Mr Hall has a clear preference for autumn over the other seasons of the year...The play itself is autumnal. The leaves are falling, and on all sides life is coming to an end. The King is dying, his conscience incurably sick and his crusade only metaphorically achieved. Falstaff is ageing, his wit not quite what it has been, and his body--like Doll Tearsheet's--is diseased...Where honour is in question, it is now six of one, half-a-dozen of the other. Old Double is dead, and the apples are ripening in the straw. Lancastrian England is sick with internal division, and there is no longer a chivalry to divide. It is crying out for new blood, even if more blood must be spilt to acquire it. Peace will be dearly bought, and it will not last for long. More will be required than two chantries, a hospice, and an agonized prayer before a battle to exorcise the curse of regicide.43
In the second part the tone darkens into elegy, and so far as the comic scenes are concerned the result is pure gain, for without some such deliberate change in mood the later revels can appear as mere echoes of their counterparts in the first play. As it is, they sometimes develop an almost Chekhovian atmosphere; there is a sense that time is running out and that the best days are already past.44
As these reviews of Peter Hall's production indicate, Henry IV Part II has lent itself to Chekhovian interpretation. The characters walk a tightrope at all times, with farcical, absurdist comedy on the one side and abject tragedy on the other. The passage of time is a constant preoccupation, as is the desultory and unsuccessful search for life's meaning. The play has an emphasis on moments of epiphany and illumination, a demand for psychological realism, and melancholy surrender to inevitability.
The work of Bertolt Brecht also proved a source of inspiration for Hall. In examining the brutal mechanics of power that moved behind Shakespeare's history plays, Hall also laid special emphasis on the social detail, showing the effect that politics have on the ordinary people who inhabit this world:
The allegorical figure of Rumour was turned into the realistic figure of a maimed soldier, but Henry Knowles' snarling performance and the uncannily successful echoic effects restored the symbolic quality.45
What the Royal Shakespeare's producing triumvirate--Peter Hall, John Barton, Clifford Williams--have done is to turn the Histories into Brecht. Again and again, as unshaven, carefully muddied soldiery pulled their little canteen-wagons into stark, straw-strewn farmyards, I looked for Mother Courage to follow with her children. The result is impressive in many respects. It rationalises and humanises those miles of blank verse, explaining, motivating, lending historical and psychological solidity.46
This Brechtian element was also present in the performance of Ian Holm, who played Hal. He appeared to many reviewers to take on Brecht's idea of actors alienating themselves from rather than inhabiting their roles. In doing so he created a coldly analytic Hal, an observer taking part, rather than engaged in the action of the play. He was criticized by many reviewers for his reading of the part, but several others thought that this style of acting suited Hal's character, who does indeed appear manipulative, cold, and disengaged at times, and who remains an enigma.
Terry Hands in 1975 took on the Brechtian level of social detail and successfully evoked the epic nature of Henry IV Part II by his inventive symbolism:
it brings the best out of Terry Hands, whose direction expresses a joy in the sheer diversity of experience. He is not out to disclose any grand design, but to show all kinds of unconnected things happening simultaneously; and he shows his hand immediately by casting the Rumour Prologue for a chorus of hooded figures who then disperse into separate characters. What most holds the production together is its sense of time. It is divided between past and future, looking back regretfully to the straight heroics and gaiety of Part One, and forward to the new age which will follow the king's death. Rightly, the Eastcheap scenes are played as an elegiac echo.47
