Word: nobleman
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...most provocative territory in the Nabokovian universe remains the convolutions of the brain. In the final play, The Grand-dad, this century's refugees are replaced by a French nobleman whose good fortune helped him escape the guillotine in 1792. Decades later he runs into the frustrated executioner, now a senile gent determined to rectify the accidents of history...
Giselle, a young girl with a weak heart, has two flaws that ultimately overstrain her fragile organ. She can neither resist dancing nor the attentions of Count Albrecht, a nobleman disguised in peasant garb. While her insistence on dancing threatens her health, Giselle is finally overcome after learning her lover's true identity. As it turns out, he is not only a count, but he is betrothed to another woman. Appropriately, Giselle goes mad and dies of a broken heart...
Brian Smiar, as Gloucester the other betrayed father, has no specific fallings, but lacks the air of nobility which should add extra bitterness to his fall. The same deficiency appears in Arthur Strimling's Kent; Strimling plays a servant, rather than a nobleman playing a servant. That complexity is crucial to the role of Kent, since in a class-conscious Elizabethan context, Kent's willingness to humble himself gives the most extreme proof of his devotion to Lear...
Mahmoud's tomb is indeed spacious, largely a ceremonial room built by a 19th century nobleman named Khanzouri. In a smaller side room, which contains Khanzouri's marble cenotaph, Mahmoud's wife hangs the laundry. "The children were born here," Mahmoud adds, "so they are not afraid...
...indispensable device. "Pacification" has become a popular term for war ("War is peace," as the Ministry of Truth says in Nineteen Eighty-Four), but the Romans meant much the same thing by the term Pax Romana. "Where they make a desert, they call it peace," protested an English nobleman quoted in Tacitus. Viet Nam brought us new words for the old realities: soldiers "wasted" the enemy, some "fragged" their own officers, bombers provided "close air support." Even the CIA contributed a verbal novelty: "termination with extreme prejudice...