Like an awkward impulse buy
We need something nice FOR ONCE so here is something.
I’m just going to quote most of the rest, for ease of reading.
Swans generally mate for life – like humans, they will sometimes get “divorced”, and if one dies they will often find another partner. One day, the pair were flying together when the male swan hit a building and sadly died. His widow was left alone on the Highgate ponds.
For four years, the widowed swan spent her days alone, flying between the Highgate ponds as if looking for her lost mate. Just after he died she made a nest and laid unfertilised eggs. She never left to find anyone new, and any suitors who tried their luck were swiftly rejected.
The swan on the roof was quickly identified as our missing widow. She was collected by the amazing volunteers from The Swan Sanctuary, which really deserves its own thread: its founder, Dot Beeson, started it in her backyard, sold her own home to expand it and was awarded an MBE!
The rescued swan spent the weekend at the Swan Sanctuary. Since January, the Sanctuary had been home to a male swan, who’d been rescued after a territorial fight at Waltham Abbey and needed surgery to remove two fishing hooks found in his throat. Our widow was placed in his pen.
Soon she seemed fine to head home, so they went to retrieve her. The large male swan stood in the way. They let the two settle and tried again, and again he stood in the way. When they finally got her into the car, she cried for the male swan. Could it be love at first sight?
Lovely story. Swans are very much loved here. They’re supposed to belong to the Queen, but they really belong to the people.
A swan pair who live on a canal near me have a brood of cygnets every year. I used to commute that way and would anxiously count them, as did other regulars. If anyone had been found touching a feather of them, that person would have been drowned in the canal.
These swans have their own twitter account. https://twitter.com/unioncanalswans
I know, about the swan love. I share it. Many years ago I lived in Hampstead for some months, and in the summer I would walk over to Golders Hill Park to watch a nesting pair on the pond there. The cygnets hatched, and I got to seem them riding around on a parent’s back.
Back when we could go to live theatre, we would go to a local Shakespeare in the Park festival that was performed in a cemetery. There is a lake there, and swans on the lake. We often go early so we can sit in the late afternoon and watch the swans on the lake. It’s as good as the show (better than some of the shows lately; they’ve got a couple of directors who seem to have made it their life’s ambition to utterly destroy Shakespeare, like rewriting the end of the Tempest).
I love swans. Thanks for the story. We need the happy ones to keep us going.
And one of Shakespeare’s nicknames is The Swan of Avon (credit: Ben Jonson). It all ties up!
@#3:
iknklast:
(1 King Henry 6, 5.3.54-60)
Swans are not game birds, though geese are. For my own part, after having endured a few pretentious and butchered ‘experimental’ modern dress and such productions, which IMHO were all stuffed like a goose for the table, I have become an avowed fan of doublet-and-hose and original scripts.
Arguably, if there are to be capital crimes, Shakespeare destruction should be one of them. (Aside) Imagine how the hanging of the director at the close of, say, Act 4 would liven up any sleepy audience..!
;-)
Omar, the last production last fall was MacBeth, done by the man who originally started that theatre. It was traditional. It was excellent. I have seen few better. He is supposed to play Lear this fall; I hope we get to see that. But the 1950s poodle skirt/diner version of Much Ado about Nothing, complete with the witty Beatrice in denim coveralls looking every bit the picture of Andrea Dworkin may have (almost) moved me past the worst I’ve ever seen, the Tempest where Prospero’s ending speech was moved to the beginning and given to another character, and the ending was changed. And they cut it to 75 minutes by making it mostly about the drunken sailors and Caliban (cheap laughs?).
Too many directors think they can write better than playwrights. If they could, they would be playwrights and not directors.
But it looks good on their CV, ([aside] well, better than nothing) even if only on the basis of a one night stand in Hicksville, Arkansas; (aside) at least of the theatrical variety..
