More Tam Lin notes

After the performance, which climaxes with my character descending to Hell, kestrell's reaction was priceless. "Am I going to have to go get a bloody piece of bread and feed it to the bloody dog to get you back? Because I *will* be grumpy about it. Don't worry, though; *I* won't look back."

The following day, there was some brief discussion of the play in the midst of a panel on "Stealing Folklore". One of the audience members brought it up, and said that she immediately was prompted to wonder about a sequel. What happens to Thomas? None of the women are still in love with him, and he's probably just going to mope around in the woods, missing Faerie. The panelists observed that it was interesting that, in this version, Janet explicitly is not in love with Thomas; she cares far more about her ownership of the woods, which puts her in a sort of parallel with the Fairy Queen.

The panel then got distracted onto other topics, but there are further issues. What happens to Janet? Her problems are left quite unresolved. She is still six months pregnant, and under the legal authority of a very angry uncle. There *is* an obvious solution, but it's not very satisfactory. She can escape from her uncle's household, by marrying Thomas. Which seems unlikely to be a happy marriage, as there is explicitly no love between them. This recapitulates some of the action of the ballad on an entirely different level: to save what she wants to save (her child, her property ownership), Janet must tightly hold something that causes her pain (an emotionally barren marriage).

More Tam Lin notes

After the performance, which climaxes with my character descending to Hell, kestrell's reaction was priceless. "Am I going to have to go get a bloody piece of bread and feed it to the bloody dog to get you back? Because I *will* be grumpy about it. Don't worry, though; *I* won't look back."

The following day, there was some brief discussion of the play in the midst of a panel on "Stealing Folklore". One of the audience members brought it up, and said that she immediately was prompted to wonder about a sequel. What happens to Thomas? None of the women are still in love with him, and he's probably just going to mope around in the woods, missing Faerie. The panelists observed that it was interesting that, in this version, Janet explicitly is not in love with Thomas; she cares far more about her ownership of the woods, which puts her in a sort of parallel with the Fairy Queen.

The panel then got distracted onto other topics, but there are further issues. What happens to Janet? Her problems are left quite unresolved. She is still six months pregnant, and under the legal authority of a very angry uncle. There *is* an obvious solution, but it's not very satisfactory. She can escape from her uncle's household, by marrying Thomas. Which seems unlikely to be a happy marriage, as there is explicitly no love between them. This recapitulates some of the action of the ballad on an entirely different level: to save what she wants to save (her child, her property ownership), Janet must tightly hold something that causes her pain (an emotionally barren marriage).