Word: hume
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...play's overall success in its Boston production with the Stratford National Company of Canada must be attributed to a remarkable acting job by Hume Cronyn, just as Alex McGowan's tour de force "made" the show in London and on Broadway. Cronyn is superb, biting off bittersweet epithets, swivelling quickly, daintily crossing his legs on the Papal throne, as a long cigarette dangles from his fingers. Cronyn's determined effort to project nuance into Rolfe's fantasies generate an ironic tension. He makes Rolfe more interesting than the play might lead us to believe...
RESERVATIONS about the play do not detract from the merits of the production. The acting, crowned by Hume Cronyn's compelling performance, is excellent. The other characters, however, are left with usually sketchy parts. Margaret Braidwood as Mrs. Crowe and Paul Harding as the Bishop of Caerleon were splendid, though Donald Ewer as Mr. Crowe's accomplice in blackmail burlesqued the role of Jeremiah Sant with a thick Irish accent. Liza Cole, Julie Andrews' mother in Hawaii, played the warm-hearted Agnes with unabashed charm. Her reward after the wildly sentimental scene with Hadrian in the Papal chambers...
...such stories Borges is playing with philosophy-Schopenhauer's concepts from The World as Will and Idea, Bishop Berkeley's assertion that existence is dependent upon individual perception; Hume's denial of the existence of absolute space. For Borges' admirers, the delicious point is simply that he takes reality with a grain of salt. Great events, vast trends, the pompous certainties implied by the French phrase grands mots -all these are not for Borges. History, that troubling angular presence that the middle-aged invoke to prove to the young that nothing ever really changes...
...artful equivocation is an almost impossible concept to explain, but it is easy to demonstrate. Let us take our earlier examination question, "Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the age he lived in?" The equivocator would answer it this way: "Some people believe that David Hume was not necessarily a great philosopher, because his thoughts was merely a reflection of conditions around him colored by his own personality. Others, however, strongly support Hume's greatness on the grounds that his personality definitely affected the age in which he lived. It is not a question of the cart before...
...long run the expert in the use of unwarranted assumptions comes off better than the equivator. He would deal with our question on Hume not by baffling the grader or fencing with him, but like this: "It is absurd to discuss whether Hume is representative of the age in which he lived unless we first note the progress of that age on all intellectual fronts. After all, Hume did not live in a vacuum...