Word: playwrightes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...play's reputation I have to admit that I can't share the general enthusiasm for it as a stage vehicle. Shakespeare was still an immature playwright when he wrote it, and the quality of the result soars and plunges like a fever chart. Much of the work is too artificial, much of the punning too protracted, much of the diction rhetorically overwrought...
...Bandello's novella, Juliet was 18 years old. In Brooke's poem, which was Shakespeare's immediate source, she became 16. The playwright, however, for reasons never convincingly argued, makes Juliet a couple weeks short of her fourteenth birthday, and underlines her age several times. Romeo is some years older, but still an immature teenager...
Romeo and Juliet is unique in Shakespeare's output for containing, in the Chorus' Prologue, the playwright's own view of the overall import of the sad outcome, which he attributes to evil destiny and the parents' feud. Romeo and Juliet themselves are not tragic figures in the classical sense. It is the parents who exhibit a "tragic flaw," and thus are made to suffer through the needless loss of their children...
Twelfth Night is not a pioneering work. The playwright was dealing with materials that he and others had manipulated countless times. The result was, to borrow Pope's words, "What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd." The Bard here had three main plots going at once; and in no other play did he tie up so many complicated strands at the end with such mastery or with such a blend of feelings...
...that requires the American Shakespeare Theater at Stratford, Conn, to vary its productions between the barely adequate and the eminently atrocious. It is just the sloppy custom of the place. The sad truth is that a merely average revival of a classic, whether by Shakespeare or some other great playwright, leaves only the forlorn impression of a weighted balloon. It takes superior acting, direction and a current of passion and imagination to raise it gloriously aloft. Stratford opened its 20th season with two grounded balloons, Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet...