Word: deathe
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...play's great enigma: what took hamlet so long in acting to avenge his dead father? Among the theories advanced are that Hamlet was fat, and consequently moved slowly in doing anything; that Hamlet hand an Oedipal relationship with his mother and therefore blamed himself for his father's death; and finally, an Elizabethan determinist interpretation that Hamlet's humours mixed in such a way that he was always by nature melancholy and lethargic. There is also a Marxist interpretation, contrived, I guess, by some lonely Russian critic with nothing better...
...tragedy. The tragic climax is not the clear and unavoidable result of certain obvious flaws in the characters. In this sense the production, perhaps inadvertantly, denies the Greek therapy of tragic catharsis, but I think that's good because the notion that there can be "meaningful" or "uplifting" death in a non-political context has always seemed like bullshit...
...focuses this aesthetic and religious conflict in the mind and body of Bomarzo's Duke Orsini. He recreates him as a hunchback who tells the story of his life as an omniscient observer, not only aware of his own time but of events from the time of his death until the present. Mujica-Lainez's implication is clear: Orsini's true immortality resides not in the few historical facts and artifacts we know but in his re-creation as a fictional character...
...Warren makes the melodramatic most of a bird-beaked Kentucky-frontier mother and her two sons who in 1811 actually gave refuge to Audubon, then plotted to murder him for his gold watch. The three rogues are thwarted and promptly hanged. As they choke on their ropes-bunglers at death as at life-Warren's Audubon unsentimentally identifies with them. In the all-embracing fraternity of failure, Audubon in some sense shares their guilt and their punishment. Now as reconciled to man as he has all along been to nature, Audubon goes on to his own fulfillment...
...smoke that "bellies the ridgepole." The language is plain-grits as a folk song without being folksy. A be-ginning-of-the-world awe broods over the work: silence, solitude, finally the violence that ruptures both. Above the wilderness soar Audubon's birds, transcendent angels of life and death...