Word: othellos
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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This is not to imply that I consider Macbeth Shakespeare's greatest work. Othello is his greatest play (Macaulay went so far as to call it "the greatest work in the world"), or at least his grandest; it is his most masterfully constructed, and for once the quality of the writing never sags from the very highest level. King Lear is the most broadly scaled, intense, and heart-rending. Hamlet is the most ingenious, kaleidoscopic, and--as no one ever tires of saying--inexhaustible...
Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (Spoken Word, 3 LPs) gets a fine new production by the players of the Dublin Gate Theatre, with Michael MacLiammoir as Malvolio, "sick of self-love," posturing his priggish way with timeless vulgarity. London is also out with a spate of Shakespeare-Coriolamis, Othello, Julius Caesar, Richard II-in a series of journeyman readings by the Marlowe Society players, who eventually will press all the plays. One of the most majestically read of the talking books is MGM's Joseph Conrad, in which Sir Ralph Richardson whittles Youth and Heart of Darkness to half...
...Much Ado is an uneven work; it shows Shakespeare at his strongest and at his weakest. The basic story deals with jealousy-inspired treachery--a serious theme the playwright would later return to in Othello and Cymbeline. But at this time, Shakespeare was just casting about for a convenient skeleton to flesh. The whole business of the tragic slandering and the ensuing deception he took from older sources, and clearly wasted little effort on; his treatment of them is decidedly thin. The greatness of the play lies in what Shakespeare himself invented: the dazzing comedy of Beatrice and Benedick...
...During this span the Renaissance style was on the wane, though still much in evidence; the Mannerist style was in full swing; and the Baroque style was in its vigorous infancy. Thus it is that Shakespeare's output reflects all three styles: in the tragedies, for example, Othello is Baroque, Hamlet and King Lear are Mannerist, and Romeo and Juliet is Renaissance...
...burningly scornful of academic mediocrity, preaches that "great teaching lies just short of prophecy." His own contribution to anticipating the future has been to establish at the Baptist school in Waco, Texas one of the most fertile experimental theaters in the U.S. In 1953 he startled Shakespeareans with an Othello that split the Moor into three abstractly made-up characters who represented separate aspects of the tormented hero's character. Three years later he persuaded Actor Burgess Meredith to quit his role as Sakini in Teahouse of the August Moon, be anchor prince in a four-hero Hamlet. Last...