Word: merchant
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...infiltrate the presidential stronghold. They include state governors and city mayors, and the senior national and state political leaders of the President's party. After them comes a helter-skelter militia of citizens, often sniping at one another, enemies of the President as well as friends: banker, lawyer, merchant, chief, cleric, doctor, scholar, journalist, student, housewife. Some advance to plead a cause, others to extol, still others to criticize and fix blame...
...Attack. In the early days of the Republic, the founders' system was honored, as Presidents sought congressional permission for military moves abroad−if not always formal declarations of hostility. During the so-called "undeclared war" with France between 1798 and 1800, Congress authorized naval seizures of American merchant ships going to French ports. But President John Adams went further and ordered the seizure of American ships leaving those ports as well, and the Supreme Court held that he had exceeded the intent of Congress. As Administration defenders often note, President Jefferson felt free to send naval vessels...
...this some cultured character out of the pages of Henry James? One of the gentry from The Forsyte Sagal Hardly. It is Shakespeare's "wolvish, bloody" Shylock, in a provocative new production of The Merchant of Venice by London's National Theatre...
...director is the multidexterous Jonathan Miller, who for the past year has been making a name in England as a Shakespearean interpreter. For his Old Vic debut, he has removed Merchant from its traditional Renaissance setting and placed it in that most mercantile of periods, the late 19th century. In his staging, the characters as well as the furniture are ornate, substantial, richly upholstered. The verse is flattened into realistic conversational accents. The play's extravagances are trimmed to the tone and dimensions of a leather-cushioned board room...
Like the production as a whole, Olivier makes no easy appeal to the audience's sympathies, but holds to an avid, harshly funny portrayal of the cruelty of human justice and the bitter ironies of human mercy. At the end of Shakespeare's text, Jessica and the merchant, the two characters whose triumphs have been bought at the cost of Shylock's downfall, pause alone and silently onstage before the final curtain. The moment apparently is intended by Director Miller to evoke Shylock, and it works. Such is the flinty power of Olivier's unorthodox performance...