Word: bard
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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HENRY IV, PART II. The darkest and most brooding of the Bard's histories is richly illuminated by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival at Ashland...
...spend their free time listening to theater performances which included magic tricks, physical comedy and Shakespearean soliloquys. Bands larger than current ensembles but smaller than full-fledged orchestras would perform both classical music and popular ditties. In the case of Shakespeare, Levine cleverly demonstrates how well people knew the Bard's works by providing examples of the careful, complex parodies of Shakespeare's plays that were performed in the mid-19th century. The jokes evidence a public familiarity with Shakespeare that would send a frisson of joy through E.D. Hirsh and his many culturally literate disciples...
...years. It was then that he decided to break for New York City and a free-lance career. But he retained his academic title, and he never really stopped being professorial. As he sees it, the unexamined life is not worth loving: "The moons of Saturn, the Bard of Avon, the mysteries of sex, the behavior of ancient societies -- all have to be analyzed before they can be appreciated." Besides, Professor Asimov has a vision: "I believe that if there's such a thing as God's word, it's rationality, and I have the call to spread...
...novelist John Gardner once wrote a version of Beowulf that was told from Grendel's point of view. There is a scene in which a wandering bard arrives among the drunken cretins and begins to sing beautiful songs to them about what they have accomplished that day in battle. Atrocity becomes glory, bloodletting becomes heroic. It is a shrewd point about mythmaking, and perhaps about the making of the myth of Camelot...
From that flimsy association with the Bard, and a lot of local mercantile hustle, emerged a 1953 season performed in a tent, with a rotating repertory of All's Well That Ends Well and Richard III, featuring Alec Guinness, already an established film star, in the title role. Thirty-five years later, the Stratford Festival has three theaters, seating a total of 3,870 people, and its repertory sometimes offers as many as six different shows on the same day, a dozen within a single week. Guinness has been followed by Tony Winner Brian Bedford, two-time Oscar Winner Maggie...