Word: bettering
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...there is no denying the opening scene's strong visual impact. Indeed the production generally serves the eye a good deal better than it serves the ear. The play contains a lot of magic and spectacle, handled most ingeniously (and without the 140-man stage crew that Charles Kean needed in 1857). When Miranda is put to sleep, she slumbers levitated a couple of feet above ground. The instantaneous appearance and disappearance of the banquet (borrowed from Book II of Vergil's Aeneid) is truly miraculous, as are the periodic flashes of St. Elmo's fire all over the place...
...occasion Haigh substitutes another word for the one Shakespeare wrote; at times he fails to heed the pronunciation required by the verse [exTIRpate, wronged, solEMnized]. His lengthy narration at the start is too slow, and his famous "revels now are ended" speech lacks sufficient musicality. He is much better in the abjuration soliloquy--which many have thought to be the playwright's own valedictory, although Shakespeare went on to collaborate on Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the lost Cardenio, and perhaps Sir Thomas More. Haigh has a long way to go before he matches Carnovsky's 1960 Prospero...
...obsessively determined to correct their mistakes and make the most impressive Olympiad yet. Spartakiad features 10,000 Soviet athletes, sifted from nearly 100 million entrants over two years of eliminations and-for the first time-2,500 foreign competitors. The games were organized so that the Soviets have a better chance of gaming the finals, and of the 87 other nations, not all entered their top competitors. The U.S., for instance, sent only 109 athletes, of whom only eight are top-ranked in their event. Still, the U.S. broke into the winner's circle when Karen Hawkins...
...Alice let them come. When they arrive, she becomes distracted from her work in progress and writes instead about her guests: the British desert lover, described as an "experiential snob," because he thinks that his search for God makes him superior to his wife who quests only for a better Parmesan cheese; a 60-year-old soil erosion specialist who fancies himself the savior of other people's lives and careers; and his young, adoring hungarian wife...
Perceived in that manner, the new pessimism seems only the old optimism turned upside down. Surely a better way to explain the neoconservatives' views is not to deal with their motives but to measure their reasons for turning right against the political and social reality that Americans have been confronting for the past 15 years. Steinfels' provocative volume might have been better served by getting down to more tough cases. He repeatedly reprimands his subjects for not blaming society's weaknesses (self-indulgence and galloping consumerism, for instance) on the free-enterprise system. He might have pursued...