Word: courtiers
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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...
...individual sports, athletes answer only to themselves these days. Jockey Eddie Belmonte, who rode 212 winners and earned $235,000 in 1969, favors a wardrobe of rich brocades befitting a courtier at Versailles. Returning from a suspension last year, he fondly recalls how he walked into the jockeys' room. "I wore a bright orange suit. The pants had bell-bottoms and the jacket was a Nehru with no sleeves so you could see the yellow shirt I was wearing. I had a beard, and I thought I looked real good. When the other jocks saw me, they called...
Eventually the idea of sexual restraint became an important element in that brocaded bag of tricks known as courtly love. But it took the cleverness of Baldassare Castiglione, a 16th century popularizer of Platonic love treatises, to humanize the conceit for sophisticated courtiers. In The Book of the Courtier (1528), Castiglione distinguished between sensual love and what he called rational love. Rational love, he said, puts greater emphasis on the senses of sight and hearing. He argued that as conduits for soul mergers, the eyes and ears are superior to the mouth, which responds to the inflammatory sense of touch...