Word: falstaffs
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...through Robert Benchley's work is "to discover a good many of his sketches astonishingly bland, disarmingly gentle." The 65 pieces that pass Richler's scrutiny are trenchant, acrimonious and sharp. Most of them are also funny. But they are no more mature than the Falstaff put down by Prince Hal: "How ill white hairs become a fool and jester...
...resolved to take to the stage. With no schooling in the dramatic arts, Ralph had literally to buy his way into an amateur repertory company. His audition speech drew this appraisal from the company's manager: "It's frightful, Richardson. You could never, never be any good as Falstaff." The next time Richardson slipped into the grand carcass of that role, in 1945, he was proclaimed the greatest Falstaff in living memory...
...Falstaff s touch, too, for the imposing phrase of self-deprecation: "Acting," he said in 1946, "is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing." Like so many luminaries of his generation, he viewed acting as a job from which one should never take a vacation; in 63 years he appeared in more than 180 stage productions, 62 movies and at least a score of TV plays. Through his early years he was the middle-class Everyman, shuffling toward archetype with good will and capacious common sense. But as he aged, his characters turned imperious...
...kind might be lost--together with Roundy Kupkakes, Kingfisher, Kingfish in Eggbatter, Shakespeare, Milton, and all of the "dirty delightful world" the hero Brodie considers worthwhile. Instead the spaceship would be "full of men and women with thin exact minds who would not know who Sir John Falstaff was." Among them would be Vanessa Brodie, a genius-goddess held to Valentine by a marriage contract, the epitome of "perfection loveable by definition" and definition only...
...World News often reads like a tour of the author's mind conducted by a drunk and disorderly Falstaff. It is an original book, and a witty one, with strengths and faults that are, much like those of its heroes--human...