Word: elizabethan
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Shakespeare was repeatedly showing off. There are numerous setpieces that, while lovely poetry in themselves, impede the dramatic flow. And he imposes on his dialogue a number of traditional forms from outside the theater. For instance, the lovers' first meeting is cast in the mold of one complete Elizabethan sonnet and part of a second; their postnuptial parting is a Provencal alba (which the Bard may have known through Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and which reaches its peak of effectiveness in the second act of the aforementioned Tristan); Juliet declaims a Classical epithalamium; and Paris delivers an elegy...
...costumes that Jane Greenwood has fashioned are lovely, though sometimes a bit late for the period. The shipwrecked sibling twins Sebastian and Viola (disguised as a pageboy) wear Cavalier rather than Elizabethan dress, similar to the "Blue Boy" garb Greenwood provided for the 1966 production. Unwisely she made the Clown's outfit insufficiently differentiated from those of the rest of Olivia's household...
...play's biggest role is that of Viola, who spends most of her time disguised as the boy Cesario, whence all the mistaken identity. Such stage disguises were common in Elizabethan times, since all female roles were played by young boys owing to the ban on actresses. And Shakespeare happened to have two extraordinarily gifted boy actors in his company at the turn of the century...
...half hours via the Massachusetts Turnpike, Interstate 91, and the Connecticut Turnpike to Exit 32 or 31. Performances in the air-conditioned Theatre begin promptly at 2 and 8 p.m. There are free facilities for picnickers on the premises; and a vocal quartet, accompanied by a lutanist, perform Elizabethan madrigals in costume on the lawn prior to each performance...
This sort of time change always has the same effect: it up dates the costumes and jarringly displaces the Elizabethan line. Kahn claims to have based his 1866 version on Luigi Visconti's film, The Leopard. But it lacks any trace of the rich textures of the Visconti settings. No one could look at this tacky Verona for a moment and call it "fair...