Word: benedick
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SHAKESPEARE: MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (3 LPs; RCA Victor). In Shakespeare's funniest social comedy, everything depends on the speed and sparkle of the witty duels between Beatrice and Benedick, played here by two fast-rising British stars, Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, whose voices are whirling kaleidoscopes. That young theatrical iconoclast, Franco Zeffirelli (creator of a successful beatnik Hamlet), directed this National Theater of Britain production, which one critic called as lurid and animated as a Superman comic. The performance on the recording is robust but never bumptious...
...introducing similar stock options to Investors Planning, Cornfeld expects to give the U.S. fund enough fresh thrust to expand it from a regional mid-Atlantic fund into a nationwide operation. Investors Planning will keep its name and its management, which is headed by Cornfeld's old boss, Walter Benedick, 67. Benedick is remarkably happy about the whole deal. "We weren't interested in just anyone taking over," he says. "Cornfeld grew up with our philosophy...
...that, within the period of one year, Shakespeare wrote in order the three comedies Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. These plays got progressively better. Significantly, the strength of Much Ado lies in the characters the playwright did not get from his source: Beatrice, Benedick, Dogberry and his watch. The derived matter is still a bore...
Much Ado About Nothing (by William Shakespeare) has a contemptible hero, a motiveless villain, a tediously improbable main plot. Happily, what academics term the subplot-the prickly-pear romance of Benedick and Beatrice-is one of the most delightful things in all Shakespeare. And it can never have seemed more a delight than when John Gielgud and Margaret Leighton are swapping insults and moving blindfolded toward the altar...
...creating his determinedly unromantic lovers, Shakespeare as a comedy writer traded sighs for banter, nightingales for mockingbirds, antic humor for elegant wit. Benedick's first sniffy words to Beatrice-"What, my dear Lady Disdain-are you yet alive?"-could drop straight out of Congreve. As for their wearing their hearts on their fingernails, it is a truism that the pair of them-he all scorn for marriage, she all scorn for men-are so antagonistic for being so much alike. Fortunately, the dullards around them dream up one bright idea: they contrive that an eavesdropping Benedick shall hear that...