IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON
Last time in this space we were talking about Harry Hotspur’s role as a shadow-self for Prince Hal in Henry IV, Part One. But nor, of course, can we ignore the other pole around which the play swings: the sack-swilling anti-Santa Sir John Falstaff. Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations — some, among them Orson Welles, who played the fat knight in The Chimes at Midnight, have said the greatest — and, perhaps even more than Romeo, Prospero and Hamlet, has escaped the play to take on the quality of a mythological figure.
Henry IV, Part One — on from April 23 at the Globe — sees Sir John in his pomp. He is not (yet) pitiable. He is a life-force: ‘not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.’
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