Over the years I became more and more fascinated by the contortions of politicians and by the corrupting seductions experienced by anyone who wields power...I realised that the mechanism of power had not changed in centuries.
...[Designer, John] Bury saw the violence and power politics of the cycle as framed in steel:
It was a period of armour and a period of the sword: they were plays about warfare, about power, about danger. One spent one's time either in armour, or piercing someone's armour--or being pierced...We were trying to make a world: a dangerous world, a terrible world, in which all these happenings fit.41
The hard and heavy oppressive nature of the set complemented a darkly political reading of the play. The fragility of the characters and the dehumanizing effect of war were also reflected in the costumes, which assimilated the metal world:
The stage floor was plated steel. The acting space for all seven plays was defined by two huge triangle-based metal-plated walls, which could be turned to present different faces and shifted to form different angles...[For Henry IV] the dominant metallic textures were modified here and there by wood and cloth, and banners were used in the battle scenes, but austerity prevailed in the overall visual impression.42
When Bury joined the RSC in 1962, he brought with him a revolutionary concept--that a production's design should be based around a central "image" which should be followed on in the costuming and sound of that production. He altered the use of stage space by using real materials that had texture, substance, and a natural sound when the actors worked on them. His style was a rejection of the romantic designs and costumes frequently seen in the 1950s.
As in so many of Shakespeare's plays, the physical and mental condition of the king is reflected in his state. The ill health of the "body politic" was clearly visible in John Napier's design for the 1982 production. Picking up on the idea that "We are all diseased," director Trevor Nunn
contrived to suggest that a whole range of minor figures suffered from the general malaise...[The] set consisted of four tall wooden structures, each built like the open-section interior of a three-storey square house...each structure could be moved separately backwards or forwards, to build a different "house" for each location. Often the structures were full of people, even as they were moved into place, particularly with the tavern-scenes, which became momentarily large portable pubs. At times, the scene practically seethed with extras, working hoists, trundling kegs, mounting ladders to paint signs, bustling about with sacks or trays of drinks, beating carpets, making beds...these sets remained drab. The boards were twisted. They were hung with shields and lances, but all were painted black--the colour of the wood itself--and the dark heavy structures seemed gloomy and overpowering. The effect was enhanced by David Hersey's lighting: often a dim suffused light; at other times a bright overhead spotlight, leaving dingy shadows all around. In addition, Eastcheap extras often remained on the set, lounging up stairs, watching, during the intervening court scenes. The effect was to suggest a political world which was haunted by shabbiness.43
In keeping with the idea that Henry IV takes its form from the medieval morality play, Adrian Noble's designer, Bob Crowley, strongly marked out the symbolism of faith and sin, heaven and hell, in the set design in 1991. He "sharply juxtaposed the excesses of the tavern with the calculation of the court":44
Julian Glover's King Henry and Robert Stephens's Falstaff form the opposing poles of Adrian Noble's production of Henry IV Part 1, the King stern, cold and authoritarian in grey and black, Falstaff warm, mercurial, libertarian, and faintly epicene in scarlet...The King's bare court is furnished with hard chairs and severe tables; while soft fabrics and yielding sofas in glowing shades of red characterise the tavern scenes. The Eastcheap tavern erupts on us like a mediaeval vision of hell, a lurid maze of private rooms with sex visibly on sale.45
We could hardly be reminded more forcibly that Shakespeare's matchless history has its roots in mediaeval drama or that Hal is poised between an angry God in Henry and a ribald Satan in Falstaff.46
