Word: caesar
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...innocent of their later culture, sacked the cities and killed off the Volsci. About 600 B. c. they were first smitten by dread malaria. Of these dire swamps wrote Vergil, Juvenal, Martial, Horace, Ovid and others, including Madame de Stael and more recently Gabriele D'Annunzio. Julius Caesar made elaborate plans for reclamation, Augustus and even Nero had vast labors performed, but in vain. The Catholic popes, notably that enlightened Medici, His Holiness Leo X, then took over the unequal struggle with the potent Pontine Marshes, and finally in 1918 the Italian Government made elaborate plans...
...Orson Welles, 22, and John Houseman, 35, would do with their Mercury Theatre. One bedrock essential that Welles & Houseman apparently lacked was cash. But after a succession of muffled death-rattles backstage, the Mercury came to its first play's first night. On November 11 it produced Julius Caesar. On November 12 the public was informed that Shakespeare's five-act classic had: 1) been turned into a one-act cyclone, 2) on a bare stage, 3) in modern dress, 4) with a modern meaning, 5) gone over with the loudest bang that Shakespeare-lovers could recall...
...With his Caesar a smash hit, Welles flung his laurel wreath into a cupboard, backed Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock-the sceneryless, music-quickened strike play which a scared WPA had dumped overboard the season before- and The Cradle rocked like mad. Then, having enough of boom and roar. Welles and the Mercury turned back to Elizabethan times for a bellylaugh, rigged up Thomas Dekker's bawdy, roistering The Shoemakers' Holiday. That was a success...
...Manhattan on successive nights last week, soon flickered out. Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor (produced by Robert Henderson & Estelle Winwood) lasted four performances, Ibsen's The Wild Duck (produced by Henry Forbes) lasted three. With the shining exception of the Mercury Theatre's Julius Caesar (TIME, Nov. 22), Shakespeare has had hard sledding on Broadway this season. As You Like It, Antony and Cleopatra, The Merry Wives of Windsor were flops, Coriolanus a middling success in its briefly scheduled Federal Theatre run. The Merry Wives, which was written to order in a fortnight because Queen...
...DARK COMMAND-W. R. Burnett -Knopf ($2.50). Lickity-split romance against a background of Kansas-Missouri border fighting; by the author of Little Caesar. A supplementary four-page leaflet explains who his Confederate villain was in real life, makes better reading than much of the novel...