The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editors: Héloïse Sénéchal and Jan Sewell
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna Phares
Henry IV Part I
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Jan Sewell and Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings), Jan Sewell (overview)
The Actor’s Voice and the Director’s Cut
(interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright): Michael Pennington, Adrian Noble, Michael Boyd
Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director, Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University, Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature, Université de Genève, Switzerland
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Jacqui O’Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Professor of English, University of Oxford, UK
CONTENTS
Introduction
Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral
Harry to Harry
Honor Versus Instinct
The Prince as Machiavel?
Reformation and Rejection
About the Text
Key Facts
The First Part of Henry the Fourth, with the Life and Death of Henry Surnamed Hotspur
Textual Notes
Oaths from the Quarto
Scene-by-Scene Analysis
Synopsis of Henry IV Part II
Henry IV in Performance: The RSC and Beyond
Four Centuries of Henry IV: An Overview
At the RSC
The Actor’s Voice and the Director’s Cut: Interviews with Michael Pennington, Adrian Noble, and Michael Boyd
Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater
Beginnings
Playhouses
The Ensemble at Work
The King’s Man
Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology
Kings and Queens of England: From the History Plays to Shakespeare’s Lifetime
The History Behind the Histories: A Chronology
Further Reading and Viewing
References
Acknowledgments and Picture Credits
INTRODUCTION
TRAGICAL-COMICAL-HISTORICAL-PASTORAL
Shakespeare’s art of mingling comedy, history, and tragedy reached its peak in the two parts of Henry IV. As history, the plays paint a panorama of England, embracing a wider social range than any previous historical drama as the action moves from court to tavern, council chamber to battlefield, city to country, Archbishop and Lord Chief Justice to whore and thief. As comedy, they tell the story of a prodigal son’s journey from youth to maturity and an old rogue’s art of surviving by means of jokes, tall tales, and the art of being not only witty in himself, but the cause that wit is in other men. As tragedy, they reveal the slow decline of a king who cannot escape his past, the precipitate demise of an impetuous young warrior who embodies both the glory and the futility of military heroism, and the heartbreaking dismissal of a substitute father who has loved a prince with a warmth of which his true father is incapable.
The action begins some time after the events that ended Shakespeare’s earlier play, Richard II. Henry Bullingbrook has usurped the throne of King Richard, who has been murdered. But now the rebels who helped Henry to the throne have turned against him. Whereas Richard II conformed to the traditional structure of tragedy—the story of the fall of a powerful man—the Henry IV plays adopt a wider perspective. Richard II had been written entirely in verse, the medium of royal and aristocratic characters, whereas long stretches of the Henry IV plays are in prose, the medium of the common people. The little scene with the Carriers at the tavern just before the highway robbery is a miniature of ordinary working-day life and common speech: “This house is turned upside down since Robin the ostler died.”
The deep structure of the two parts of Henry IV is that not of tragedy but of pastoral comedy. They were written around the same time as Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, when Shakespeare’s comic muse was at its zenith. They are his most enjoyable history plays because they are his funniest—and in the figure of Sir John Falstaff they introduce his greatest comic character—but they also share with the comedies a technique of counterpointing the intrigue of court and power politics against what has been called the “green” or “festive” world.
The traditional comic pattern turns on the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice. The girl’s father, or some other authority figure of the older generation, resists the match, but is outflanked, often thanks to an ingenious scheme devised by a clever servant, perhaps involving disguise or flight (or both). The union of the lovers brings a renewed sense of social integration, expressed by some kind of festival at the climax of the play—a marriage, a dance, or a feast. All right-thinking people come over to the side of the lovers, but in Shakespearean comedy there is usually a party pooper, a figure who refuses to be assimilated into the harmony—Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, Jaques in As You Like It, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The key to the two parts of Henry IV is that they take the comic structure and apply it to Prince Harry—with the difference that, instead of his courtship (which ends up being tacked on very briefly at the end of Henry V), the action turns on his maturation from wild youth to exemplary warrior prince and statesman. And, in a brilliant reversal, the figure who is isolated at the end is not the party pooper but the embodiment of the festive spirit: Falstaff. Comedy is thus placed in opposition to the march of history. The necessity to reject Falstaff in the name of historical destiny and social order is why the final resolution is tinged with the feeling of tragedy.
The distinctive feature of pastoral comedy is that the action develops by means of a shift of location from the everyday world of work, business, politics, patriarchy, and power to a “green” or “festive” place of play, leisure, anarchy, feminine influence, and love—the wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Belmont in The Merchant of Venice, the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, rural Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale. After the comic resolution is achieved, there has to be a return to the normative world, but recreative change has been effected by the values of the festive world. In Henry IV Part I, a tavern in Eastcheap plays the part of the festive world. In Part II, there is a reprise of that setting, but also a rural green world. As in the comedies, the shuttle between contrasting worlds and contradictory value systems creates the dialectic of the drama. But because of the calling of the prince to power, there can be no reconciliation between the value systems. Prince Hal announces in his first soliloquy that his time of “playing holidays” and “loose behaviour” will be but an interlude before he takes upon himself the mantle of historical duty.
