Word: lear
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...King Lear. For his return to the U.S. stage after nine years abroad, Orson Welles chose a tragedy as theatrically challenging as it is tremendous. His King is every inch a showman. His Lear is often pictorially brilliant. But it is hardly, on Shakespeare's terms, Lear; nor, even on Welles's terms, successful...
With its striding rages and vivid madness, Welles's Lear scarcely buttressed the widespread belief that the part is unactable; even with an injured ankle, Welles was never a mere "old gentleman tottering about with a walking stick." But both as actor and director, Welles slighted Lear's character and Lear's significance, did far too little with Shakespeare's poetry. Any number of moments lacked their sovereign power to move-and not least from scanting Shakespeare's sovereign powers of language...
Welles gave Lear not character but personality. The quest for effect outlawed inwardness; the thirst for size defeated stature. And the City Center cast had neither Shakespearean style nor personal distinction...
Biographer Murry mercifully spares the readers a psychiatric treatise on the great dean, but the book does, with immense elaboration, spell out one of the saddest stories in literature. Few Americans read King Lear, and fewer still would read it if it existed only in Scholar Kittredge's famous notes. Middleton Murry's book is of that scholarly kind. Yet, readers who do not insist on a bland diet of print will be well rewarded by this study of a man of tragic genius...
...justice rails upon yon simple thief," Lear says to Gloucester. ". . . Change places; and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which the thief." Many observers connected with Harvard have long looked upon the Arnold Arboretum controversy with similar bemusement and unconcern. To them, the problem of housing the Arboretum's botanical library and specimens has been a thorn in the University's side through ten years of huff and puff. But for those people actually touched by the controversy, the solution of the Arboretum dispute is a matter of principle and commonsense...