Word: hymen
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...apparition that haunts the final scene at the Loeb epitomizes his achievement. Modern directors of this play face an annoying problem--Shakespeare's inclusion of an actress representing Hymen to cement the multiple marriages at the end. Much of today's audience can't even identify which deity that is, and the idea of a nuptial goddess seems inapposite to this As You Like It's earthiness, anyway. Belgrader breathes coarse, jocular humor into the tired device, turning Hymen into an earth-mother who rises on an elevator, with four false breasts, giant phalluses sticking medusa-like from her head...
...admitted that she had never had full intercourse with her husband. But she insisted that she had not had sex with any other man either. Her proof: after learning that she was pregnant, she had undergone a medical examination. Doctors testified that she was still technically a virgin; her hymen had been only partly perforated. How then had the baby been conceived? During a night of "Hunnish" behavior ten months before Geoffrey's birth, she testified, when her husband tried to force her to have intercourse, but succeeded only in an incomplete act. He flatly denied any such behavior...
...week's end, the lords adjourned without reaching a decision. The main argument put forward by Geoffrey's lawyers was that if Christabel had had a lover prior to her marriage, then she could not also have had an intact hymen. John's lawyers offered, unsuccessfully, to introduce results of blood tests of the late third baron's blood as evidence in the complicated paternity issue. Whatever the lords eventually decide, the only person who knew for sure about Geoffrey's parentage will never tell. Serenely confident and "without one backward look that saddens...
With the burden of proof thus on the petitioner, trials have dragged on for years. One virginal wife in Italy, charging that her marriage had never been consummated by her impotent husband, found that her case rested on the intactness of her hymen. Her only recourse, through six years of investigation, has been steadfastly to guard her virginity-and the case still remains undecided...
...settles on his recollections of an old acquaintance, Hymen Lustgarten, a former Marxist from New Jersey who has passed through all the radical ideological incarnations of the '30s. Lustgarten loses at everything, including the postwar European black market and the Laundromat business in Algeria. But as Bellow reveals in a balance of satire and compassion, Lustgarten's failures brim with life juices while Mosby's successes are empty and dry. "Having disposed of all things human," Bellow concludes, "he should have encountered God . . . But having so disposed, what God was there to encounter...