Meanwhile, the greed, the violence, the humble bustle, the sordid pastimes of ordinary English life go on. Shakespeare's greatness is at its most awesome when he shows you how the politics of the nobility is mirrored, refracted, parodied and complemented by the goings on in Eastcheap and Rochester. Noble has retained Act Two Scene One, in the inn at Rochester, which directors usually cut. Here the robbery is set up when Shakespeare's equivalent of the hotel manager tips off Gadshill as to which guests are carrying the loot. The underworld types are played without a touch of mockery. These are dangerous but ordinary people who have a living to make, and their lives are no laughing matter any more than the Percys'.47
When explaining his entrance as Falstaff, Desmond Barrit explained the idea for the design of Henry IV in 2000:
Up through the floor I pushed, by way of a sort of rubber flange that we came to know as the sphincter...The idea of this curious entrance, of course, was symbolic: our production was part of the RSC's "This England" project to present eight of Shakespeare's history plays, and the subject of those plays was this island, this England, this earth that we live on, and the director wanted Falstaff, as a man of the earth, to be seen to be born from the earth.48
In contrast to the history cycle of 1964, no design concept linked the plays. Each was individually conceived by separate directors and designers. This was criticized by some who felt that the continuity of the cycle was less apparent, and confusing, when the same actors in the same roles appeared in completely different times and settings. However, Es Devlin's set design for the two parts of Michael Attenborough's production of Henry IV was completely appropriate to the play: "England is basically conceived as an often blood-stained, earthy battleground, with a steep hill at the rear, [conveying] Attenborough's sense that the play intensifies the impression...of a country rent asunder."49 With lights shining up through the floor, the earth appeared primordial and volcanic, as if awaiting a moment of violence. With "its mound of smoke-filled peat [the set] effectively embodies the idea that "the land is burning."50
Fathers and Sons
What the father hath hid cometh out in the son; and oft have I found in the son the father's revealed secret.
(Friedrich Nietzsche)51
As Harold C. Goddard points out, it would be hard to find a better illustration of this axiom than Henry IV and Hal: "In his concentration on power the elder Henry has suppressed both the playful and the passionate tendencies of his nature...What he has kept under comes out in Hal, who leads a life of abandon under the tutelage of Falstaff."52 Hal finds in Falstaff a father who embodies the "unrealised half of [Henry's] soul,"53 providing him with a rough education and emotional warmth.
Of the 1975 production, directed by Terry Hands, John Elsom wrote:
Alan Howard's Hal is a young prince, growing up. His mind is being formed by two mutually opposing fathers. His natural father, the King, is tortured by guilt and obsessed with ideals of kingship. His debased "father," Falstaff is impervious to guilt, scornful of honour and duty, but relishes the simple pleasures in life, sack, sex and getting away with things.54
Hands' production focused on this central relationship, providing "a study in domestic psychopathology, probing the tortured relationship of father and son."55
Emrys James, who played Henry IV, portrayed him as a lonely character frustrated by his inability to express emotion in a non-aggressive fashion:
The play is about the longing a father has for a relationship with his son. It is peculiarly painful to have that figure high above, cut off from his son, but watching. He is a distant father-figure for Hal because this man doesn't, cannot unbend...
Stay, and breathe awhile.
Thou hast redeemed thy lost opinion,
And showed thou mak'st some tender of my life,
In this fair rescue thou hast brought to me.
4. Alan Howard as Prince Hal, "a young prince growing up," and Brewster Mason as Falstaff,
who "relishes the simple pleasures in life, sack, sex and getting away with things," in Terry Hands' 1975 RSC production.
It's incredible that he is not able to say, "You are a wonderful son to me because you have given yourself in battle with this great beast of a man and fought him off. And it shows without question that you love me." That's not the way he thinks. It's part of his hang-up, part of his trouble. If he had shown emotion to this emotional young man their relationship would have been that much easier.
