Word: shaffers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Royal Hunt Shaffer has tackled some of man's profoundest problems: God, Faith, Hope-Despair, Joy-Pain, Greed, Honor. In the Introduction to the printed text, he states some of his premises: "What is most distressing for me in reading history is the way man constantly trivialises the immensity of his experience" the way, for example, he canalises the greatness of his spiritual awareness into the second-rate formula of a Church-any Church..... To me, the greatest tragic factor in history is man's apparent need to mark the intensity of his reaction to life by joining a band...
...Shaffer has not fallen into the trap of abstract debate, however. He explores his theme by dramatizing a segment of actual history-the Spaniards' conquest of Peru, and more specifically, the period 1529-1532 and the events surrounding the crucial confrontations between Pizarro the Conquistador and Atahuallpa the God-Become...
Royal Hunt is just as purely an epic as is the lliad (and one could point out numerous parallels between the two). It also shows high quality in all six departments postulated by Aristotle for tragedy: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, song. Shaffer says he was aiming for "total this theatre," and he definitely has achieved it. For this is not just a play to be spoken. Lighting, sets, costumes, masks, instrumental music, singing, sound effects, mime, dance, ritual-all are wonderfully integrated and absolutely indispensable...
...just as Shakespeare could not have done without Holinshed's Chronicles, Shaffer could not have done without Prescott's Conquest of Peru (an astounding achievements-researched and written Jasmite the almost total blindness Prescott incurred from a food throwing fracas among Harvard students-and still, after more than a century, the definitive work on the subject). And Shaffer did his homework well. He follows the account in Book III of Prescott rather more closely than Shakespeare kept to his historical sources...
...Shaffer has, however, departed in certain instances from Prescott. Some deviations are inconsequential details, but others are important. Shaffer has moved the murder of Atahuallpa's brother Huascar ahead in time. And he has made Pizarro eventually a more sympathetic character than emerges from Prescott, who rightly stated that "the treatment of Atahuallpa, from first to last, forms undoubtedly one of the darkest chapters in Spanish colonial history." But these changes are invariably justified dramaturgically, Shaffer has retained, compressed, omitted, and changed the right things to insure a better play...