Word: shakespeareans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Died. Alfred Bennett Harbage, 74, emeritus professor of English at Harvard and perhaps the nation's foremost Shakespearean scholar; of a heart attack; in Philadelphia. Editor of the Pelican edition of Shakespeare's works and author of such studies as Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions and As They Liked It: An Essay on Shakespeare and Morality, Harbage was scornful of all theorists who argued that Hamlet and Macbeth might actually have been written by Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe or any other pseudonymous poet...
Died. Ben Iden Payne, 94, venerable Shakespearean actor, director and drama instructor; in Austin, Texas. Born in England, Payne managed Dublin's Abbey Players before becoming general director of the Shakespeare Memorial Theater at Stratford on Avon. In the U.S., he taught for nearly 20 years in the famed drama department at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and later created a Stratford of the Southwest at the University of Texas in Austin. On Broadway he directed such stars as Maude Adams, the Barrymores and Helen Hayes, who credited him with being the director "who taught me the most...
...faster and perhaps more tongue-twisting; but the Lord Chancellor's song is the Moby Dick of patter songs, the masterpiece all the rest led up to or away from. Singing the Lord Chancellor's song is the equivalent, for a Savoyard, of Hamlet or Lear for a Shakespearean. The lyrics are a juxtaposition of complete irreverence ("the black silk with gold clocks") with a sense of heightened reality and absurdity characteristic of real nightmares...
...more sinned against than sinning--the temptation that this production, not without provocation, succumbed to. One suspects that Esptein really wanted to play Lear or Coriolanus. Epstein was the only actor in the entire cast to successfully master the art of speaking verse on stage and achieving a Shakespearean voice. Although at all times he was eloquent, Epstein, in a proper attempt to make Shylock a genuine foreigner in the midst of the Venetian oligarchy, overdid his accent to the point where--combined with the wheezing and spluttering of old age--it obscured his lines. In a sense Epstein...
...have recognized. The only serious miscasting was the Duke of Venice himself (David Garcia) who lacked the eloquence to make his magnanimity seem better than a sham. Graziano (Dan Riviera) left his role in a shambles, just a little too rasping and sinister to fit in with the overarching Shakespearean theme...