Word: dukedom
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Perhaps the greatest strength of this unconventional production of "The Tempest" is Freeman's strong conventional performance. Prospero is a magician exiled from his dukedom who seeks revenge. When the men who betrayed him are near the shore of his island, he sends a storm to wreck their ship and bring them all onto the shore. As he plans revenge, oversees the engagement of his daughter Miranda (Jessalyn Gilsig) to Prince Ferdinand of Naples (Scott Ripley) and foils Caliban's plot against his life, Freeman evokes every doubt, conviction and emotion Prospero experiences. He is temperamental and harsh with...
Everybody knows the story of The Tempest: the magician Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, have lived on a desert island ever since Prospero's brother, Antonio, usurped the Dukedom of Milan and banished them. But now Prospero conjures a tempest to wreck Antonio's passing ship. Antonio and his fellow conspirators fall into Prospero's hands. With the help of the sprites that he controls, Prospero dictates the subsequent events on the island, cunningly arranging a reconciliation and improving his political standing. The play toys with our notions of reality and illusion, and presents an engaging debate about power...
...Bourre's sentences probably read better in the original. "The mouth," he notes at one point, "acts as a trial laboratory as well as a processing plant, and it's also an artist at work." The author, though, has a splendid eye for culinary trivia. In the Germanic dukedom of Saxony, noblemen who illicitly married commoners were punished by being force-fed pepper until they died. The builders of Egypt's pyramids were paid off in onions. The Roman scholar Pliny was startled by the high retail prices of the Eternal City -- "Have times really changed?" the author asks...