Word: bard
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...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...
Nevertheless, this Windy City bard founded Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. Within three years she printed an odd-looking work that opened with six lines of Italian and then proceeded: "Let us go then, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table ..." Nothing quite like T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" had ever appeared before. The expatriate gentleman from St. Louis and the lady from Chicago put each other...