Word: ghosts
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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Romance is dead, long live Romance! "Drake, he's in his hammock"; Frobisher likewise; only the ghost of Captain Kidd is still burying treasure, only a phantom Long John Silver is still digging it up. Writers of the present day can submerge themselves in the atmosphere of other times or more primitive climes and so produce a Sea-Hawk or a Lord Jim. But among the furnaces, the black smoke, and the steel girders of modern America, "where are the snows of yesteryear...
...detect a motive proper to the entire company. A certain prosaic literalness and timorous aversion from the loftier strains of prose perhaps comes nearer than any other quality to providing a measure for the book as a whole; at best, it is little above mediocrity. There is a ghost story by Somerset Maugham, for instance, in which the author describes an uncanny scene in the most matter of fact terms, no doubt believing this the certain means of investing the supernatural with reality. The story cannot help reminding the reader of "The Phantom Rickshaw", an unfortunate recollection, for Mr. Maugham...
...Melancholy Adventure", might have been the greatest story in the book; might even have been the greatest story. But in this instance, as in Mr. Maugham's ghost story, the author failed through the attempt to make the commonplace suggest the emotional. Mr. Boyd loses his laurels by pure timidity. No doubt one says less than he means, and it is an offense to open the heart; but Mr. Boyd plods with matter of fact foot along a path where Merrick would have sung with "voice memorial". Perhaps it is not timidity that led Mr. Boyd astray; he sinned...
Hamlet. While the return of John Barrymore is not strictly news, two facts combine to make his reappearance noteworthy. He forsook the electric nebula, which last year served for the ghost, in favor of a flesh and blood actor (Reginald Pole) ; he gave an even greater interpretation than the one which last season served to break the world's record for consecutive performances (101). Barrymore is rapidly becoming recognized as America's greatest actor...
...Ghost-mad, love-mad, revengefully sane?Hamlet as only Barrymore can do it?New Haven, Hartford, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, London? such is the itinerary laid out by Arthur Hopkins for his own John Barrymore and Shakespeare's own Hamlet...