Word: messalina
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...falls in love with an agoraphobic library assistant, Tissy, a delicate, nervous creature whom he hopes to nurse to a normal life. Abetted by her mother, a "Messalina of the suburbs," Tissy turns out to harbor the tyrannical selfishness of the very weak. Their marriage is a fiasco. Lewis falls under the spell of Emmy, a passionate and extraverted actress who is the opposite of his wife in every way except relentless self-absorption. Although he resists Emmy's advances, his wife leaves him anyway. He drifts passively through decades of wistful misery, unable to attain pleasure or please others...
...plays of this sort are like a cram course with illustrated color slides. The audience can never quite settle down to the entertainment for fear of some impending exam. Knowing the names of the characters does not really help, since their natures change with bewildering rapidity. Click: here is Messalina gamely struggling to protect her virginity from Caligula. Presto: here is Messalina, Empress to Claudius, cuckolding him wholesale in the foulest brothels of Rome...
Centuries shuttled back and forth last week on NBC. Italian truck drivers be came Roman legionnaires; butchers were metamorphosed Into gladiators (one burly swordsman was nearly reduced to tears When he got a scratched ear); a woman switched from modern bourgeois matron to sadistic Messalina. These time-machine gambols took place on Fellini: A Director's Notebook, one program in the NBC series called "Experiment in Television" that had managed to escape from the usual Sunday-afternoon intellectual ghetto to prime time...
Planned Parenthood. Catherine's self-portrait is in demure contrast to the pic ture drawn by historians, who characterize her as a Messalina. with a reputed score of 55 lovers. She was the first to concede her womanly charms, admitted - in a passage expurgated from the 1907 Russian edition - that these were "the halfway house to temptation." But she intimates strongly that Peter never consummated their marriage, and that her first affairs during the years of waiting were instigated, apparently by the Empress, to perpetuate the dynasty...
When Demetrius refuses to kill his opponent, the Emperor substitutes three tigers. But Demetrius tarzans the beasts (obviously tame as tabbies), and a Roman noblewoman named Messalina (Susan Hay ward) decides she would like to do a little wrestling with him herself. In due time Demetrius is thrown, and lands for a brief period in the lady...