Word: lovelies
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...flaws lie in Shakespeare's clumsy handling of the central plot. The two gentlemen, Proteus and Valentine, represent two conventional types of young Renaissance men: Proteus, the languid romantic, and Valentine, the seeker after honor. In the first scene, Valentine chides Proteus for wasting his youth on love and idleness before sailing for Milan to attend the Emperor--who later turns out to be a Duke in an odd but minor discrepancy. After an interlude with Proteus's lover, Julia, Shakespeare has Proteus sent off to Milan to follow in Valentine's footsteps...
...meantime, predictably enough, the scorner of love falls like a clay pigeon for Silvia, the lovely daughter of the Duke, and his love throes are even more tortured and ludicrous than Proteus's. But when Proteus arrives he, too, is smitten by Silvia's beauty, resolves to lose his friend, Julia, and himself to win her. The rest of the play revolves around Proteus's despicable betrayals of friend and lover in his attempt to have the reluctant Silvia...
Although poets say a man's thoughts turn to love in springtime, the Harvard tennis team is focusing more on courts than on courting at the moment...
...ical or verbal violence. In A Prayer for My Daughter, a police detective who could have prevented his daughter's suicide deliberately fails to do so by not answering her radio call for help. In Fathers and Sons, a mythic play about Wild Bill Hickok, neither friendship nor love escapes the carnage. In Babe's Civil War play Rebel Women, General Sherman says, "I have no passion for war." The plausibility gap in Babe's plays is that almost nothing arouses his characters' passions...
Given time, the happyologists could conceivably come up with a useful, or at least a discerning, answer. Perhaps the question is so fundamental that, like love and wisdom, it will al ways elude human definition. For the moment, surely, it can be answered decisively, for better or worse, only by each in dividual. In short, the considerable resources, even good intentions, of science have so far disclosed little about happiness that was not available in the words of Seneca "Unblest is he who thinks himself unblest") in ancient times or those of Abe Lincoln ("Most folks are about as happy...