Word: apuleius
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Vidal is his own best act, and he does show off. He cannot defend homosexuality without name-dropping Apuleius, making sly references to the Spartans, and advising the reader to check his concept of masculinity against circuitous quotations from the Apocrypha (Il Maccabees 4: 7-15). Even in the midst of considering children's literature, the portentous generalization can tempt him: "In the last fifty years we have contributed relatively little in the way of new ideas of any sort. From radar to rocketry, we have had to rely on other societies" etc., etc. Sarcasm betrays him into rhetorical...
...blame on the playwright. For A Midsummer Night's Dream was the finest comedy in the English language until Shakespeare himself surpassed it in Twelfth Night. It is undeniably true that Dream is an unusually eclectic work, drawing its material from Plautus, Plutarch, Ovid, Apuleius, Chaucer, French romance, Italian commedia dell'arte, a couple of earlier English plays, popular folklore, and even Scot's nonfiction treatise The Discoverie of Witchcraft. But Shakespeare worked everything up into a fresh plot of his own -- or, rather, a skillfully unified interlocking set of three plots -- involving four classes of people from supernatural beings...