Word: elizabethaning
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...EASIEST MEANING OF THE TRIAL IS THAT WE LIVE IN A GOLDEN age of high trash, an Elizabethan epoch of lowest-common-denominator, everything-is-entertainment daytime drama that in Judge Ito's courtroom composed, day by day, its masterpiece--its soap, Santa Monica Othello...
From this moment on, the play elaborates the blindingly original premise that modern life would appear pretty silly if described in Elizabethan English. When Constance, who soon slips into iambic pentameter like all the other characters, describes someone as a creep and Desdemona is mystified, she says absent-mindedly: "Creep--it's colloquial for 'base and noisome knave...
...tricks, and, in a clever scene, turns Desdemona against Constance with the same words that had convinced Othello in the opening scene. Constance's only escape is another sudden jump, this time into Romeo and Juliet, where the abundant joys of sexual innuendo are added to those of Elizabethan paraphrase...
Even without the Harvard jokes, the script is funny--kitschy, but funny. The play is described in the program as "a late-20th-century response to the Elizabethan masterpiece," Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe. The plot has no surprises: a previously upstanding citizen and scholar sells his soul to the devil in exchange for having his innermost wishes fulfilled and must eventually pay the price for his folly...
...hand, I'm trying to give the students a sense of Shakespeare in his culture, in some sense Shakespeare for Elizabethan and Jacobian culture," says Greenblatt, a visiting lecturer from the University of California, Berkeley. "But secondly and at the same time, I'm trying to give a sense of what is peculiarly unique and individual about this particular playwright...