Word: dictional
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...Titus Andronicus is a particularly sympathetic character, and the actors don't make the mistake of trying to win sympathy. Nor do they strive for the kind of perfect diction and modulation one normally expects from performance of Shakespeare. Instead, they play up the wild distortions, creating a melange of half-bestial, half-diabolical passions. As the two unredeemable villains of the play, Demitrius and Chiron, Kelly Keough and Chuck O'Toole '97 are costumed and made up to resemble a cross between macabre spirits and S&M partygoers--an image reinforced, perhaps overdone, by slinking movements and exaggerated gestures...
Colapinto's Macbeth seems to have two basic styles of diction: shouting and petulant muttering. The first, which appears in most of his earlier scenes, entails Colapinto's roaring his lines very loudly and in evident agony at the ceiling, the audience, the other characters, or whatever happens to be handy. The goal, evidently, is to convey Macbeth's anguish and guilt. This is in itself not really so objectionable. Histrionics is a forgivable flaw in a performance that calls for intense extremes of emotion...
...readers who tend to veer away from poetry find themselves propelled toward the work of Derek Walcott. It's not just because the West Indian Nobel laureate has the classic gift of mixing ease with eloquence and of deepening, dignifying his most private moments with the high and burnished diction of a sunlit Shakespeare. Even more, Walcott has strained and struggled all his life to match sun and rain, to marry the world of autumn leaves and opera houses that he learned to love on paper with the unrecorded "pomme-arac" and fireflies of his long-colonized islands...
...Pynchon's new novel is in some ways even more difficult than its famously challenging predecessor. This time out, the author renounces contemporary English speech altogether and casts the entire narrative in the 18th century diction allegedly spoken by a clergyman named Wicks Cherrycoke; he is the one who tells aloud the tale of his one-time acquaintances Charles Mason (1728-86) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-79) over what must have been an incredibly long night in Philadelphia during the Christmas season of 1786. Cherrycoke is given to utterances such as the following: "The Pilgrim, however long or crooked...
...trademark narrative rhythm, Thomas Pynchon?s new novel (Henry Holt; 773 pages; $27.50) is in some ways even more difficult than its famously challenging predecessor, 'Gravity's Rainbow.' This time out, the author renounces contemporary English speech altogether and casts the entire narrative in the 18th century diction allegedly spoken by a clergyman named Wicks Cherrycoke; he is the one who tells aloud the tale of his one-time acquaintances Charles Mason (1728-86) and Jeremiah Dixon (1733-79) over what must have been an incredibly long night in Philadelphia during the Christmas season of 1786. For all its whimsical...