Word: shamela
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...caught him on Broadway a few years ago. This week sees Ally McBeal venturing into an "Athenian" forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Indeed, the hottest writer of treatments in Hollywood (as he was three years ago) is that high-concept old guy Shakespeare. Keanu Reeves in Shamela? Bette Midler and Stephen Dorff in The Merry Wives of Windsor? Who knows where it will...
...four-letter words, Shamela nonetheless runs high in four-letter situations. Locked away for decades in the rare-books collections of university libraries and sometimes contested as to authorship, it has been newly edited and annotated by a University of Michigan English professor, Sheridan W. Baker Jr., and is now available to any reader who can stomach a well-hung bit of 18th century game...
...When Shamela opens, Sham, unlike Pam, is not running from but gunning for the young squire, son of her late mistress, and writing her mother progress reports: " 'Laud,' says I, 'Sir, I hope you don't intend to be rude'; 'no,' says he, 'my Dear,' and then he kissed me, 'till he took away my Breath-and I pretended to be Angry, and to get away, and then he kissed me again, and breathed very short, and looked very silly; and by Ill-Luck Mrs. Jervis came...
Taking mamma's advice to heart, Shamela is soon playing the untouchable so prettily that she sends the squire's temper as well as his temperature up, and he goes around raging, "Hussy, Slut, Saucebox, Boldface-come hither!" Shamela takes to her bedroom instead, but carefully leaves the door unlatched (Pamela always locked hers). When Pamela's door was forced, she would faint dead away, but when the squire comes "pit a pat into [Shamela's] Room in his Shirt," Sham flashes some impromptu but effective jujitsu...
After losing a few more amatory battles, the squire is ready to offer his hand and fortune in marriage. Shamela has a moment of doubt. She still nurses a soft spot in her heart for a certain "jolly Parson" to whom she had borne an illegitimate child. But she consoles herself with another of mamma's maxims: "A married Woman injures only her Husband, but a single Woman herself." Like Pamela, she goes through with the marriage...