HARRY TO HARRY
Richard II had followed the tragic pattern of a mismatch between the character of a man of high estate and the demands of his position as a ruler. It juxtaposed the fall of King Richard to the rise of Henry Bullingbrook, comparing them to a pair of buckets on a pulley, one descending into a well as the other ascends. Once Bullingbrook has become
King Henry IV, the pattern is reasserted and reversed in the next generation. Henry sees his son seeming to become another Richard, a time waster surrounding himself with unsuitable companions and allowing the country to run to seed. He sees himself— a soldier, a man of decision and action—not in his son, but in Hotspur, child of the Percy family who had helped him to displace Richard from the throne.
Historically, Henry Percy, known as Hotspur, was more than twenty years older than Prince Henry (usually called Harry and, by Falstaff alone, Hal), the future King Henry V, victor of Agincourt. With his habitual dramatic license, Shakespeare altered history and made them rival youths of the same generation. Henry IV’s nightmare of history repeating itself is that Hotspur will play his own role to his son’s Richard. He wishes that “some night-tripping fairy” had exchanged the two Harries in their cradles “And called mine Percy, his [i.e. Northumberland’s] Plantagenet.” But this time it is the rebel who falls and the true heir who succeeds. Henry IV, a doubleheader of a play, is full of doubles. There are paired fathers and sons: the king and the prince, Northumberland and Hotspur in Part I. There are surrogate fathers to the young hero: Sir John Falstaff and, in Part II, his antithesis, the Lord Chief Justice. There are brothers in blood (in Part I, Northumberland and Worcester, Hotspur and his brother-in-law Mortimer; in Part II, Prince Harry and Prince John, the aged kinsmen Shallow and Silence) and brothers in jest (Hal’s “sworn brethren” among the tavern crowd, Ned Poins chief among them).
One of the questions that fascinates Shakespeare in these plays is, what is the appropriate education for a future king? The Tudor view was that the ideal king should combine the qualities of soldier, scholar, and courtier. Fencing, jousting, and hunting offered training in the chivalric arts of the medieval aristocracy, but a learned humanist tutor was also required to drill the prince in languages, literature, history, ethics, law, and theology. And at the same time it was necessary to imbibe the elaborate codes of behavior, the conventions of propriety and deference, upon which courtship depended.
Hotspur is the embodiment of an old-style chivalric warrior. He would rather be astride his horse than engaging in courtly parley with his wife. He lives by the code of honor and is deliciously scornful of the courtly manners embodied by the trimly dressed, clean-shaved lord who comes with “pouncet-box” in hand to demand Hotspur’s prisoners: the clash of styles between battlefield and court is enough to turn him into a rebel. Hotspur has boundless courage and energy, but his desire “To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon” is susceptible to parody: his own wife teases him and Prince Hal mocks him as “the Hotspur of the north, he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife ‘Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.’” His impulsiveness means that he cannot calculate, he is never the politician. “[A] plague upon it, / I have forgot the map!” he says during a council of war. A more politic customer would be most unlikely to have forgotten it—and would never admit as much if he had.
As Hotspur embodies the old chivalric code, his fellow warrior, the Welshman Glendower, stands for an equally antiquated mode of being: magical thinking. He boasts of portents at his birth—fiery shapes in the air and goats running from the mountains—but this kind of talk is ridiculed. When he claims that he can call spirits from the vasty deep, Hotspur wryly asks, “But will they come when you do call for them?” Talk of dragons and finless fish is “skimble-skamble stuff” which does nothing to advance the cause of the rebellion. In the end, the consequence of Glendower’s desire to listen to prophecies is that he fails to turn up for the battle.
HONOR VERSUS INSTINCT
Part I shows Prince Harry playing “truant” from “chivalry,” but returning to it when the time is ripe. Even as he proves himself on the battlefield, the critique of honor continues with Falstaff’s mock “catechism”: “Can honour set to a leg? No…Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday.” Falstaff’s philosophy is a simple “give me life”: never mind about ethical and political codes of behavior. “I am not a double man,” he says to Hal, putting down the dead Hotspur, whom he has been carrying on his back. Yet he is double the size of anyone else in the play and he has a double life, rising from feigned death on the battlefield of Shrewsbury so that he can return in Part II. It will be altogether harder to get rid of cowardly Falstaff than to defeat brave Hotspur. “Thou art not what thou seem’st,” remarks Hal: in seeming to have killed Hotspur, Falstaff is not the coward he has appeared to be. But he has not slain Hotspur, merely stabbed him when he is already dead—a supremely dishonorable deed. And yet, what is honor? A mere word, an empty code. It is the trickster, the chancer, who survives, not the honorable man.
