Word: bard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...filled, encouraging the strange game of pseudoscholarship designed to show that Shakespeare did not really write the plays, that he was a front man for Sir Francis Bacon or Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford,* or Christopher Marlowe or Sir Walter Raleigh or Queen Elizabeth or even the Bard's wife, Anne Hathaway. Amateur cryptographers have thought they found hidden codes in Shakespeare's writing, pointing to the true authors...
When the London theaters reopened in 1660, after having been shuttered by the Puritans for 18 years, the Restoration decided that Shakespeare needed rewriting. Taking its cue from Ben Jonson ("Shakespeare wanted art"), the Restoration and the Age of Reason argued that the Bard was a barbaric child of Nature whose war bled woodnotes wild violated the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. His plots were a confusing mishmash of the tragic and comic. He was vulgar. Samuel Pepys confided to his diary that Hamlet "disgusts this refined age." Dryden called him "divine Shakespeare," but added smugly: "I have...
Victorian prudery nice-Nellified 19th century Shakespeare. In 1818 Thomas Bowdler, a retired physician, blue-penciled what he regarded as the Bard's blue lines and produced a Shakespeare without blushes for the family reading hour-doubtless pleasing that Victorian matron who emerged from a performance of Antony and Cleopatra saying, "How strangely different from the home life of our dear Queen." In the U.S. Shakespeare was so passionately popular that a dispute between the fans of rival actors-William Charles Macready and Edwin Forrest led to New York
...City's famed Astor Place riot, in which 22 people were killed. But in the U.S., too, touring companies were beset by moralizers, and as they played the Bard in gold-rush camps and over billiard rooms, the actors placated indignant religious sectarians by billing Othello as "a moral dialogue depicting the evil effects of jealousy...
...Bard. All the actors, British and American, like their predecessors, are involved in the attempts of their age to press Shakespeare into a contemporary mold. Orson Welles dressed his Caesar in quasi-Fascist uniform, and Olivier's mother-possessed, mob-envenomed Coriolanus ended hanging head downward, like the dead, degraded Mussolini. Moscow has staged Hamlet as an army plot against the King, with Ophelia a court whore who played the mad scene drunk. In Manhattan a group of feminists staged an all-female Lear, and a Polish actor played Shylock as a fat, wisecracking Broadway type. At Stratford...