Word: seem
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Adolescence was a period in life when scrapes and worries that now seem minute appeared to be of cataclysmic importance. In case anyone has forgotten this, there is "What a Life" to bring back those memories, fond or otherwise. Jackie Cooper is the butt of all situations that regularly occur in the average high school. Framed into being caught giving a teacher a "hot-seat", into having his name forged on the pawn ticket for the school's band instruments, though guilty of cribbing in an exam, he blunderingly comes out near the top, even to winning the girl, acted...
...show at the Wilbur does not really seem to be a play at all, but merely the discussion of the possibilities of plays. It is an illuminating and entertaining discussion, to be sure, but it gives the impression that Mr. Behrman is spending three acts rolling up his sleeves and sharpening his pencils without ever really getting down to work. He has spent three acts in eloquent defense of comedy and yet has only succeeded in writing a comedy which is self-conscious, superficially novel without being actually original...
...whole tribe of scholars and interpreters have encamped on the slopes of the Bard, assaying his every semicolon. Their discoveries have made a gulf great & wide between the specialist's knowledge of Shakespeare and the ordinary reader's memory, in which the plays are likely to seem bombastical old standbys, crested here and there with great quotations. To distill the specialist's knowledge, to provide a lucid and sound account of what art may now be seen in every play, remained an important job for somebody...
...result, a compression of wonders perceived by a sensitive ear and mind, is to prove the plays strange and fresh enough to have been written yesterday or even tomorrow. Illuminated and relieved of their characteristic length and considerable dross, some seem almost too attractive, too clearly themselves. Not that Shakespeare's flops are spared. "The poet in The Comedy of Errors puffs with unnatural effort. . . . His rhymes . . . rattle like bleached bones." But The Merchant of Venice, in which money and love go hand in hand and uncorrupted, is a "gentlemen's world," inhabited by "creatures whose only function...
...earth as a massive rock or a tree. Fiene speaks much in the same manner. His men are on a par with the countryside which they inhabit. But his is a new kind of landscape, one bristling with cranes and pulleys, a valley of machines whose wheels seem as if they might revolve for all eternity. And out of this maelstrom chimneys point upward like lank, black limbs. Breughel, in his work, brings out the essential sameness of man and his natural environment; Fiene shows that man is degenerating into an unimportant phase of a new and artificial environment...