Word: monarchal
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...which he meant the playwright's ability to avoid putting his own personality and opinions into the mouths of his characters. But this "negative capability" was least in evidence in Henry V, in which Shakespeare set out to limn the unlimited glory of a national hero-conqueror, a model monarch. Yet Kahn has tried to make the play into a sardonic antiwar tract...
...even agree with the God-is-dead proponents. But Shakespeare and the sixteenth-century Elizabethans believed in war, just as had Henry V and his subjects in the early fifteenth century. The word "warlike" in Henry V is an adjective of praise, not of opprobrium. And the monarch, for "our kingdom's safety," repeatedly invokes God's participation in doing battle when the "cause [is] just and [the] quarrel honorable." For good or ill, Henry's goal is that of so many present-day politicians: law 'n' order...
...prestige is not, of course, a reflection of any real power. More than a century ago, Walter Bagehot noted that a constitutional monarch has only three rights: "The right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn." Those narrow royal prerogatives have further diminished in the years since. Such considerable aura as the British crown still has for Britons and the rest of the world is largely the residual glow from the past. It emanates from the legends and lives of England's kings, evoking images of silver trumpets raised on lofty battlements, the colored swirl...
...Your position prevents you from taking an open part in these discussions. But you must have been an interested spectator. And you must certainly be uncomfortably aware that none of the numerous social Utopias currently being advocated by your fellow students have any room at all for a hereditary monarch or an imperial throne. You could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that you have been born and trained to a job hopelessly out of date...
WEDNESDAY NIGHT MOVIE (ABC, 8:30-11:05 p.m.). Deborah Kerr, as Governess Anna Leonowens, squares off against Yul Brynner in his Oscar-winning performance as Siam's petulant but engaging monarch in Rodgers and Hammerstein's The King...