dovunque al mondo or rent to own

Last night I got a chance to spend a cultural evening out and saw moving production of Giacomo Puccini's Madame Butterfly, hosted in the very fancy venue of the storied state theatre.  I was expecting tragedy and melodrama, being an opera, but did not recall the actual story and subject, thinking wisps of what I remembered to be possibly a contemporary interpretation: an American naval officer is stationed in Nagasaki at the turn of the century, and through the US Consul acting as an intermediary, purchases a house staffed with domestics and is introduced to the breathtaking and available Butterfly. 
Despondent and restless though afraid to make a commitment, the Navy officer decides to wed Butterfly—at least until he can find a "proper American wife" and due to Japanese mores and marriage laws (as interpreted at the time by an Italian librettist) in comparison to the relatively stricter rules regarding divorce (but not polygamy) in America.  The officer, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton speaks of a lease of nine-hundred ninety nine years with the option of quiting in the coming months.  Butterfly has already garnered her family’s displeasure by marrying a foreigner—a wealthy local businessman is also making overtures for Butterfly's affections but she rebuffs his advances, and covertly converts to Christianity for the sake of her new life, renouncing Buddhism and her ancestral, household gods.  A short while later, the officer is assigned to another port of call in the US and is away for three years.  Butterfly divulges to the Consul, whom she hopes to implore for her husband to return, that she had born the officer a son in secret.
The Consul does manage to arrange the officer's return, but the officer brings his new American bride with him and plans to take custody of the young child and raise him in America.   This modern opera is itself a direct adaptation of earlier stories, but I am not sure in what context and what allegorical elements are intentionally writ, how direct and literal, but it was certainly the musical element of the score that came across as most emotive. As the orchestra was striking its limbering cacophony before the curtains parted, those strains they played of the Star-Spangled Banner, the US anthem—were random exercises, like hearing snatches from the Miss Marple theme or scales during this warm-up—and not samplings from the liet motif. We'll have to have a night at opera together real soon.

manager of mirth or as you like it

The Bard, William Shakespeare, had such a circumspect command of English grammar (and other languages besides) as to be able to depart significantly from convention and intersperse his plays with what is regarded now as natural and essential parts of speech but created or rather committed to paper transformations of verbs in to noun counterparts and vice-versa and coined the antithesis for many words. The action to manage was in common parlance but not so a manager; there was hearten but no dishearten, the same for inaudible—not to mention inventive and intuitive words for the nonce, like swagger and belongings. One convention Shakespeare was unable to buck, however, was the Elizabethan proscription again having women on the stage and all roles were played by male actors. Often in the stage directions, one can find the abbreviation, “Dr.A.G.,” dressed as a girl, in other words, when these characters were cued. It was not until the latter half of the nineteenth century that the term drag (and the counterpart for a cross-dressing female, drab—dressed as a boy) appeared again in print, but maybe the idea can be traced by to the playwright as well.

bardolatry

In recognition of the upcoming anniversary of the birth (extrapolated, guessed, from his documented baptism) and death some fifty-one years later of William Shakespeare, I would like to point readers to the excellent series of postings, recently concluded, from the Big Think, that not only keep the debate of authorship alive, as well as other aspects of the cult of personality, but go further to explore how prodigy and poetry challenge and strengthen one's own mental capacities and how the timing of the playwright came as the English language was still malleable and under development. These two grammars, Elizabethan and complex, grew together and the body of work culturally crystallized English literary tradition more so than king, country and might. No one wants to entertain that those plays and sonnets germinated as some unsourced leavings and improvisation of the age and the focus on the historical identity of William Shakespeare has never taken away from the genius and richness of his drama, no matter if revised and polished over the years--idealized like the author--or were gifted complete like some religious acheiropoieta, but it strikes me as perfect that Shakespeare identity is really only knowable through his works, just like his characters, who no matter how real or contrived, are fleshed out with just a few lines and stage-directions but each one is much more than some playful but scant vocabulary.