Word: hamlets
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...opera libretti (by Arrigo Boito), which, when set to music by Verdi, became the supreme Italian tragic opera of the Romantic century; and it gave us Shakespeare's unequaled, Baroque-styled drama (as distinguished from his Renaissance plays like Romeo and Richard II, and from his Mannerist plays like Hamlet and Lear). It gives us now another superlative--the production of Shakespeare's masterpiece that has inaugurated the third season of the American Shakespeare Festival Theatre. I have seen some seven or eight Othello productions over the years, and this far surpasses all the others...
...that most unhappily suffers cutting. The playing-time of this production is 165 minutes; the restoration of all the cuts would make the total running-time about three hours. Surely audiences now accustomed to four-hour movies and O'Neill plays can take three hours of Shakespeare. Hamlet, a much longer work than Othello, was given at Harvard this season without a single cut, and without any intermission whatever, with good results. So, at an institution exclusively devoted to Shakespeare, let's have him with both ears, with ten fingers and with ten toes...
With sennets and flourishes, Cinemactress Jayne Mansfield brushed aside objections that she is too, too solidly fleshed for tragedy, announced that she was memorizing Hamlet's soliloquies, would follow the examples of Actresses Siobhan McKenna and Sarah Bernhardt by playing the Prince of Denmark, possibly on television. Proposed costume for Actress Mansfield: black tights, bare bodkin...
...some English students excessively literary in their approach to the course. Another is a sort of philosophical commitment to the idea, which faintly parallels the general education course at Lawrence, where instructors from all departments taught the basic Gen Ed course, and Physics professors became the mostenthusiastic teachers of Hamlet. The stimulation of this approach is worth further thought, if only in terms of moreguest lectures...
...think St. Louis Post-Dispatch Editorial Writer Rufus Terral [who parodied President Eisenhower's mixed metaphors-TIME, April 2 2.] should know that Ike is in good company. In Hamlet we find Shakespeare writing: "Take arms against a sea of troubles...