Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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EVERYBODY HAS a theory about what Napoleon did with his hand stuck inside his coat: more accurate accounts have it that he had a bad case of gout or rheumatism, that his hand was relatively useless. More morbid conjecturers claim that he had a bad case of the claw--his hand tightened up into a gruesome eagle-grip. But the wildest theory I've heard yet was that he had a thirty-eight inch cock. Of course this is mere speculation--nobody really knows for sure what compelled Napoleon to do all the things he did. But George Bernard Shaw...
...Shaw's first play staged in America. After they turned him down he made an aborted attempt to sell the play to Henry Irving, who was something of a tyrannical manager-leading man at London's Lyceum Theater. Possibly Shaw had Irving in mind when he wrote about Napoleon in the stage directions...
...WHATEVER Shaw's motives, The Man of Destiny combines a lot of plain fun with an attack directed equally at self-willed, Nietzchian types and the principled English. It's about Napoleon right at the period of his life when his military ventures against Austria were winning him acclaim back home. The setting is a small Italian inn, and Bonaparte has just won the battle of Lodi. He's awaiting more information both from the field and from Paris and at the start, anyway, the play has potential for getting very serious. It is only when his courier walks...
...Destiny is one of Shaw's lesser-known plays, a "historical" drama about Napoleon and the women he loved. At the Loeb Ex, tonight...
...life without reason, his Desastres de la Guerra brought out the impossibility of life without reason. The most piercing and disturbing part of the MFA's exhibition is the room devoted to the Desastres. Built on Goya's own experience during the six-year war between Spain and Napoleon's France, the Desastres show the carnage, the stench--the actuality of war. Goya shows no heroes and no villains. No supernatural forces are at work here--the agony and suffering are inflicted by people onto other people, and no one is spared...