Word: hamlets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hamlet has obsessed the Western mind for 369 years. Why? It is not because most people love great works of art. On the contrary, most people find great works of art oppressive, since such works invariably center on the nature of human destiny, and that destiny is tragic. Quite simply, Hamlet is a world, and like the world, it cannot be ignored. Every man has lived some part of the play, and to be a man is to be inextricably involved in the play. Hamlet probes and grips the profound themes of existence-death, love, time, fidelity, friendship, family...
...from being a surefire part, the role of Hamlet dwarfs most actors, for the magnitude of the role requires a corresponding size and scope in the actor who plays it. Technique is not enough. Verbal violin play, a graceful carriage, a handsome profile-these suffice for the ordinary Hamlet. The great Hamlet is coached by life itself, schooled by life to think, listen, grow, love, hate, suffer and endure. So rigorous is this demand that in these more than 31 centuries there have been no more than a dozen great Hamlets. Everyone who is alive today has the rare...
...This means that he transcends the celluloid and holds the audience in a dramatic vise. His eyes sear the viewer. He is not speaking to the air; he is speaking to you. As far as Williamson is concerned, elocution be damned. Poetry be damned. Meaning is all. Never has Hamlet been rendered with more clarity or more biting timeliness, and that includes Gielgud, Olivier and Burton. Shakespeare held the mirror up to nature. Williamson holds a mirror up to the soul...
...hamlet of Marblehead is well named...
...Like Hamlet, who claimed, "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a King of infinite space," Borges seems completely at home with his years and his blindness. By 1955, his sight was nearly gone. "I stopped wasting time at movies," he jokes. But he actually began an intensive study of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse to enjoy the odd lore about monsters and dragons as well as recurrent poetic devices-known as kennings-"whale's path" and "swan-road" for sea. For relaxation he is read to, mostly from favorite writers whom his intellectual admirers disdain...