Word: courtiers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...monumental size, but the smaller objects, dug out of the rubble of Tell el Amarna and now on exhibition in Brooklyn, testify dramatically to the marked change in style and approach that the young Sun King instigated. It was a new particularity - a King with a paunch, a courtier with a sullen mouth, a sensuous Queen. Even the beasts of the field were liberated from the frozen rhythmic frieze of an earlier time. The result was an art vivid as yesterday, eternal as tomorrow...
...overwhelmed with calculation. In this setting we meet Alceste, the misanthrope, who is repelled by all the vanity and hypocrisy he sees around him and doggedly asserts his own righteousness. He is, however, madly in love with Celimene, an incorrigably trivial coquette who likes to play her string of courtier suitors off against each other by deceiving each one into thinking that he is her true love. The plot thickens into a series of brilliant verbal battles and intrigues between the suitors and between Celimene and her lady rivals. She is finally exposed, and the courtiers, including Alceste, go their...
Raleigh, "a most satirical courtier," commands the book, but three splendid set pieces are the best of it. Garrett summons three ghosts-a sergeant, a sailor, a courtier. These winy wraiths testify singly and at bold length about Raleigh, but mostly about soldiering, flattering, storms and other things they know. The illusion is so good that the skin crawls. Here, for example, is the courtier taking his leave: "This ghost, an ageless young man, ever idle and restless, courteous and cruel, unchanging child of change, this man will say no more. He touches his lips to signal silence. He smiles...
This flourish of a book takes Raleigh from the year 1603, when he was condemned to death for his supposed part in a plot against James I, the new king, to 1618, when James finally enforced the sentence. Raleigh was a complex figure-a scholar, poet, courtier, soldier, explorer, promoter, privateer. Garrett's narrative is appropriately various, a subtle play of moods and musings, expository fragments, incantations set in italic type, scenes from Raleigh's young manhood and middle years. But the sense is simple enough, as well as convincing; here were...
...PREGNANT? Now the Council has outdone itself. On the cover of 200,000 pamphlets that will be distributed to British high school and college students and local medical clinics later this month is a posed reconstruction of a 200-year-old engraving of Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, the 18th century courtier whose name is a byword for sexual adventurism. It shows the world's most famous seducer kneeling before a bare-breasted and obviously willing maiden. The moral of the scene, says the caption: CASANOVA NEVER GOT ANYBODY INTO TROUBLE...