Word: soliloquy
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...another word for the one Shakespeare wrote; at times he fails to heed the pronunciation required by the verse [exTIRpate, wronged, solEMnized]. His lengthy narration at the start is too slow, and his famous "revels now are ended" speech lacks sufficient musicality. He is much better in the abjuration soliloquy--which many have thought to be the playwright's own valedictory, although Shakespeare went on to collaborate on Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the lost Cardenio, and perhaps Sir Thomas More. Haigh has a long way to go before he matches Carnovsky's 1960 Prospero...
Happy Days is essentially a soliloquy, and thus it confronts us with Beckett's major drawback as a playwright. As the most brilliant disciple of James Joyce, Beckett is the master of the interior monologue. But drama breathes only in dialogue. Hamlet is not babbling to himself in the four great inebriant soliloquies; he is addressing questions to his tormented soul, his troubled mind, his impotent will, and the sultry air resonates. In his one-character play, Krapp's Last Tape, Beckett took some notice of this problem. Between his senile musings and avid munching on a banana...
...hands: Who could forget his parody of a Midwestern accent in the former or his rapturous cigarette smoking in the latter? Olivier is such a sly devil that he could make his Oscar acceptance speech, a riotous stream of sheer poppycock, sound as though it were a Shakespearean soliloquy. As TV audiences saw, it was enough to addle Fellow Oscar Winner Jon Voight's brain for the rest of the night...
...Macho editors, who would never put such a question to a man, still send women's page reporters to interview her, and well-meaning businessmen still give her head-patting lectures to explain balance sheets. Whitman smiles at the condescension and responds with her ultimate putdown: a stunning soliloquy on international economics...
...tape to his mirror. Instead, the book combines both these elements, forming a recitation of memories interspersed with philosophy. It reads like a dreamy monologue, as if the reader and Miss Seldes went home together after her evening performance, and she began to describe her career. The soliloquy soon disregards the rules of sequential narration, as if the speaker began to interrupt herself, linking events by theme rather than by time, injecting the insights of the present into the past...