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Current FIFA rankings (looking increasingly irrelevant):
Hearty congratulations to
That’s an interesting idea. It seems to have been Shakespeare’s year for public recantations (c.f. “Oldcastle is not the man” in the epilogue to 2 Henry IV). I wonder who would have been doing the yelling, though? Someone powerful and political, or someone closer to home – a fellow actor, or a miffed Arden in-law, perhaps?
Mind you, Fluellen shares a lot of “ridiculous” characteristics with Glendower, don’t you think? Both verbose, priding themselves on their learning, brave certainly but also bombastic. Gower essentially has to calm down his excitable Celtic comrades, with a bracing douche of Anglo-Saxon common sense.
They’re an odd triplet of plays, though, and might almost be a study of the same kinds of actions in different lights, like Monet with his haystacks: 1HIV is a sunshine play; 2HIV is darkening toward evening; HV glitters in artificial light and sharp shadow. Falstaff palls, of course, and the thievery of the Cheapside crew which was hi-jinks at Gads Hill, in France becomes a hanging offence. Henry as politician giddies his people’s minds with foreign quarrels, but what had been Machiavellian advice from his father is recast as glorious in Henry’s execution. And in Act V of Henry V, Henry becomes (or pretends to become) just the no-nonsense, down-to-earth, hyper-masculine soldier he had previously mocked Hotspur for being, except that now we are to find it impressive.