Word: bertram
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...trouble, though, was that Shakespeare, drawing on an episode in Boccaccio's Decameron. foisted on us a plot that is at once preposterous and poorly constructed. To which we must add that his heroine, Helena, lacks motivation, and his supposed hero. Bertram, lacks all semblance of virtue...
Consider the skeleton on which Shakespeare has hung his play. Helena is the orphaned ward of the Countess of Roussillon, and is in love with the Countess' son Bertram, who is above her in station. When he goes to the King's court, she follows. The King has been pronounced incurably ill, but Helena promises to cure him in return for the hand of any lord she chooses. The King recovers in two days, and she picks Bertram, who wants none of her. He is forced to marry her, but leaves at once to fight in the Italian wars...
...from Maiden. Greene's dimly tragic nephew is Henry Pulling, an unmarried London bank manager who has retired to look after his dahlias. His comic aunt is Miss Augusta Bertram, who at 75 concedes that her life expectancy may be only 25 years. She is far from maiden. Nephew first meets her at the cremation of his mother. The ashes are intended for a tasteful urn among his dahlias, but somehow, in the overpowering presence of Augusta, Henry leaves the urn behind in his aunt's apartment. He is only reminded of his dead mother by a chance...
...convergence theory, in the words of Kremlinologist Bertram Wolfe, is "vulgar Marxism." It posits a fundamentalist belief in economic determinism that Marx himself would probably have disavowed. It ignores or underrates the role played by traditions, value systems and even national characteristics in deciding the future of societies. The concepts that people have of national characteristics, of course, are often mere caricatures, but they generally contain some truth, of a subtler variety than meets the eye. The American devotion to individualism and freedom can be exaggerated; yet the Lockean principles of individual liberty and ordered freedom that underlie...