Word: iv
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...IV. Trying to recoup some of their losses, left-wing Socialists start making overtures to the Communists again. They are led by Deputy Premier and Party General Secretary Francesco de Martino, a 62-year-old law professor who learned how to tack and test the winds as a yachtsman on the Bay of Naples. He sees to it that far-left factions slowly take control of the party machinery. This infuriates the ex-Social Democrats; their leader, Giuseppe Saragat, has been President of the Republic for four years and is presumably above politics. But others angrily threaten to bolt...
...courtier, fallen from favor, nailed up in a chest. Then, the story goes, he gleefully listened to the dying man's moans. Still, when assassins cut Sforza down at the door of a church, his wife, the Duchess Bona of Milan, mournfully wrote to Pope Sixtus IV, declaring that "after God," she loved Galeazzo above...
...surprised when someone tries to depose Britain's most religious and heroic king. But Shakespeare himself had already taken care of the deposition of a king in the first of the four-play series of which Henry V is properly the shining culmination. Richard II and the two Henry IV plays are markedly greater and more complex works, but Henry V--when allowed to do so--compensates through its ringing patriotism and its moral, legal, and divine certainty. The play is really nothing short of dramatized hagiography, and one should accept the fact or leave it alone...
Unwilling to trust the play, Kahn has cut the text liberally, transposed lines, distributed the one-man Chorus speeches among four persons, imported dialogue from the end of 2 Henry IV (delivered over loudspeakers), and added lines of his own by way of scene descriptions. And there is a steady parade of gimmicks and odd bits of business, borrowed from such sources as the plays of Brecht, Genet's The Balcony, and the Living Theatre's Mysteries and Smaller Pieces. Kahn is, like Autolycus in The Winter's Tale, a 'snapper-up of unconsidered trifles." He has seen...
Kristoffer Tabori is most appealing as the young smooth-cheeked sidekick that Pistol inherited from the dead Falstaff. (Whereas Shakespeare designates him simply as "Boy," the program calls him "Davy," through Davy in 2 Henry IV was Justice Shallow's servant and not Falstaff's). When the Boy is left alone with a field of corpses, he slowly wanders about, deeply, shaken and unhardened by his hands. Espying the approach of two enemy French soldiers, he scampers up the jungle-gym. But the soldiers pursue and overtake him, coldly spear him, and depart leaving one more corpse on the silent...