Word: courtiers
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...effectiveness of the show element in theater depends to a large extent on its seeming natural to the audience, just as half a courtier's elegance is in his non-chalance. Servants should be graceful, heralds dashing; and if the audience notices them it should be only briefly, and with pleasure...
...time is a hundred years after the Norman Conquest, and Anouilh roots his conflict in the blood enmity between Henry, great-grandson of William the Conqueror, and his Saxon subject. Henry sneers at Becket as a "collaborator," but in fact the king is sycophant to the courtier, whose quiet contempt holds his master eternally in thrall...
Burton-Becket hardly senses this obsession; his concern is his own soul, "Where honor should be, in me there is only a void," he tells his mistress (Sian Phillips). Then the easy-living courtier becomes archbishop, and fate summons him to uphold "the honor of God." But does he die to defend canon law, made great by the great office thrust upon him, or is he merely a self-appointed martyr in search of his Cain? Given a mass of ambiguities to project, Burton projects them remarkably well. He daringly meets the competition offered by O'Toole with...
...piece series of figures from the commedia dell' arte, the endless, semi-improvised popular comedy in which stock characters mimicked Europe's manners and morals, and lack of them (see color). There was Il Dottore, the gulled pedant; Mezzetino, the capering servant; Octavio, the youthful courtier; Scaramouche, the blustering rogue. Bustelli placed them in theatrical stances on curvilinear pedestals that swept up in rococo curlicues to counterbalance the curves and bends of the figures...
...Queen's Fingers. Queen Elizabeth of Hungary, who probably owned the altarpiece, headed a gay and lively court in Visegrad. When, one day in 1329, a berserk courtier tried to assassinate her husband and children, the Queen helped fight off the assassin. In the defense she lost four fingers of her right hand-"that hand," as a monk-chronicler put it, "which she extended so many times to the poor and miserable." Beautiful, bountiful and (thanks largely to gold mines that she owned) enormously rich, the Queen became more devout than she had ever been before...