Word: mishmash
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...that Shakespeare needed rewriting. Taking its cue from Ben Jonson ("Shakespeare wanted art"), the Restoration and the Age of Reason argued that the Bard was a barbaric child of Nature whose war bled woodnotes wild violated the Aristotelian unities of time, place and action. His plots were a confusing mishmash of the tragic and comic. He was vulgar. Samuel Pepys confided to his diary that Hamlet "disgusts this refined age." Dryden called him "divine Shakespeare," but added smugly: "I have refined his language, which before was obsolete." Voltaire may have summed up his era's widespread judgment...