Word: braggart
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...though from Your highest heaven You plunge Your spear at my heart, I fear You not. No, not if the blow Is as the lightning blasting a tree I fear You not, puffing braggart...
Theatregoers of today can reasonably be expected to show familiarity with the stock characters of the old Italian commedia dell'arte, from which Shakespeare took the five low-comedy figures that Berowne ticks off as "The pedant, the braggart, the hedge-priest, the fool, and the boy." Respectively, Holofernes corresponds to the dottore, Armado to the capitano, Nathaniel to the pantalone and parasite, Moth (a wit) and Costard (a dimwit) to the comic servants (zanni). But it seems that Shakespeare also had in mind here poking fun at such now-forgotten men as Thomas Nashe, Gabriel Hervey, and John Florio...
...SHOW-OFF is George Kelly's comedy of 1924, but it is datelessly entertaining. Its hero (Clayton Corzatte) is a braying, backslapping braggart with the laugh of a hyena and the grandiloquent transparency of a born liar. The actress who commandeers the stage in this APA revival is Helen Hayes in her best role since Queen Victoria...
Into the middle-middle-class Fisher family, bickering affectionately in a comfortable old house in North Philadelphia, comes the Show-Off, one Aubrey Piper, a $32.50-a-week clerk in the Pennsylvania Railroad freight office. A back-slapping braggart with the laugh of a hyena and the implacable euphoria of a lobotomy patient, Aubrey woos and wins the Fishers' younger daughter Amy over the vociferous outrage of the rest of the family. Aubrey does everything wrong-lying with grandiloquent transparency, big-spending his way into debt-and as a husband seems to justify every dire prediction of the fuming...
David Cornell is perfect as the braggart general -- very big and very bass. James Lardner, as the young love interest, has little poise and less animation, but he delivers a strong lyric. Leland Moss plays the part of the funny old lecher Senex as if he were not supposed to be old, lecherous, or funny. As Senex's wife, Gladys Smith has the right looks and voice, but she is a weak comedienne...