Word: bardolph
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...life. Here we see the dissipated life he led under Falstaff's tutelage. The bacchanalian rollicking of yesterday contrasts sharply with the cold reality of the present. The film brilliantly captures these ironies of Henry's transformation. In one tense scene, Henry orders one of his old thieving comrades, Bardolph, to be hanged. The poor man looks straight at Henry and as the young king returns the piercing stare, we see the contradictions of Henry's ascension to royalty...
...general's gift of being the man you automatically follow," says Richard Briers, who plays Bardolph in the film Henry and will assay King Lear in the Renaissance's tour of the U.S. next year. Branagh needed that royal self-assurance to build a major acting company and mount a large film. He will need more of it to sustain his career at its current velocity. "Quite soon," says Terry Hands, the RSC's artistic director, "Ken must decide whether he will be an admin man or a great actor. If a leading actor is also running the whole show...
...prevailing attitude toward the play was largely conditioned by Laurence Oliver's 1944 film version, made as a morale booster for war-torn Britain. The Henry acted by Olivier here is the only really first-rate performance among his five Shakespeare's play. He omitted the conspiracy plot, Bardolph's execution, Williams' challenge about the responsibility for war, the king's threats of rape and pillage and his order to kill the prisoners-of-war, and the references to Richard's deposition and (in the Epilogue) to Henry VI's loss of everything. Then he added some lines from Marlowe...
Graeme Campbell rants nicely as the bragging toper Pistol, whose tavern cronies Bardolph and Nym are sharply limned by Raymond Skipp and Norman Allen. (These two double as the soldiers who converse with the disguised king in a night scene far too brightly lit by Marc B. Weiss.) Aideen O'Kelly is a passable Mistress Quickly and a better Queen of France...
Readers further learn that Shakespeare stole from Falstaff in other dramas too. Hamlet's elegant admonition, "There are more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy," was really first uttered by Falstaffs disreputable pal Bardolph to confuse a policeman in a bawdy house. And that as early as 1459, Falstaff was reflecting: "I think for Hal the whole world was a stage and all the men and women merely players...