Word: shrewishly
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They put him on the Reuben James. She was one of the old four-stacker crack-erboxes that were finished too late for the other war; she was two years older than he, and shrewish in a choppy sea. But he got to like her, learned to refer to her as Rube and developed a heap of respect for the commanding officer, Lieut. Commander Heywood L. Edwards. That name Heywood did not mean a thing: it was better to call him Tex and pay heed to his calm voice: he was six feet two and used to be an Olympic...
...Coward's cycle of nine short plays called Tonight at 8:30 she surprised every one with her emotional flexibility, playing not only Mayfairian parts, but a shrewish lower-class wife whose husband revolts from their sodden routine, and a romance-starved middle-aged woman beginning and ending a hopeless affair in a railroad station restaurant. By the middle '30s it had become clear that while Gertrude Lawrence might not be the perfect understudy for Katharine Cornell, the versatile Miss Lawrence could come a great deal closer to putting across Juliet than Miss Cornell could to putting across Someone...
Ruth Gordon, recently brought from Broadway to Hollywood to play shrewish Mary Todd Lincoln, plays an even more difficult role as self-effacing Frau Ehrlich, and plays it better. By shadings of voice, gesture, glance, she becomes the wife who, excluded from her famous husband's death chamber by the presence of his great colleagues and his physician, sits playing the simplest of German love songs: Du, du liegst mir im Herzen. When she can be alone with him at last, he is dead. And her closing of the door upon herself and his body is the picture...
Whether their interpretation is accurate or not, no one can really tell, but anyone who has seen the play can readily tell that they have brought a vivid personality to life. Mystic, tragic, almost pathetic, their Lincoln is haunted by a trauma of youth, heckled by a shrewish wife, driven into the White House almost against his will, yet ostensibly he is just a backwoods politician with canny horse-sense and a flair for fence-sitting. None of the rampant idealism usually attributed to Lincoln colors the Sherwood-Massey characterization, and for that reason the play might be considered derogatory...
Born not an aristocrat but a stonecutter's son, Socrates was schooled by Sophists (the Leftists of Athens) and was at first a penurious democrat. As he grew more famed, Socrates began to hobnob with aristocrats, took gifts of money from them, became less ascetic, changed wives (from shrewish, lowborn Xanthippe to patrician Myrto). By the time he had passed 50, Socrates was followed by no rabble but by young aristocrats who plotted to overthrow the Athenian democracy...