Word: caesar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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STRATFORD, Conn.--I suppose almost everyone has been put through Julius Caesar as a high-school sophomore and been forced to commit some of its speeches to memory. For all its familiarity the play remains, like Beethoven's Fifth, a rattling good work; and no one should shrink from mounting it on that account...
...Julius Caesar was, in fact, the very first play to be offered when the American Shakespeare Festival began its operations eleven summers age. And it has not been restaged there until...
...Julius Caesar is a no-nonsense play. It gets right down to business and sticks to business. There is no sub-plot, no comic relief, not even any mildly humorous lines except for a handful of Casca's; and the play is freer of bawdry than any other save Richard II. Aside from a little compression of chronology, Shakespeare followed closely his three source biographies in Plutarch's Lives, often just turning its line of prose into verse...
This being so, one of the tasks facing a director is to see that the legitimately rhetorical is not allowed to burgeon (or "escalate," to use up-to-date terminology) into the bombastic. It is all too easy for Julius Caesar, in performance, to turn into one long shouting match. The present production is not sufficiently free of this tendency. Fortissimo speech is not this troupe's strongpoint; and some of its playing goes so far out of control as to be totally unintelligible. Its actors need to learn that forcefulness is not necessarily directly proportional to loudness...
Watson's weakest moment is unfortunately his most famous one, when he addresses the Roman plebs at Caesar's funeral in the Forum. Here he lacks sincerity and sonority. The crowd, however, handles itself rather effectively in this scene, emitting a susurrus of suspense before Brutus' harangue, and erupting into noisy iterations of a metrically unison spondee-anapest pattern before Mark Antony...