One curious trait in Hands's directorial character is that when he faces scenes which require plain, even pedantic, storytelling, he has a tendency to get bored with them and to stray into ornate symbolism...he presents us with some extraordinary images. The regional rebels cluster like black ravens, to pick the carcass of a king (and a kingdom) who is by no means dead. When Hal is crowned, Hands lays a glistening white carpet across the stage with the courtiers lined up one side and Falstaff's friends roughly gathered on the other. Then Hal appears, covered from nose to toenail in gleaming gold. He walks downstage, to RSC trumpets, and raises his golden visor to speak to Falstaff: and reject him.48
In an episodic play that covers the whole gamut of society--from court, to tavern, to rural Gloucestershire, to the battlefield--a strong directorial vision and an excellent designer are needed to hold the strands of the play together in a unified way that doesn't detract from the variety of tone. Adrian Noble's production in 1991 had a versatile staging which:
heighten[ed] the play's wide variety of tones, from the grim Expressionist intensity with which the whole milling cast deliver Rumour's many tongued Prologue, through the many sight-gags which erupt round Albie Woodington's crazed leather bike-boy of a Pistol in the Eastcheap scenes, to the elegiac rhythms of Shallow's misty, autumnal Gloucestershire, with its slow-motion apple pickers and beekeepers. In a dream-like, non-naturalistic touch, the corpse of Henry is borne offstage through this last landscape, suggesting that none of the play's seemingly separate worlds has been immune to the infection of his reign.49
This production achieved cohesion of setting and tone by having Henry IV wander through the worlds of his realm in different states of being. Thus:
the King delivers his great speech on the sleepless cares of majesty not from within the Palace of Westminster but while wandering like his own troubled ghost, through the darkened tavern at Eastcheap, to which his insomniac thoughts appear literally to have conveyed him. He sits down frailly in the armchair vacated only moments before by Falstaff on his way out to a night of pleasure with Doll Tearsheet. Around him, the disarrayed furniture betokens the riots and revels from which, as monarch, he is by definition excluded. It offers a haunting image of the emotional isolation which is one of the costs of kingship.50
FOR LAUGHTER FRAMES THE LIPS OF DEATH51
This is in many ways a twilight play: its characters are stalked by death, betrayal and disappointment.
--John Peter52
For a play, which deals with such melancholy themes, there is a tangible poignancy evoked by its comedic aspects. Where Part I offered a brightness and energy in the characters outside the court and the influence of Henry IV, in Part II there is a diminished joy, and a darkening in the laughter of the audience. This is nowhere more evident than in the Gloucestershire scenes where Silence and Shallow provide the most plangent and uproariously funny parts of this play, and Falstaff reveals a darker, melancholic side to his character.
In 1964, these scenes were played too darkly for the critics' tastes as they adjusted to modern cynicism infiltrating productions. Hugh Griffith, who played Falstaff, was considered definitive in his day. He surprised critics when, in Part II, he gave us "an ageing Falstaff whose interior gaiety, if he ever had any, is stilled by the thought of the grave":53
for once, [Falstaff] abandons his role as the clown and speaks with a melancholy reflectiveness heavy with the sense of mortality. This strain is picked up again in the scenes with Shallow when the two old men confront one another--Shallow talking of death but in fact envying his friend's life, and Falstaff finding in Shallow's absurdity another proof of the world's vanity.54
4. Benjamin Whitrow as Justice Shallow, Desmond Barrit as Falstaff, and Peter Copley as Justice Silence in Michael Attenborough's 2000 RSC production.
There is no doubt that Falstaff finds solace in the fact that he is, by comparison, younger and healthier than his companions. His stint in Gloucestershire is not just for financial reasons but, in escaping the tavern and the decay pervading his life in London, Shallow and Silence take him mentally away from his proximity to the Grim Re
aper.
