Word: shakespeareans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...opening Twelfth Night was greeted with morning-after queasiness by the critics: Illyria became a British seaside resort circa 1830, and most of the cast appeared to be on shore leave from H.M.S. Pinafore, including tremolo-prone Katharine Hepburn, an exponent of the Bryn Mawr school of Shakespearean diction. The Connecticut Stratfordians followed up with a becalmed Tempest. Expected later with some foreboding: Movie Actor Robert Ryan's Antony to Katharine Hepburn's Cleopatra...
...life was a very Shakespearean mixture of the familiar and the strange, of petty peace and dark tragedy, acted out against the incomparable backdrop of the Elizabethan Age. Young Will had a far better family background, and probably far better schooling, than the anti-Shakespearean theorists usually concede. The Shakespeares were Warwickshire farmers, but Will's father, ambitious John, moved to Stratford and became a glover. He was one of the town's official aletasters, and donned the scarlet robes of high bailiff, or mayor, when Will was four. The boy presumably went to Stratford's King...
...less considerate. Relentlessly, the dust has been dug up, the literary remains chopped, scattered, reshaped by each succeeding age according to its own vision. A history of changing Shakespearean fashions, as T.S. Eliot has pointed out, is a history of Western civilization...
...Players. Except for the lambently poignant Ellen Terry, England suffered an early 20th century eclipse of great Shakespearean acting-performers had their minds on the theater of social significance, and considered Shakespeare the kiss of death...
Compared to such models, the American Shakespearean actor is short on breath, long on Method and nil on tradition, despite the dimly remembered glories of Booth and Barrymore. Too many U.S. actors either singsong like walking metronomes or chop up the lines and speak blank prose. As for acting, Method-mad U.S. actors swallow a character like medicine and then release him through their pores in involuntary shudders. They are nonetheless eager to try the roles that all agree are the touchstones of an actor's skill and imagination. What is needed is the continuity of acting tradition that...