Word: elizabethan
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...progresses" through the countryside, prompting an extravagant social frenzy everywhere she stopped. On a typical 1560s tour of Suffolk, one witness wrote, the Queen's hosts laid on "such sumptuous feastings and banquets as seldom in any part of the world hath been seen before." The provincials' Elizabethan party clothes were to die for. "All the velvets and silks that might be laid hands on were taken up and bought for any money," which made for "a comely troop and a noble sight to behold...
...motorcade, they raced to Los Angeles city hall, where the Queen made her only formal address. Fans swarmed outside, including one group dressed in Elizabethan doublets and capes. "Come on, pedestrians!" ordered a policeman over a bullhorn. "Heads up, pedestrians...
...that neither Greek pan pipes nor Elizabethan sack buts could ever carry a really good Broadway tune. Richard Rodgers' score is overflowing with delightful melodies that are by turn jaunty and sweet. Harnessed to Lorenz Hart' witty and graceful lyrics, they pull the show along at an exhilarating clip, and in between numbers, George Abbott's book provides just the right mix of Shakespearean vaudeville and vaudevillian Shakespeare. Large chunks of iambic pentameter are carelessly tossed across the stage, only to be nimbly undercut by an outrageously topical reference or a wonderfully bad pun. And since its 1938 world premiere...
...steady, settled mind, we neither wholeheartedly trust, approve of or admire it, nor do we wish it for ourselves. In late 16th century England, a literary genre developed called the comedy of humors, which was at base the comedy of consistent thought and action. A humor, as Elizabethan playwrights defined it, was an exaggerated human trait, a leaning of disposition so severe as to create a caricature. Thus a character in a comedy of humors would be called Squire Downright, and only downright would he act. In 1900, Henri Bergson proposed an elaborate theory of laughter based on just such...
...Modern incarnations of this nonpareil (out of, say, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene or Robert Stone) have become increasingly antiheroic, their designs questionable and their morality ambiguous. But the trials they must endure, the plot of their quests, remain much the same, as formal and stylized as kabuki or an Elizabethan sonnet...