Word: ophelia
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...theaters, tents and schoolrooms of every land, wherever the sun sets and curtains rise, Falstaff struts with his gorbellied wit, Bottom bumbles through the woods, and wide-eyed Ophelia trembles before Hamlet's abuse. Malvolio preens like a toad in yellow stockings. Hotspur wells blood. In soliloquy and song, in bantering bawdry and scalp-tingling rhetoric, in the kingliest English and in tender or rough translation, they speak to man from mankind's heart. Never in the nearly 400 years since their creator was born have Shakespeare's characters spoken to so many, or meant so much...
...dark vision of the great tragedies. The second was Shakespeare's-embittered love affair with the unknown "dark lady of the sonnets." Biographers have found traces of this siren's raven hair, pitch-black eyes, jigging walk, panting breath and wanton ways in the characters of Ophelia, Cressida and Cleopatra. The third event was the arrest and imprisonment of Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, for helping Essex plot against the Queen. In combination, these events seem to have left Shakespeare at times with a bleak view of man's fate, and a nausea...
...face (a deaf-mute was one of his most ardent fans), pioneered a conversational, non-declamatory style. Although he restored some of the verse and affected to play "as written by Shakespeare," Garrick did his own tampering with the text. The gravediggers were missing in his Hamlet, as was Ophelia's funeral, and Laertes had no pact with the King to kill Hamlet. As far as the public was concerned, it was a case of mime over matter; audiences thrilled to volcanic Edmund Kean playing Tate's sugar-coated Lear, and demanded that mesmeric Sarah Siddons ring down...
...intelligence, gave a performance that would shock insulin: giggling behind a waterfall of hair, pacing the room on invisible paths of tension, she movingly evoked the torment of madness with subtle and abandoned gestures, darted back and forth across the borders of sanity from the vague lostness of Ophelia to the purring, look-how-balanced-I-am attitude of a Dr. Joyce Brothers...