Word: stageful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ougly Hell. As master of the court revels from 1605 onwards, Jones revolutionized English stage techniques, importing the Italian proscenium arch and exiling the simple "wooden O" of Shakespeare's stage for three centuries. From Florence, he adapted stage sets that consisted of serried ranks of flats painted in perspective, with a distant vista on the backdrop, "the whole worke shooting downewards," as Jonson said, "which caught the eye afarre off with a wandring beauty...
Jones delighted in intricate stage machinery, created supernatural effects ranging from the mouth of an "ougly Hell" that shot flames to a "heaven opening," full of deities and a celestial chorus. He specially enjoyed sketching extravagant costumes for the court ladies, most of which he designed so that the ladies were prettily, if ingenuously, exposed, wearing at most diaphanous veils across the bosom. Seventeenth century ladies, however, were an imperious lot, and had no compunctions about altering their dress to suit themselves. History does not record how many of them actually chose to turn up bare-breasted at the festivities...
...only a handful of his paintings hung in museums; today, there are more than 30, and their prices have escalated some 1,500% (a major drip painting by Pollock now brings upwards of $100,000). Matters have even reached the stage where, when Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week opened an immense Pollock retrospective, some critics decided that it was high time to begin to debunk the "myth" of his achievement. Sniffed the New York Times's Hilton Kramer: "An interesting artist of, say, the third class. It is only the poverty of our own artistic...
...sexual mores have quite obviously changed during the 2,000 years of Christian history, churchmen nonetheless continue to act as if there were a permanent, inflexible standard of behavior. "Why," he asked, "should it not be conceivable to think of the act of marriage as being divided into several stages, from single life to matrimony?" One such interim stage, he suggested, might be a "recognized premarriage," during which sexual relations by the couple would not be condemned as sinful...
...more benign mood, he once wooed a prospective screenwriter: "I'll do anything for you. You can't sleep with your wife any more? You're crazy about a starlet? I'll let you take her down to Stage Eight, and I'll stand outside and guard the door...