After looking up Meleager on Wikipedia (I know, my high school English teachers would have been so disappointed!), I think we could get a lot of things out of this story. Here are some quick ideas:
Some clown talking about the Calydonian boar could crack a joke about it becoming drunk--since it's always trampling the vines & all. He could also crack jokes about the centaurs & maybe the girl they try to rape. (Horrible, I know, but that is something Shakespeare often does--make fun of serious things. That's kind of one of the definitions of humor.)
There could be a really cool speech or even a motif throughout the play about fire, since the fates said that Meleager would die when fire consumed a branch burning in the hearth, plus it deals with gods, and fire is always associated with deity.
The whole story is very workable in regard to Shakespeare's style.
I really like the idea of using a continuous fire metaphor. It reminds me of what I have been reading in the scriptures. Elijah and how he showed the priests of Ba'al that only God could deliver fire from Heaven. Plus the irony with Meleager's own death being tied to fire would really make the analogy.
ReplyDeleteYes, isn't it neat all the things you can do with fire? As we learned in Isaiah last semester, fire was both a symbol of God and of hell--it just depends on the purpose it's used for and the spirit in which it's given.
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