Word: napoleons
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EVERYBODY HAS a theory about what Napoleon did with his hand stuck inside his coat: more accurate accounts have it that he had a bad case of gout or rheumatism, that his hand was relatively useless. More morbid conjecturers claim that he had a bad case of the claw--his hand tightened up into a gruesome eagle-grip. But the wildest theory I've heard yet was that he had a thirty-eight inch cock. Of course this is mere speculation--nobody really knows for sure what compelled Napoleon to do all the things he did. But George Bernard Shaw...
...Shaw's first play staged in America. After they turned him down he made an aborted attempt to sell the play to Henry Irving, who was something of a tyrannical manager-leading man at London's Lyceum Theater. Possibly Shaw had Irving in mind when he wrote about Napoleon in the stage directions...
...WHATEVER Shaw's motives, The Man of Destiny combines a lot of plain fun with an attack directed equally at self-willed, Nietzchian types and the principled English. It's about Napoleon right at the period of his life when his military ventures against Austria were winning him acclaim back home. The setting is a small Italian inn, and Bonaparte has just won the battle of Lodi. He's awaiting more information both from the field and from Paris and at the start, anyway, the play has potential for getting very serious. It is only when his courier walks...
...loon-tenant. He has this sense of uncanny timing, this air of naivete that works particularly well when he tells the strange lady to take off her dress so he can see if she really isn't that boy in disguise or when he casually draws a scenario for Napoleon showing how his horse had actually won the battle of Lodi...
...nuance from their actors--facial expressions and the slightest gestures must be just right--and both are admirable. Mosca has a certain half-smile that he can turn into a scowl as easily as a self-congratulatory smirk. Although his rages somehow seem more passionate than Napoleon probably was, the whole play seems to support that kind of style. After all, Shaw needed to build a rapport between Napoleon and the audience so he could get in his good lines about the English...