And, regrettably, famous directors: Peter Brook, for example, in his cut-down ‘Hamlet’ with the very good actor Adrian Lester playing the title-role. His removal of the servants who stand up against Cornwall during the and after the torture of Gloucester in his too-famous ‘Lear’ with Paul Scofield (the greatest film versions of ‘Hamlet’ & ‘Lear’ by the way are those by Grigori Kosintsev, who being Russian and having suffered under Stalin, understood the politics of the plays, which most Anglo-American productions and films do not). A production of ‘Antony & Cleopatra’ at the National Theatre in Britain, with Ralph Fiennes as Antony, began, as in the ‘Tempest’ iknklast speaks of, with Octavius’s final speech brought to the beginning, though its speaker was not changed, and spoken thoroughly badly by an actor who seemed not to understand the character he was supposed to be playing. (You were recently able to see the production no ‘National Theatre Live’.) In case anyone is interested, an essay I wrote on Brook’s cut-down version of
‘Lear’‘Hamlet’ is being reprinted in ‘Playing Shakespeare’s Monarchs and Madmen’, edited by Louis Fantasia & published by Peter Lang in the US, but I warn you at a terrible academic price.Just in case anyone is interested, here’s a link:
https://storage.googleapis.com/flyers.peterlang.com/May_2020/978-1-4331-7522-0_normal_English.pdf
Yessss I hate Brooks’s Lear.
Who ever even needed it?? The play is already harsh and direct and fierce and painful enough, it doesn’t need any modddern jazzing up.
And I am interested. Maybe I’ll see if the University library has it once the restrictions are over. If we’re not under martial law by then.
Not to mention a Hamlet I saw which they set in a Catholic girl’s school, and Hamlet was a lesbian. (Played by a girl; no trans overtones.)
@#12: Hamlet played by a woman. It would have almost certainly been better and more convincing than Ophelia being played by some Cockney accented and falsetto-voiced bloke, as would probably have happened at the Globe, back in the days of Elizabeth 1.
@ iknklast#12:The first woman to play the part of Hamlet seems to have been Charlotte Charke in the 18th-century, and then there was Sara Bernhard in the late 19th- & early 20th-century. One of the best Lears I have seen had Kathryn Hunter in the title role. I saw it twice, in Tokyo & in London. The director was Helena Kaut-Howson, of Polish Jewish extraction, and was to the memory of her mother who had saved her three (as I recall) daughters during the Nazi Occupation by constantly keeping on the move. She was clearly a very remarkable and tough woman, and in age became rather like Lear in her behaviour, apparently, but she was a good person and Helena loved her and wanted to somehow commemorate her in her production.
@Omar13
I think one should beware of such assumptions about actors in Elizabethan times. Many of the boys came from the children’s companies, and were extremely well trained (Ben Jonson, who wrote for the children’s companies, has some interesting things to say about the child-actors, or, rather, to them), and some of them – Nathan Field was one – went on to become excellent adult actors. As for their speech, it would have been of course Elizabethan & Jacobean English, and many of the boys and adult actors would have originally spoken in regional accents – and even Welsh, for there were certainly Welsh actors in the troupe, and at least one of them was a child actor, as Henry IV, part 1 shows: Glendower & his wife speak in Welsh, and subsequently his wife sings in Welsh; there is also the very well-observed Welsh-speaker’s English spoken by Fluellen in Henry V – Shakespeare’s attempts to reproduce Irish English (MacMorris) & Scots (Jamie) are not nearly so good. Almost certainly, the boys, whatever their background, were trained in some sort of diction that was suitable for the stage and consistent throughout the troupe – although, of course, Falstaff’s boy would have been required to speak in a London accent (not Cockney in those days), and regional accents would have been used for the ‘lower’ characters. Going back, there were the choirs of Henry VIII’s time (and later), which astonished foreign visitors because of the quality of their singing – they had to be highly trained to sing the works of great composers like Tallis & Byrd. I see no reason to suppose that the boy actors at the Globe were not highly trained – although Cleopatra talks of not wishing to be guyed by ‘squeaking Cleopatras’ if she is taken in triumph to Rome.
I should add to what I said about Helen Kaut-Howson that she wanted primarily to come to terms with her mother through the play, and not simply to commemorate her.
And I should add that the actors who played women in Shakespeare’s times were generally boys with unbroken voices, though, as with altos in a male choir, there are boys who, despite their voices having broken, are able to speak and sing in a falsetto that certainly does not sound ‘false’. If one wants to continue along that line into later life and become a counter-tenor, one needs training.
