Word: gentility
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...century. Nine hundred years later, when "Syr Thomas Maleore, knyght" put together Morte d'Arthur, he was already synthesizing a well-encrusted legend, the sources of which he "dyd take oute of certeyn bookes of frensshe and reduced it in to Englysshe." Another 400 years and the parfit gentil knights in the pious allegories of Alfred Lord Tennyson startlingly resembled iron-padded Victorian cricketers, later followed by Mark Twain's slapstick farce and the droll sophistications of John Erskine...
...uncooperative debutante daughter, while the girl herself falls in love with a cad. In one of those splendid reversals of the seeming truth, the shakoed young palace guardsman whom Mother favors proves morally unworthy of such exalted employment, while the handsome cad emerges not only a verray parfit gentil knight but, at the last moment, a duke as well...
...King Arthur a gentleman, or was he a sort of Legs Diamond of the early Middle Ages? Was it the age of chivalry or the age of the shiv? Were the "parfit gentil knights" of the Round Table just a passel of paleo-Stalinist thugs? Henry Treece, English poet, critic and historical novelist (The Dark Island), wields a mean historic mace and it lands squarely on the romantic Arthurian legend of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. "Malory was wrong," says Novelist Treece flatly. He admits that his own hard-boiled debunking may be no less wrong...
...comedie-ballet," Le Bourgeois Gentil-homme, when first produced in 1670, was less important for its Molière text than for its Lully music, while most important of all (with Orientalism the rage) was its Turkish ballet...
...bathed each picture in suche a light That, though he be no "parfait gentil knight...