Word: prescott
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...TEXAS RANGERS by Walter Prescott Webb. 583 pages. University of Texas...
...just as Shakespeare could not have done without Holinshed's Chronicles, Shaffer could not have done without Prescott's Conquest of Peru (an astounding achievements-researched and written Jasmite the almost total blindness Prescott incurred from a food throwing fracas among Harvard students-and still, after more than a century, the definitive work on the subject). And Shaffer did his homework well. He follows the account in Book III of Prescott rather more closely than Shakespeare kept to his historical sources...
Shaffer has, however, departed in certain instances from Prescott. Some deviations are inconsequential details, but others are important. Shaffer has moved the murder of Atahuallpa's brother Huascar ahead in time. And he has made Pizarro eventually a more sympathetic character than emerges from Prescott, who rightly stated that "the treatment of Atahuallpa, from first to last, forms undoubtedly one of the darkest chapters in Spanish colonial history." But these changes are invariably justified dramaturgically, Shaffer has retained, compressed, omitted, and changed the right things to insure a better play...
...mean to imply that this is a flawless work. There is, near the end of Act II, one abrupt and unmotivated shift in Pizarro's attitude that Shaffer failed to validate (Prescott didn't have the answer either). Also the Narrator can't seem to make up his mind whether the Spanish forces numbered...
...partial understanding of Johnson, one has to go back to the harsh hill country of west-central Texas where he was born in 1908. Historian Walter Prescott Webb describes it as a land of "nauseating loneliness," whose inhabitants were "far from markets, burned by drought, beaten by hail, withered by hot winds, frozen by blizzards, eaten out by grasshoppers, exploited by capitalists and cozened by politicians...