Then
march to Paris, royal Charles of France,
And
keep not back your powers in dalliance.
-Duke of Alencon
King Henry the Sixth Part I Act
V, scene ii Line 4
There are
only 21 lines in this scene. It seems that the plays with the battle scenes are
the ones with a lot of very short scenes. This is true of the latter part of
Antony and Cleopatra when Augustus Caesar comes to Egypt for the fight. But
today’s Totally Random line is not from in Egypt, it’s in France. The French
and English are fighting in this play, and in this scene Charles (I’m not sure if he’s king
yet, or still prince) of France is discussing the situation with some of his
boys and with Joan of Arc. The scene is the plains in Anjou, and the Duke here, is telling Charles to go to Paris and
muster up his forces there to fight.
So the past
two days we’ve been dealing with battle scenes, or more precisely, people
talking about the battles. Yesterday they were discussing the sea battle about
to take place, and today they’re talking about mustering the troops in Paris.
There are lot of battles fought in Will’s plays. Most of the fighting, though,
takes place off stage and we find out what’s happening from the people talking
about it or showing up with severed heads. Of course Will had to write it this
way because there was only so much he could expect to be able to perform on a
stage. I really don’t know how much battling they actually portrayed on the
stage. I’m guessing that most of it was limited to a few guys swinging swords
around. These were stages, after all, and I’m guessing somewhat primitive
special effects. I’ve heard that back in the day the Romans were able to fill the coliseum
with water and stage mock sea battles. They weren’t able to do this at the
Globe theater and hence you get a lot of people talking about battles, and not
so much of them acting out battles.
This is a real Roman Coliseum. It's not the big, famous one in Rome. It's a smaller one in Spain. But it's still Roman. I'll tell you, though, that we didn't see any battles taking place there. Too bad.
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