Word: wits
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Dates: during 1960-1960
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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...
...passion for public anonymity is readily understandable at the individual level. Every alcoholic needs pals on whom he can lean for help, and whom he can help to bolster his own ego. At the organizational level, the anonymity is more complex. Bill W., a forceful speaker with a cutting wit, explains: "Identification leads to power drives. The thought of power is one reason we were drunks in the first place. A.A. takes no denominational, political or economic stands. It stays out of controversy. We do not claim that anonymity is a virtue. Rather, it is a protection." In proof...
...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...