Word: bertram
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...class"-on the battle in every society between rank and value, between nobility in title and nobility of the soul. Helena (Harriet Walter), a physician's daughter living in the care of the Countess of Rossillion (Margaret Tyzack), is desperately in love with the Countess's son Bertram (Philip Franks); but Bertram, influenced by the pompous Captain Parolles (Stephen Moore), refuses to love a woman of low station, especially when forced into marriage with her. Deception and humiliation bring Parolles to his knees and Bertram, ultimately, to his senses...
...play the structure but not the spirit of a romance, and gave the leading female characters most of the good lines and gracious impulses. Commentators from Coleridge to Shaw have praised Helena and the Countess as among the "loveliest" and "most charming" of Shakespeare's heroines, while dismissing Bertram and Parolles as unworthy of the ladies' or our interest. By Act V, Helena's passion for her unrequiting snob has become an act of beatific willfulness and the stuff of gaslight melodrama...
...Historian Bertram Wolfe unwisely described Brezhnev as "an insignificant transition figure in a new interregnum." Initially, Brezhnev shared authority in a triumvirate with Premier Alexei Kosygin and President Nikolai Podgorny. By 1973 he had elbowed aside any rivals for power. He placed allies in principal positions in the party hierarchy and increasingly emerged as chief spokesman for the Politburo. On trips abroad he was treated as head of state, even though he did not formally assume that title again until after Podgorny's dismissal...
...reward, the ruler promises her the hand of any noble in his court. Helena chooses Bertram. Aghast, the snobbish youth flees to the Florentine wars, leaving word that he will only acknowledge Helena as his wife when she secures the ancestral ring on his ringer and is pregnant with his child. To cut the Gordian knot of the plot, Helena achieves just that...
Apart from the lustrous leading players, each major-minor role is played in stellar fashion. Stephen Moore makes of Bertram's boon companion, Parolles, a pompous, endearing rogue and braggart, a mini-Falstaff. The countess's clown (Geoffrey Hutchings) is Lear's fool, in wit though not in pathos. And Robert Eddison, as adviser to the King, is an elegant paradox, a wise Polonius...