Word: yorick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...impression that l) Donaldson is a loud, obnoxious reporter; and 2) the President is a nice guy with a crinkling smile who would be happy to oblige even the cretins of the press, if it weren't for that darned helicopter. The tableau is as inevitable as Hamlet contemplating Yorick's skull in the final...
...DIMLY LIT corner, a courtier clutches a skull and caresses its sockets. Alas, poor Yorick? No--this time the hero is Vindice (vengeance) and skull is that of his love, Gloriana, poisoned by the wicked Duke. Cyril Tourner's The Revenger's Tragedy, while reminiscent of Hamlet, is of a distinct genre: it is not so much a tragedy as a horror play in which vengeance, severing the ties of love and kinship, sweeps its victims toward their own destruction...
Hamlet's frequent "O God" comes out "O Gahd," and the dramatist's "O Wonderful" has been turned into a Wittenbergian "Wunderbar," and "inexplicable" is mispronounced. On holding Yorick's skull, Hamlet comments, "I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest. "But Walken says, "I knew him, [Long pause] Horatio a fellow of infinite jest." When we reach the Prince's dying words, Walken is so heedless of meter that the beautiful line. "Absent thee from felicity awhile" emerges with an accent on the first syllable...
Books everywhere are falling apart. Acids in the ink and the pulp devour the pages. The paper crumbles, powdered words in a few generations will blow away like dandelion fluff. Some computer-literate great-grandchild will hold the empty, mortal binding in his hands as if it were Yorick's skull...