Word: courtiers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Perhaps the fearful fact we're now on the verge of discovering is that prosperity and peace have made us all courtiers to small kings. They are small because their divine right descends from small gods, gods with names like Wealth, Fame and Power. These are imperious gods of last resort, but the only ones left standing. These are not in themselves bad gods and they certainly are not new gods either. One must judge a deity by its martyrs. Many might die for democracy; very few, I think, for the 106th Congress. And how must a courtier live...
...contention that began in 1920 and has gathered steam through the '80s and '90s. De Vere led a life that was a veritable mirror of Shakespeare's art. Why then did he not write under his own name? It would have been unseemly, his advocates point out, for a courtier to attach his name to public wares. And De Vere was a truly uncommon nobleman: he was the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain and a sometime favorite of Elizabeth...
...also called Reuel and Hobab), as she draws water from a well. Soon he takes her as his wife, and they have two sons. Nahum Sarna, in his book Exploring Exodus, notes the story's similarities to an Egyptian tale circulating at the time of Rameses. In it, the courtier Sinuhe takes refuge with Bedouins in southern Syria fearing he will be blamed for the assassination of a Pharaoh; there he marries the eldest daughter of the local chief. In the end, Sinuhe returns to Egypt to face the new Pharaoh. Such tales of political refuge and return abound...
...access to the King is all but impossible for a humble man of the country. The only possible route is to scale the court hierarchy and win admission to the king's presence. Needless to say, the court has no interest in the drainage of the swamps. As one courtier remarks, "Those poor peasants! They're not only dying, they're boring." Gregoire has to play the game of Versailles on their terms, keeping his motivation in the back of his mind to drive him on, as do the other courtiers...
...before Kenneth Branagh, Shakespeare's most doting and dogged courtier. Last year he played Iago to Laurence Fishburne's Othello and made a film, A Midwinter's Tale, about doing Hamlet in the provinces. This year he directs and stars in Hamlet--every word of Shakespeare's longest play--and has cast it with nearly every tony Brit actor (Derek Jacobi, John Gielgud, Kate Winslet, Rosemary Harris) but Emma Thompson. There are also some ringers: Robin Williams, Jack Lemmon and Billy Crystal. How do you say shtick in Elizabethan English...