5. David Troughton as King Henry IV "believes himself cursed by his sin of regicide" in Michael Attenborough's 2000 RSC production.
Having achieved power he believes himself cursed by his sin of regicide. If the king is God's emissary on earth, to kill the king is an act against God:
Once he gets the crown, things start to go wrong politically and personally. The guilt has started to eat away at him; it's as though the year that elapses between the plays has hugely changed him. The fulfilment of that one aim of getting the crown was one thing; keeping it is quite another, for once you've got it, the only thing to do with it is to stop anyone else getting it.74
In a very different reading of the part, Julian Glover's Henry in Part I "was neither infirm nor tired, as so often he has been played, but firmly in control of the political world":75
When Glover is present there is no doubt where the power lies, and the daring and monstrosity of the challenge against him is palpable. There is a strong sense of personal ambition and vanity in these confrontations, but essentially they are about political power: great impersonal imperatives which command a man's will and demand his self-sacrifice.76
Until struck down with a heart spasm in his moment of victory, he plays with undiminished power throughout: curtly disdainful to Owen Teale's hulking Hotspur, releasing thunderbolts of majestic wrath against Hal, and a match for Angus Wright's fire-breathing Douglas on the battlefield.77
[Julian Glover] is like some stern, unforgiving Old Testament patriarch who provokes rebellion by his curt dismissal of the Percys and who alienates his son by treating him as a recalcitrant hooligan. It is a marvellous portrait of a frosty spirit incapable of warmth.78
The qualities of kingship are constantly discussed or displayed by various characters in the play, as if Shakespeare were asking us, What makes a king? The influence of Falstaff, Hotspur, and Henry offers Hal life's alternatives from which he must choose and discard in his preparation for the throne.
Hotspur so impresses his elders because he embodies the idea of chivalric honor, an exalted view of warfare and armed conflict that is tried and tested on the battlefield. Combining the qualities of military skill and political power, matched with a single-minded determination to promote the rebels' cause, Hotspur drives much of the main plot and is admired by all, despite his occasional outbursts. Although historically older than Hal, Shakespeare makes him a peer to establish a direct rivalry between the two men, especially in Henry's conception of the ideal son. If, as Montaigne suggests, "The reputation and worth of a man consisteth in his heart and will; therein lies true honour"79 rather than in martial prowess, we can see that Hotspur and Hal are on opposite sides of this maxim. Contrary to Hal, in Hotspur's attractive arrogance we can see the essence of an unbending spirit, especially in the scene with his wife.
In 1964, Roy Dotrice's Hotspur, although capturing his usual inextinguishable humor and vitality, in the words of the Times' reviewer, had "the mentality of an amiable psychopath."80 The scene with Lady Percy took the form of rough foreplay, with "husband and wife pushing over, kissing, tumbling, wrapping-up, kneeling astride or lying on top."81 In this very antiheroic production, Hotspur's death was in keeping with Dotrice's interpretation and the mood of the production. At war with Hal, he was in his element. Flying at him with a huge sword, laughing aloud, Hotspur's sword jammed into the side of a horse trough, Hal got in quickly to stab him under the ribs. "Hotspur's...violent death-throes...robbed his death of the last shred of heroic dignity."82 "Lowering him, dying, into the trough Hal delivered his line 'For worms, brave Percy' [5.3.88]. Now he was dead; and curiously, the man who remained alive seemed to have no zest for life at all."83
In 1982, Timothy Dalton's Hotspur emerged
not as a contrast but as a parallel. The warm-hearted side of him was played down, and replaced by moodiness. Many of his more "poetic" lines were cut. His impulsiveness was much like Hal's own. In the first scene with his wife, he knelt, reading, as his wife came creeping downstairs. Played by Harriet Walter as a very submissive lady, she crouched beside him. The two figures became, suddenly, two people talking about their marriage. They looked grim and lugubrious. Hotspur jumped up, to call for his horse. Lady Percy followed, attempting playfully to wheedle his secrets out of him. Quite suddenly he turned on her. The line, "Away, you trifler" was delivered with ferocious force. When he said, "I care not for thee, Kate," there was no doubt that he meant it. If at the end he relented, holding out a hand to her which eventually she took, the patching-up of their marriage was only temporary.84
