Word: elizabethan
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...SEARCH OF CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE by A. D. Wraight and Virginia Stern. 376 pages. Vanguard. $12.50. A pictorial investigation of the one Elizabethan poet who could hold a candle to Shakespeare and who was a trouble-maker as well. Marlowe's route is traced through contemporary prints and present-day photos of his haunts. In trouble with the Star Chamber because of his vocal atheism, Marlowe was killed in a drunken brawl at Deptford, just as the law was closing in. The murder had so many loose ends that historians still wonder...
...Gammer Gurton's Needle is not even a vehicle for Kaplan's production, it is an excuse. Don't see the play, but do see the production and dream about the marvelous things that might happen if this company got its hands on a real bawdy Elizabethan farce...
They're not really sure if Gammer Gurton's Needle is a bawdy Elizabethan farce like the posters say. It's date of composition (c. 1555) by an unknown Mr. S, Master of Art at Cambridge might make it Edwardian. And its bawdiness never makes it out of the anal stage and into the genital, which really means it's not bawdy...
...problem lies in the text and in Kaplan's handling of it. The play comes from a tradition of academic farce in an era when the celibate Fellows of English universities had to blow off steam some way. It is more "important" as a source of Elizabethan comedy than worthwhile in itself. To play it completely straight would be the kiss of death...
...theater is the Lazarus of the arts. Two thousand years of "worst seasons ever" between Periclean Athens "and Elizabethan England failed to bury it. Indeed, in the two and a half millenniums since Aeschylus, the number of dramatic geniuses could be counted on one and a half hands. The theater does not live on its masterpieces but between them. Man created the theater in his own image, and it wears two masks and a thousand faces. The mask of tragedy says weep-and bear it. The mask of comedy says grin-and bear it. The theater is witness and partner...