Word: elizabethan
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...Shakespearean stage, like our own, was cankered with financial woes and preoccupied with sex. Shakespeare produced more dubious double entendres than anyone before or since. Some are readily perceived: Hamlet's announcement, "Then came each actor on his ass," meant then what it does now. In the first Elizabethan world - when there were some 40 euphemisms for sexual organs (including will, dial and den)-almost every passage twinkled with lewdness. Like today's cheerless smut, the Elizabethan bawdiness was both deplored and exploited. The nonsexual slang has traveled with greater success: here are the witches in Macbeth, telling...
...drinking or bathing water. But in the great rooms of the liner, it was like a mod version of Wellington's ball on the eve of Waterloo. Singers Judy Abbott and Glenn Weston chanted as indefatigably as blackbirds on a spring morn. Bands and discotheques rocked away with Elizabethan abandon. And many young couples were seen to be popping below quite early, leading one ancient mariner to muse that the cruise might be fruitful beyond Cunard's calculations. The great drift-in's only real disaster, said New Bedford, Mass., Travel Agent Bob Penler, occurred "when...
...Riverside critics have too often absorbed the bad side of "objectivity" as well as the genuine. Their commitment to a falsely monolithic view of Elizabethan culture is shown implicitly in their reliance on literary influence to explain Shakespeare. Too often, this kind of source-tagging degenerates into a check-list of things to remember for orals--it is probably unnecessary to bring Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes twice into a brief discussion of Cymbeline. I suspect this approach is not the fault of the authors; the essays follow a general pattern closely enough to indicate that the publisher had unity...
Vita Sackville-West, whose memoirs make up about half the book, grew up in an Elizabethan manor house larger, she liked to point out, than most palaces; if she'd been a man, she would have inherited it along with one of England's oldest titles. Instead, she became a writer and served as the model for Virginia Woolf's amazing Orlando, who danced his way through history and changed sex with the centuries. Harold Nicolson, who married Vita, was an equally blue-blooded dilettante with dozens of books to his credit. Together, they shared an aversion to the middle...
...first glance, the program seemed interesting, contrasting English Renaissance music in the first half with motets by Bruckner and Brahms in the second. By the end of the concert, however, the contrast seemed to have little point. The six florid Elizabethan motets from "The Triumphs of Oriana" were all similar and Brahms and Bruckner, at least as interpreted here, seemed uniformly dreary...