Commedia dell'arte

Commedia dell'arte is apparently a form of theatre characterised by masked types and begun in Italy in the 16th century. It was responsible for the advent of the actress and improvised performance based on sketches and scenarios.The stock characters which usually occurred were:

• The Servant
• The Master
• The Innamorati- the Lovers

For those who don't know stock characters are played very melodramatic and over exaggerated and their characteristics are usually based on the social stereotypes. Therefore stock characters can change over time and are very different in different cultures and societies. So yeah guess this links to Bloody Chamber as many of her characters can be seen to be stock characters e.g. beautiful woman who is a damsel in distress and needs to be rescued. However Carter does not make all of them stock character's such as the Mum in the Bloody Chamber due to her being a feminist and all.

Bluebeard in 314 words

So once upon a time in France lived a powerful Lord with the nickname of Bluebeard as he had a long black beard with glints of blue in it...random but true. Throughout the years he had wife after wife but as bad luck would have it they all died inexplicably. This never striked people as odd and his next wife thought nothing of it either. After they were married Bluebeard buggered off giving his wife a bunch of keys and telling her she can go into any room but the one at the end of the ground floor corridor. His wife promised she wouldn’t, (even though it was blatant she would) and he left her alone in the castle. However understandably she grew too curious and could stand it no longer. She opened the forbidden room. Dun Dun Dunnn!! :O Hanging on the walls inside the room were the bodies of Bluebeard’s wives- he had strangled them all with his own hands!! Big shocker there :/ Anyways woman obviously was a little freaked out and ran out of the room; unfortunately she noticed the key which opened the room was stained with blood. Unfortunately it no matter how much she washed, scrubbed and rinsed the key it was all in vain, the key was still red. When Bluebeard came back the woman was freaking out especially when he asked for the keys back. When she gave them to him he noticed that the key had blood on it and realised she had been into the room therefore he exclaimed “You must die!” Bit of psychopath really. Anyway luckily before he had the chance her brothers came into the room swords and all and killed him. Hurray! :D And woman ended up marrying a good and honest man who helped her to forget the terrible adventure and she lost all her sense of curiosity. The End

What did Cinderella say when the Chemist lost her photographs? Someday my prints will come!

Ok so cheesy pun for the title but couldn't resist. I decided that I will look at how fairy tales have changed over time making them more suitable for children. I was actually quite shocked as although I knew that Fairy tales of the past were often full of macabre and gruesome twists and endings as I was familiar with the works of the Grimm brothers I didn't realise how horrible some of them were. These days, companies like Disney have modified them for a modern audience targeting them towards young children, as I feel that if they kept their original stories that some would be classified as an 18 and wouldn't be pleasant to watch. Here are a few examples of the common endings we are familiar with – and explains the original gruesome origins that I found on the Internet. 

• In the tale of snow white that we are all familiar with, the Queen asks a huntsman to kill her and bring her heart back as proof. Instead, the huntsman can’t bring himself to do it and returns with the heart of a boar. Now, fortunately Disney hasn’t done too much damage to this tale, but they did leave out one important original element: in the original tale, the Queen actually asks for Snow White’s liver and lungs – which are to be served for dinner that night! Also in the original, Snow White wakes up when she is jostled by the prince’s horse as he carries her back to his castle – not from a magical kiss. What the prince wanted to do with a dead girl’s body I will leave to your imagination. Oh – in the Grimm version, the tale ends with the Queen being forced to dance to death in red hot iron shoes!
• In the original sleeping beauty, the lovely princess is put to sleep when she pricks her finger on a spindle. She sleeps for one hundred years when a prince finally arrives, kisses her, and awakens her. They fall in love, marry, and (surprise surprise) live happily ever after. But alas, the original tale is not so sweet (in fact, you have to read this to believe it.) In the original, the young woman is put to sleep because of a prophesy, rather than a curse. And it isn’t the kiss of a prince which wakes her up: the king seeing her asleep, and rather fancying having a bit, rapes her. After nine months she gives birth to two children (while she is still asleep). One of the children sucks her finger which removes the piece of flax which was keeping her asleep. She wakes up to find herself raped and the mother of two kids.
• In the modern Cinderella fairy tale we have the beautiful Cinderella swept off her feet by the prince and her wicked step sisters marrying two lords – with everyone living happily ever after. The fairy tale has its origins way back in the 1st century BC where Strabo’s heroine was actually called Rhodopis, not Cinderella. The story was very similar to the modern one with the exception of the glass slippers and pumpkin coach. But, lurking behind the pretty tale is a more sinister variation by the Grimm brothers: in this version, the nasty step-sisters cut off parts of their own feet in order to fit them into the glass slipper – hoping to fool the prince. The prince is alerted to the trickery by two pigeons who peck out the step sister’s eyes. They end up spending the rest of their lives as blind beggars while Cinderella gets to lounge about in luxury at the prince’s castle.

At the moment I am unsure whether they were supposed to have some moral message such as if you try and lie bad consequences will happen to you such as have your eyes pecked out by pigeons (questionable I know) or whether writers such as the Grimm Brothers were just a bit disturbed and had an urge to write horrible, disturbing endings. 

Personally I prefer a good old fashioned Happy Ending because if they can't happen in fiction then there sure is no help in hell of them happening in real life.