Word: parfit
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Author Turner's most savage anecdotes are from the annals of court medicine. In a day when only God could save a King, a typical court quack was John of Gaddesden (probably Chaucer's "verrey parfit practisour"). John went so far as to publish a list of ailments that, financially, were beneath his notice. His gaudiest feat: curing Edward I's son of smallpox by swaddling the boy in scarlet robes, confining him to a room hung with scarlet drapes, claiming that the color's influence turned the trick. The 17th century court physician had less...
...century. Nine hundred years later, when "Syr Thomas Maleore, knyght" put together Morte d'Arthur, he was already synthesizing a well-encrusted legend, the sources of which he "dyd take oute of certeyn bookes of frensshe and reduced it in to Englysshe." Another 400 years and the parfit gentil knights in the pious allegories of Alfred Lord Tennyson startlingly resembled iron-padded Victorian cricketers, later followed by Mark Twain's slapstick farce and the droll sophistications of John Erskine...
...uncooperative debutante daughter, while the girl herself falls in love with a cad. In one of those splendid reversals of the seeming truth, the shakoed young palace guardsman whom Mother favors proves morally unworthy of such exalted employment, while the handsome cad emerges not only a verray parfit gentil knight but, at the last moment, a duke as well...
...King Arthur a gentleman, or was he a sort of Legs Diamond of the early Middle Ages? Was it the age of chivalry or the age of the shiv? Were the "parfit gentil knights" of the Round Table just a passel of paleo-Stalinist thugs? Henry Treece, English poet, critic and historical novelist (The Dark Island), wields a mean historic mace and it lands squarely on the romantic Arthurian legend of Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur. "Malory was wrong," says Novelist Treece flatly. He admits that his own hard-boiled debunking may be no less wrong...
...Ivanhoe, Robert Taylor makes a parfit gentle knight and troubadour, while Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Fontaine are the very models of ladies fair. Supporting them are some polished character actors: Emlyn Williams as Ivanhoe's faithful Squire Wamba, Finlay Currie as Ivanhoe's father Cedric, Felix Aylmer as the patriarchal Isaac of York, father of Rebecca, and a whole host of Normans and Saxons, knights and squires, lords and ladies and kings and commoners from the days when knighthood was in flower...