Word: falstaff
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...better American audiences will like it (he may be right about this). So he has imported Doll Tearsheet from 2 Henry IV and interpolated a low-life scene from that play. And just before the end of the show, after the climactic Battle of Shrewsbury, Coe brings on Falstaff to declaim his long paean to the wonders of sherry sack--which also comes from the later play--and thus mars Shakespeare's carefully wrought conclusion. There are, too, some lines that have been moved from their proper place...
...Henry IV strikes many as a work in which Falstaff got away from Shakespeare and walked off with the play. And it is true that Falstaff's is the longest role in the play--without any interpolations from elsewhere. But the playwright's main business here is serious history. In fact, I Henry IV is the earliest extant example of the word history used to designate a dramatic genre. By playing down the history and inflating Falstaff (who is already inflated from excess of food and drink). Shakespeare's balanced design shuttling from palace to pub, from province to plain...
Then there is the matter of vocabulary Shakespeare's Falstaff says. "I am melancholy as a gib cat or a lugg'd bear." But Coe's Falstaff changes this to "castrated cat" (and no bear), thus running the punchy parade of six monosyllables. Coe has also seen fit to supplant wenches with daughters Nit-picking, you say? Then how about Coe's alteration of one of the most famous lines in all Shakespeare? When Prince Hal comes upon the supposedly dead Falstaff, he says. "I could have better spar'd a better man" And Coe has substituted the word lost...
Sarandon delivers this speech with serious intensity, and makes one believe that he is indeed a kind of proto-Hamlet, putting on a show and maintaining a measure of inner detachment Quite consistently, he retrains from displaying as much love for Falstaff as Falstaff shows to him. And Sarandon's facial expression on finding the "dead" Falstaff alive after all is absolutely wondrous...
Apart from the lustrous leading players, each major-minor role is played in stellar fashion. Stephen Moore makes of Bertram's boon companion, Parolles, a pompous, endearing rogue and braggart, a mini-Falstaff. The countess's clown (Geoffrey Hutchings) is Lear's fool, in wit though not in pathos. And Robert Eddison, as adviser to the King, is an elegant paradox, a wise Polonius...