Word: faustus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Scholars know Simon Forman as the man who attended-and made notes on -four of Shakespeare's plays performed during the dramatist's lifetime. Historian A.L. Rowse, 72, knows Forman as something more: an extravagant conflation of Horatio Alger and Doctor Faustus whose claim to fame lies buried in a "vast mass" of barely decipherable manuscripts. Having burrowed through this trove of papers, Rowse now announces that Forman "has exposed himself as no one has done, not even Pepys or Boswell or Rousseau, and with more naive candor and ingenuous truthfulness than a Henry Miller...
...Eugene Gant, came here and started reading books like crazy because "he simply wanted to know about everything on earth; he wanted to devour the earth and it drove him mad when he saw he could not do this." If there was anywhere you'd expect a modern Dr. Faustus to turn up it would be Widener Library, but these days, alas, people mostly talk about how they learned what they learned at Harvard outside of classrooms and libraries, how they had "learning experiences" here...
...about Don Juan. Now I am going to be a sorcerer for sure. Only my death could stop that." It is a ro mantic role, this anthropological ges ture across a pit of entities which, in a different age, would have been called demons. Will Castaneda become the Dr. Faustus of Malibu Beach, attended by Mephistopheles in a sombrero? Stay tuned in for the next episode. In the meantime, his books have made it hard for readers ever to use the word primitive patronizingly again...
Marlowe's Dr. Faustus turned up on television this past summer with Richard Burton in the title role and Elizabeth Taylor as Helen of Troy. No play so great has ever failed so abysmally. Not even Marlowe's poetry could save the film from its stylistic pretensions--no important line was let past without the screen quivering in peculiar effects of light and color; no setting lacked a quality of manufactured gloom. At its climactic worst--as Faustus prepares for damnation--red blotches swirl round his head, and music builds to a crescendo. Burton grimaces in the best Burton fashion...
...FANTASTICKS is a conglomerate. It ties together the separated lovers and feuding parents of Romeo and Juliet, the wall from A Mid-summer Night's Dream, the desire for power of Doctor Faustus. It is musical comedy, didactic medieval morality play, and, in case the audience finds itself laughing at the idea of putting all these elements together, a tongue-in-cheek satire of its own characters and mood. It has something for everyone, and that's probably why it is, as the press blurb announces, "The longest-running American stage production of all time." It has had over...