On a visit to Creswell Crags years ago I actually experienced something I didn’t think was possible–friendly swans. They came up to me and rubbed their necks on me, and let me pet them.
Years ago the Globe did a version of Macbeth as a comedy–granted there are some funny lines in the play, and it was cool to see them highlighted, but the production itself turned out to be awful. Unlike an earlier Macbeth I saw at the Globe where the groundlings were covered by a black rubber sheet (people stuck their heads through holes in it) to keep from being spattered with the blood and guts coming off the stage. (This also allowed for what must have been a scary piece of business with the witches running around through the audience under the sheet.)
Friendly swans? I agree with others that they are beautiful, but my experience of being close to them was being bitten on the chest by a black one when I was six (Hamilton gardens) and having a white one charge my partner and nearly bust her knee here in Christchurch (public walkway). Wild animals are best treated as such.
As far as I can gather, Shakespeare would have spoken with the Warwickshire accent characteristic of his native Stratford-Upon-Avon. The closest accented speaker I know to that comes from an acquaintance who is a native of Northamptonshire, next door to Warickshire geographically. The most famous purveyor of Northamptonshirespeak I have ever encountered is the one and only, the inimitable Pam Ayres.
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4oydSZTAns )
Shakespeare in Love could have been really livened up if Pam had been engaged as vocal coach for Ralph Fiennes and Gwynneth Paltrow, or better still played Viola de Lesseps herself. Or, some Warwickshire lad could have been hired to do the same for Ralph Fiennes, who played The Bard. (“Now once agayin, Ralph: AS BILL HIMSELF WOULD HAVE PROUNCED IT!: ‘Shall oi comparr thee to a szommerz doiey?’ Get shot of yer bluddy Oxbridge accent, for Gawd’s bleeeedin’ sake.”
NB: Viola de Lesseps is the only role I have ever seen Gwynneth Paltrow play. Brilliant IMHO. None of her subsequent goopiness can destroy the memory of that.
On the canal I was speaking of the swans occupied half the towpath – Mother, Father and adolescent children, and reduced the towpath to one person wide. I thought this was a novel form of traffic control.
Swans have the image of a half domestic park bird – something you see on lakes and ponds. I was astonished when I saw flocks of wild swans on remote lochs in northern Scotland.
I note that Yeats in The Wild Swans at Coole counts the swans (59 of them).
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43288/the-wild-swans-at-coole
@Tim Harris – I saw the National Theatre production of Antony and Cleopata with Ralph Fiennes on broadcast. I enjoyed Ralph Fiennes’s performance as Mark Antony, as middle-aged, clapped out soldier, going to seed. However I didn’t notice the transferred speech – it’s a long time since I read the play.
I love Pam Ayres, too! But if you had heard Ben Crystal in the flesh, as I have, speaking ‘To be or not be’ in original pronunciation (or supposed OP) as though Hamlet was chatting to his mates down the pub, I think you would not be quite so keen. But there was a company up north, Northern Broadsides, who did ‘Samson Agonistes’ and Shakespeare in Yorkshire accents, and did it wonderfully well, by all accounts. Here in Tokyo, the Tokyo International Players, a community theatre whose Shakespeare is usually pretty dreadful, put on ‘The Two Gentlemen of Verona’ with an all female cast who hailed from all over the Anglophone world and outside it as well. The director, who is Canadian, as I recall, had done a wonderful job with getting the actors to speak the verse, and as a result the differing accents did not matter at all. The production quite blew away any prejudices (not mine, I assure you!) that North Americans can’t do Shakespeare or that RP is the only way to do it. It was an excellent production in many other ways as well. Of course, the OP people think that Shakespeare should really be performed in OP, as do certain Early Musicians where Dowland et al are concerned, but it all too often comes across as an affectation – if you are more interested in pronouncing things ‘properly’ than in getting the song across, the results are not all that interesting. Though of course you do get singers who are so obsessively interested in singing in perfect RP that they are quite as bad as, if not worse than, those who sing in pedantic OP.
