Word: hamlets
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...central role is that of Prospero, the play's Grand Puppeteer, which was highly suited to the talents of Richard Burbage, for whom Shakespeare fashioned his Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, Lear and other major parts. The role is more than three times as long as any other in the play, and the character has been thought to stand for God, Jesus, Fate, Justice, Art, Intellect, the Ideal Ruler, the Colonizer, the Grumpy Old Man, and a host of other things including Shakespeare himself...
...film is "like taking a play out of town for a tryout." All's well that ends well as long as the picture does well at the box office. Epstein, for one, boasts that he would rewrite Shakespeare: "I think the worst ending in the world is Hamlet. There is too much blood. There should have been a few less corpses." It looks as if Coppola has been won over to that less-is-more outlook...
...cursed that wherever I'm engaged they want a program like the Pops," Fiedler once said. "But every clown wants to play Hamlet." He never did play Hamlet, but he was a peerless Puck...
...attraction of presenting Shakespeare in modern dress dates from the productions of Sir Barry Jackson, starting with his Hamlet of 1925. The earliest modern-dress Caesar apparently was the anti-Fascist one with which Orson Welles, at age 22, inaugurated his Mercury Theatre in 1937 (the previous year he had mounted an all-Negro Macbeth set in the voodoo world of Haiti). In 1939 Henry Cass put the play in Mussolini's Italy. Donald Wolfit, Minos Volanakis, Michael Croft and others have since updated this drama...
Happy Days is essentially a soliloquy, and thus it confronts us with Beckett's major drawback as a playwright. As the most brilliant disciple of James Joyce, Beckett is the master of the interior monologue. But drama breathes only in dialogue. Hamlet is not babbling to himself in the four great inebriant soliloquies; he is addressing questions to his tormented soul, his troubled mind, his impotent will, and the sultry air resonates. In his one-character play, Krapp's Last Tape, Beckett took some notice of this problem. Between his senile musings and avid munching on a banana...