Word: bard
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Welles has ignored the light side of the pun-prone, fun-filled roisterer. Falstaff describes himself as "not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men." Not, apparently, in Welles. What ultimately makes this Falstaff ring false is a lack of comedy in the Bard's most comic creation...
...Taming of the Shrew. "We intend to make Shakespeare as successful a screenwriter as Abby Mann." Thus spake Director Franco Zeffirelli last year when he began filming The Taming of the Shrew. The screen credits maintain the mock-the-bard tone: script billing goes to Zeffirelli, Paul Dehn and Suso Checchi D'Amico, with a coy acknowledgment "to William Shakespeare, without whom we would have been at a loss for words." The irreverence in this case is less a shame than a sham. Despite the disclaimer, Zeffirelli has succeeded in mounting the liveliest screen incarnation of Shakespeare since Olivier...
This is not Zeffirelli's first brush with the bard. He once overdirected an eccentric Italian version of Hamlet in which the Dane intoned: "To be or not to be, what the hell!" In Shrew, he displays a sure sense of what makes comedy funny. When a classic is treated as deathless, it dies; by being brash and breezy, Zeffirelli has breathed new life into an old text...
...light-verse forms are as rare as septuplets, and as vulnerable. Latest in the long line of poetic inventions-and, it is to be hoped, not too vulnerable-is the double dactyl, the result of a collaboration of two poet-professors, Anthony Hecht of Bard College and John Hollander of Hunter. According to the rules set forth in Jiggery-Pokery (112 pages; Atheneum; $3.95), all the poems must begin with a double-dactyl nonsense line such as "higgledy-piggledy" or "jiggery-pokery." Thereafter comes a famous name-also double dac tylic-followed by another double dactyl and a line...
Marie Menken, 57, wife of Willard Maas, an avant-garde bard who made some well-known experimental movies in the '40s, is possibly the finest film poet the underground has produced. She has a subtle feel for rhythms, a grand flair for colors and a gay wild way with a camera that leaves the eye spinning. In Lights, a 5½-minute study of Manhattan after dark, she slashes at her subject with a camera as an action painter slashes at his canvas, and the great stone city breaks up into a wriggling calligraphy of flash and filigree...