Word: serjeants
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...prude nor Puritan, Hogarth sought to lay bare the foibles of his England. Yet he was no revolutionary; he wore the scarlet coat of a gentleman, and respected the Crown. He married the daughter of the man who painted murals in St. Paul's, eventually succeeded him as Serjeant-Painter to Kings George II and III. He began life as an apprentice silversmith, wound up with a country house and six servants...
...Serjeant Musgrave's Dance. Give some playwrights a stage and they turn it into a combination lecture platform and thundering pulpit. Scarcely bothering to dramatize their themes, they simply harangue the playgoer as if he were a retarded child or a calloused sinner...
...Serjeant Musgrave (John Colicos) is a deserter from a station in an unidentified British protectorate of a century ago. The slaying of a buddy and the ensuing messy retaliatory action against the native population have turned Musgrave into a peace fanatic. He heads back for his buddy's home town in the north of England with the boy's crated skeleton, a Gatling gun, several rifles, and three fellow deserters...
...moral virtue of a troubled conscience. Going off on tangents, staging diversionary incidents, piling on self-indulgent rhetoric: all these would have been enough to spoil the play. But Arden has a much more drastic flaw. He tries to practice consensus drama, a contradiction in terms. For Serjeant Musgrave's Dance to possess any intrinsic vitality, there would have to be a respectable body of thought holding that war is heavenly. As it is, Arden is merely preaching sermons to the converted, and universal agreement is the most potent sleeping powder in the theater...
Most of the book's main characters are intact-Messrs. Pickwick, Winkle, Tupman and Snodgrass, the indomitable Sam ("The world is wery full of willains") Weller, the scapegrace Jingle, Mr. Wardle ("Joe? Drat that boy! He's asleep again!"), Serjeant Buzfuz, Mrs. Bardell, the pettifogging Dodson & Fogg. Most of the main "adventures in the course of enlightenment" are related-Winkle's duel with Dr. Slammer ("Mr. Pickwick, do not obtain the assistance of several peace officers to take either me or Dr. Slammer into custody. I say do not."), the "gammoning" of Rachel Wardle, Mr. Pickwick caught...