Word: spake
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...Shakespeare, Madam, is obscene, and thank God, we are sufficiently advanced to have found it out!" Thus spake the pure-the ever so pure-voice of the born bowdlerizer. Self-congratulatory, combining limitless prudery with limitless zeal, the expurgator haunted the live authors of the 19th century, and the dead authors of every century previous. Without respect for reputation, he labored-blue stockings on his feet, blue pencil in his hand-to save the reading public from corruption and to save masterpieces (including the Bible) from themselves...
During the two unbroken hours of action that followed, Actor Yan Brian recited a passage from Thus Spake Zarathustra while climbing a ladder, male dancers struggled for balls of rolled-up newspapers, a black-clad hag buzzed around on a scooter and recited folk poems. Men and women frugged wildly to rock-'n'-roll music, imitated coitus to electronic pings and a soft-voiced reading of the Song of Songs, staged a mock war between classical and modern ballet, and ended looking up expectantly while the noise of jet engines screamed overhead. Then, during ten minutes of bravos...
...Taming of the Shrew. "We intend to make Shakespeare as successful a screenwriter as Abby Mann." Thus spake Director Franco Zeffirelli last year when he began filming The Taming of the Shrew. The screen credits maintain the mock-the-bard tone: script billing goes to Zeffirelli, Paul Dehn and Suso Checchi D'Amico, with a coy acknowledgment "to William Shakespeare, without whom we would have been at a loss for words." The irreverence in this case is less a shame than a sham. Despite the disclaimer, Zeffirelli has succeeded in mounting the liveliest screen incarnation of Shakespeare since Olivier...
...pieces written by these men would probably embarrass them today. Leonard Bernstein '39 wrote music columns for the Advocate, so Culler has included one of them in which Bernstein knocked Columbia Records; he was given to college boy chattiness, concluding paragraphs with phrases like "end of tirade" or "Thus Spake Zarathustra." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. contributed political analyses, so a piece predicting a Republican comeback in 1940 has been re-printed. Presumably, the reader is supposed to be delighted with this gentle irony, amused by a posterior knowledge of the quirks of fate and history...
...Thus spake Duke Ellington, 66, in the lyrics for his swinging Genesis, In the Beginning God. Putting on the "personal statement" in his Concert of Sacred Music with the full band in Manhattan's 157-year-old Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, the Duke made a joyful noise indeed. So did torchy Lena Horne, who sang an exquisite Christmas Surprise, the Ellington song about the birth of Christ. In doing hip hymns for the concert, which CBS will televise Jan. 16, the Duke explained, "You have to believe very strongly yourself or else it doesn't work. The pulpit...