Word: playwrightes
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Shakespeare's real interest is in getting away to the Forest of Arden, where nothing much happens for three acts except a parade of bantering duologues. When it's time for us to go home, the playwright suddenly in the fifth act rounds people up for a quadruple wedding, has someone report that the usurping duke has reformed offstage, and (in a gesture unique for the period) bids the heroine directly dispatch us from the theatre in an epilogue...
Touchstone (not found in the source novel) is Shakespeare's first intentional fool, a character the playwright would vastly improve on in Twelfth Night, All's Well, and King Lear. It is a tribute to George Hearn's skill that, with rouged cheeks and polychrome doublet, he makes this satirizing role better than it really is; and he fully merits the applause his speech on duelling elicits...
...Duck Variations, a bright young playwright, David Mamet, 28, displays the Pinter trait of wearing word masks to shield feelings and of defying communication in the act of communicating...
...hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." The experience of Miss Hellman--herself one of the small handful of American playwrights in Miller's class--may well have spurred Miller to finish The Crucible. (One famous playwright who did cave in and supply HUAC with a list of names was Clifford Odets...
...Loyalists with names like Shallow and Dupe are trapped in a garrison surrounded on three sides by Rebel forces and on the fourth by the sea. They face a "curs'd alternative, either to be murder'd without or starv'd within." With unmistakable relish, the playwright proceeds to detail the physical and moral collapse of the besieged enemy. Britain's sons of Mars, "the terror of the world," become mere "skeletons, our bones standing sentry through our skins." Speeches about an honorable defeat give way to scatological laments over the breakdown of their bodily functions...