The word Marry appears quite often
in Shakespeare's plays, prefacing a sentence
and meaning sometimes Indeed! but more often
just an attention-catching word like Look!
It is a short form of By the Virgin Mary!
and disappeared in Cromwell's Commonwealth,
if not before.
It is curious that the secular and proletarian,
tomboy-virginal, revolutionary symbol
of the French Republic since 1976, Marianne
(who appears in silhouette on stamps and on
official stationery and documents) is named
after the Virgin Mary and her mother,
and not the burned-by-the-English Jeanne.
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| Delacroix's painting of Marianne adapted as a mural in support of the right-wing Gilets-Jaunes. |
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