Word: reader
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...storytelling style that she developed in her first novel, Judah the Pious, Francine Prose '68 relates a fictionalized account of these actors' private lives. The book links together short memoirs written by each of them, centering around their loves and power struggles to control the troupe. Directed toward the reader as stage-whispered confessions of behind-the-scenes intrigues, these memoirs are at first appealing in their simplicity and gossipy perceptions, but soon melt into each other. Straightforward once-upon-a-time rhythms become monotonous, especially since Prose does not shift tones of voice. She introduces few variations--in speech...
...action itself, although dramatic at times, is muffled by hazy memories, and by the fact that the actors speak from calm points of resolution. The reader must often settle with a single version of incidents that involve several of the other actors, a version which more often than not is exasperatingly broken by frequent explanatory comments. Isabella, for example, a beautiful alluring woman who always played the Beloved, writes her memoirs from what is an acceptable fairytale vantage point, heaven. Her happiness assured, the tale raises no great anxieties and the recounting of a gruesome and cruel death loses...
Complete editions of most standard authors are sold on the basis of "extensive notes," or "sumptuous binding," or "frequent illustrations." The selling point for the new Houghton-Mifflin Riverside Shakespeare is the text itself, the most honest one now available. Few editions of Shakespeare give the reader much sense of where the words he reads come from. Some of them, of course, come from Shakespeare; but many are the additions of collaborators, the mistakes of printers and scribes, the faulty recollection of actors, the alterations of bowdlerizers and the guesswork of editors. The Riverside text, prepared by Gwynne B. Evans...
...important that the reader be brought as close to Shakespeare as possible. Evans marks editorial revisions with brackets and his textual notes are clear and absorbing. His textual introduction magisterially surveys the history and techniques of Shakespearean editing, condescending not at all to the general ignorance of the subject. The principles of the "choice of the most difficult reading" (restoring unusual words which early editors may have considered mistakes) and "memorial reconstruction" (actors simply writing down their old parts to the best of their remembrance) are two things every reader should know about, and Evans effectively illustrates them from...
...fault of the authors; the essays follow a general pattern closely enough to indicate that the publisher had unity of method in mind. Houghton-Mifflin chose to take the safe, easy approach; and the essays will save many freshmen from silly mistakes. If they do not make the reader stop and wonder, and make that wonder deepen, at least they are free of error and extravagance and demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of a sound, stolid commentary. But it is unfortunate that such a distinguished group of contributors was not given a freer hand; I would much rather have heard...