Word: witting
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...Happy Jack Kelly, up from hod carrying to become a millionaire and father of a Princess, wanted no squabbling over his estate. All his legatees knew in advance exactly what he meant to leave them. With that matter out of the way, Kelly sat down and penned words of wit and wisdom. To his sons-in-law (including Monaco's Prince Rainier), he left nary a penny: "I don't want to give the impression that I am against sons-in-law. If they are the right type, they will provide for themselves and their families...
...theaters, tents and schoolrooms of every land, wherever the sun sets and curtains rise, Falstaff struts with his gorbellied wit, Bottom bumbles through the woods, and wide-eyed Ophelia trembles before Hamlet's abuse. Malvolio preens like a toad in yellow stockings. Hotspur wells blood. In soliloquy and song, in bantering bawdry and scalp-tingling rhetoric, in the kingliest English and in tender or rough translation, they speak to man from mankind's heart. Never in the nearly 400 years since their creator was born have Shakespeare's characters spoken to so many, or meant so much...
...temper Shakespeare had caught was in a ferment. In the "quick forge and working-house of thought," Elizabethan London was minting a new breed: Renaissance man. Never was the Englishman more Latin; bristling with Spanish pride at personal indignities, Italianate in his boastful womanizing, French in his world-playful wit. After the Spanish Armada went down (1588), England ruled the waves, and no one had ever so masterfully ruled England as Elizabeth I. The Elizabethan was agape at the sheer wonder of himself: "What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty...
...sizable share of his biographers. His mistresses, whom he kept in oriental profusion, thought that they governed him, and Parliament agreed. Political adversaries and friends alike thought him a libertine, which he was, and a fool, which he was not. His sober adviser, Lord Halifax, grumbled that "the wit of a gentleman and that of a crowned head ought to be two different things...
Billy almost never does, on screen or off. Inside a head that makes him look like a benevolent old bullfrog resides a restless imagination, a "flypaper memory" and a wit that ranges from the merry to the mordant. Wilder, not Benchley, was the man who first said: "Wait till I slip out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini." He is also the author of this scathing epigram: "I would worship the ground you walk on if you lived in a better neighborhood...