Word: buffoons
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...meant to be entertainment, not solemn tragedy. In Graves's view, the poem is a satirical work in which Homer lampooned the princelings at whose courts he recited, while pretending to hymn the heroes of the past. In this view, Agamemnon, leader of the Achaeans, is the prize buffoon. And when Hector, the Trojan leader, offers to stake the whole war on a single combat, the Greeks respond at first with resounding silence. Then Menelaus, whose wife Helen set off the strife by running away with Paris, grudgingly accepts the challenge-but quickly lets himself be talked...
Encolpius offends Priapus. god of fertility and lust, and Priapus retaliates by making the buffoon impotent. The anguished lover delivers a severe lecture to his disabled member, but to no effect. Petronius borrows some lines from Vergil to describe the disaster...
...Paycock is fashioned around characters who escape the last-act curtain and become dramatic immortals like Hamlet, Tartuffe, and St. Joan. Captain Boyle, the strutting Paycock, is a Homeric boozer, braggart and whine. With a sea-rolling gait and a gravelly brogue, Melvyn Douglas makes him an amiably puckish buffoon but scarcely a Dublin Falstaff. O'Casey's Juno has a spiny tongue for her shiftless husband, but she is also an Earth Mother of Sorrows. Her unmarried daughter becomes pregnant; her son loses an arm to the British and his life to the I.R.A. Shirley Booth puts...
...Shima fleet during the battle are found in the U.S., and many reports . . . were written neither with ample knowledge nor facts of actual features." He defended himself against Critic James A. Field Jr., who wrote in The Japanese at Leyte Gulf that "Shima, in a sense, is the buffoon of the tragedy...
...Buffoon or not, Shima has a lot to explain. On Oct. 25, 1944, the second day of the historic sea fight, Shima steamed toward Surigao Strait, south of Leyte Gulf, with two heavy cruisers, a light cruiser and four destroyers, still distant from the main battle. He hoped to reach Leyte Gulf in time to harass U.S. landing forces there, but his entire contribution to the battle, as Historian Morison observes, was to ram his flagship into a crippled heavy cruiser of another Japanese force, after firing 16 torpedoes at two islands he mistook for U.S. ships...