Word: victorians
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...what it was at old Central High. There you talked just when you felt like saying something. Here talking is a tool and a weapon. Your courses are not a handful of cards, to be slapped down face up and turned for chips. Rather, like the calves of a Victorian lady, they are to be displayed to the vulgar view only at the most propitious moment, and then only after suitable preparatory skirmishes...
...even the City of Cambridge dared not violate her wishes by installing sewer connections. The great elms which gave the house its name had grown up into the sort of forest one finds in Grimm tales, and inside, each of the twelve large rooms was done up in gloomy Victorian style--a sad fate for what was once a bright, airy Colonial country house...
...floor rooms, snipping swatches from the upholstery as souvenirs. On the eve of Lincoln's second inauguration, his bodyguard observed that the public parlors looked "as if a regiment of rebel troops had been quartered there-with permission to forage." Ulysses S. Grant redecorated in garish Mississippi Riverboat Victorian, with a great profusion of potted palms and gaslight globes...
Another of Shaw's targets in this play has receded from view a good deal since his day: the Victorian melodrama. But Shaw, as a practicing drama reviewer in the 1890's, was fed up to the gills with this type of play. In Caesar and Cleopatra (as well as the other two "Puritan" plays) he was poking fun at this genre and pulling the pedestal out from under the Romantic hero. The play is, then--if I may run the risk of Polonius' excessive categorization--an example of the didactic parody - melodrama. Brilliant comedy, epigrammatic wit, and hectic melodrama...
...Miss Hertz sprinting purposefully through a forest of knees in the second act patter trio. With a lovely soprano voice and superb comic timing Kathleen Campbell played a village beauty, Rose Maybud-"sweet Rose Maybud," as she often reminds us. Demurely and discreetly, she was a girl on the Victorian make. Her turn came in the second act's "Tight Little Craft" sequence when, with a Maiden At Prayer expression transfixing her lovely visage, Miss Campbell executed a kick step which was far more Minsky than Savoy...