Another matter is that regional accents would have been much more pronounced in Shakespeare’s time (and, spoken truly, would have involved dialect, and if you have heard Yorkshire dialect, bristling with Old Norse words, spoken – an old farmer demonstrated it for me when I was working in the North Riding – it is barely intelligible to a Southron). And a glance at William Barnes’s poems demonstrates that Dorset dialect even in the 19th century would be very difficult on the London stage for most of the audience, if not all of them. No doubt, actors came from various parts of the country in Elizabethan & Jacobean England, but I suspect that there was almost certainly some kind of standardised dialect (well, you can see that from the writing of Marlowe, Shakespeare & Jonson, when they are not writing for characters who are meant to speak with regional accents), as well as a more standardised accent, used by the actors – actors are used to shuffling accents, and would have been even more so in those days, since dialects differed far more profoundly than they do today.
Ah, enough! Pam Ayres is bloody good!
KBPlayer#19 Yes, of the little of it I managed to see, I thought Fiennes did very well, and I very much liked the actress playing Cleopatra. But Octavian – oh, dear. There he was, being big and emotional as though Caesar were another Antony, and not the precise, cold, calculating man that he is. The transferred speech was there all right! The true play begins with Philo talking to another soldier, Demetrius, just before Ant & Cleo swing on to the stage.
I have said enough!
On Yorkshire dialect, bristling with Old Norse words – there’s this series the local public station ran a year or two ago in which Penelope Keith (the actor) goes to villages in various regions, and one episode took her to Swaledale, where she got a farmer in Gunnerside to do the real thing. It was like that.
The boys – some of the Shakespeare commentary I’ve read underlines that Shakespeare – unlike his rival playwrights – was also an owner. He wrote for his own particular company, so he wrote for specific actors, with the knowledge of what they were good at and what they were not. The upshot tends to be that the boys must have been pretty damn skilled. (His way of writing comedy changed when Robert Armin replaced Will Kemp.)
There’s a lovely bit in the frame opening of Olivier’s Henry V in which he, as Richard Burbage dressed as Hal, tweaks the costume or hair or something of one of the boy players dressed as a woman. It’s very backstagey and nice.
When I am commuting, rather than WFH due to corona virus lockdown, “Train delayed due to swan on the line” is about the only excuse from Southwest Trains that gets a sympathetic hearing.
@Tim Harris Sophie Okonedo played Cleopatra. A little shrill at the beginning but warmed up. She’s a good actor – she was great as Wnnie Mandela in a telly series. And did so much look the part and wore those gorgeous dresses wonderfully. I think this must be the only Shakespeare play with middle-aged lovers. There are plenty of young lovers in Shakespeare and plenty of marriages, but I don’t think there are middle aged lovers.
I agree about the actor playing Octavian. Stiff as a board.
I’m not so down on mashed-up Shakespeare. Colour blind casting is fine, women doing men’s parts are fine, as long as they speak the words well. The National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare broadcasts have been a great boon, and I’ve enjoyed a lot of good productions on the big screen. However there are wince-inducing moments.
Comedy – with much cod-piece clutching and innuendo to get over jokes that don’t work.
Politics – Shakes is a very good political writer, very good on political intrigue, power hunger, changing allegiances, betrayal, the fickleness of mobs, the cruelty of tyrants. But I howl at the parochial interpretations of plays which people say are “about Brexit” or whatever or which underline, doublescore and put in bold political parallels. The very first RSC production I saw had Coriolanus goose-stepping and being a populist Fascist – which misses the point of Coriolanus, who is not a populist whatever his general illiberalism.
I get as annoyed with directors who push their usually shallow Guardianasta politics at me as comedians who do similar. I don’t expect a director to know much about politics – that’s not their area of expertise.
Omar #13, I don’t have any problems with a woman playing Hamlet; I’ve seen some fine performances. This woman, though, was actually inadvertently hilarious, especially during advice to the players, as she was committing every offense her character was saying not to commit. And she mispronounced a lot of words, and wasn’t a good Hamlet, with or without the Catholic girls school/lesbian subplot.
KB Player, I’m not totally down on mashed up Shakespeare, if it is done well. But light sabers in Henry V need to have some logic to them. And I see only a tiny fraction of them that do work. When we first arrived in Nebraska, we saw a MacBeth done that was very plainly an allegory of the Bush administration, by an extremely talented director with amazing actors, and it was extremely good. Ian McKellan’s Richard III as a Nazi was also quite interesting and well done.
