Word: tales
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...libretto uses only words from Shakespeare: the text of Shrew, a speech from Romeo and Juliet, and some lines from the Sonnets. Unlike the Cole Porter musical comedy version of the play, Kiss Me, Kate, Giannini has given equal weight to the two pairs of lovers in the original tale--Katherina and Petruchio, Bianca and Lucentio. The result is a highly dramatic and serviceable opera libretto...
Coming after Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale, The Tempest caps a magnificent interrelated tetralogy, the dramatist's counterpart to the late Beethoven quartets Op. 130-133. All four plays explore the estrangement-remorse-reconciliation theme. But The Tempest is extraordinarily rich in meanings--in Mark Van Doren's felicitous words, "Any set of symbols, moved close to this play, lights up as in an electric field." Whatever else it may be, the play is a masterful study of the use and abuse of liberty (how often the very words "liberty," "free" and "freedom" crop up in the text...
...most bizarre happy ending of the lot, King Lear's daughter Cordelia married Edgar, and Lear was offered back his kingdom. Adapter Nahum Tate, who also edited out Lear's Fool (this cut lasted for 157 years), solemnly declared that his only purpose was "making the tale conclude in a success for the innocent distressed persons...
...1940s to open a store. An endlessly fascinating playground is revealed to him by his Indian chum, Buckety, who first greets him: "We can be brothers and cross ourselves with clam juice and chicken blood to prove it." Woven into the boys' Huck Finn adventures is a darker tale of the Indians' past. From his grandfather, Jerrod learns of the Indians' once robust life, of how they hunted whales in canoes and dragged the carcasses back to shore as the symbol of their power...
...trouble is that Author Brown, noted for a good World War II novel, A Walk in the Sun, seems to have lost faith in his audience. Lest the reader miss the parallels, he tells his tale in the pidgin poetry of the conventional translator. What he has set out to do, says the author, is tell of "a yellow Sunday in the last days of a good spring, while . . . pale threads, drawn out from dark hidden places, began to be wound inexorably together . . . until there had been wrought, out of such tenuous white and fleeting things, a taut tripwire...