Word: elizabethan
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...nags; he drinks, wenches and poaches. Out of this dubious material, the genius of Western dramatic literature emerges-though one would never know how from William Gibson's meandering fustian. Anne Bancroft does not help with her Bronx-housewife intonations, but Frank Langella speaks a convincing pseudo-Elizabethan line and conveys the anguish of a young man torn between his responsibilities...
...drinks, wenches and poaches. Out of this ill wedding, the genius of Western dramatic literature emerges-but one would never know how from William Gibson's meandering fustian. Anne Bancroft does not help the play with her Bronx housewife intonations, but Frank Langella speaks a convincing pseudo-Elizabethan line and conveys the anguish of a young man torn between his responsibilities...
Goldman, who adapted the screenplay from his 1966 Broadway drama, can hardly be blamed for that, but he does not even seem to know who the real James Goldman is. Sometimes he seems to be a swaggering Elizabethan playwright whose rhetorical sword never gets out of its scabbard. "The sky is pocked with stars," sighs Henry. "Has my willow turned to poison oak?" he inquires of his mistress. At other times, Goldman is an anachronistic historian. "It's 1183, and we're all barbarians," announces the Queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn). Often Goldman is simply...
...only play in the canon to take place entirely in one location. And it is maddeningly rigid and sym-metrical in structure--less a drama than a formal and artificial Elizabethan pavane (in a couple of years he would wisely loosen up his predictable precision when he undertook the similarly structured As You Like...
...that 'parson,' 'person,' and 'pierce' were homophones? How many of you are familiar with words like kersey, farborough, caudle, inkle, thrasenical, and placket? You do know 'half' and 'capon,' but not in their meaning of 'wife' and 'love-letter.' And there is a parade of obscure proper names, Elizabethan slang, malapropisms, and sentences in both good and bad Latin. All of this makes the play an absolutely fascinating goldmine for the student of language in his den, but now it is hardly conducive to excitement on the stage...