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Whatever the critics think, Actor Laughton is convinced that his is Shakespeare's true Lear. With his wife, Elsa Lanchester, he studied the play in a facsimile of the First Folio all last winter, finally concluded that the author had scored it like music. Voice inflections, pitch, rhythms, everything seemed indicated by what would otherwise be pointless punctuation and irrational typography. "Elsa noticed it first, and I think she was the first to treat it that way. But it works! It works! Shakespeare tells you how to say every word...
...choice of All's Well raises a raft of problems (some of them insoluble). One of these is of long standing, and arises from the publication of Shakespeare's collected plays by his fellow-actors John Heminges and Henry Condell in the celebrated First Folio of 1623. In this volume the publishers divided the plays into "comedies," "histories," and "tragedies"--a categorization that has perdured far beyond its usefulness. A considerable number of the plays either do not fit in any of the three divisions or do not belong in the one assigned them in the Folio; All's Well...
This play was designated a "comedy" in the Folio. Modern scholarship has tried to improve the situation by setting up a sub-category of "dark comedies" for All's Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure. But let's face it: All's Well simply is not a comedy, dark or otherwise--unless one wants to render the term meaningless by applying it to anything with a happy or, as in this case, pseudo-happy ending. (Actually, this ending is utterly absurd, unbelievable, perfunctory, and, for a man of Shakespeare's stature, inexcusable--the sort of thing one finds...
...president of England's Bacon Society, Frank Woodward, tried to prove his case through numerology. Assuming that A equals one and B equals two, etc., he added BACON up to 33, found it "very significant" that in one passage of Part I of Henry IV in the First Folio, the name Francis appears 33 times. Another numerologist noted that SHAKESPEAR has four vowels and six consonants. He then turned to the 46th Psalm, declared that the 46th word from the beginning was SHAKE and the 46th from the end was SPEAR. His conclusion, according to the Friedmans: "Since Shakespeare...
...arrived at the Presidencia, he paused for the inevitable photos, then went inside, took a heavy, carved-mahogany chair at a long table in the banquet hall. The main and strange order of business: formal exchange of autographs among the American Presidents, each one presenting to the others a folio of his country's postage stamps. Eisenhower was clearly tired; as the proceedings wore on, he clasped his hands tensely in front of him. Said one aide: "He's gotten more exercise today than any time since his operation. He'll feel...