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Love that part in episode 4 of The Terror where Goodsir is trying to explain why the expedition is in the far north and seems to realize that suffering untold horrors for "the economy" is really not a reasonable thing to do. What a fucked up little show.

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I thought that "no harm done" "they broke seven of your ribs" "ah but i made several cutting remarks that surely bruised their egos" thing was an incorrect quote someone made up. What the fuck do you mean garak actually said that after getting his shit rocked by klingons

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buffy summers more like buffy snork mimimi <3333

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I would love to hear more about the grapes, btw. The Globe version kinda rewired my brain a little 🤯

Yes. Hahahaha. YES. (Lengthy response below.)

So, for those who don't know, there is a scene in Doctor Faustus in which the Duchess of Vanholt expresses a craving for grapes in January. She requests that Faustus perform a miracle for her by summoning this out-of-season fruit, and Faustus sends Mephistopheles to collect grapes from the other side of the world. (The geography makes no sense here—more on that in a moment.)

Grapes in England are harvested in late September–October, but Henslowe's Diary shows performances of Doctor Faustus happening year-round. Because fresh produce could not yet be shipped long distances in Marlowe's time, this leaves us with a scene whose implications, and possibly text, change significantly depending on month of performance.

Let's start with performances during grape season. 9 of the 24 DF performances recorded in Henslowe's Diary happened from September to November, when grapes were presumably locally available. This number includes the first recorded performance of the play (Sept 30, 1594), though it's likely that there were previous, unrecorded performances. When played during these months, the audience may well have been eating grapes from the same harvest as the actor playing the Duchess—excavations of the Rose Playhouse have found grape seeds dating back to this period. There's a cool paper by Sally Templeman arguing that Shakespeare deliberately included food in his early plays to generate business for the inns in which they were being performed. I think that DF's inclusion of grapes may have similarly benefited Rose Playhouse fruit vendors. Witnessing the Duchess' grape craving may have manufactured a similar craving in the audience, and eating them alongside her may have allowed them to take part in Faustus' magic, transforming the ordinary experience of purchasing seasonal snacks at the theatre into something miraculous.

When grapes weren't in season, the Admiral's Men would have needed to either swap grapes for another seasonal fruit, use fake grapes onstage, or remove the scene altogether. I'm going to take each of these possibilities in turn, cause IMO they all have interesting implications.

Substituting grapes for other seasonal fruits at different times of the year would have retained most of the scene's resonances. It would also demonstrate a fluidity to the play text—perhaps the A-Text of DF reflects a fall performance. Eyewitness accounts and archaeological records alike tell us that Southwark playhouses offered seasonal snacks, meaning that varying the fruit used in this episode through the year would produce in the audience the same effect as the grapes: suspension of disbelief, participation in the play's magic, and possibly increased fruit sales.

However, different fruits would shift certain implications of the scene, as grapes have very specific associations. As the fruit behind wine, grapes were seen as an aphrodisiac, creating a potential sexual undercurrent to this scene (which many modern productions capitalize upon, including the Globe's magnificent 2011 version). We know that wine was sold at the Rose, and audience members who purchased it may too have felt a connection to the Duchess, drinking a beverage that came from grapes like hers. DF was also being performed during a period of declining grape production in England, as more and more wines were being imported from France. This trend was intensified further by a series of cold summers in the 1590s resulting in poor grape harvests (see Kelly and Ó Gráda page 307). The audience may have connected grapes to international trade for this reason, strengthening Faustus' speech about importing grapes from abroad. They may have also seen grapes as somewhat of a delicacy due to shortages, something which archaeological records seem to support: notably fewer grape seeds were found on the yard floor than in the gallery during this archaeological phase, suggesting that wealthier theatre patrons were more likely to purchase grapes during this period.

On the other hand, the Admiral's Men may have chosen to remove this scene or to fake grapes when they were out of season. While swapping the fruit used may have been a feasible solution for much of the year, there were certain performances where the Admiral's Men would have been hard pressed to find any fresh fruit, such as for the 5 recorded shows in January and February. (Yes, apples may have been available, but their long shelf life makes them ill suited for this plotline.) Omitting the scene altogether would have sidestepped certain technical issues. Using fake grapes, meanwhile, would bring new meaning to Faustus' grape conjuring: rather than suspending their disbelief, the audience would occupy the same winter as the characters onstage—they would experience Faustus' magic through shared awe with the Duke and Duchess.

