Word: passions
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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HAMLET. Although Richard Burton as Hamlet and Hume Cronyn as Polonius burnish all the richness of language, wit and humor of the play, this revival, and specifically Burton's Hamlet, lacks the burning passion, the mind-tossed anguish, the self-divided will that Hamlet must have to be a true prince of tragedy...
PEDRO MARTINEZ, by Oscar Lewis. Anthropologist Lewis follows his brilliant tape-recorded pastiche, The Children of Sanchez, with the story of an old Mexican peasant whose passion and native eloquence were spent on aborted uprisings and hopeless land-reform politics...
...role splendidly, but something sly, evasive and insecure in his countenance and bearing saps all conviction from his attempts to play parts like Hamlet and Henry V. His "Once more unto the breach, dear friends" and St. Crispin's Day ("we happy few") speeches are not plunges of passion but sputterings of saliva...
...overfamiliar and, in spots, threadbare. Even the wit is surprisingly creaky: "Oh! You are an Englishman, are you?" "Certainly not, my lord: I am a gentleman." The ghost of Shaw haunts all the rooms, but his voice sounds more garrulous than eloquent, and he speaks with pedantry rather than passion...
From the welter of facts, with the passion of a born antiquarian and the insights of a self-made sociologist, Powell has reconstructed the intense pulling and hauling of an early American community that was, "in a real sense, a little commonwealth," able to create "as much of an ideal state as its leaders could conceive and find agreement on." Such fine-grained history is certainly more for the scholar than for most general readers. Yet Powell's style is clear, if sometimes too sugary, and the people and events can be absorbing...