Vigilien

is there any any? nowhere known some?

O.W.: There is hardly a good man in dramatic literature who dominates a whole scene and Falstaff is, I think, really Merrie England. I think Shakespeare was greatly preoccupied, as I am in my humble way, with the loss of innocence. And I think there has always been an England, an older England, which was sweeter and purer, where the hay smelt better and the weather was always springtime, and the daffodils blew in the gentle warm breezes. You feel nostalgia for it in Chaucer. And you feel it all through Shakespeare. And I think that he was profoundly against the modern age, as I am. I am against my modern age, he was against his. And I think his villains are modern people, just as thery’re likely to be continental. I always see that the villains in Lear are non-Anglo-Saxon. They’re from over there. They represent the modern world, which includes gouging out eyes and sons being ungrateful to their fathers and all the rest of it. I think he was a typically English writer, archtypically, the perfect English writer, in that very thing, that preoccupation with that Camelot which is the great English legend, you know. And innocence is what Falstaff is. He is a kind of refugee from that world. And he has to live by his wits, he has to be funny. He hasn’t a place to sleep if he doesn’t get a laugh out of his patron. So it’s a rough modern world that he’s living in. But I think you have to see in his eyes; it’s why I was so very glad to be doing it in black and white, because if it’s in color he must have blue eyes, you know. You’ve got to see that look that comes out of the age that never existed but exists in the heart of all English poetry.

Interviewer: Then that rough modern world explodes into one of the most violent, I think, battles.

O.W.:Terrible battle scene, yes, which is supposed to show the end of the chivalric idea, you know. It’s supposed to show the way it’s gonna be from now on.

Link | 5. September 2009, 13 Uhr 10