[Milton-L] Clifford Odets' "Paradise Lost"

[pluscachange at comcast.net]

Today's issue of the Oregonian lists some local playbills for the 2008-09 season. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival at Ashland will be doing Clifford Odets' "Paradise Lost" from July to November When I read this immediately thought perhaps they intended an oblique nod to our own poet's quadricentennial, but upon reading the plot synopsis in Wikipedia and the movie review in the IMDB database, I think maybe Odets himself hardly knew the epic. I've never read nor seen the play or film, so I can't say, but it would seem to raise the question of whether economic downsizing in hard times results in rebelliously Satanic behavior. I thought you all might like to know.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0212415/

A couple of weeks ago  while riding the commuter train and reading the fine thriller "Interred with his Bones" by Jennifer Lee Carrell, a fellow sitting opposite asked me about the book. I told him it concerns the questions of Shakespeare's lost play "Cardenio" and gets into the authorship question (Ashland is also doing a dramatization of "Don Quixote"). He started telling me about Psalm 46 and insisted it was not 46 but 43 that was supposed to be the magic number. After tactfully doing the math, I even more tactfully changed the subject to a question I had just mentioned here, namely, what would be your short list of works that have truly influenced or changed people's lives? He named Dante, Shakespeare, Homer -- and Thomas Paine. I suggested Pilgrim's Progress and Paradise Lost, and he claimed that "nobody  reads them." I insisted they did, citing the fact of many marathon readings and having had the full opening recited to me by an office worker. Fortunately he got off, !
 so I wa
s relieved of the need to change the subject again, as I was running out of tact!

Also, I've just started reading Elizabeth Redfern's "Music of the Spheres," a very complex and fairly dark novel that quotes PL abundantly.

A joyous Easter to those who celebrate it, and for those who don't -- happy equinox!

Nancy Charlton

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