Word: playfulness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...tale from a secondary source, complete with the trite gimmick of identification of rings. But he failed to expend the necessary effort on characteriaztion as well. Pascal once said, "Every author has a meaning in which all the contradictory passages agree, or he has no meaning at all." This play contains such passages. For example, the first two acts make real sense only if one assumes a homosexual relationship between Bertram and Parolles; yet the last half of the play precludes this situation. Until I am convinced that the inconsistencies do in fact agree, I am rash enough...
...This play was designated a "comedy" in the Folio. Modern scholarship has tried to improve the situation by setting up a sub-category of "dark comedies" for All's Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure. But let's face it: All's Well simply is not a comedy, dark or otherwise--unless one wants to render the term meaningless by applying it to anything with a happy or, as in this case, pseudo-happy ending. (Actually, this ending is utterly absurd, unbelievable, perfunctory, and, for a man of Shakespeare's stature, inexcusable--the sort of thing one finds...
...strongest point of all, however, is Helena. This is Helena's play; and in her lies the clue to its nature. If we disregard the incongruous ending, we are confronted with a "tragedy," or something perilously close to it; and Helena is the heroine. She is a noble, strong-willed personage, "the most virtuous gentlewoman that ever Nature had praise for creating." But, like the great tragic protagonists, she has a serious flaw of character: the lofty quality of Love becomes in her the lowly passion for Sex. And to achieve her goal, which is a perfectly legitimate...
Born at what he calls a "wide place in the road" named Fair Play, S.C. (40 miles southwest of Greenville), Heller is the son and grandson of physicians, had a brother and an uncle with M.D.s. Yet when he entered Clemson College at 16, Rod went into engineering. He switched to the family tradition in time to get his M.D. from Atlanta's Emory University in 1929. Joining up with the U.S. Public Health Service in 1931, he began hopscotching around on two-year tours of anti-VD duty. In 1934 Dr. Heller married Susie May Ayres, daughter...
...Raisin in the Sun. Lorraine Hansberry's prizewinning, flavorful first play about a Chicago Negro family that yearns to leave the black South Side jungle for a place in the white suburban...