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  3. Fanny Kemble(1809—93)was the niece of two Shakespearean tragedians, Sarah Si

Fanny Kemble(1809—93)was the niece of two Shakespearean tragedians, Sarah Si

游客2024-08-07  35
问题     Fanny Kemble(1809—93)was the niece of two Shakespearean tragedians, Sarah Siddons and Siddons’s brother, John Philip Kemble.【R1】______In fact her whole extended family constituted the foremost theatrical dynasty of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Handsome and gifted, they crop up in letters and diaries throughout the period, and were generally regarded as a kind of royalty: a race apart.
    【R2】______As her friend Henry James noted: " in two hemispheres, she had seen everyone, had known everyone". What’s more, she recorded it all in many volumes of vividly written memoirs, all swarming with people, criticism, social commentary, anecdote, scenery, political o-pinion and superb set-pieces: the digging of Brunei’s Thames tunnel, for instance.
    Kemble’s memoirs, especially her "Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation" , are as important historically as they are engrossing. But what fascinates us now is the way that Fanny, clever and reckless as she was, broke the rules-or the way she appropriated and revised the role prescribed to her by gender politics.
    【R3】______She spoke her mind and thought nothing of walking into a stream fully clothed if it was hot. It wasn’t until her marriage that her gender collided with the realities of power and money. Though she was never intended for the stage, the looming bankruptcy of her father obliged her to try her chances. Overnight, she became the toast of London. Money flowed, and yet more on a tour of America, where she met a seductive young man, Pierce Butler, heir to huge rice and cotton slave-plantations in Georgia. Hoping to escape the shallow emotionalism of the theatre, assuming a companionship of equals and somehow she managed to forget the slaves, she married him.
    【R4】______ Butler, deeply illiberal exerted his rights. He appropriated her earnings, censored her writing and when she woke to the horrors of slavery, forbade her public opposition to it. She wept, she ran away, she returned. The birth of children, in whom she had no legal rights, further enchained her.
    【R5】______The Butlers did divorce. She did lose the children. But on their majority, she recovered them. She made her own money again. Criss-crossing the Atlantic, she gave Shakespeare readings to packed audiences. Every summer, she climbed the Alps, startling the guides by singing loudly as she went. She met James in 1872 and he fell under her spell, fascinated by her proud idealism, her eccentric honesty and above all by her talk of "old London". "She reanimated the old drawing rooms, " he wrote, "relighted the old lamps, returned the old pianos. " When at last she died, he felt it, he said, "like the end of some reign or the fall of some empire. "
Questions 61 to 65
A. At a stroke she lost everything.
B. The rest of Kemble’s life was sheer indomitability.
C. The real competition for any biographer of Kemble is Kemble herself.
D. She forgot the existence of slavery in American plantations.
E. She never cared about such prescriptions.
F. The Kemble family was once a royal family that is separated from common people.
G. Her father and her French mother were also actors. [br] 【R3】
选项
答案 E
解析 本第四段开头提到“写肯布尔随心所欲，想到什么就做什么，直到婚后，她的性格才与权力和金钱这些现实发生抵触”。说明她是一个不在乎规定的人。
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