Word: mandragora
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Even the slightest of the plays were produced with engaging theatricality, as in the swaggering bawdiness of the Drama Club's Mandragora, the Machiavelli farce. Czech acting at its frequent best combines an animal energy with the timing of aerial acrobats. Czechs make superb comedians, and have that highest comic skill-to slip with a flash of the eye into the tragic mask. Czech direction is passionately intelligent. In Architect Josef Svoboda, they have the most imaginative stage designer working anywhere today...
...poppy nor mandragora...
Shakespeare's poppy is still around in the form of morphine and its derivatives, plus synthetic substitutes. Mandragora is gone. But the drowsy syrups, and more recently tablets and capsules, have multiplied enormously. By far the most abundantly used and misused are the barbiturates. They come under a hundred names. New, synthetic hypnotics are claimed by their makers to be safer and in some cases surer...
...Shakespeare speaks to the soul. He speaks in metaphor, which relates world to self, thing to thing, in the endless chain of being. Shakespeare could do anything he wanted with language; the way he talks of a thing conjures up the thing itself. The lines, "Not poppy nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep which thou owedst yesterday," hypnotize with their own heavy-lidded evocation of sleep. He packed worlds into monosyllables. "To be or not to be" is man's largest question...
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