Word: hamlets
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...smitten by the theater at tender ages. (He imagines a boyish Shake speare falling in behind a touring theatri cal company announcing its presence by parading down Stratford's main street; he recalls himself manipulating a cardboard Laurence Olivier and Jean Simmons in a toy-theater production of Hamlet.) The second is that both grew up to be men of the working theater, practical poets striv ing for the memorable effect. Many of his selections are in fact from speeches in which Shakespeare insisted on the stage as a metaphor for the world. A scholar might find this oversimplified...
McKellen, at one point, even does a passable imitation of himself. If his Romeo is perhaps too much a modern teenager, or his Macbeth more empurpled than it should be, there is illuminating humor in his rendering of Hamlet's advice to the players in the manner of a rather fey modern director giving notes to his company...
...Hamlet says in his last words, "the rest is silence." Great terminal summations are a form of theater, really. They demand an audience - someone has to hear them, after all. More than that, they have been traditionally uttered with a high solemnity. Some last words have the irony of inadvertence - as when Civil War General John Sedgwick was heard to say during the battle of Spotsylvania Court House, "Why, they couldn't hit an elephant at this dist- " But premeditated last words - the deathbed equivalent of Neil Armstrong's "One small step for a man, one giant leap...
John Barrymore lived in the building I grew up in, No. 36, the white one with the stonework gingerbread facade and the visored knights out front. Edwin Booth, whose statue still plays Hamlet in the center of the park, had a house remodeled by Stanford White to serve as the Players, a club for actors. When I was ten, I once waved to Charles Coburn as he emerged from the Players, and he waved back. The park's most mentioned artist-in-residence was William Sydney Porter, known as O. Henry, who lived on Irving Place and used...
...have attacked more than 60 towns, putting the country's U.S.-trained 25,000-man army on the defensive. Acknowledged a military observer: "The Salvadoran forces are tired and frustrated. Their morale has been shot." Evidence of the increased influence of the guerrillas can be seen in the hamlet of Chirilagua, 90 miles southeast of San Salvador. In September, 200 rebels attacked, routing the 20-man National Guard detachment. Since then, guerrillas have openly shared power with the mayor. Says a rebel soldier in Chirilagua: "The army is demoralized. Even though they are being trained by U.S. troops...