Honor at the expense of the personal, or personal life at the expense of honor? Is there any way that a man in power can maintain a life of duty and keep intact his humanity? Key to Hal's education, and a central concern of Shakespeare's in many plays, is this understanding of "honour." On discussing his portrayal of Falstaff in 2000, Desmond Barrit pointed to this questioning nature of the play in his performance of the famous soliloquy:
I used to play the "honour" soliloquy as a sort of dialogue with the audience, with them asking the questions: "Can honour set to a leg?," and Falstaff replies "No"; "Or an arm?," and Falstaff replies "No"; "Or take away the grief of a wound?," and again he replies "No" [5.1.131-3]. Falstaff is placing himself, I think, as an intermediary between the war and the audience, forcing them to wonder why men go to war at all, asking, and answering, the questions that are in their minds.85
The effectiveness of this delivery was picked up on by most reviewers, and was an appropriately serious reading for the end of the twentieth century: "His beautiful delivery of the famous 'honour' speech here becomes a totally persuasive indictment of the hallow, macho posturing of war."86
The question as to whether Hal truly learns the lessons offered by both court and tavern is best discussed in the representation of the prince in Henry IV Part II: "Hal must learn to exercise authority with integrity. In Part I, this is the path Hal successfully finds for himself, on the way losing nothing in his admiration for Hotspur's shining example and learning something of the warmth of humanity from Falstaff and his cronies."87
Despite the upbeat nature of the ending of Part I, productions often suggest a certain ambiguity as to Hal's assumption of kingly behavior. What has he learned from these diverse parental figures that will make him a better king? The various workings of the father-son relationship demonstrate the battle in Hal to find a true path to kingship. Hal proves, as he said he would in the "I know you all" speech (1.2.175-97), his abilities to his father and the officials of the court. However, his education is at an early stage. For Shakespeare, honor and integrity do not come from wielding a sword, and Hal has his most difficult of battles yet to face. Only when fathers are lost and cast aside will we see the emergence of the man who will be king.
THE ACTOR's VOICE AND THE DIRECTOR's CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH MICHAEL PENNINGTON, ADRIAN NOBLE, AND MICHAEL BOYD
Michael Pennington, born in 1943, was brought up in London and read English at Cambridge University. While at university he appeared with the National Youth Theatre. He went on to join the RSC, playing small parts in The Wars of the Roses directed by Peter Hall (1964). He has since returned to the RSC on many occasions, playing Angelo in Measure for Measure (1974), Edgar in King Lear (1976), Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost (1978), Hamlet (1980), and Timon in Timon of Athens (2000). He has numerous radio and television parts to his credit, as well as film roles. He has written books on acting Shakespeare and Chekhov. In 1986 he and Michael Bogdanov founded the English Shakespeare Company (ESC), dedicated to taking Shakespeare to new audiences. Their inaugural production, The Henrys, comprising the two parts of Henry IV plus Henry V, in which he played Prince Hal/King Henry V, was enormously successful. Richard II, the three Henry VI plays, and Richard III were subsequently added, and their Wars of the Roses toured the world to great acclaim. He launched his one-man show, Sweet William, about Shakespeare's life and writing and his own relationship with those works, in 2006. He talks here bo
th about playing the part of Hal and about wider aspects of the ESC staging of the two parts.
Adrian Noble, born in 1950, arrived at the RSC from the Bristol Old Vic, where he had directed several future stars in productions of classic plays. His first production on the main stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford was the acclaimed 1982 King Lear. Two years later, his Henry V sowed the seed for Kenneth Branagh's film. Among his other major productions during his two decades at the RSC were Hamlet, again with Branagh in the title role; The Plantagenets, based on the Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy, and the two parts of Henry IV. Noble's 1994 A Midsummer Night's Dream was made into a film. He was artistic director from 1991 to 2003, since when he has been a freelance director. His production style is characterized by strong use of colors and objects (such as umbrellas), and fluid scenic structure. He talks here about his 1991 production with Robert Stephens as Falstaff, making reference to both Part I and Part II of Henry IV.
