Word: played
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...left hanging a good deal of the time, it hung to his knees. Insofar as it did not allow him the modesty allowed to those around him, it gave him a reason for his cynicism. Insofar as, when it was it was present, the full dramatic force of the play swung on its axis, it gave Thirsites immediately the authority which on the page he achieves only in the last...
Enough of Thirsites. It was perhaps fitting that this play was performed in the grimy heart of London, while The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Winter's Tale were performed at the Royal Shakespeare Company's real home in its theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. There the lawns, though trampled, are green...
...Merry Wives of Windsor is a play which, though it presents a flat and calcified Falstaff, and though on the page it may drag, nevertheless can, and did when I saw it, overflow with life. It is a farce with typically Shakepearian comic elements. For the most part everyone stays the same, there is no real hero, and the humor consists of the devices which were old hat to Aristophanes. But the pasteboard hero (Fenton) does get his girl (Anne Page), and Ford learns that he has been unreasonably, unnaturally jealous, and calms down...
Karl Marx said of the play, "In the first act alone of The Merry Wives of Windsor there is more life and movement than in all German literature." Few are in a position to disagree...
...Caius is a French physician in the play whose accents, mannerisms and character are constantly ridiculed, and whose energy is one of the play's driving comic forces. He had a habit, selon Terry Hands, the director, of kissing those he presumed to be his friends on both checks. The trouble was that all his friends were Englishmen, or normal height, and he was about 4'10". Hence to reach each check he had to hop, and his helloes and good-byes became increasingly more hilarious sight gags...