Word: breath
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Breath, Brass, and Brawn
...have already launched their programs. Of the plays done on college campuses last year, Shakespeare topped the list. Actor Arnold Moss, who won raves for his magical Prospero some seasons back, has completed a 7,000-mile barnstorming tour of eleven states with his Shakespeare Festival Players. No breath of Shakespeare stirs at the moment on Broadway, but off-Broadway's Phoenix Theater has just concluded an excellent revival of Henry IV, Parts I and II. John Gielgud's Ages of Man recording, patterned on his brilliant stage readings of last season, has sold 30,000 copies. Macbeth...
...sunlit hours of the early comedies and prologued the dark vision of the great tragedies. The second was Shakespeare's-embittered love affair with the unknown "dark lady of the sonnets." Biographers have found traces of this siren's raven hair, pitch-black eyes, jigging walk, panting breath and wanton ways in the characters of Ophelia, Cressida and Cleopatra. The third event was the arrest and imprisonment of Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, for helping Essex plot against the Queen. In combination, these events seem to have left Shakespeare at times with a bleak view...
Compared to such models, the American Shakespearean actor is short on breath, long on Method and nil on tradition, despite the dimly remembered glories of Booth and Barrymore. Too many U.S. actors either singsong like walking metronomes or chop up the lines and speak blank prose. As for acting, Method-mad U.S. actors swallow a character like medicine and then release him through their pores in involuntary shudders. They are nonetheless eager to try the roles that all agree are the touchstones of an actor's skill and imagination. What is needed is the continuity of acting tradition that...
Shakespeare's breathtaking change of pace carries a man to the brink of eternity and then restores him to common humanity. On seeing Cordelia's body, the grief-stricken Lear cries: "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life and thou no breath at all?" In the extremity of human despair ("Thou'lt come no more") he utters his towering, fivefold "Never, never, never, never, never!" Then the dam of his unbearable anguish breaks with the homely request, "Pray you undo this button." No one but Shakespeare would have dared put those two lines together...