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that might make his audience more amenable to his increasingly radical and often arcane views. Shaw felt, as he also acknowledged in 1921, that the ‘sweet-shop view of theatre’, by then out of fashion, compelled him to sugar-coat the pill of philosophy with his rollicking comedy and thus to deliver his polemical message without resorting to a stultifying lecture or treatise
councillors, blue, by taking some of the Eupholon pills. Vincent realises that Solly had known of his complicity in their predicament all along and, moreover, that the revolutionaries ‘are fucking delighted’ that he sent the pills (158). But there is a catch: in order to get the pills and join the collective blueness, Vincent must get past the crack-shot guard he himself had posted outside the warehouse: he faces his own invention, in a test which has echoes of classical fables such as Theseus facing the Minotaur in the labyrinth. This explores the
’s kitchens. Poullemouillet, one of the King’s advisers, declares that Ripaille, the royal chef whose death has thrown the kingdom into turmoil, had carried to his grave the secret of those pills that calmed one’s appetite, which he had distributed to the starving masses (Marinetti 1905: 25). Although the concept of artificial feeding through pills exists in both works, the pills envisaged in Le Roi Bombance did not have a transformative power on the lives of the citizens. These pills merely calmed the appetites of the Bourdes but did not have the effect of providing
, absorbing the radical and romantic elements of his culture.’ 5 Though in some sense the novel’s politics conform to the conventions of the genres it employs, genre never hems the politics in. Genre theorists, as Kerri Andrews summarises, ‘argue that some degree of modification, some degree of evolution, is both inevitable and inherent within systems of genre’. 6 Beside the outrageously romantic, gothic, and melodramatic is explicit political content. The ‘penny blood’ material does not simply make the politics ‘more attractive’, as Ernest Jones has it, 7 making the
malcontent from faithful subject. This essay has attempted to show the practical and ideological difficulties of ‘speak[ing] plain’ that Bacon encountered in the New Atlantis. We have identified the covert criticism Bacon levelled at James I. Indeed, the fact that Bacon’s dissatisfaction was articulated obliquely should come as no surprise since for a counsellor not to make his advice palatable by sugaring the pill was political, often literal, suicide. Given the uncertainty of the patronage system and the powerlessness, or worse, of those that failed to please their
The church as sacred space places the reader at the heart of medieval religious life, standing inside the church with the medieval laity in order to ask what the church meant to them and why. It examines the church as a building, idea, and community, and explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was crucial to its place at the centre of lay devotion and parish life. At a time when the parish church was facing competition for lay attention, and dissenting movements such as Lollardy were challenging the relevance of the material church, the book examines what was at stake in discussions of sanctity and its manifestations. Exploring a range of Middle English literature alongside liturgy, architecture, and material culture, the book explores the ways in which the sanctity of the church was constructed and maintained for the edification of the laity. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary theoretical approaches, the book offers a reading of the church as continually produced and negotiated by the rituals, performances, and practices of its lay communities, who were constantly being asked to attend to its material form, visual decorations, and significance. The meaning of the church was a dominant question in late-medieval religious culture and this book provides an invaluable context for students and academics working on lay religious experience and canonical Middle English texts.
of a date is one of the most poignant moments in the film – and justifiably repulsed by the aggressiveness of her real gentleman caller, she is ready to pull down the curtains on her life and take enough sleeping pills to knock out all of New Jersey, as Stella notes. Hearing the song, though, makes her change her mind, put down the pills and open the curtains. The rest of her story is told elliptically, but the later vignettes are revealing: she is briefly seen rushing to look out to the courtyard, concerned by Jefferies’ cry for help, a sign that she is now more
’, ‘queynteli’, ‘curiouse’ – he focuses on ‘whough’ (how) the pillers are painted and polished and carved. His attention is not on what is depicted, but how it 214 The church as sacred space in Middle English literature and culture has been achieved, on the craftsmanship itself rather than what it signifies. The Lollard position on imagery often points out that such objects are ‘maade be werkyng of mannys hand’ and therefore should not be worshipped, but the narrator’s forensic inspection of the craftsmanship almost slips into this very adoration.86 Fortunately, the