Word: lavinia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...secretly dedicated to guiding others to salvation. Three characters in the play indicate Eliot's idea of the two paths to that goal: Celia, a married man's mistress, is guided to a saintly martyrdom ("crucified very near an anthill"); an unhappy couple named Edward and Lavinia are pointed toward the quotidian heroism of accepting their own and each other's shortcomings and simply getting on with their lives...
...After Lavinia, the most important character is the Roman Captain. Wheeled in at his imposing first entrance, and decked out in armor with a raspberry cape, Josef Sommer makes him a formidable figure indeed. He is handsome, superior, intelligent, obviously used to command, and able to fall in love with another as forcefully as he is in love with himself...
...Captain and Lavinia carry on the play's most important discourse about religion, and it is too bad that the two are not more evenly matched here. It is in the course of their disputation that Shaw makes his chief point...
...Lavinia: I have now no doubt at all that I must die for something greater than dreams or stories. . . . If it were for anything small enough to know, it would be too small to die for. I think I'm going to die for God. Nothing else is real enough...
...Lavinia: When we know that, Captain, we shall be gods ourselves...