Keep in a little life? Poor Jack, farewell!
I could have better spar’d a better man:
O, I should have a heavy miss of thee
If I were much in love with vanity:
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Death hath not struck so fat a deer today,
Though many dearer, in this bloody fray.
Embowell’d will I see thee by and by,
Till then in blood by noble Percy lie. Exit.
[Falstaff riseth up.]
FALSTAFF Embowelled? If thou embowel me today, I’ll
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give you leave to powder me and eat me too tomorrow.
‘Sblood, ’twas time to counterfeit, or that hot
termagant Scot had paid me, scot and lot too.
Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit: to die is to be a
counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man, who
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hath not the life of a man: but to counterfeit dying,
when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but
the true and perfect image of life indeed. The better
part of valour is discretion, in the which better part I
have saved my life. ‘Zounds, I am afraid of this
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gunpowder Percy, though he be dead; how if he should
counterfeit too and rise? By my faith, I am afraid he
would prove the better counterfeit; therefore I’ll make
him sure, yea, and I’ll swear I killed him. Why may not
he rise as well as I? Nothing confutes me but eyes, and
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nobody sees me: therefore, sirrah [stabbing him], with
a new wound in your thigh, come you along with me.
[He takes up Hotspur on his back.]
Re-enter PRINCE and LORD JOHN OF LANCASTER.
PRINCE
Come, brother John, full bravely hast thou flesh’d
Thy maiden sword.
LANCASTER But soft, whom have we here?
Did you not tell me this fat man was dead?
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PRINCE
I did, I saw him dead,
Breathless and bleeding on the ground. Art thou alive?
Or is it fantasy that plays upon our eyesight?
I prithee speak, we will not trust our eyes
Without our ears: thou art not what thou seem’st.
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FALSTAFF No, that’s certain, I am not a double-man:
but if I be not Jack Falstaff, then am I a Jack: there is
Percy [throwing the body down]! If your father will do
me any honour, so: if not, let him kill the next Percy
himself. I look to be either earl or duke, I can assure
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you.
PRINCE Why, Percy I kill’d myself, and saw thee dead.
FALSTAFF Didst thou? Lord, Lord, how this world is
given to lying! I grant you I was down, and out of
breath, and so was he, but we rose both at an instant,
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and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock. If I may
be believed, so: if not, let them that should reward
valour bear the sin upon their own heads. I’ll take it
upon my death, I gave him this wound in the thigh; if
the man were alive, and would deny it, ‘zounds, I
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would make him eat a piece of my sword.
LANCASTER This is the strangest tale that ever I heard.
PRINCE This is the strangest fellow, brother John.
Come, bring your luggage nobly on your back.
[aside to Falstaff] For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,
I’ll gild it with the happiest terms I have.
[A retreat is sounded.]
The trumpet sounds retreat, the day is ours.
Come, brother, let us to the highest of the field,
To see what friends are living, who are dead.
Exeunt Prince of Wales and Lancaster.
FALSTAFF I’ll follow, as they say, for reward. He that
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rewards me, God reward him! If I do grow great, I’ll
grow less, for I’ll purge, and leave sack, and live
cleanly as a nobleman should do.
Exit, bearing off the body.
5.5 The trumpets sound. Enter the KING, PRINCE, LORD JOHN OF LANCASTER, EARL OF WESTMORELAND, with WORCESTER and VERNON prisoners.
KING Thus ever did rebellion find rebuke.
Ill-spirited Worcester, did not we send grace,
Pardon, and terms of love to all of you?
And wouldst thou turn our offers contrary?
Misuse the tenor of thy kinsman’s trust?
5
Three knights upon our party slain today,
A noble earl and many a creature else,
Had been alive this hour,
If like a Christian thou hadst truly borne
Betwixt our armies true intelligence.
10
WORCESTER What I have done my safety urg’d me to;
And I embrace this fortune patiently,
Since not to be avoided it falls on me.
KING Bear Worcester to the death, and Vernon too:
Other offenders we will pause upon.
15
Exeunt Worcester and Vernon, guarded.
How goes the field?
PRINCE The noble Scot, Lord Douglas, when he saw
The fortune of the day quite turn’d from him,
The noble Percy slain, and all his men
Upon the foot of fear, fled with the rest,
20
And falling from a hill, he was so bruis’d
That the pursuers took him. At my tent
The Douglas is; and I beseech your Grace
I may dispose of him.
KING With all my heart.
PRINCE Then, brother John of Lancaster, to you
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This honourable bounty shall belong;
Go to the Douglas and deliver him
Up to his pleasure, ransomless and free:
His valours shown upon our crests today
Have taught us how to cherish such high deeds,
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Even in the bosom of our adversaries.
LANCASTER I thank your Grace for this high courtesy,
Which I shall give away immediately.
KING Then this remains, that we divide our power:
You, son John, and my cousin Westmoreland,
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Towards York shall bend you with your dearest speed
To meet Northumberland and the prelate Scroop,
Who, as we hear, are busily in arms:
Myself and you, son Harry, will towards Wales,
To fight with Glendower and the Earl of March.
40
Rebellion in this land shall lose his sway,
Meeting the check of such another day,
And since this business so fair is done,
Let us not leave till all our own be won. Exeunt.
