Word: shakespeareanly
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...actor after actor, the part of Othello proves more a trap than a triumph. Seemingly a model of uncomplicated clarity, the role is replete with opaque ambiguities and calcified misconceptions. Apart from strangling Desdemona and killing himself, Othello initiates less action than any other Shakespearean tragic hero. Indeed, he often seems like lago's stringed puppet. His credulity makes him appear less than normally intelligent, and the rapidity with which jealousy races through his veins suggests that he is as much passion's fool as passion's slave. At the end of Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear...
...director is the multidexterous Jonathan Miller, who for the past year has been making a name in England as a Shakespearean interpreter. For his Old Vic debut, he has removed Merchant from its traditional Renaissance setting and placed it in that most mercantile of periods, the late 19th century. In his staging, the characters as well as the furniture are ornate, substantial, richly upholstered. The verse is flattened into realistic conversational accents. The play's extravagances are trimmed to the tone and dimensions of a leather-cushioned board room...
...answer is neither of these, for neither supports both Renaissance humanism and Shakespearean tragedy; and it is certainly not Antony's petulantly self-deceiving "O whither hast thou led me Egypt?" but some combination of Lepidus' pusillanimous fatalism, and Enobarbus' introspective free will...
Though may of the nuances that Shakespeare gave his characters are lost to the exaggerated action of this production, the motion and emotion generated by the cast compensate for the absence of any Shakespearean accountrements and help to illustrate lines and images that might otherwise have been lost on 20th century ears...
...another piece, "Romeo and Julie?." Goodby makes up a passage similar to a Shakespearean sonnet and proceeds to give 27 annotated comments on 17 lines of verse. lambasting Shakespeare as well as the Bard's life long devotees. The note on "She [Juliet] speaks, yet she says nothing" is "'This line, more than any other, best exemplifies the Shakespearean style.'-Kittridge...