Word: flamineo
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Webster's hero-villain is a spleeny young opportunist named Flamineo. He is secretary to the Duke of Brachiano. To better himself, he plots the murder of the duke's wife and his own sister's husband, thus clearing the way for his sister to marry the duke. When his brother becomes squeamish about this short cut to success at court, Flamineo kills him, driving his mother mad. In Act II, Operation Avenger, the duke, his new wife and Flamineo are, in turn, killed...
This rapid pileup of corpses does not entirely evade the risk of becoming farce, a kind of Marx Brothers tragedy. But whenever the villainy threatens to become laughable, an authoritatively able cast keeps the drama under sobering control. Frank Langella makes Flamineo a smilingly, itchingly venomous blood brother to lago, and Carrie Nye and Eric Berry are absorbingly effective as the duke's second wife and a corrupt cardinal. Director Jack Landau has given the play drive and fury by cutting garrulous speeches and eliminating intrusive ghosts...
...White Devil, evil wears its proper guise, disguise-and deceit. The sinister masquerades as the pious. Murderers dress as monks. Treachery promotes itself as loyalty. Love is feigned, so is madness, even death. The last deceit-self-deceit-is stripped away in Flamineo's final speech when he sees life as he has lived it: the consummate cheat, the ultimate vanity, the supreme counterfeit. At that moment, The White Devil becomes a tragedy of more than blood...
...attempts to convert Eichmann before his execution. After condemning Hull for being "puerile" and for attempting "to browbeat Eichmann into a 'repeat after me' attitude," Lee accepts his claim that Eichmann never recognized his own guilt. He was therefore, Lee says, "no willful Edmund, Richard Ill, Iago, or Flamineo, for the willful ones find out." Men like Eichmann, on the other hand, "have engaged in no quest, no pact, no pursuit in the name of something, they have no moments of lucidity in which they stand judged...
When Vittoria and Flamineo are on stage, you hope that Webster will forget how to write an exit line. Particularly in their syncopated death scene, murder is shown to be a business which impoverishes all its entrepreneurs...