It’s just so often you get the idea a director is doing something just to be “different”. It’s fine to be different, but you need to make it work.
And as for director’s and their politics (or playwrights for that matter), I read a study while I was in my MFA that found that theatre people are extremely uninformed. They don’t follow the news on TV, in written form, or otherwise. They do all have opinions, though, as I’ve discovered in my years working with the theatre, and I found to my surprise that study fits what I am observing in my theatre friends. I have encountered people who had never heard the term Feminazi, claimed to have never heard of a vengeful, angry god (this from a man in his 70s, who apparently never walked outside the Unitarian church he attends), thought small-town mayors were incapable of behaving like yokels and entitled pricks, and insisted that everyone – yes, everyone would have flown on a plane by the time they are 20. (All of these observations come only from plays I have written that have left them puzzled; there are many other examples.)
KBPlayer#24
Many plays by Shakespeare and writers of his time are profoundly political (European visitors were shocked at what the English companies got away with, for you simply could not be so political in any other European country), and if the director does not recognise this, or seeks to foist on plays some obvious contemporary ‘relevance’ that has nothing to do with the issues that are addressed in the plays, then that is a recipe for rendering the plays as dead as doornails. European (non-Anglophone) productions of Shakespeare, and particularly Kosintsev’s great film versions, often recognise the politics of the plays far better than most Anglo-Saxon productions do. I think that after the Civil Wars, it became difficult to address political matters on the English stage, and then in the Victorian Age, individualism, the growing lack of a sense of the common weal, and mere pathos came to dominate the theatre – and this continued into the 20th century in the Anglophone world. ‘Politics’ was thought to be in rather bad taste, an attitude that pervades modern journalism in the Anglophone sphere, particularly the USA, with its ‘both-sides-ism’. ‘”Hamlet” is about Hamlet,’ said Peter Brook in an interview on Japanese television about his pared-down version, a very unsatisfactory remark that went with a very unsatisfactory production – it is this attitude that I take strong issue with in my essay on the production. This is not to say that there not have been productions that recognise the importance of the political: Michael Bogdanov’s come to mind, and there is a very good RSC production of ‘Julius Caesar’ with an all-black cast, directed by Greg Doran. Speaking of this last play, there’s a wonderful film of it performed in Italian by the denizens of a high-security prison in Italy (that is, by men who are members of the Mafia and other ‘societies’): these men absolutely understand hierarchy, intimidation, vaunting, the politics etc from the inside, and it shows: ‘Caesar Must Die’, directed by Paolo & Vittorio Taviani.
There was also the matter of censorship: censorship in Shakespeare’s time was there, of course, but it was rather loose. But in 1737 a law was brought in that put the Lord Chancellor’s office in charge of licensing plays for performance – Robert Walpole didn’t want any satirical takes on his government appearing on stage. In the 19th century, Ibsen was banned from the British stage. The first great British political play in Britain in the 20th century was Harley Granville Barker’s ‘Waste’ (1907), which was banned from public performance by the Lord Chamberlain’s office, and remains still too little known. .
[…] a comment by Tim Harris on Like an awkward impulse […]
I recommend, for all those who are interested in the question of boy players and their training, the first chapter of ‘Squeaking Cleopatras: The Elizabethan Boy Player’ (and indeed all of it, since it is an excellent book) by Joy Leslie Gibson. The chapter is entitled ‘Education & Apprenticeships’.
I wrote that I’d written the essay on Brook’s cut-down version of Lear’; I should have written ‘the cut-down version of “Hamlet”‘.
Omar, #18.. Not to be pedantic but I must point out that Pam Ayres has a Berkshire accent, coming from Stanford-in-the-Vale, a Berkshire village despite being administered by Oxfordshire since the mid-1970s. Her distinctive twang owes much to the Wiltshire accent, hardly surprising as Swindon is only 15 miles or so from Stanford.
Before this thread expires, I have to say some warm words about Pam Ayres, who is thoroughly enjoyable, and always cheers me up. I especially enjoy her bucolic voice on panel comedy shows where she’s as quick witted, sharp and funny as all the London smarties.
