Word: duked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...getting away to the Forest of Arden, where nothing much happens for three acts except a parade of bantering duologues. When it's time for us to go home, the playwright suddenly in the fifth act rounds people up for a quadruple wedding, has someone report that the usurping duke has reformed offstage, and (in a gesture unique for the period) bids the heroine directly dispatch us from the theatre in an epilogue...
...nitpicker might complain also that Shakespeare for some reason gave two different characters the same name of Jaques; that he forgot to assign the rightful duke any name at all; that Celia is described as taller than her cousin Rosalind early in the play, and shorter later on; that he confused Juno and Venus; and so on. This is not a careful piece of work...
...complained Louis Philippe, Duke of Orléans and a future King of France (1830-48), after a four-month swing through the U.S. in 1797. Four years earlier, the young aristocrat, whose father was guillotined by revolutionists, had begun a 21-year exile, spent mostly in Europe. Then 23 years old, the duke filled two notebooks as he explored the exotic New World, writing of "very pretty" and "coquettish" Cherokee women, "gross, lazy and inhospitable" whites in Tennessee, and George Washington's "most exquisite politeness" during a dinner at Mount Vernon. The journal has just been published...
...American political and social systems. But he was appalled by Washington's rather shabby treatment of his 300 slaves and, like the far more perceptive Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville a generation later, predicted that slavery would "sooner or later be fatal to the southern states." The young duke also recorded the sentiments of a certain Captain Chapman in Kentucky: "Our Government could be no worse than it is now." The plaint sounds remarkably up to date...
...interesting and perhaps a bit mystifying that most of the religious struggles around the world involve Moslems. Some scholars believe such conflicts may be an expression of a resurgent Islam. Says Duke University Political Scientist Ralph Braibanti: "This may be the moment in history when money, diplomacy and strategy join together in providing a new context for the renaissance of Islamic identity and perhaps of Islam itself." Islam makes no distinction between the secular and the religious. The Moslem doctrine of jihad (holy war) has an immediate, literal significance. As the Vatican's guidelines on Islam observe, "Islam...