Word: elizabethaning
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ALTHOUGH PUNCTUATED with terrific bangs of comic energy, the current Winthrop House production of The Taming of the Shrew trips and falls over the unmasking of its Kate. By accenting the fast-biting moments of Elizabethan wit, director Leah Rosovsky has left the meaning of the play unclear. The actors, dressed in a hodge-podge of costumes and too often blocked like isolated commentators on the action, come up each with their own interpretations. Jennifer Marre's shrew submits to her husband with an attempt at audience-directed irony. But Jonathan Epstein's Petruchio tries to woo her sincerely with...
...must to my own self be true, and I simply remain unconvinced. The great Elizabethan scholar Alfred Harbage (whom Harvard and the world lost only recently), having devoted most of his life to Shakespeare, said of As You Like It that "a fondness for it is the best single test of a reader's compatibility with Shakespeare." So I stand condemned...
Kahn has done a little textual trimming and rearranging to bring the running time down to exactly two hours and a half. And Jane Greenwood has created an attractive bunch of period costumes, although the period is considerably later than Elizabethan...
Jaques (also Shakespeare's invention), the cheerless square peg in a round hole, reflects the Elizabethan era's fascination with neurotic states of mind (as in the plays of Ben Jonson), which would climax a few years later in the publication of Burton's huge Anatomy of Melancholy. Jaques is the counterpart of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, which Philip Kerr played so admirably here two years ago. Kerr is now imbuing Jaques with the same wide-stanced, pigeon-toed gait he used for Malvolio. To this he has added a wonderful pasty face and a hilarious mannerism of gargling...
...immigrants who learned English as a second language and were heavily dependent on the written word, he notes. Southerners, on the other hand, have always relied on the spoken word. "In that respect, Southern speech is closer to the native speech of England," concludes Pederson, and often to Elizabethan England. "It is a much more sensitive and effective medium of communication than Northern speech, for the most part, because it is so rooted in the spoken word...