Word: elizabethan
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...highlighting the plays ribaldry and underplaying Barabas' vengeful character, Schmidt chose the proper touch, for The Jew of Malta was quite distinctly written for an Elizabethan audience. When Marlowe so immediately linked Barabas with Machiavelli, he captured both the notoriety of The Prince and the legend of the Jew in England. Barabas was a complete steretoype, done with all of Marlowe's unbelievable extravagance. Sacrificing even his daughter to his lust for money and revenge, Barabas embodied such a total immorality that the Elizabethans could only have flinched in fear of his craft...
Perhaps most typical of the performance was the delightful background music. Had the production been done with Elizabethan overtones, the unique rhythms might have seemed even more macabre than Barabas' horrible, murdering vengeance. As it is, the music jumps and thumps in fanciful accompaniment to the play. Following each murder after the intermission, the music descends a scale with loud bangs, as if Charlie Chaplin's body is bouncing down a stair-case. Marlowe may not have intended the effect, but it makes for wonderful entertainment...
Rowse brings unique advantages to his study; he probably knows as much about Elizabethan times as any other man and he has collected an immense mass of material on Shakespeare's contemporaries and their England. The first three chapters, describing the country of Warwickshire, the town of Stratford and the education Shakespeare might have received, are as interesting as they are detailed, and it seems inconceivable that any further research could have made them much more extensive. Again, in describing the London of Shakespeare's time and the courtiers who befriended the young poet, Rowse is superb...
Biographical Blather. Rowse is a noted writer of Elizabethan history and one of the few historians ever to invade what has clearly been marked out as literary terrain. This, plus the fact that 1964 is the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth, allowed some small room for hope-not that his book would offer new material (there has been none discovered since 1931), but that it would somehow be intriguing and different. Alas, Rowse is no further along than his second chapter before it becomes clear that he is going to bog down in much of the traditional blather...
Begetter Guessed. Into this mare's nest Rowse has stalked, offering his services, as he puts it with marvelous false humility, as a "mere historian." For anyone acquainted with Elizabethan history, he reports, it is all "quite simple." Beyond all doubt, the sonnets are to Southampton. W. H. was, clearly, William Harvey, Southampton's stepfather, who, when the young earl's mother died in 1608, inherited the sonnets and "got them" for Publisher Thorpe. Rowse points out that "beget" is used twice in Hamlet as meaning simply "to get." The sonnets were written in 1592-94, because...