Word: hals
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ever shifting moods, interests, personalities: now the apoplectic boss, now the courtly charmer, now the scholar and Renaissance man, now the buccaneer business baron. If Turner were a character from Shakespeare, and he has that kind of incandescence, he would be in equal parts the nobly ambitious Prince Hal, the impulsively belligerent Hotspur and the comically self-indulgent Falstaff. Says Schonfeld: "If Ted Turner were a color, it would be red-the red of the surface of the sun." Adds another Turner aide, insisting that he not be named: "Do I like Ted? Do you like a volcano?" Turner...
Reports of the historical Hal's fun-loving and riotous youth date from his own time. But Shakespeare gives him just one self-revelatory soliloquy in which Hal claims that his carousing is essentially an act and that he knows full well what will be expected of him as a mature ruler. The notion that he is a pretender as well as the Pretender has upset many critics (Quiller-Couch went so far as to brand the speech Shakespeare's "most damnable piece of workmanship"). But it can make sense of one perceives that there are two Hals. Good...
Quite shrewdly, Shakespeare brings Hotspur and Hal together only for the climatic personal duel at the play's end Here director Coe has made a serious mistake He bade his fight master. B H Barry, to stage the combat so that Hotspur repeatedly gains the advantage and could dispatch the Prince, but repeatedly chooses through sheer bravado to spare Hal and permit him to rearm Hal's combative skill is thus cheapened, and his eventual victory is made hollow, the result of mere chance. (It is, by the way, not known who slew the historical Hotspur...
Still, Coe's epilogue is affecting, with Hal all alone, facing front. He plants his sword firmly in the ground, makes the sign of the cross, picks up his weapon, and determinedly and sedately walks off upstage--a man who-unlike his father, has learned from intentionally mixing with all strata of society and is well along in the process of equipping himself for his destiny as the model hero-king, Henry...
...captures Falstaff's deep love for Hal, a love that is nothing less than paternal (for Falstaff is as much Hal's father as is King Henry); he is quick to tousle the youth's hair or put his arm around Hal's shoulders And he makes "If to be old and merry be a sin" as touching as Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes" Chalk up another triumph for the doting Dotrice...