Word: knave
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Dick Dudgeon, the imposturing knave of the title, Actor Douglas gnashes his teeth - as well as the arch dialogue -and looks less like the male Candida that Shaw intended than like a Sportin' Life in tights. Actor Lancaster, as the local parson, glooms away Shaw's most romantic scenes as if he were lost on a Brontë moor. In a climactic scene of comic derring-do, ex-Acrobat Lancaster makes heroic hash of a colonial court house and all the Redcoats in it. Otherwise he is as stiff and starchy as the clerical collar he eventually gives...
...also for turning passing sorrow inside out. Standing in for Sullivan, Wayne and Shuster skittered nimbly through a confused-identity routine, belted out a metrically sound skit about a Shakespearean baseball team. Shrilled Catcher Wayne to a myopic umpire: "So fair a foul I have not seen. Accursed knave with heart as black as coat you wear upon your back! Now, for the bum thou art, stand'st thou revealed! Thy head is emptier than Ebbets Field...
When Britain's King Edward VII asked a "pretty young lady" to partner him at bridge, she declined, saying sweetly: "I am afraid, Sir, I can't even tell a King from a Knave." Most of Edward's biographers have had the same trouble: none has satisfactorily explained how and why the monarch whom Rudyard Kipling called "a corpulent voluptuary" was also modern Britain's most agile royal diplomat and plenipotentiary. Now, Boston-bred Virginia Cowles has shown that an American woman may look at a King with more understanding than many a Briton. Married...
...were tied- Matured till they glowed with a purplish tint As though there were gems inside. Now grapes were what our adventurer on strained haunches chanced to crave, But because he could not reach the vine He said, "These grapes are sour, I'll leave them for some knave." Better, I think, than an embittered whine...
Even in a day when the traitor has become a headline staple, the name of Benedict Arnold remains the U.S.'s symbol of ultimate treachery. His was the classic sellout, the shocker that reduced a national hero to a despised knave. Yet there are still those ready to defend him as a maligned soldier who was goaded into villainy, and schoolteachers in his home state of Connecticut have complained that it becomes increasingly difficult to present him as a traitor...