Word: bard
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Clients who visit him in his office are sometimes surprised to find him dressed in a bathrobe or riding britches, conducting an imaginary orchestra as a hi-fi system plays a favorite Verdi opera. He is also a Shakespeare buff who once spent an afternoon trading quotes from the Bard with Marlon Brando as the two worked out a custody settlement over Brando's child...
...Sellars sustains the initial gimmick with scene after scene of slapstick splashing and general mayhem, but balances his off-the-wall antics with a sound sense of the appropriate; invention almost seems subordinate to the text. If it frequently resembles a circus, it is an indisputably Shakespearean circus, the Bard doing breast-stroke, the actors barnstorming with the kind of relish rarely unleashed in Harvard theater. It never approaches a tragedy of thought and feeling--it doesn't leave you numb (unless with the cold)--only surprised and which is saying a lot for swimming-pool Shakespeare...
...clothes, patricians in velvet ankle-length robes. The stage is blocked out like those tunnel run ways through which cattle are prodded to slaughter. Terry Hands' hot-spirited direction makes 3½ hours pass like one, a daunting feat well worth emulation by directors who dawdle over the Bard till he turns tepid...
...would be false to call the Bard contemporary. His psychological insight may be keener than Freud's, and his social perceptions, about women and blacks for example, travel freely across the borders of age. But he was first and last an Elizabethan...
...members operate in the wrong era. "This filthy 20th century," complains the self-made elitist. "I hate its guts." What better place for a man who loathes welfare statism than the century of the other Elizabeth? After decades of living in its atmosphere, Rowse tends to treat the Bard as an intimate. Others may puzzle over the identity of the Dark Lady of the Sonnets; Rowse is sure that she is Emilia Bassano Lanier, the half-Venetian wife of a court musician and "a bad lot." As for those who find evidence of homosexuality in the canon, Rowse dismisses them...