| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: listener tense with expectation, ends with an explosion that tears
the very air. I was more and more irritable: I sat on the edge
of the berth and hoped the snorer would choke to death. He had
considerable vitality, however; he withstood one shock after another
and survived to start again with new vigor. In desperation I found
some cigarettes and one match, piled my blankets over my grip, and
drawing the curtains together as though the berth were still occupied,
I made my way to the vestibule of the car.
I was not clad for dress parade. Is it because the male is so
restricted to gloom in his every-day attire that he blossoms into
gaudy colors in his pajamas and dressing-gowns? It would take a Turk
The Man in Lower Ten |
The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: lance and shield, for instance, in actual warfare, which is so
frequent in his plays, is drawn from archaeology, and not from the
military accoutrements of his day; and his general use of armour in
battle was not a characteristic of his age, a time when it was
rapidly disappearing before firearms. Again, the crest on
Warwick's helmet, of which such a point is made in HENRY THE SIXTH,
is absolutely correct in a fifteenth-century play when crests were
generally worn, but would not have been so in a play of
Shakespeare's own time, when feathers and plumes had taken their
place - a fashion which, as he tells us in HENRY THE EIGHTH, was
borrowed from France. For the historical plays, then, we may be
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