Word: passions
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Country Wife, by William Wycherley. Charles II's England shared the obsession of its king-it was sex-mad. From that consuming passion sprang the witty, monomaniacally bawdy drama known as Restoration comedy. If Congreve was the age's greatest theatrical wit, Wycherley (1640-1715) may well have been its most vigorous social chronicler. He was a rake who later reformed, with all the zealotry that implies. In him, the pagan warred with the Puritan, the scandalizer with the sermonizer, and perhaps never more fiercely than in his most durable play, The Country Wife...
...Shakespeare's destiny to dwarf his playwriting contemporaries, which by no means makes them dwarfs. Webster, best known for The Duchess of Malfi, was a splendid poet who mixed beauty with horror. If he spilled too much blood on stage, he also drenched the boards with passion. The decisive motion in The White Devil is a plunging dagger, but its determining mood is an obsessive sense of evil. In an admirable off-Broadway revival in modern dress, the play leaps the centuries with ease-it is galvanically alive...
Captain of Grenadiers. Despite the drawbacks of involvement, Schlesinger rejects the notion that the best historian is the one who has withdrawn to a perch above the heat and passion of life. Thucydides served as a general during the Peloponnesian War. Edward Gibbon, a soldier in his youth, found the experience valuable when he wrote Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "The captain of Hampshire Grenadiers," Gibbon insisted, "was not useless to the historian of the Roman Empire." Indeed, says Schlesinger, "until the last half of the 19th century, the great historians were, in one way or another, captains...
...faculty members and physicians who say that you are of sound enough mind, and body to, say, enter graduate school face the same challenge in filling out forms that you do. The same passion for a complete, readable overview which leads the State Department to describe the Curriculm Vitae as a "narrative statement giving a pic- ture of yourself as an individual" may motivate its instructions to your doctor ("Comment in full on cranial nerves, motor status and coordination, reflexes, and equilibrium and indicate if the applicant has ever suffered from seizure...
Humphrey noted that increasing and voluble concern international affairs has made it more important than to protect the right of dissent. "Let us never in our frenzy, our passion, our emotion, deny the right to be different, to disagree," he said...