Word: ariel
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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André Maurois, best-selling litterateur (Ariel, Byron, The Art of Living), wartime French refugee in Manhattan, and more popular abroad than in France, prepared to move west, to teach at Kansas City U. Subject: European novelists...
Percy Bysshe Shelley has been beckoning from the abode where the Eternal are. His signals, picked up by a literary Ariel who signs herself: "Shirley Carson Jenney, Clairaudient Psychic," are transcribed in The Fortune of Eternity. The book, she says, ''has been transmitted wholly thro' clairaudient dictation...
...Shakespeare pitched upon a strange island world almost outside geography. There, while his playwriting became a tangled, stunted vine, his poetry blazed like a burning bush. There Prospero, the banished Duke of Milan, tended his daughter Miranda, shipwrecked his enemies by waving his magic wand, ruled over the spirit Ariel, all speed and light, and the monster Caliban, that "freckled whelp hag-born." There also the shipwrecked men tediously conspired and caroused. When, at the last - his enemies forgiven, Ariel and Caliban set free - Prospero forswears magic, he seems indeed (as many men have thought) to symbolize Shakespeare himself, breaking...
...also a less poetic one. In The Tempest, with its wonderful language, words speak louder than actions; not everybody in the Webster production knew how to utter them. Arnold Moss was a sonorous and commanding Prospero, Frances Heflin a sensitive Miranda. But as Ariel, Ballerina Vera Zorina let a good many speeches dwindle, and her grace was cold rather than sunlit. As Caliban, Negro Actor Canada Lee could not (like Shakespeare) make poetry of ugliness. Stressing the rather dull comedy also shattered the mood; the revolving stage was more practical than atmospheric. This generation may never see a livelier Tempest...
...Moss is an impressive Prospero with an incisive voice that gives force and significance to some of Shakespeare's most moving poetry. France Heflin portrays Miranda with an air of innocent wonder that is truly beautiful. Ballet is not out of place in "The Tempest," and Vera Zorina's Ariel has exceptional grace, if not marked dramatic excellence...