Word: hotspur
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...hand and uncorrupted, is a "gentlemen's world," inhabited by "creatures whose only function is to sound in their lives the clear depths of human grace." In Henry IV, however, Van Doren considers that Shakespeare came to mastery by discovering that poetry can be better than beautiful; Hotspur, who hates poetry, is a fine poet "out of a hot love far nothing except reality and hard sense...
...Trip to Shrewsbury. See Hotspur killed...
...good and sometimes excellent Burgess Meredith has the part of Prince Hal, but he seems too boyish in his rendition and not at all gallivanting; furthermore his occasional lapses into a "toity-toid street" accent, ostensibly for lightness, does little credit to Shakespeare's blank verse. John Emery, as Hotspur, has great vitality, but often he palls in tearing his passions to tatters. Morris Ankrum as Henry IV gives a sterling performance throughout, and outstanding in the lighter vein are Gus Schilling, as Bardolph, and John Berry, as Poins...
James Morcom's idea of a Fourteenth Century castle looks like a clapboarded New England barn, and his revolving set often does not fit the scene, sequences. Millia Davenport's costumes never get beyond the phony chain-mail stage, and her costume for Hotspur's wife in the first act is one of the most atrocious bits of ugly design to appear for some time...
...plot, Henry IV poses the cool Hal against the fiery Hotspur; but for theme it poses Hotspur against Falstaff, contrasting on a mighty scale the romantic and realistic ways life. To great-hearted Hotspur honor is everything. But Falstaff asks: "Can honor set to a leg? . . . Honor hath no skill in surgery then? . . . Who hath honor?-he that died o' Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. . . . Therefore I'll none of it." So Falstaff lives; and Hotspur dies...