...It isn't accidental that Shakespeare left his wife out of the play. He's a lonely man surrounded by four big, surly, rebellious sons, whom he rules with a rod of iron...Here's a man who hasn't learned how to handle his emotions and his solution to the problem is to suppress them completely. Except in moments of extreme stress. Then they come out.56
In order to emphasize the relationship between father and son, Hands deliberately merged Eastcheap and the court, with Henry and Hal often present, onlookers in their separate scenes:
Here both king and prince stray into scenes from which they are usually absent. From the first, Henry IV watches, soft-lit and chorus-like, from the back of the stage as Hal and Falstaff flirt--almost literally flirt--with self-indulgence. From his dallying, Hal strolls off, seeing Henry lambaste the nobles who will turn against him, removed from his father yet linked as he circles the stage.57
Props were also used to signify Hal's half existence between two worlds:
James's Henry treats Hal as a child, takes his hand, pulls him onto the seat...beside him, hugs him, kisses him. He tries to supplant the physical affection evident between Hal and Sir John but the boy is only disorientated and reaches out of the scene to take a bottle and goblet from the tavern in which their palace meeting is limboed.58
The deliberate merging of court and tavern also prompts us to think of Henry IV and Falstaff as the lords of two realms within England. The device was used to great effect in Michael Attenborough's production in 2000:
Bolingbroke, now Henry IV, sits on the same throne that serves as Falstaff's perch in downtown Eastcheap. This neatly indicates that the king and the old reprobate serve as competing father figures to Prince Hal.59
How the actors physically relate to each other reveals their character and the dimension of their relationships. Of the 1964 production, Scott McMillin observed that
Falstaff offered what Hal ought to have sought according to a psychological reading, a little fatherly contact. Hal's own father, the Henry IV of Eric Porter, was remote and unapproachable, but Falstaff showed warm feeling and caressed Hal's face while acting the father's role. [Ian] Holm did not spurn such gestures.60
Holm played Hal in an antiheroic fashion, as an onlooker, never completely engaged or in contact with the people around him, "a cold-blooded young man who was working his way toward heroism":
in the vital matter of [Henry's] relationship with Hal there seemed not even the contact of pity between father and son. Their meeting...was played with great physical and emotional distance between the two men. When the time came for Hal (Ian Holm) to declare his loyalty, he first went over and closed the door: a telling gesture with its suggestion of guarded secrecy. He remained inaccessible to his father.61
In Adrian Noble's 1990 production:
Caught between King and clown is Michael Maloney's slightly built Hal, initially an emotionally dependent adolescent. His relationship with Falstaff is intense: they hold hands affectionately in the opening scene; as the boy taunts Falstaff after the exposure of his cowardice, Falstaff kisses him on the lips on "no more of that, Hal, an thou lovest me." And Robert Stephens'...agile Falstaff is dependent on Hal too. There is introspection behind this bluff exterior; the spaniel eyes seek affection...Hal's determination to conquer Hotspur is motivated by the need to demonstrate his maturity to his father; the thwarted love behind it seems about to resolve itself with a kiss from son to father when the King [Julian Glover] holds Hal at arm's length.62
David Troughton, who played Henry in 2000, believed, like Emrys James, that Henry is aware of his failure as a father and attempts to redress this in order to win back his son: "with his own son he has no idea how to behave at all. Hal's search for an alternative father is a cry for help, because his own father wants him for only one thing: to be his successor."63 Unable to be demonstrative in his love, Henry's attempts at a bond between father and son are thwarted by awkward moments of unwanted physicality. Unlike Glover's Henry, who chose to remain distant, Troughton's actively sought to embrace his son when the opportunity arose:
It takes just one speech from Hal to bring them together--metaphorically, anyway, for though I used to put out my arms to him here, he never noticed, and no embrace was achieved. Perhaps Hal doesn't want to notice, or perhaps he simply doesn't see; that ambiguity was important in our production, and I think right. It's like one of those moments when you go to kiss your father--and it turns confusedly into shaking hands. Hal has said that he's sorry; he has said that he will fight along-side his father; but there has been no expression of love of son to father, which is what Henry misses. But whether Henry could achieve the embrace, even if Hal were looking, remains a question. He simply doesn't know how to touch his son properly. So I just used to give him a little push on his shoulder with my fist, and the awkward moment passed.64
Troughton thought Part I "brilliantly written in its exploration of all the tactics that we use as parents: anger, loving kindness, emotional blackmail, they're all there." The character of Hotspur was key in this production as a means for Henry to get to his son: "he betrays his weird fixation on Hotspur, that son who is the 'theme of honour's tongue'...who is so good to his father, such a great soldier."65 It is clear that this is the son that Henry would wish for, and that Hal, played by William Houston, was made aware of it.
