Word: malfi
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Duchess of Malfi (by John Webster; adapted by W. H. Auden; produced by Paul Czinner), though one of the most famous of Elizabethan dramas, received its first Broadway production in 88 years. From a theatrical standpoint, there were possibly reasons to explain the delay. For all its magnificent flashes of drama and snatches of poetry, The Duchess moves slowly, mounts uncertainly, lets its fire go out between quick, bright blazes. It lacks, too, the humanity that a Shakespeare could fuse with horror; Webster's tale of the rich, widowed young Duchess who remarries in secret, fearing her rapacious brothers...
Canada Lee, Negro pugilist-turned-actor, got into a wig and grease paint in Boston and made a little modern theatrical history by playing a white man's role opposite Star Elisabeth Bergner in The Duchess of Malfi. Critics' judgment: a success. In Wilmington, Del., history repeated itself: a theater manager disavowed racial prejudice but canceled The Duchess' engagement...
...Tributary Theatre last night achieved one of the most potent productions of Elizabethan drama seen herabouts in its showing of Christopher Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus." Under the direction of Eliot Duvey, a group of relatively unknown players have infinitely outshined the Broadway luminaries of last week's "Duchess of Malfi," and in their organization, point the way for serious theatre groups everywhere...
...built on the grand Shakespearean scale." Readers, argues Cecil, may be overcritical of Hardy's often cumbersome, melodramatic writing if they fail to grasp that his work was modeled on the Elizabethan drama-on the wild and stormy tragedy of King Lear and The Duchess of Malfi rather than on he carefully constructed novel form of a Tolstoy or a Jane Austen. They may also become impatient with his pessimism if they do not realize that, unlike his great Elizabethan predecessors, Hardy was a reluctant atheist...
Elisabeth Bergner, playing in The Two Mrs. Carrolls (TIME, Aug. 16), looked forward with relish to her next play, John Webster's early 17th Century The Duchess of Malfi. "It is an incestuous play," she explained. "A woman almost gives birth to a baby on the stage, a woman almost rapes a man on the stage...