Word: elizabethan
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...character assassination. It should all begin with the dawning of Enderby's last day on his own godforsaken planet, but in fact the novel begins with some revealing articles published two years ago in London's Times Literary Supplement. During 1972-73 Burgess was a "writer-academic" teaching Elizabethan drama and creative writing at New York's City College. And apparently he was quite disgusted with everything, even himself. His TLS article May 11, 1973) attacked American university students of literature for their insistence that everything they study be "relevant," a phrase that most intelligent students had already recognized...
Shakespeare was repeatedly showing off. There are numerous setpieces that, while lovely poetry in themselves, impede the dramatic flow. And he imposes on his dialogue a number of traditional forms from outside the theater. For instance, the lovers' first meeting is cast in the mold of one complete Elizabethan sonnet and part of a second; their postnuptial parting is a Provencal alba (which the Bard may have known through Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and which reaches its peak of effectiveness in the second act of the aforementioned Tristan); Juliet declaims a Classical epithalamium; and Paris delivers an elegy...
...Elizabethan period the role of Juliet was played by a young boy, Mary Saunderson in 1662 being the first woman to assume the part. But in the 19th century the original practice was stood on its head, and there was quite a vogue of giving the role of Romeo to such women as Lydia Kelly, Priscilla Horton, Ellen Tree, Mrs. H.B. Conway, and Charlotte Cushman (playing opposite her sister's Juliet until she herself switched to the female part). One year George Rignold was advertised to give a performance of Romeo with seven different Juliets, but the promise fell...
...play's lyricism and innocence, it is at the same time one of the dirtiest in its diction. It teems with smutty puns that would get the work banned by highschool teachers and boards of education if these folks were really up on their Elizabethan lingo. The bulk of the bawdry issues from the mouths of Mercutio and the Nurse, who are the foils to Romeo and Friar Laurence. Kahn has a lot of the phallic and other ribaldry indicated through gesture or mime...
This sort of time change always has the same effect: it up dates the costumes and jarringly displaces the Elizabethan line. Kahn claims to have based his 1866 version on Luigi Visconti's film, The Leopard. But it lacks any trace of the rich textures of the Visconti settings. No one could look at this tacky Verona for a moment and call it "fair...