Desmond Barrit, who played the role in 2000, found self-serving and cynical motives behind Falstaff's visit to the country:
Things aren't working for him at this time and he needs to find somewhere else where he might be important, and one of those places might be among these yokels who find even his most obvious witticisms terribly funny...Falstaff realizes that their sense of humour is very basic, and just sends them up. He also realizes that there's money in the country, plenty to eat, and plenty to drink, that nobody's short of anything, that recruits who will buy themselves out are easy to find, and that, at last, there's some possibility of getting that thousand pounds that has eluded him for so long...What's more, he suddenly finds himself with people much older than himself, or, with the recruits, with bumpkins and buffoons, so that here he can feel superior to (and younger than) those around him. Looking down on them almost, as if they belonged on a much lower level than himself.55
Likewise, Robert Stephens in 1991 gave a Falstaff of psychological complexity, egocentric, but not without emotional depth. On the line "If I had a thousand sons ...," he broke down, reminding us of his parental longings, found but now lost in Hal. The critic Michael Billington noted how he
starts out as a guileful charmer who supplies the tactile warmth and paternal affection that Hal cannot find at court. But in Part Two Mr Stephens becomes a much more vicious predator who reaches an apex of cruelty when he enlists the shambling, disabled Wart for his rag-and-bobtail military recruits.56
Sympathy for Falstaff hangs in the balance here. Conversely, John Peter found the recruits too ridiculous to find out Shakespeare's darker edge:
The savage political comedy of Falstaff's and Bardolph's recruiting activities are rendered harmless and almost improbable by the grotesquely bedraggled appearance of the men, one of whom, in a state of near epilepsy, can barely walk. Shakespeare was writing lethally biting political drama; Noble blandly draws its teeth.57
The melancholy inherent in the Gloucestershire scenes was emphasized with gentle humor:
old men remember their lost youth, lament their dead companions, get drunk and sing songs, Noble scrupulously avoids an easy sentimentality. As in [Robert] Stephens's performance as Falstaff, you are made sharply aware of these characters' faults even as you warm to their flawed humanity. In these bittersweet autumnal passages, Shakespeare was writing like Chekhov 250 years before Chekhov was born, and David Bradley and Anthony Douse are superbly sad and funny as the ancient Justices.58
In a very different reading of the part, belonging to the more traditional view of Falstaff, Brewster Mason in 1975 emphasized Falstaff's humanity. Critic John Elsom commented that Mason:
concentrates on the loving tolerance of the scenes at Eastcheap and his gradual recognition of age and approaching death, in the scenes with Shallow and Silence. His cunning is pragmatic, not malicious, and we sense that when his ship comes home and Hal is king, he plans genuinely to repay his friends.59
The performance is entirely sympathetic, and amounts to a walking testimonial to his speech in praise of sack. He is magnanimous, seignorial and valiant brushing assailants aside like flies. And down in Gloucestershire with Sydney Bromley's Shallow, he is clearly relishing the immediate party more than planning to fleece his host. The fact that a collection of death's-heads like Trevor Peacock's double up Silence (doubled into an O so perfect that you could bowl him like a hoop60) and Tim Wylton's hideously dilapidated Bardolph still manage to make a very good party, is another index of the production's balance between fun and mortality.61
...Whose Common Theme Is Death of Fathers62
Hal represents the future, the possibility of hope and fortune for both Henry IV and Falstaff. For Henry, the hope is that he has taught his son enough to take the crown with firm hands and lead the country out of civil strife. For Falstaff the hope is for financial security and the social standing that will afford him comfort in his old age. However, Hal is not a certainty that either man can rely on. Against this deeply flawed, complex, and enigmatic character, the final act depicts terrible acts of betrayal. Hal's rise to the throne sees the fall and death of both men--as one father dies, the other is cast off.
