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Current Talk '03 II / Re:The New DARK SHADOWS?
« on: November 16, 2003, 05:54:11 AM »I personally prefer Marlowe. And John Webster... the Duchess of Malfi is a fabulous play, perhaps one of the very greatest plays in the English language.
I'm willing to bet you like Marlowe's "Edward II" ... I saw a small theatre group's electric contemporary production of this a few years ago, and there's also Derek Jarman's interesting take on it ...
For 16th century Elizabethan poetry, Sir Thomas Wyatt is unequaled ... Shakespeare's sonnets are complex and challenging, but very static and undramatic; I enjoy reading more Philip Sidney's "Astrophil and Stella" sonnet cycle (whose title personages Dickens' named his Philip "Pip" and Estella after ...).
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Not to say that Willie the Shake is chopped liver, of course.
Nicely put!
And speaking of literature in relation to DS, I wonder if writers for a new DS could possibly be as literate as they often were on DS. I'm thinking of Barnabas' lengthy speech recounting the death of Josette to Carolyn and Vicki in the drawing room at Collinwood (this was pre-1795/7) ... the range of reading that the writers showed, drawing on classic works of literature ... Roger Collins' recitation of "Dover Beach" ... the knowledge the writers display of customs and language and manners during the various time periods ... there really is a lot of intelligence in a lot of DS that I can't even imagine seeing in a show today.