Word: poetics
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...amount of skill in acting and producing can make The Bandeirantes into good theater. The play, however, does raise the question of how much subtlety of expression and meaning a writer of poetic drama has to sacrifice for the sake of clarity. Plays, perhaps, more than any other form of literature, must be capable of raising and sustaining the interest and immediate involvement of the audience. If the language of a play is subtle to the point of obscurity, and if the action thereby appears unmotivated, then the audience will grow bored and the work will fail. It seems...
...achieving the proper sense of a play at all, Tamburlaine has been understandably enough passed by. But, as dynamically staged by Tyrone Guthrie, it richly justifies a for-the-nonce revival. For if a failure, this vast creation of the 23-year-old Marlowe is yet a work of poetic genius; if undramatic, it can be stunningly theatrical; if monotonous, its monotony is a many-splendored thing. The "high, astounding terms" with which 14th century Tamburlaine assailed the world are equally those with which Marlowe assaulted the theater...
...Born the same year as Shakespeare (1564), Marlowe managed, in a short life, to write some fine lyric poetry ("Come live with me and be my love"), a long narrative poem (Hero and Leander), and four superb poetic dramas: Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II. A militant atheist, in flight from arrest, he was killed at 29 during a drunken brawl in a riverside tavern near London, probably a political victim of Queen Elizabeth's Secret Service...
...Cronin reported that the Place took on poetic hues in the candlelight, a ceiling of darkness closed in each booth, and voices whispered in a romantic hush. "But we don't plan to make either the candles or the dulcet voices a permanent part of our atmosphere," Cronin said. "We will await future happy misadventures in the Cambridge electric power for repetitions of the occasion...
...prototypes but from among the mocking, high-spirited, slapstick players of the Italian Commedia dell'Arte. By placing them against the superb park landscapes he sketched in and around Paris, Watteau created a half-make-believe world of his own that paid homage to nothing but his own poetic imagination...