Michael Boyd was born in Belfast in 1955, educated in London and Edinburgh, and completed his MA in English literature at Edinburgh University. He trained as a director at the Malaya Bronnaya Theater in Moscow. He then went on to work at the Belgrade Theater in Coventry, joining the Sheffield Crucible as associate director in 1982. In 1985 Boyd became founding artistic director of the Tron Theater in Glasgow, becoming equally acclaimed for staging new writing and innovative productions of the classics. He was drama director of the New Beginnings Festival of Soviet Arts in Glasgow in 1999. He joined the RSC as an associate director in 1996 and has since directed numerous productions of Shakespeare's plays. He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director for his version of the Henry VI plays in the RSC's This England: The Histories in 2001. He took over as artistic director of the RSC in 2003 and oversaw the extraordinarily successful Complete Works Festival in 2006-07. He followed this up with a cycle of all eight history plays, from Richard II through to Richard III, with the same company of actors. This transferred to London's Roundhouse Theatre in 2008 and won multiple awards. He talks here about both parts of Henry IV.
These plays can be thought of as individual works, as parts of a pair, or of a tetralogy, or even of a longer cycle of English history plays. There are cross-references across the two parts, back to Richard II and forward to Henry V. Some audience members know the backstory and the forward-story, some don't. How do you cope with all this?
MP: Each of the history plays has to stand alone--that's how Shakespeare planned them--but it's almost as if he had an idea that they might one day be seen in sequence, as they often are now, because each generally "trails" the next episode of the story at its end. So Part II closes by looking forward to Henry V's French campaign, and indeed the end of Henry V to the reign of Henry VI. With the Henry IVs it doesn't really matter if the audience doesn't know Henry V since it's in the future, except as general interest as to how Henry V became Henry V. The backstory of Richard II is more of a problem: you need to know about the shakiness of Henry IV's claim to the throne and his own conscience--if he has any--about having usurped. The only real answer is to make sure the actors make the audience truly listen to Hotspur's argument against Henry in Part I and what the king himself says, so that they miss none of it. It's a matter of emphasis in the acting, of determination to get it across.
AN: In two ways. First of all, one has to start with the very simple premise that people are buying a ticket for one show, therefore it has to stand alone. But from the point of view of the acting company and as somebody involved at the RSC with the history plays for quite some time, it's very hard not to appreciate the wider context, going back to the Henry VI plays. It seems to me impossible that Shakespeare did not have an architectural form in his head as he wrote them. The Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy was the first time since Sophocles and Euripides that someone had attempted a cycle of interrelated plays for the secular stage. It hadn't happened for two thousand years. Writing it as a man in his mid-to-late twenties, I cannot believe Shakespeare wasn't conscious of that. And of course they were enormously successful, so slightly later in his career, when his gaze cast upon the Henry IV plays, I think he must again have had some sort of ghost of the architecture in his mind all the time. But because the first tetralogy tackled events that chronologically took place after those of the second, you get a very strong sense of moving forward toward anarchy and chaos. If you look at all eight, you start with the formality of Richard II and end up with the butchery of Richard III. It's a divine untidiness. In the second tetralogy you can see the architecture but also a maturity of construction and a depth of characterization within each play, which makes them highly satisfactory as individual plays.
MB: We conceived our Henry IVs as part of an eight-play cycle of Shakespeare's history plays, and a large proportion of our audience saw them in this context. Clive Wood had not only played Bullingbrook in Richard II but, as Richard of York, had spent three plays trying to take the crown from Henry VI and failing. We staged the plays initially in the order of their writing so York was seen on a Sisyphean journey toward the crown, which faltered in Henry VI Part III and began again with renewed vigor and sophistication in Richard III. The Henry IV plays revealed the eventual fruits of his labors as bitter.
