Shakespeare and Bon Jovi in the same post! YES.

[brynnmck]

Friday Post Into the Void:

- china_shop and I managed to exhaust not one, but TWO of the cordless phone handsets in my house last night, over the course of a conversation. China: "I feel so accomplished!" ♥ ♥ ♥

- My BFF and her newly-minted hubby are here for the weekend, and we all braving PAX. Not really my corner of fandom, but still fandom, so it

Comments

[brynnmck]

I love the symmetry of the Falstaff- Hal- Scroop thing, too.

YES. I was thinking about that, too, as I was looking back on this, and--there's a lot going on there. I mean, here you have Hal, who (chronologically) fairly recently "betrayed" his own friends (albeit in a non-lethal way), all upset because someone has betrayed him. Yet the Falstaff betrayal is mitigated by the fact that Falstaff's motives were hardly pure to begin with, and hardly ended up pure, for that matter. It was really interesting the way they cut that in our show--they actually cut out most of the second Henry IV, so they skipped right from Hotspur's death (which Falstaff takes credit for, which is potentially a huge thing, as Hal is trying to prove himself to his father) and burial to Henry IV's death and Hal's coronation. So instead of having Hal hang out with Falstaff some more for an entire play, and then reject him, smooshing that all together made it seem a lot more of a mutual thing. And in the rejection scene, Hal was wearing this giant stole thing that dragged out behind him like a train, and after the rejection, he propped it up with his arms and ran upstage so that the stole literally covered everyone in its path as it trailed out behind him. It was a nice piece of symbolism. (Though then they cobbled together this whole death scene for Falstaff--based on Mistress Quickly's description of his death in Henry V--and claimed that he died of a broken heart, which was one of the few things about the shows that struck me as a bit OTT.)

ANYWAY, what I also see going on in that speech, if you take the plays together, is that Hal has just rejected Falstaff for not being all the things that Scroop is, and yet apparently Hal can't trust that either. So he has no one. (And poor boy, he has to kill two of his boyfriends in three plays, that's a sad ratio.)

Which is why I think the scene between him and Pistol in the camp toward the end really struck me, too--seeing these plays consecutively, with the same actors, really highlighted that Pistol is basically the only one left at that point who's known both sides of him, both the wastrel boy and the king. (They actually conflated Pistol and Poins for this--there was a lot of character-smooshing of that nature going on--which made it even more pronounced.) So then you have Pistol as a contrast for Scroop, where Pistol is a liar, thief, braggart, opportunist, etc., but when he's asked about the king, he says, completely without any hope of advancement because of it:

The king's a bawcock, and a heart of gold,
A lad of life, an imp of fame;
Of parents good, of fist most valiant.
I kiss his dirty shoe, and from heart-string
I love the lovely bully.

Which, honestly? Makes me get all verklempt.

LLASSAH. I LOVE THIS PLAY.