Word: shakespearean
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That democracy remains in office; the custom of the sharpened axiom continues. Elizabeth Bowen's "Memory is the editor of one's sense of life" is a Shakespearean perception; Peter De Vries' "Gluttony is an emotional escape, a sign that something is eating us" belongs with the best of the Edwardians. Hannah Arendt's observation compresses the century down to a sentence: "Power and violence are opposites; where one rules absolutely, the other is absent...
...through mid-June at the Museum of Broadcasting in Manhattan-is less a professional challenge than an act of reckless physical courage. This recklessness has become something of a habit with Olivier. A sense of danger, athletic as well as emotive, has often been at the heart of his Shakespearean performances. His Romeo (1935) clambered up to his fair lady's balcony in record time; his Hamlet (1947) leaped from a 14-ft. balcony to wrestle with Laertes; his Coriolanus (1959) executed a horrendous, death-daring fall. Inside this theatrical peer, the spirit of a Douglas Fairbanks was always...
...fall flat and occasionally a skit is lost before it ever gets off the ground, but that's the beauty--and the risk--of a live performance, And the infrequent bumbles are more than made up for by the group's strongest pieces. One standout is the Melrod-penned Shakespearean soap opera called "Most Grievous Hospital," which is rendered in Elizabethan rhyming couplets from the introduction by a character named Gossip ("Enjoy the play, friends, Gossip now be gone. I'll change my costume quickly and return anon.") It continues through a brief and purposefully confusing ploy of divorces...
...spring the weather has been weird: violent, Shakespearean. It might have been worse, of course. In the annus mirabilis of 1811, the air was dense with portents: a comet in the northern sky, an eclipse of the sun. The Eastern U.S. was broiled by ungodly heat and swept by tornadoes and hurricanes. Multitudes of squirrels, in the tens of thousands, were seen migrating south across Kentucky. In 1816 Connecticut had a blizzard on June 6. On the Fourth of July that year, the highest temperature recorded in Savannah, Ga., was 46°F The prevailing opinion, for a little while...
...slowing down the fast-paced delivery. Kaplan might have reinforced the contrast inherent in Stoppard's play and done more justice to the Hamlet half. For the near-antithesis between the two voices, the Shakespearean prose and the Beckett-like, riddling repetitions, lead to the play's core: Hamlet's tragedy as seen from side-stage, through the Godot-like absurdity of two characters who are not the least bit heroic...