Word: claudius
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...life - not just novels but short stories, book reviews, memoir and art criticism. His relentless curiosity sometimes led him to attempt experiments that were beyond his range: science fiction in Toward the End of Time, for example, and a retelling of the Hamlet story in Gertrude and Claudius. But at his very best, as in the Rabbit novels - two of which won Pulitzer Prizes - or his 1968 shocker, Couples, in which he dove fearlessly into the sexual revolution, he looked deeply and clearly into the swamps of human experience and reported back to us what he saw with a matchless...
...least no idea of whom it celebrates: St. Valentine could be any of half a dozen Christian martyrs whom the early church recruited to clean up and bless pagan fertility festivals. Of the top candidates, the best known is a priest named Valentinus, who was beheaded by Emperor Claudius the Cruel on Feb. 14, A.D. 269. Upon slim evidence, whole layers of legend are stacked: that Valentinus performed secret weddings after Claudius banned marriage to prevent soldiers from deserting his armies; that he refused to deny Christ and so was thrown in prison, where he healed the jailer's blind...
...pretty, vigorous, thoughtful, this Hamlet expands the story with helpful flashbacks; Yorick, Priam, Old Norway come alive as if from a vivid history book. The full version restores Shakespeare's emphasis on court politics, with whispers of intrigue that establish Hamlet and Laertes as potential usurpers of Claudius' throne, and massed armies behind Hamlet. Here he might be a Henry V who's gone just this side of bonkers...
...main failing of Rome, a BBC co-production, is that it is more like an expensive I, Claudius than a work of HBO iconoclasm. The visuals are staggering--you see every penny spent--but cosmetic changes aside, it does not rethink its genre as, say, Deadwood did the western. At heart, it is largely a history-book story with familiar themes, enacted by regal men with British accents. One has to wonder what HBO would have had if it had let Deadwood creator David Milch do the more unusual series he once proposed: a drama about ancient Roman city cops...
DIED. Joan Wilson, 56, TV producer who kept even blasé viewers riveted to their sets on Sunday evenings with the British mini-series she imported from 1973 on for PBS's Emmy Award-winning Masterpiece Theater, including such classics as Upstairs, Downstairs; I, Claudius; and last season's The Jewel in the Crown;of cancer; in Boston...