Word: shakespeareans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Lebow rears his tall bulk up, out of the general confusion at ground level, and almost manages to clear away the smoke Cain's direction pours forth. This is a confident Lear, a rarity considering how many critics believe the role nearly unplayable. Lebow's accomplished command of the Shakespearean line never falters under the unreasonable demands of his role; try shouting "vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts" sometime, for example, and see how easy...
...other Shakespearean play has elicited such a range of interpretation and evaluation. If Agate declared it one of his "unfavorite" plays in the canon, Dover Wilson thought it Shakespeare's greatest work, Wilson Knight and Henry James placed it at the top of English literature, and Quiller-Couch proclaimed it the supreme work in all literature. For me, it has unsurpassed moments, but as a whole ranks below The Winter's Tale among the four late romances. Everyone agrees that the play means more than it says, but what that meaning is remains a bone of vigorous contention...
...half century since 1929, about 50 sound films have been made, including three of Caesar, all American. The straightforward 1953 version, directed by Joseph Mankiewicz--with James Mason's Brutus, John Gielgud's Cassius. Marlon Brando's Antony, and the late Louis Calhern's Caesar--remains the only excellent Shakespearean film ever done in our country (and few people know that its off-camera crowd roars in the stadium were specially recorded by a huge throng at a baseball game...
...grace, therefore, was all the more dramatic. In surprisingly sympathetic words, the prosecuting counsel, Peter Taylor, noted: "The tragedy of this case ... is that Mr. Thorpe has been surrounded and in the end his career blighted by the Scott affair. His story is a tragedy of truly Greek or Shakespearean proportions-the slow but inevitable destruction of a man by the stamp of one defect...
...Shakespearean terms, this interpretation is an unconscionable outrage, yet it leaves a vivid comic impression. What makes Pacino dreadfully wrong for the role enhances what is prickingly funny about the way he plays it. In social mobility, this young (39) actor has come a long way upward from The Bronx, but no one has been able to mouthwash The Bronx from his speech patterns. From moment to moment, his urban streetside inflection breaks up the house, deliberately. Pacino has insufficient breath control to carry a Shakespearean line, so he spits out the poetry and mars the imagery. He strikes just...