The parental battle between Falstaff and Henry for Hal never comes to a climactic moment when the two characters meet and argue over his emotional and moral education. In 1982 Trevor Nunn contrived
a moment in which Hal finds himself between his father and Falstaff, with Bolingbroke's look of envious contempt at Sir John and silent appeal for his son's affections answered by Hal's following his friend's insistent call: "Hal, if thou seest me down in the battle..." The king turns away, apparently defeated, an interesting explanation for what in the text is the curious continuation of the estrangement of Hal and his father in Part 2 in spite of the outcome of the battle. Not until he sees his father dying is this Hal ready to demonstrate any emotional commitment to him.66
Similarly, in 2001, "Troughton also gives us the anxious father aware that he is in danger of losing his son to the taverns and the fat knight: there's a great moment when his path crosses that of Falstaff in battle and he shoots him a wounded look."67 David Troughton recalled how this moment was realized:
[Henry and Falstaff]...were symbolically present on stage together for a few moments between the first and second scenes of Part One...We created a brief moment in our production--after I had rejected (for fear of losing my heir) Hal's offer to take on Hotspur in single combat and as we were all girding up for battle--when I look at him and Falstaff together and thought "O, God, I don't want them meeting any more."68
Kingship
Renaissance philosophy believed that the best man was the "fullest" man, the one with the widest experience of the world. Behind this lay the mediaeval theory of elements and humours, whose balance and combination was the key to mastery of oneself and others. A king should not only know the life of his subjects. He should contain in himself an equilibrium of all human passions--anger, pride, melancholy, mercy and love...The best education is the world itself, and the best introduction to the elements of one's own nature is other people.
(Ronald Bryden)69
Henry IV Part I posits many questions as to the nature of kingship. Shakespeare examines the political theory of the divine right of kings through Henry's gnawing guilt, which stems from a belief that he has sinned against God in the
usurpation and murder of Richard II. Regardless of the fact that he believed himself the right man for the job, Henry cannot escape the belief that he is a counterfeit king: "Confirming a change that had long been in incubation, on the day when Henry deposed Richard he became a double man, one thing to the world, another to his own conscience."70
Emrys James played Henry in 1975 as the most unregal of men. Erratic in behavior, he was a self-made man, an administrator and clerk, a cunning politician who made his way to kingship when, as Falstaff said (ostensibly of Worcester), "Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it":
He wants to assert his authority again and again, because kingship doesn't come naturally to him...Richard could go through crowds as a golden figure, and you could never ever conceive of Henry IV as a golden figure. Here is an executive, an executive of the state, angrily aware that the kind of chief executive he is is better for the state than the preening vision of majesty that Richard II presents.71
In David Troughton's highly acclaimed performance in 2000, he embodied the idea of Henry as a man racked by inner conflict, caught between faith and the necessities of power:
A dominant Bolingbroke, he now turns into a guilt-wracked Henry IV, ever conscious that he seized the throne by force. Yet, although first seen at prayer in penitent's gown, Troughton's king is still a brutal pragmatist who seeks to pre-empt rebellion by squashing his fractious nobles.72
The opening is heavy with brooding anger, even melancholy...Power may be coveted; you may cheat, lie, manipulate, even kill for it; but when it is yours it can become a burden, a prison of responsibility...[Troughton's] huge body suggests both brute force and vulnerability. The king is not at ease with himself...loyalties come at a heavy price. And over all this hangs Henry's guilt about the murder of his predecessor, the deposed Richard.73
Henry IV, Part 1 (Folger Shakespeare Library) Page 16