizes the story into motion) and besides, I'd just read Astrophil and Stella and was more interested in the poetic interludes. Which are, among other things, gloriously inventive type catalogs of Elizabethan forms.

Speaking of which, while the prose is less difficult now, I still can't make myself hear quantitative meters -- that is, those based on long or short vowels, instead of accentual meters based on relative stress. Try as I may, they sound like purely syllabic (if graceful) lines. This is as true in Latin, where the form was grafted on so thoroughly hardly anyone can tell it's not native, as in English.

None of which is nearly as important as that it's a great big heap of Teh Silly.

(rachelmanija, you need to read this and pimp it to coffeeandink and oyceter. I assume matociquala, truepenny, and the_red_shoes already have.)

---L, fun fun fun.

ETA: At one point, the boss's daughter (whom I should have said needs a Silvius instead of a Touchstone, for she's more Phebe than Audrey) "throw[s] a great number of sheep's eyes upon" the shepherd-prince. Um. Er. Ew!