Word: queened
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...opens Act II. Lavishly costumed for a kind of inverts' Mardi Gras, the imperial army's top officers cavort in the home of the Baron von Epp. Dennis King plays the role in tiara and gown, and flutters an imperious fan with the regal disdain of a queen of players. At no other point does the play rise to this level of theatricality. Salome Jens adorns the evening physically as a Russian Mata Hari, but she delivers her lines like a fishwife. As for Maximilian Schell, he is frostily remote. Director Peter Glenville doubtless tried to coax some...
...MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS by Antonia Fraser. 613 pages. Delacorte...
...from fading into historical limbo, however, Mary Queen of Scots projected herself dramatically into the royal and religious tumult of the 16th century. In death as in life, she was sometimes reviled as a scheming whore, sometimes revered as a misunderstood martyr to her Roman Catholic faith. But she was invariably regarded as fascinating. Antonia Fraser's overlong but richly readable biography demonstrates that Mary's great fascination continues unabated...
...beguile even her English jailers long after she had lost her looks. She grew up in the cultivated, opulent court of France and French was the language she ordinarily spoke and wrote throughout her life. Pampered and adored there, she was the bride of the sickly Dauphin at 15, Queen of France at 16, a widow-and very possibly still a virgin...
...through the eyes of contemporaries, from whom the future was concealed." With such handling, events achieve a fresh plausibility; Mary's behavior with Darnley and Bothwell, for example, becomes humanly understandable. Historic perspectives are foreshortened-a most notable defect in Miss Fraser's acerbic portrait of Queen Elizabeth. Nonetheless, the author marshals her evidence generously enough to allow for differing interpretations and briskly clears away the "cobwebs of fantasy" that have attached themselves to Mary's character over the centuries. Her Mary emerges neither as a Jezebel nor as a saint, but as a high-spirited woman...