All of these options, I think, show that the text of DF is built to be fluid, in a way that rings far more Medieval than Early Modern, or at least, than Early Modern as we like to understand it. The idea of a fixed text is a modern one, and DF would have needed to be mutable until relatively recently, since fresh produce available all year round is a recent development.

Speaking of! Faustus, when asked how he procured grapes in January, says that he summoned them from a region where it is still summertime: "in India, Saba, and farther countries in the east." Obviously this makes no scientific sense, but Jane Hwang Degenhardt has an excellent paper in which she points out that Faustus' eastward path reflects trade routes that are starting to be built in the 16th century. This situates the scene within Elizabethan England's growing naval and imperial power following its defeat of the Spanish Armada, and, when performed in England's grape season, exoticizes the land on which the audience stands. In the late 1500s, England didn't have trade roots as far east as Faustus describes, nor the ability to import perishable goods, but the audience may have seen Faustus' magic as the technology of the future within the framework of an emerging colonialist power.

Nowaways, we do have those trade roots, and we do have the technology to supply fresh produce year-round—though these things have come at a massive cost, to both the environment and to the many people who have suffered at the hands of colonialism. A deal with the devil indeed. As a result, we see seasonal food as atemporal for the most part, meaning that not only can this scene be reproduced with grapes all year round, but a lot of its implication have been reduced or shifted. Now, the scene creates in the audience a temporal distance from its characters—in England, seasonal availability is by and large a thing of the past. And as climate change moves wine production north into England, increasing the country's grape production, the scene's implications continue to change. Our destruction of the environment is literally making grapes easier to obtain in England.

Selected Bibliography of Secondary Sources

Bowsher, Julian, and Pat Miller. The Rose and the Globe: Playhouses of Shakespeare’s Bankside, Southwark: Excavations, 1988–90. Museum of London Archaeology, 2009. 

Degenhardt, Jane Hwang. "The Reformation, Inter-imperial World History, and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus." PMLA 130.2 (2015): 402-411. doi:10.1632/pmla.2015.130.2.402. Accessed 11 Apr. 2025.

Kelly, Morgan, and Cormac Ó. Gráda. “The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe.” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 44, no. 3, 2014, pp. 301–25. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43829489. Accessed 11 Apr. 2025.

Templeman, Sally. “‘What’s This? Mutton?’: Food, Bodies, and Inn-Yard Performance Spaces in Early Shakespearean Drama.” Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 31, no. 1, 2013, pp. 79–94. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26354928. Accessed 11 Apr. 2025.

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I just submitted the final assignment of my undergrad, everyone cheer. (I’m back to the same department and some of the same classes for my MA next year.)

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Giles had such a cute reaction right before reality hit

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A colored version of this post. 💛

[copic markers and colored pencils]

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Dan Hays Colorado Snow Effect 4 (with detail) 2007, oil on canvas

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Please stop saying that we’re moving to a two party system. It’s not true! This is a minority meaning that the BQ and NDP still hold the balance of power, however diminished they are.

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don't you feel ashamed of what you've done?

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View between villages. Posting it here because apparently the YouTube video is unavailable in some regions agajsbs

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scurvy has got to have one of the biggest disease/treatment coolness gaps of all time. like yeah too much time at sea will afflict you with a curse where your body starts unraveling and old wounds come back to haunt you like vengeful ghosts. unless☝️you eat a lemon

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Ploop ploop ploop

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Aside from Puvirnituq, CBC has heard from residents in four other Nunavik villages who say voting booths closed early in their communities.

In a statement, Elections Canada said weather issues were affecting flights for workers.

"The returning officer attempted to implement several different strategies to provide voting services to communities," it said in a statement.

So they didn’t hire anyone from the community to work for the election, though I’m certain there are people capable of doing so.

They didn’t make alternate arrangements for people to vote on election day, nor did they make arrangements for what they would do if there were issues with weather, which is a pretty basic thing to make a backup plan for in remote communities at this time of year.

For what reason are alternate methods of voting not utilized to ensure folks in remote communities have the ability to exercise their right to vote? That’s a pretty basic thing to expect the government to accommodate.

@allthecanadianpolitics

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(:<

Your friends watching something for the first time and getting to that scene VS you, the knower.