Word: marianas
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...authors have taken the thematic framework of the book from the story of a 17th-century nun, Mariana Alcoforado. Sent to a convent at the age of 16 because her parents could not afford to provide her with a dowry, she was seduced and impregnated by a dashing French cavalier, who then abandoned her and returned to France with Napoleon's army. Mariana poured out her love and her bitterness in a series of five letters addressed to her seducer--the original Portuguese Letters, which were published in Paris...
...STORY of Mariana serves the authors the way a grain of sand serves an oyster. It acts as an irritant to which they return again and again, a stimulus to the creation of an entire world--a world constructed from materials extracted painfully from within themselves. Through letters supposedly written to and by Mariana, they invent a cast of characters and unfold a baroque plot full of passion and intrigue. Interspersed with these letters are vignettes of other Marianas. Marias and Maria Anas, all trapped in some kind of "convent"--of marriage, of motherhood, of passion--and all somehow seduced...
...most mysterious, least-known area of man's universe does not lie in the farthest reaches of outer space. Nor is it found in the most remote Amazonian jungle or in the inky blackness of the Mariana Trench. It is located instead in side the human skull, and consists of some 3½ pounds of pinkish-gray mate rial with the consistency of oat meal. It is, of course, the human brain...
...fiancee Juliet, Isabella pleads for her brother's life: and Angelo, his lust aroused, promises to spare Claudio only if she will sleep with him. Despite Claudio's imploring, Isabella refuses to surrender her chastity, but goes along with the trick of letting Angelo's long-ago-jilted fiancee Mariana take her place...
...play's only song, "Take, o take those lips away" (which also turns up in Beaumont and Fletcher's play Rollo, with music by John Wilson), is assigned by Shakespeare to a young boy, who serenades Mariana in the garden of her "moated grange." Instead of a solo ayre, John Morris has composed a pleasant madrigal for ten singers, which is later reprised offstage and, at the end, played by a brass choir, to round off a dissonant play with harmonious concords...