Word: theseus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...past as past is merely archaeology or entertainment, or both. Author Mary (The Last of the Wine) Renault's The King Must Die (a midsummer Book-of-the-Month Club choice) is both, but she is a better literary archaeologist than an entertainer. Her myth is the Theseus legend and she is all too faithful...
...combat with such ferocious beasts as the lion, wild bull and dragon. Treated with religious awe and epic endowments in their time, such old heroes never fade away, still have power in art. Dorothy Norman thinks she knows the reason. "Why," she asks, "do such age-old concepts as Theseus and the Minotaur, Job and Behemoth, continue to speak to us with such undiminished power?" Her reply: "Because they suggest to us not some remote force or personage, but phases of our own most essential struggle with ourselves...
...from ego, pride . . . destructive forces to be faced, overcome, transmuted." The powerful, majestic bull she sees as lunar, the great progenitor who nonetheless partakes of the dark unconscious and "the lower material aspects ... to be sacrificed, conquered, outgrown ... so that the positive, creative energies may be released." The reason Theseus had to search out and slay the half-bull, half-human Minotaur in the labyrinth, she suggests, is that the beast represents the "misused powers of the 'bull...
Besides Miss Tettelbach, other leading roles in the production are played by Eugene Gervasi, as Richard II; Earle Edgerton, as Falstaff; Bruce Macdonald as Theseus; Thomas Lumbard as Lysander; and Erich Segal as Romeo...
...Said Johnson: "Sir, a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.* A bullheaded character of mythology, to whom many innocents were sacrificed. It took a hero, Theseus, to find the way out of his labyrinth...