On the Shakespeare theme, I like the history plays best and the RSC (I think) did a very good Henry IV I & II recently. Prince Hal is the nastiest character in Shakespeare – his duplicity can’t be redeemed by later descriptions of his chivalric prowess – and his “I know you not old man,” to Falstaff, is the most poignant moment in all of Shakespeare, worse than Lear’s cries over dead Cordelia.
They were supposed to broadcast King John this year, which I’ve never seen, and which the coronavirus has knocked on the head.
Acolyte #30: If you say so.
KB PLayer: I read Henry IV as a high school student, a few years back admittedly, and yours is one interpretation. Another is that Prince Hal made the most of his youth, thanks to the Boar’s Head Tavern and the company of Falstaff,. Poins and Bardolph, et al until he was left with no choice but to assume his responsibilities as King Henry V and lead an army in the French wars. So Prince Hal comes to say as King Henry V: “I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;/ How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! …./ Presume not that I am the thing I was;/ For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, / That I have turn’d away my former self; / So will I those that kept me company./ When thou dost hear I am as I have been,/ Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,/ The tutor and the feeder of my riots:/ Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death…”
Shakespeare’s plays are stuffed full of ambiguities, probably by design such as to keep the issues he raises alive in the minds of the audience members long after the performance is over: the very opposite of most of the stuff churned out by say, the Hollywood Machine, which strives for black / white simplicities wherever it can. (Which has its place, mind. I love a good western.)
Omar#33 I suggest reading Hal’s final speech about Falstaff and his other pals in Act I, scene 2:
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyok’d humour of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondr’ed at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish’d-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents:
So, when this loose behaviour I throw off,
And pay the debt I never promisèd,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offence a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
I rather doubt that Shakespeare stuffed his plays with ambiguities to keep the issues alive in the minds of audiences (although that is surely one result), but feel he rather, like Montaigne, saw life,and particularly moral life, as inherently & thoroughly ambiguous, as it is, and his vision of life is thus presented in his plays. Falstaff is a thoroughly ambiguous figure in himself – great fun and wholly irresponsible in his fun (if one is not a woman), yet capable of stabbing the dead Hotspur in the leg and claiming that he had killed him, whereas of course Hal had; nevertheless Hal, who had seen Falstaff feigning to be dead and had assumed he was dead (saying at that time ‘What, old acquaintance, could not all this flesh/ Keep in a little life/ Poor Jack, farewell!/ I could have better spar’d a better man…’), indulges the man and tells him in an aside: ‘For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,/ I’ll gild it with the happiest terms I have.’ He loves the man in a way, and yet knows that he cannot bring him close to the throne once king – it would be rather like voting in Boris Johnson & his merry men.
That too.
One more note on the Shakespeare-Montaigne connection – the translation by John Florio is an absolute gem of Elizabethan/Jacobean linguistic exuberance.
I will hear no good words of Prince Hal. He’s the privileged frat boy hanging around with the edgy criminal dudes, knowing that Daddy will offer him the big job when the time comes, and he’ll then dump these embarrassing associates. At the worst, they’ll be seen as the wild times of his frat boy days. A pox on him, the twain-faced knave. (“Faced” pronounced with two syllables.) King Henry of Henry V is a totally different bloke altogether.
KBPlayer: Is he a different bloke? And what about those words on Falstaff’s supposed death, if we are talking of good words? And his indulgence of Falstaff’s lie? Are they not ‘good words’, and from his own mouth? And what about these words from his final address to Falstaff: ‘For competence of life I will allow you,/That lack of means enforce you not to evils./And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,/We will, according to your strengths and qualities/Give you advancement.’ Are these bad words?
Regarding ‘Henry V’, Henry takes the nation to war, on his father’s advice, in an attempt to unite the country and to prevent civil unrest, is given advice that favours his plans by his bishops, who in a little scene before the meeting with the king seem quite cynical about providing it since by means of it the Church may preserve its privileges; achieves glory in France while sentencing Bardolph to be hanged for stealing from a church; and at the end of the play we are informed, after all the excitement and vaunting of the play, that all his gains in France were lost after his early death and the accession to the throne of his son (who was a child, whose reign was filled with civil wars, and who was eventually murdered). It was all for nothing.
And, yes, Ophelia, I have Florio’s Montaigne on my bookshelves!
I do too! At least, a sizable selection, in an ancient paperback.