In the last act of this eventful history, both fathers die, the old king in a prolonged deathbed struggle in which his destiny, England's future, and an intensely self-absorbed relationship with his son war with the fever in his bones. Death does not come until his will allows it to: satisfied that Hal has the mettle to command honorably, the old king allows himself to be borne into the Jerusalem chamber. Meanwhile,
Falstaff's "death" is quieter but no less categoric. It begins by being "caught out," by the Lord Chief Justice and Mistress Quickly combined. It continues in the countryside, traipsing up north with his band of pub belligerents and stopping off on the way to con Justice Shallow and all. It ends in London, with his rejection by Hal, the young King, in front of his friends, drinking partners and those whom he needs to impress. With this cruel snub, Falstaff's optimism and his will to live disperse, with the other rebels against the state. Only his paunch and distended liver twitch on nervously: the man is dead.63
The significance of Hal's taking the crown from Henry before his actual death was explained by David Troughton:
finally for Henry comes the scene in which he has a sudden relapse and asks for his crown to be placed beside him on his pillow: "Set me the crown upon my pillow here" [4.2.142]. The line is immensely important, though it is hard to convey to a modern audience the symbolic idea of the crown on the pillow being temporarily in abeyance, waiting for the king to die before it is placed on his successor's head. To remove it is an act of sacrilege--almost as bad as stealing it from Richard II.64
Linking Hal's sin with the sin of Bullingbrook implies a cyclical pattern in the history of the family's reign in England, and not one that bodes well for the security of the country. In 1975 a visual motif showed the ominous nature of Hal's future, one that he appeared unaware of:
There is a fine moment in Part Two when Hal, framed by the guillotine-like structure of his dying father's bed, looked down from behind the crown at the King he believed to be dead.65
Having seen what possession of the crown has done to his father, Michael Maloney's Hal, although aware of the necessity, had severe misgivings about carrying the burden himself. During Part II:
Henry seems increasingly tormented by guilt as he views both the nobles' insurrection and Hal's apparent profligacy as retribution for his usurpation of Richard II. Julian Glover appears unkempt, gaunt and ravaged. Instead of wearing the crown, he held it loosely by his side, as if he had forfeited the right to wear it. In his relationship with Hal, he changed from the embodiment of cold, distant paternal authority seen in Part One, to the sick and fearful father of Part Two.66
When he mistakenly supposes that Henry has expired, there is no sense, in this production, that Hal's fingers are itchy to take possession of his right with an unseemly haste. Instead, he makes a wild lunge for the crown, ramming it on his head like someone trying to get a necessary torture over with quickly. So it's all the more agonising for him when Henry, reviving and taking the dimmest view of the situation, here summons up the last vestiges of his strength to subject his son to a brutal mock coronation, pressing the golden circlet into his temples as though it were a crown of thorns. The unfairness of this is piercing and, for once, the prince's impassioned self-defence sounds in no way like a face-saving operation.67
Henry's emotional repression in his relationship with his son breaks down in this final scene between the two, and in many productions it can emerge as the emotional apex of the play:
the only time he ever does show affection is when he's dying--when his son has broken through to him. When all his defences are down, when he's within ten minutes of his death. Then he calls him "my son" and "my Harry" [4.2.315, 321, 350]. Only then does he use endearment.68
His final confrontation with Prince Hal is one of the climactic moments i
n all Shakespeare, not, as has often been thought, because of the reconciliation between father and son, but because of the great Oedipal recognition which precedes it. Henry has to realise here that his son both loves him and wants his crown, that filial love can be sadly and bitterly compatible with ambition and a knowledge of what it must cost.69
Henry dies of an unspecified illness--one assumes that the cares of both state and son have worn away at his reserves to such a degree that his physical strength has been dissipated by psychological and spiritual debility, his obsession with the crown, and his own and Hal's dubious right to kingship. In order to play the part with physical realism, David Troughton based his performance on a fatal wasting illness, common and recognizable to the audience:
I decided that my Henry was dying of cancer, and because he says, just before he is carried out to die, that "my lungs are wasted so / That strength of speech is utterly denied me" [4.2.354-5], I took lung cancer as the illness. There are a lot of half lines in Henry's speeches here, and having made this decision about the illness, it seemed to me appropriate to use the missing half lines to show the audience how ill he was. In this way you avoid acting illness on the line: you can use normal energy when you have verse to speak and then take a big heave of a breath in the missing half line, thus suggesting that you have urgent things to say, and that you can still speak perfectly well--but only briefly. Henry is an energetic man, and always has been, and that energy is still there, still a part of the character, even as he approaches death. That's why I decided that he must get out of his bed for the final berating of his son. The anger inside him for what Hal has done--for what he has done to me, throughout his life--all comes together in this final speech...I used to start crawling towards the exit as Hal began his speech of excuse and explanation.
The Oxford Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 2 (Oxford World's Classics) Page 17
