I'm surprised at the R&J dissing. What do you guys think is inferior about it?

R&J are Too Stupid To Live, and I hate plots that are basically driven by idiocy.

Err. That's the short form. The comedy-gone-wrong is something I've heard often in my studies of the play. Sadly, it's the kind of comedy that drives me bonkers.

Could we think of them as the original winners of the Darwin Award?

Yeah, I mean it is not like they were not intentionally stupid characters. Hormone fueled teenage crushes among spoiled aristocrats. "Too stupid to live" is absolutely plausible, and I think one of the points.

"Too stupid to live" is absolutely plausible, and I think one of the points.

For me, it works beautifully because, at their age, everybody is too stupid to live. And for most of us, what we get in the long run is comedies gone right. R&J were young and afire with hormones and their first taste of Huge Grown-Up Emotions and, in their too-stupidness, exactly like everyone who manages to squeak through and live to tell the tale...except that they don't.

There were a lot of things about Luhrman's R+J that irritated me, but I loved the way he staged their deaths (loved in the sense that I found the entire scene physically unbearable): the comedy-gone-wrongness of it was ratcheted up to a ridiculous pitch, with that inevitable sum depending on split-second bad timing. One glance down, one glance up, literally one second could have saved them both at three or four different points in the scene. People in the theater I saw it in were actually pounding their armrests in frustration, and I wasn't the only one who started blubbing when that last bad number slid into the equation and the last trapdoor out of death slammed shut.

Dombey is so very much my favorite Dickens. I love the main story (which Mervyn Peake must have had in the back of his mind when he wrote Titus Groan), and it also contains possibly his greatest ever secondary characters. I mean, I love almost everyone in almost all his novels, but if I could be any one of them when I grow up, it'd be Susan Nipper.

Trollope: I still slightly favor Framley Parsonage because of the excellent, big-hearted and snarky Lucy Robarts, but I really love them all. (Small side note: Trollope himself was considered a mild oddity in his time: a big blustery hunt-and-smoking-and-strong-liquor-loving manly man who genuinely preferred the company of women, not for the sex (or not just, anyway) but for the conversation--and, damn, he writes great women.)

JZ, can we call that cause and effect? I mean, if you're actually talking to women, you have to pick up something about what goes on in their (our) heads.

JZ, can we call that cause and effect? I mean, if you're actually talking to women, you have to pick up something about what goes on in their (our) heads.

I think so. Though Trollope was such an utter freak that he not only talked to them, he was a notorious listener. Other men couldn't understand why women seemed so fond of him--he was big and burly and frequently scruffy and had lousy table manners and was so plainly Not A Gentleman; it apparently never occurred to them that women liked him anyway, no matter which fork he failed to pick up or which shitty brandy he liked to swill, because he treated them like people.

One glance down, one glance up, literally one second could have saved them both at three or four different points in the scene

Yes, the split-seconds difference, when he turns his head just a little as he drinks! And the missed letter!

What Trollope do you recommend? I've tried a couple, but I get bogged down in the manneredness and my impatience with the social conventions.

Yes, the split-seconds difference, when he turns his head just a little as he drinks!

One spit-take away from a comedy, in other words (although Mercutio's and Tybalt's deaths had raised the stakes past the point of comedy, I think).

Framley Parsonage or The Eustace Diamonds -- one has a great, smart, snarky heroine (Trollope was consciously trying to write a modern Rosalind) and the other has a gloriously small-minded but cunning anti-heroine, both of whose stories comment on and critique the manneredness and social conventions of the world they inhabit.

Do not under any circumstances attempt to begin your Trollope reading with Can You Forgive Her? or The Small House at Allington, both of which ride hard on one of his romantic-love-related hobbyhorses and are fairly irritating even to people who love him.

For a complete oddity, not especially representative of his work as a whole but very very enjoyable, there's his one slightly science fiction novel, The Fixed Period.