King Henry IV, Part 2
‘The second parte of the history of kinge HENRY the iiijth with the humours of Sir JOHN FFALLSTAFF’ was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 23 August 1600, and a Quarto was published that year, printed by Valentine Simmes. One scene, 3.1, in which King Henry makes his belated first appearance, was accidently omitted. To insert it Simmes set four new leaves, which not only include the missing scene but reprint the surrounding lines from the end of 2.4 and the beginning of 3.2. The two states of the 1600 Quarto, with or without 3.1, mark the only appearance of the play in print before the 1623 Folio, a surprising fact given the extraordinary popularity of King Henry IV, Part 1.
The Quarto text serves as the primary authority for most modern editions. The Folio, however, includes eight substantial passages absent from the Quarto, and seems in other places authoritatively to correct and add to the earlier tex
t, so it too must be taken into account by editors. In other particulars, however, the Folio seems further from Shakespeare’s own hand than the Quarto, regularizing its colloquialisms and purging the text of most of its oaths and profanities.
The play was written soon after King Henry IV, Part 1, probably early in 1598, but more as a sequel than as the second half of a single ten-act dramatic entity. Had two plays been clearly in his mind from the outset, Shakespeare would no doubt have parcelled out the historical material more evenly. Though Part 2 brings the action forward to King Henry’s death and Hal’s accession to the throne, the play does more than merely complete the history of the reign. Shakespeare echoes the structure of the earlier play, transposing it into a darker key. Part 2 also ignores various aspects of the plot of Part 1, even forgetting the reconciliation of father and son that ends the earlier play.
Yet if the trajectory of the action is the same in each play, dividing interest between the King and Prince, the rebels and Falstaff, the history in Part 2 is more troubled and troubling. The climactic battles of each play, while structurally analogous, starkly establish the plays’ different tones. Part 1’s glorious victory at Shrewsbury, where Hal magnificently proves himself a worthy successor, is paralleled by the betrayal at Gaultree Forest, where Prince John of Lancaster displays not the chivalric magnanimity of Hal but a prudential cynicism all too appropriate to the dispiriting world of this play.
Hal does not even appear on stage until 2.2, and his first line is telling: ‘Before God, I am exceeding weary.’ Even Falstaff is here more tired and cynical than in Part 1, his actions meaner, his wit less agile. Though his presence is still engaging, he shows the marks of the disease that infects the play world. He first enters worrying about the doctor’s report about his urine sample, and his own diagnosis is that he suffers from ‘consumption of the purse’.
Falstaff in this play is no longer a father figure for Hal; indeed the two are rarely together on stage, and the play’s most notorious moment is the fat knight’s public rejection. Falstaff eagerly anticipates the crowning of his erstwhile tavern friend as King, but the ‘Hal’ he knew is no more. The once wayward Prince is now King of England, and coldly tells Falstaff: ‘Presume not that I am the thing I was.’ The newly crowned Henry V has no choice but to repudiate the dissolute knight, but audiences inevitably feel that the new King gives up some of his humanity in so fully taking on his necessary public role. It is here, in the way in which Henry performs the rejection, in the degree of evident regret, in the extent to which he realizes what he has lost and what he has become, that productions of this complex and unsettling play reveal their moral focus.
Though never as popular on stage as its predecessor, Part 2 has a distinguished performance history. It was one of the plays performed at Court in the winter of 1612-13 to celebrate the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine. After the Restoration it continued to be played, but often in adaptations that emphasized the role of Falstaff, or in conflations of the two parts. Such conflations go back at least as far as 1622-3, when Sir Edward Dering prepared one for his own private theatricals, but the tradition survives into the twentieth century, as in Orson Welles’s film Chimes at Midnight (1966) and an extraordinary production of Enrico IV by the Colletivo di Parma, first staged in Italy in 1982 and brought to London the following year.
The Arden text is based on the 1600 Quarto, supplemented by the 1623 First Folio.
LIST OF ROLES
RUMOUR
the presenter
KING Henry the Fourth
PRINCE Henry
afterwards crowned King Henry the Fifth Prince John of LANCASTER
sons to Henry the Fourth, and brethren to Henry the Fifth
opposites against King Henry the Fourth
of the King’s party
irregular humourist
both country Justices
DAVY
FANG and SNARE
servant to Shallow two sergeants
country soldiers
LADY NORTHUMBERLAND
Northumberland’s wife
LADY PERCY
Percy’s widow
HOSTESS Quickly
DOLL Tearsheet
Speaker of the EPILOGUE
FRANCIS and other DRAWERS
Beadles and other Officers, Grooms, Porter, Messenger, Soldiers, Lords, Musicians, Attendants
King Henry IV, Part 2
INDUCTION
Enter RUMOUR painted full of tongues.
RUMOUR Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?
I, from the Orient to the drooping West,
Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold
The acts commenced on this ball of earth.
5
Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.
I speak of peace, while covert enmity
Under the smile of safety wounds the world;
10
And who but Rumour, who but only I,
Make fearful musters, and prepar’d defence,
Whiles the big year, swoln with some other grief,
Is thought with child by the stern tyrant War,
And no such matter? Rumour is a pipe
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Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures,
And of so easy and so plain a stop
That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,
The still-discordant wav’ring multitude,
Can play upon it. But what need I thus
20
My well-known body to anatomize
Among my household? Why is Rumour here?
I run before King Harry’s victory,
Who in a bloody field by Shrewsbury
Hath beaten down young Hotspur and his troops,
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Quenching the flame of bold rebellion
Even with the rebels’ blood. But what mean I
To speak so true at first? My office is
To noise abroad that Harry Monmouth fell
The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works Page 167