Word: dramatistic
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PLAYWRITING is assumed to be an art requiring an idea, imagination and knowledge of life, but in current U.S. practice, all the dramatist needs is someone else's book. See SHOW BUSINESS, The Unoriginals...
Coming after Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, The Tempest caps a magnificent interrelated tetralogy, the dramatist's counterpart to the late Beethoven quartets Op. 130-133. All four plays explore the estrangement-remorse-reconciliation theme. But The Tempest is extraordinarily rich in meanings--in Mark Van Doren's felicitous words, "Any set of symbols, moved close to this play, lights up as in an electric field." Whatever else it may be, the play is a masterful study of the use and abuse of liberty (how often the very words "liberty," "free" and "freedom" crop up in the text...
...creative artists use exaggeration as a tool. This is as true of a Beethoven symphony as of the distorted figure of a Gothic saint as of the distorted pointing finger of Matthias Grunewald. The literary artist also by necessity must choose the exaggerated and often grisly side, especially the dramatist. Characters like incestuous Oedipus or child-murdering Medea are as "immoral" as the deplored modern ones, and so, for that matter, are Macbeth or Hamlet. FREDERICK P. BORNSTEIN El Paso...
Riemenschneider's altarpieces are the work of a man who was dramatist as well as sculptor. His figures, like actors in a play, take life from each other. When a climax comes, as in the Assumption (see color) the scene bursts with sudden passion. The wooden eyes fill with wonder, and the apostles' faces soundlessly proclaim their unforgettable experience of agony...
...what Dear Liar suffers from is less Shaw as lover than Shaw as letter writer, a role in which he falls far short of the dramatist. Things perk up when the stars can get their teeth into something theatrical rather than into each other, as when they go over a scene from Pygmalion. But the stars are not quite wedded to their parts. Unfailingly gracious, Actress Cornell seems too gentle and Actor Aherne seems somehow too jaunty...