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...edition as far back as 1500. He also provided readers with a complete Chaucerian vocabulary. Philip Gove has chosen to eliminate all words obsolete before 1740. The damage done to the study of Tudor and Stuart literature is not easily calculated. Such a policy destroys any claims to scholarship Webster's might make. No matter how many experts and Ph.D's spent their time writing definitions for this new lexicon, the fact still remains that 250,000 words are "out of print," and they are just the sort of words that scholars have interest...
...will take a fairly "posh" word-fancier to pay $47.50 for the economy edition. Prices for buckram and India paper scrape the empyrean. Once, the Webster's Unabridged had the advantage of cheapness over the O.E.D., but now it can vaunt nothing but its relative portability...
Last night's production of The White Devil at the Loeb went a long way toward vindicating the choice of Webster's complicated and allusive masterpiece. For the first time a group of actors concentrated seriously enough on clarity to prove that the theater's acoustics are not defective; and a director seemed aware that the drama center did not exist solely for the University's English majors...
...that it is futile to emphasize anything but "the poetry." (Most directors who do realize that dramatic poetry cannot exist without drama, go to the other extreme and delineate plot-line until nothing is left of the text but a Hymarx outline.) The current production strikes a fitting balance: Webster's language is respected while his tale of murder and intrigue is played to the hilt...
...Jean Weston's Vittoria, and she rode it majestically. Her fury was never shouted, but came through instead as the disciplined, brittle, half-smiling anger of a real devil. Peter Haskell, though, prevented her from stealing the show. His unconventional Flamineo, more a pimp than a conspirator, lightened Webster's heavy psychologizing. As a commentator he clarified the story; as a murderer, he mad the killer's impulse seem explicable; and even when the action reached its bloodiest, he sustained its dramatic plausibility...