Word: falstaff
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...sized lump of flesh is discovered slouching on a bench, snoring. It is the snore of authority, rich with phlegm and idiosyncrasy, and within a few minutes after it dwindles into wakefulness there is no question that things will be all right. The lump of course is Sir John Falstaff, in the considerably-augmented person of Daniel Seltzer, and the effervescent Mr. Seltzer is engaged in one of the most amazing tours de force ever perpetrated upon the risibilities of the Harvard community. He shows us an entirely fabulous creature, soaring in the Empyrean of obesity and insolence; he totters...
There is in the pages of Henry IV another incarnation of disorderly glory as eminently actable as Falstaff himself: Harry Hotspur, who is both the noble avatar of chivalry gone out-of-date, and a very young man full of appealing foibles. In this role Thomas Weisbuch is properly brisk and explosive, but even from Row D his words are often hard to understand; worse, he lacks both the charm of boyish buoyancy that should make Hotspur irresistible, and the trumpet-tongued grandeur requisite to his mounting "esperance...
Hotspur lies dead, however, at the end of the play, and the coming repudiation of Falstaff is announced near the beginning. Shakespeare's theme, one of his favorites, is the defeat of high disorder and glorious idiosyncrasy by a comparatively hum-drum and rather chilly practicality, in the person of Henry, Prince of Wales. In Part II of Henry IV Shakespeare shows us that Hotspur's colleagues are merely anarchic self-seekers and that Falstaff and his friends have a sizeable streak of moral rottenness; in Henry V the now-eponymous hero reconciles (with some disturbing overtones) personal grandeur with...
...escape the last-act curtain and become dramatic immortals like Hamlet, Tartuffe, and St. Joan. Captain Boyle, the strutting Paycock, is a Homeric boozer, braggart and whine. With a sea-rolling gait and a gravelly brogue, Melvyn Douglas makes him an amiably puckish buffoon but scarcely a Dublin Falstaff. O'Casey's Juno has a spiny tongue for her shiftless husband, but she is also an Earth Mother of Sorrows. Her unmarried daughter becomes pregnant; her son loses an arm to the British and his life to the I.R.A. Shirley Booth puts a barbed disenchantment in her lines...
...opera, Giulio attended rehearsals at La Scala, recommended the hiring or firing of singers, publicly castigated conductors. A pet hate for a time: Toscanini, whose style he once likened to a "mastodonic mechanical piano." Above all, Giulio commissioned Arrigo Boîto to write the librettos of Otello and Falstaff, which fired the aged Verdi into composing again. Although Puccini drew monthly advances for nine years before paying the money back, their friendship was sometimes stormy. "All composers," Giulio wrote him once, "French, English, German, Turkish and Abyssinian, [are] a bunch of idiots...