Word: shakespeareanly
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...luck play," he maintains, "is that it's done in the dark, and people are always falling off parapets and breaking their ribs." Polanski is bringing it into the daylight. His witches are not spirits, but real, scruffy women. His actors, wearing no makeup, speak the Shakespearean verse conversationally. Authenticity is Polanski's byword; he uses it to mean 'not so much chronological accuracy as "a look that can make people believe all this actually happened...
...looking for a speck of dirt or any antique grime cherished from the old Bick era. A dark blue rug covers the ungodly Bick tile, and a double set of glass doors throws up a space-lock between the dining room and the filthy sidewalk ecology outside. The fancy Shakespearean name and the fleur-de-lis table mats won't fool too many patrons: this place is about as Elizabethan as Dayton, Ohio...
Chamberlain was not to the Shakespearean canon born. He grew up in Beverly Hills and, out of "sheer uncooperativeness," did not learn to read until the fourth grade. He eventually managed a B.A. from Pomona College, and, after some acting lessons, landed an MGM contract. The studio gave him the Kildare part after passing over 35 others (including Lew Ayres, who created the role in films). It did not, however, make an actor out of him, as Sir Cedric Hardwicke once told Chamberlain. "You're doing it all backwards. You're a star...
...Shakespearean canon, "Troilus and Cressida" comes after "Hamlet" and the powerful tragedies and at a time of the moody, enigmatic comedies that are unresolved and express a general distaste for life. There was a time when pedants were convinced that Shakespeare had suffered a nervous breakdown. Romanticists are sure that the Dark Lady of the Sonners had betrayed him more wantonly than usual, and that, like Jimmy Durante, he was in a mowing mood...
That Richard Burton would have been a great Shakespearean actor had he not married Elizabeth Taylor...