Falstaff is at once the great deceiver and the great truth-teller, who reduces war to its bottom line: common foot soldiers are but “food for powder.” One of the reasons why Shakespeare made him fat was to remind the audience of the solidity of the human body: Falstaff’s girth is a way of saying that history is made not only of big speeches and dramatic events, but also of the daily lives of people who eat, drink, sleep, and die: “Rare words! Brave world! Hostess, my breakfast, come! / O, I could wish this tavern were my drum!”
A key word is “instinct.” Hotspur has instinctive courage and Falstaff an instinctive sense of self-preservation. The king thinks that his son is instinctively idle and irresponsible. The aim of a sixteenth-century royal humanist education was to overcome such innate propensities by developing the ethical, linguistic, and political faculties of the pupil prince. For Hal, the King’s Tavern in Eastcheap serves as a parody of the schoolroom at court. Falstaff is explicitly identified as his “tutor” and a central part of his education is to learn a new language—not, however, Latin, Greek, or the rhetorical elaboration of courtly speech, but the language of the people. This is a Harry who develops the art of speaking with every “Tom, Dick and Francis.” He learns their jargon—“They call drinking deep, dyeing scarlet”—and he becomes “so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour” that he will be able to “drink with any tinker in his own language” for the rest of his life.
Henry IV believes that one of the failings of his predecessor Richard II had been to seek to make himself popular, thus eroding the necessary distance that creates awe and gives mystique to the monarchy. But King Henry’s own distance from public life—he is nearly always seen surrounded by an inner circle of courtiers or closeted alone in his chamber—causes power to ebb from him. His son, by contrast, comes to know the common people, developing a rapport that will enable him to inspire and lead his army in Henry V. The point is made through the very linguistic medium of the drama: all Shakespeare’s other English kings speak entirely in verse, whereas Prince Hal has command of a flexible prose voice, with which he reduces himself to the level of his people, an Eastcheap trick that he repeats when he goes in disguise among his men on the night before the battle of Agincourt.
The prince works according to the principle articulated by the cunning politician Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida: a man “Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, / Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection, / As when his virtues shining upon others / Heat them and they retort that heat again / To the first giver.” That is to say, we can only make value judgments through a process of comparison. “Percy is but my factor, good my lord, / To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf”: by temporarily ceding glory to Henry Hotspur, Henry Monmouth will seem all the more glorious when he eventually triumphs over him. His whole strategy is revealed in the imagery of his first soliloquy: the sun seems brighter after cloud and a jewel on a dull background will “show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off.” The offsetting of the prince against his various foils is the structural key to the drama.
THE PRINCE AS MACHIAVEL?
What is the basis of political rule? Orthodox Tudor theory propounded that kings and magistrates were God’s representatives on earth, their authority sancti
oned by divine law. But the Elizabethan stage had another possible answer. Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy The Jew of Malta, written about 1589 and well known to Shakespeare, has an extraordinary opening. The prologue is spoken by an actor pretending to be the Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. He voices a series of deeply subversive suggestions about the nature of sovereignty. His riposte to political orthodoxy is that the only basis of effective government is raw power:
I count religion but a childish toy,
And hold there is no sin but ignorance…
Many will talk of title to a crown:
What right had Caesar to the empery?
Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure
When, like the Draco’s, they were writ in blood.
Religion as an illusion; the idea that human knowledge does not require divine sanction; the notion that it is “might” not “right” that decides who rules; the proposition that the most effective laws are those based not on justice but on the severity exemplified by the ancient Greek lawgiver Draco (from whose name we get the word “draconian”). French and English thinkers of Shakespeare’s time demonized Machiavelli for holding these views, but for Christopher Marlowe the act of thinking the unthinkable made Machiavelli a model for his own overreaching stage heroes.
Shakespeare’s history plays are steeped in the influence of Marlowe, but politically he was much more cautious—he would never have risked suffering Marlowe’s end, stabbed to death by a government spy while awaiting questioning in a heresy investigation. But that did not stop Shakespeare from recognizing the theatrical charisma of the Marlovian machiavel. He created a string of such characters himself—Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Iago in Othello, Edmund in King Lear. What attracted him to the type was not so much the subversive politics as the stage panache of the unapologetic villain. Political orthodoxy is staid and solemn. The machiavel is nimble and witty. But is he necessarily brutal and irreligious?
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