Shakespeare had five very successful histories behind him as he wrote the Henry IVs, and Henry V was a popular title long before Shakespeare wrote his version, so I think it's fair to say that both author and audience were conscious of context as they experienced the events of Henry IV.
These plays move between very distinctive settings: royal court, rebels' castles, Eastcheap tavern, Gloucestershire orchard, battlefield. How did you and your designer set about creating these contrasting worlds?
MP: On their own terms, eclectically. The court wore Edwardian dress, the rebels harked back variously to the eighteenth century and forward to twentieth-century warfare; the tavern was more or less 1980s, the Gloucestershire orchard perhaps a little pre-First World War, the battlefield went back to medieval chain mail and broadsword. All the time we were responding to the temperament of the characters and the atmospherics of each scene and asking the audience to accept unexpected contrasts. The plays are in a sense about the entire history of Britain.
AN: Bob Crowley designed the set and Deirdre Clancy the costumes. We started with a very beautiful wooden floor fringed with gold that both functioned as a practical space and had a strong resonance that could operate as a metaphor. The second thing we decided was that we would spend a lot of our money (because in the end it comes down to that) on the Boar's Head in Eastcheap, because we felt it was an aspect of the play that really needed to jump into the audience's imagination. In any of Shakespeare's plays, some parts require what I would loosely call "social realism" and some don't. King Lear does not require much social realism. The Merry Wives of Windsor requires a lot, because the plots operate and are triggered by different things. There are certain aspects of Henry IV Part I that require that social realism, and the Boar's Head tavern is one of those.
The tavern in Part I was a well of life: it absolutely teemed with energy and life. The tavern in Part II was a much emptier place. It was a lonely and quite sad place, a place for losers, a place where folk were in danger, so everyone got out very fast when they were told there was another war starting. I used it for Henry IV's great monologue, "How many thousand of my poorest subjects / Are at this hour asleep?" [3.1.4-5]. I had King Henry wander through the tavern, in which the down-and-outs and the losers were all lying drunk and asleep.
This relates to the structure of Part II, which is absolutely brilliant. It all works contrapuntally. It's contrapuntal between town and country, between war councils and petty quarrels. And one of the great pieces of counterpoint is at the death of King Henry IV. Henry IV dies in the Jerusalem chamber in the Palace of Westminster and the next scene is in Gloucestershire. From the very beginning of Part I he has wanted to go to the Holy Land. He keeps talking about how he wants to go to Jerusalem and eventua
lly he does go there, but he goes there in death. I had his sons and the courtiers lift his body and carry him, and as his bed was lifted aloft and he came weaving downstage then upstage, I did a transformation into the countryside in Gloucestershire. I had a huge canopy with ladders poking up through it and all you saw were the legs of the actors. They were up the ladders, throwing apples down, and the dead body of the king was carried up through the canopy, up through this orchard, the orchard of England. We did this strange picture in slow motion, so it was like he'd gone to heaven, and so we had this fabulous juxtaposition which I think completely fulfilled Shakespeare's purpose. It was a wonderful juxtaposition of the realistic--we had real beekeepers and real apple-pickers in the orchard--and the imagistic, the metaphorical. The man had finally found his way to Jerusalem: it was just eighty miles up the Thames in Gloucestershire. So we found a way in Part II of being much freer, much bolder, in the integration of the scenery with the structure of the play.
MB: Henry's court was characterized by a simple silver bowl of water where he tried to wash his hands of the blood of Richard II.
Eastcheap was dominated by a battered old armchair that had taken the shape of David Warner's Falstaff, and was framed by a large and tattered red velvet drape, which spoke of warmth, theatrical artifice, and backstage assignations. Staff and customers also emerged from and disappeared into a smoky purgatory beneath the stage.
Nearly all the castles from Orleans and Bordeaux in Henry VI Part I to Harfleur in Henry V were carried by our great rusty Louise Bourgeois-style tower, that rose from its hell mouth gates up past an "I'm the King of the Castle" balcony to an ambiguous spiral stair, which rose to and fell from the grid seven meters above the stage.
Henry IV, Part 1 (Folger Shakespeare Library) Page 17
