Word: caesar
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...innocent of their later culture, sacked the cities and killed off the Volsci. About 600 B. c. they were first smitten by dread malaria. Of these dire swamps wrote Vergil, Juvenal, Martial, Horace, Ovid and others, including Madame de Stael and more recently Gabriele D'Annunzio. Julius Caesar made elaborate plans for reclamation, Augustus and even Nero had vast labors performed, but in vain. The Catholic popes, notably that enlightened Medici, His Holiness Leo X, then took over the unequal struggle with the potent Pontine Marshes, and finally in 1918 the Italian Government made elaborate plans...
...Orson Welles, 22, and John Houseman, 35, would do with their Mercury Theatre. One bedrock essential that Welles & Houseman apparently lacked was cash. But after a succession of muffled death-rattles backstage, the Mercury came to its first play's first night. On November 11 it produced Julius Caesar. On November 12 the public was informed that Shakespeare's five-act classic had: 1) been turned into a one-act cyclone, 2) on a bare stage, 3) in modern dress, 4) with a modern meaning, 5) gone over with the loudest bang that Shakespeare-lovers could recall...
...With his Caesar a smash hit, Welles flung his laurel wreath into a cupboard, backed Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock-the sceneryless, music-quickened strike play which a scared WPA had dumped overboard the season before- and The Cradle rocked like mad. Then, having enough of boom and roar. Welles and the Mercury turned back to Elizabethan times for a bellylaugh, rigged up Thomas Dekker's bawdy, roistering The Shoemakers' Holiday. That was a success...
...Orson before the age of ten was a professional actor, ma-ing $25 a day dressed up as Peter Rabbit in Chicago's Marshall Field's. At twelve, in the progressive Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Ill., Orson was staging his first production of Julius Caesar-in which he played the Soothsayer, Cassius and Marc Antony with relay-race technique...
...child. It was first just an idea, bounded north & south by hope, east & west by nerve. Crossing their Rubicon before they even started to march, Welles & Houseman leased the Comedy Theatre for five years, renamed it the Mercury, then started looking for their first play. When they found Julius Caesar, they started looking for the money to produce it. Houseman combed Wall Street, got dibs & drabs, enough to keep the cast stringing along and repair the Mercury toilets. He also got promises of $12,000; then the recession came and two of the Mercury's seven angels had their...