Word: witchcraft
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...himself surpassed it in Twelfth Night. It is undeniably true that Dream is an unusually eclectic work, drawing its material from Plautus, Plutarch, Ovid, Apuleius, Chaucer, French romance, Italian commedia dell'arte, a couple of earlier English plays, popular folklore, and even Scot's nonfiction treatise The Discoverie of Witchcraft. But Shakespeare worked everything up into a fresh plot of his own -- or, rather, a skillfully unified interlocking set of three plots -- involving four classes of people from supernatural beings down to manual laborers. And on this work he lavished lots of his loveliest language...
...reactions of the townspeople, falsely accused of witchcraft by Abigail, the depraved 18-year-old, closely parallel the response to the "Are you now or have you ever been...?" of the HUAC hearings. When, John Proctor, the play's hero, agrees to confess his own sins but refuses to "name names," he is repeating Lillian Hellman's stand before the Committee; The Crucible is a textbook of such reactions...
...Ervin Jr. of North Carolina, the widespread use of such tests to probe federal job applicants is reminiscent of witchcraft: "Does the flesh of the applicant burn when a hot iron is applied to it? Heaven help us if we are reduced to alchemy as a technique of screening applicants for highly sensitive positions in the federal bureaucracy...
...sodomy and laughing too loudly at Mass. The laughter he suppressed, but there was nothing much he could do about sodomy, since his brother, the Due d'Orleans, and his best general, old Vendóme, were notorious sodomites. The black arts were another thing Louis frowned on. Witchcraft, magic, and a Parisian underworld of pimps and professional poisoners had been involved in a plot to eclipse the Sun King...
Comet Ikeda is expected to Crash into the sun tomorrow because of heavy witchcraft this weekend. The Astronomy Department unofficially announced last night that the extinguishing effects of the comet on the sun should cause dusk about an hour earlier for the remainder of the winter. A national time adjustment is expected...