Word: virtuousness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Trumbull stages his Tory sticking at the town meeting of an unnamed New England hamlet where, in traditional fashion, citizens "met, made speeches full long winded,/ Resolved, protested, and rescinded." Independence is the subject under debate, and the battle is between the virtuous Patriot Honorius and the affronted Royalist Squire M'Fingal. Honorius is too admirable to be very interesting, and the author devotes most of his attention to M'Fingal. The squire, writes Trumbull, is so perceptive that "not only saw he all that was,/ But much that never came to pass," adding slyly that the squire...
...whole, the acting in The Dragon is excellent. Jonathan Epstein, as Lancelot, is properly virtuous, if a bit given to pregnant pauses between his lines. The only time the three-hour show really drags badly is during his pseudo-death scene, which lasts a long 15 minutes instead of five or ten. But perhaps that's how Lancelot should be: a little too virtuous to avoid those long and tedious soliloquies. It isn't easy, after all, to make completely believable a character who tells the maiden he has not seen in a year that he came back a month...
...exhortation to better behavior; Hills promises not only to make virtue fashionable but to bring it within the grasp of the most temptation-beset person. When it comes right down to it, though, if you start with Hills's straight-forward view of vice, the actual how of being virtuous isn't that complicated--if you want to be good, why not just do it (leave your car window intact, pay for your books, etc)? Virtue costs money, to be sure; but the part that really bothers Hills--what makes how to be good a question he can sink...
...entertaining. The answer is something like, "to thine own self be true" with firm principles and a dollop of theatricality tossed in for good measure. "Vice can be very interesting. But it is a vice to be dull. Similarly, while it may or may not be interesting to be virtuous, it is indubitably virtuous to be interesting. That's why Virtue isn't dull. That's why the cultivation of the self is the sine qua non, the without-it-you're-not-in-it, of being good." Hills is right, of course, about the unpopularity of small-scale...
During their confrontation outside the prison gates, Mary accuses Elizabeth of hiding her sins behind "the false show of a virtuous-seeming face." Mary Stuart's sins--its slow pace and weak male leads--are right out in the open, but they fail to obscure the queenly virtue which illuminates the show...