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From the glamorous world of opera to the underbelly of New York's seediest tenements, a page–turning rollercoaster ride of kidnappings, betrayals, /td/tr/table friendships, spies, bribes, hidden identities, and twisted intrigues ... By 1908, Francesca Frascatti has the opera world at her feet. A volatile Neapolitan diva, Francesca secretly aches with regret for having given up her daughter, Maria Grazia, on the road to stardom. Hearing that Maria has started a new life in America, Francesca tries to find her. By night, she sings Tosca; by day, she and Dante Romano, a detective posing as her lover, assume any guise necessary to search New York. Francesca must brave a sordid maze of spies, corrupt police officers and greedy hooligans to reach Maria Grazia before her cunning grandfather can whisk her off to his Italian estate, and away from her forever. At the opera house, Mina DiGianni, a gentle Italian lace maker from the Lower East Side, becomes Francesca's costume dresser and confidante. Mina is also haunted by her past. Caught between the joyful hope of new life growing inside her and the painful reality of her husband's abuse, Mina discovers new strengths and possibilities working for Francesca . and is bewildered to find herself falling in love with the diva's enigmatic lover, Dante. Mina and Francesca's worlds become ever more intertwined, and then collide in a shocking turn of events. Both women will face the greatest challenges of their lives: to finally lay their pasts to rest, and to embrace the present.
'He's a fool that marries, but he's a greater fool that does not marry a fool.' This bawdy, hilarious, subversive and wickedly satirical drama pokes fun at the humourless, the jealous, and the adulterous alike. It features a country wife, Margery, whose husband believes she is too naïve to cuckold him; and an anti-hero, Horner, who pretends to be impotent in order to have unrestrained access to the women keen on 'the sport'. A number of licentious and hypocritical women request Horner's services – the country wife among them. The Country Wife has provoked powerfully mixed reactions over the years. The seventeenth century libertine king Charles II saw it twice, and is said to have joined the 'dance of the cuckolds' at the end of one performance; the eighteenth century actor-playwright David Garrick declared it 'the most licentious play in the English language'; the Victorian Macaulay compared it to a skunk, because it was 'too filthy to handle and too noisome even to approach'. Twentieth century productions heralded it a Restoration masterpiece. Sexually frank, and as ready to criticise marriage as infidelity, the virtuosity, linguistic energy, brilliant wit, naughtiness and complexity of this ribald play have made it a staple of the modern stage. This student edition contains a lengthy, entirely new introduction, by leading scholar, Tiffany Stern, with a background on the author, structure, characters, genre, themes, original staging and performance history, as well as an updated bibliography and a fully annotated version of the playtext.
Don't think that your wife has placed waste-paper baskets in the rooms as ornaments. Don't forget that very true remark that while face powder may catch a man, baking powder is the stuff to hold him. Marriage can be a series of humorous miscommunications, a power struggle, or a diplomatic nightmare. Men and women have long struggled to figure each other out--and the misunderstandings can continue well after they've been joined in matrimony. But long before Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, couples turned to self-help booklets such as How to Be a GoodHusband and How to Be a Good Wife, two historic advice books that are now delightfully reproduced by the Bodleian Library. The books, originally published in the 1930s for middle-class British couples, are filled with witty and charming aphorisms on how wives and husbands should treat each other. Some advice is unquestionably outdated--"It is a wife's duty to look her best. If you don't tidy yourself up, don't be surprised if your husband begins to compare you unfavorably with the typist at the office"--but many other pieces of advice are wholly applicable today. They include such insightful sayings as: "Don't tell your wife terminological inexactitudes, which are, in plain English, lies. A woman has wonderful intuition for spotting even minor departures from the truth"; "After all is said and done, husbands are not terribly difficult to manage"; or "Don't squeeze the tube of toothpaste from the top instead of from the bottom. This is one of the small things of life that always irritates a careful wife." Entertaining and charmingly illustrated, How to Be a Good Husband and How to Be a Good Wife offer enduringly useful advice for all couples, from the newly engaged to those celebrating their golden anniversary.