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Ashland, Ore.: Richard II, The Taming of the Shrew, Julius Caesar, The Tempest, and a sleeper, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi...
...Webster is a moldy fig. For all its scholarship, the supposedly unabridged dictionary (600,000 entries) gives hardly a hint that the American language is in the grip of a permanent revolution. The Websterian ideal of language as a careful garden of hardy perennials and occasional exotics, cultivated by a corps of devoted lexicographers, is consistently challenged by a weedy invasion of the vulgate. Professors may still protest, but the public -and most authorities-tends to silence them. Says one philologist: "It was once thought that most slang came from the underworld, but nowadays a great deal of it comes...
Even with an extended campaign, the best man is not always selected (Clay, Webster and Greeley were all defeated by lesser statesmen). Nor is a razzle-dazzle road show a prerequisite to victory on Election Day: William McKinley, in 1896, and Warren G. Harding, in 1920, won easily with "front-porch" campaigns, letting the groups of voters and the politicians come to them. And Franklin Roosevelt used the pressures of wartime as a reason for limiting his campaign appearances outside Washington to a bare minimum...
Charlestonese is not an intelligible distortion of the American language in the sense that the dialects of Boston, Brooklyn and Davenport, Iowa are. It pays the merest thank-you-ma'am to Webster's English, draws a lot of its vigor and flavor from Gullah, an African slave dialect still spoken by the white and Negro populations of the rice islands along the South Atlantic littoral, adds a touch of Huguenot French and a dash of regional accent that is as deep-rooted and mysterious as the brooding cypresses. Confronted with Charlestonese, philologists tremble...
Looking born for the role, aging (66) Actor Edward G. Robinson triumphed over Old Nick (played by David Wayne) at week's end in NBC-TV's version of Stephen Vincent Benet's The Devil and Daniel Webster. As Webster, Robinson bargained eloquently for the soul of a New England farmer who had sold out to Satan for material wealth. During rehearsals, Rumanian-born Actor Robinson allowed: "I wouldn't want television as a steady diet. It's back-breaking work...