Word: prescott
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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MARY TUDOR (439 pp.)-H.F.M. Prescott-Macmillan...
...lived and how well-deserving of the same epithet were "Bluff King Hal" (her father) and "Good Queen Bess" (her half sister). But none has succeeded in presenting Mary against the background of her time with quite the acumen and diligence of H. F. M. (for Hilda Frances Margaret) Prescott, a sometime Oxford lecturer and novelist (The Man on a Donkey-TIME. Sept. 22. 1952). First published (under the title Spanish Tudor) in 1940, Mary Tudor is an enlarged, revised version of a first-rate work of scholarship...
...Kingdoms. Biographer Prescott's aim is to show how and why a princess of "patient, untiring affection" grew into a soured, suspicious queen who was incapable of compromise in the matter of religious heresy. So the real story of Mary has to begin with the canceling of the marriage of her mother, Katherine of Aragon, and Henry VIII...
...Confession of me, the Lady Mary" (as this surrender was entitled) was destined "to mark Mary for life." She had been "false to her mother and her mother's Church." writes Biographer Prescott. "In every crisis . . . afterwards she remembered it, and . . . made her decision . . . regardless of wisdom, deaf to argument . . . not daring to compromise because once in her life she had known what was right, and had not done...
Slightly obscuring the weakness of the play is the general competence of the cast. Felix Aylmer is a restrained and amiable British Delegate, and Ben Astar capitalizes on a remarkable resemblance to Malenkov in a convincing, and not wholly unsympathetic portrayal of the Russian Delegate. As Mrs. Prescott, Katherine Cornell is a little hearty in her portrayal of the brilliant career-woman, but she clutches at furniture with appropriate intensity in her distraught moments...