The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works
Page 183
might! Well, of sufferance comes ease.
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DOLL Come, you rogue, come, bring me to a justice.
HOSTESS Ay, come, you starved bloodhound.
DOLL Goodman death, goodman bones!
HOSTESS Thou atomy, thou!
DOLL Come, you thin thing, come, you rascal!
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1 BEADLE Very well. Exeunt.
5.5 Enter three Grooms, strewers of rushes.
1 GROOM More rushes, more rushes!
2 GROOM The trumpets have sounded twice.
3 GROOM ’Twill be two o’clock ere they come from the
coronation. Dispatch, dispatch. Exeunt.
Trumpets sound, and the KING and his train pass over the stage: after them enter FALSTAFF, SHALLOW, PISTOL, BARDOLPH and the page.
FALSTAFF Stand here by me, Master Robert Shallow, I
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will make the King do you grace. I will leer upon him
as a comes by, and do but mark the countenance that
he will give me.
PISTOL God bless thy lungs, good knight!
FALSTAFF Come here, Pistol, stand behind me. [to
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Shallow] O, if I had had time to have made new
liveries, I would have bestowed the thousand pound I
borrowed of you. But ’tis no matter, this poor show
doth better, this doth infer the zeal I had to see him.
SHALLOW It doth so.
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FALSTAFF It shows my earnestness of affection –
SHALLOW It doth so.
FALSTAFF My devotion –
SHALLOW It doth, it doth, it doth.
FALSTAFF As it were, to ride day and night, and not to
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deliberate, not to remember, not to have patience to
shift me –
SHALLOW It is best, certain.
FALSTAFF But to stand stained with travel, and sweating
with desire to see him, thinking of nothing else,
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putting all affairs else in oblivion, as if there were
nothing else to be done but to see him.
PISTOL ’Tis semper idem, for obsque hoc nihil est; ’tis all
in every part.
SHALLOW ’Tis so, indeed.
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PISTOL My knight, I will inflame thy noble liver,
And make thee rage.
Thy Doll, and Helen of thy noble thoughts,
Is in base durance and contagious prison,
Hal’d thither
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By most mechanical and dirty hand.
Rouse up Revenge from ebon den with fell Alecto’s snake,
For Doll is in. Pistol speaks naught but truth.
FALSTAFF I will deliver her. [Shouts within.]
[The trumpets sound.]
PISTOL
There roar’d the sea, and trumpet-clangor sounds.
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Enter the KING and his train, the
Lord Chief Justice among them.
FALSTAFF
God save thy Grace, King Hal, my royal Hal!
PISTOL
The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!
FALSTAFF God save thee, my sweet boy!
KING My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.
CHIEF JUSTICE
Have you your wits? Know you what ’tis you speak?
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FALSTAFF
My King! My Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
KING I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester!
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane;
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But being awak’d I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest;
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Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
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Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots.
Till then I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
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For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evils;
And as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement.
[to the Lord Chief Justice] Be it your charge, my lord,
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To see perform’d the tenor of my word.
Set on. Exit King with his train.
FALSTAFF Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand
pound.
SHALLOW Yea, marry, Sir John, which I beseech you to
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let me have home with me.
FALSTAFF That can hardly be, Master Shallow. Do not
you grieve at this; I shall be sent for in private to him.
Look you, he must seem thus to the world. Fear not
your advancements; I will be the man yet that shall
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make you great.
SHALLOW I cannot perceive how, unless you give me
your doublet, and stuff me out with straw. I beseech
you, good Sir John, let me have five hundred of my
thousand.
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FALSTAFF Sir, I will be as good as my word. This that
you heard was but a colour.
SHALLOW A colour that I fear you will die in, Sir John.
FALSTAFF Fear no colours. Go with me to dinner.
Come, Lieutenant Pistol; come, Bardolph. I shall be
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sent for soon at night.
Enter the Lord Chief Justice and PRINCE JOHN, with officers.
CHIEF JUSTICE Go carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet;
Take all his company along with him.
FALSTAFF My lord, my lord, –
CHIEF JUSTICE
I cannot now speak: I will hear you soon.
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Take them away.
PISTOL Si fortuna me tormenta, spero me contenta. Exeunt all but Prince John and the Chief Justice.
LANCASTER I like this fair proceeding of the King’s.
He hath intent his wonted followers
Shall all be very well provided for,
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But all are banish’d till their conversations
Appear more wise and modest to the world.
CHIEF JUSTICE And so they are.
LANCASTER
The King hath call’d his parliament, my lord.
CHIEF JUSTICE He hath.
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LANCASTER I will lay odds that, ere this year expire,
We bear our civil swords and native fire
As far as France. I heard a bird so sing,
Whose music, to my thinking, pleas’d the King.
Come, will you hence? Exeunt.
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EPILOGUE
First, my fear; then, my curtsy; last, my speech.
My fear, is your displeasure; my curtsy, my duty;
and my speech, to beg your pardons. If you look for a
good speech now, you undo me, for what I have to say
is of mine own making; and what indeed I should say
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will, I doubt, prove mine own marring. But to the
purpose, and so to the venture. Be it known to you, as
it is very well, I was lately here in the end of
a
displeasing play, to pray your patience for it, and to
promise you a better. I meant indeed to pay you with
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this; which if like an ill venture it come unluckily
home, I break, and you, my gentle creditors, lose. Here
I promised you I would be, and here I commit my
body to your mercies. Bate me some, and I will pay
you some, and, as most debtors do, promise you
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infinitely: and so I kneel down before you – but,
indeed, to pray for the Queen.
If my tongue cannot entreat you to acquit me, will
you command me to use my legs? And yet that were
but light payment, to dance out of your debt. But a
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good conscience will make any possible satisfaction,
and so would I. All the gentlewomen here have
forgiven me: if the gentlemen will not, then the
gentlemen do not agree with the gentlewomen, which
was never seen before in such an assembly.
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One word more, I beseech you. If you be not too
much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will
continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you
merry with fair Katharine of France; where, for
anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless
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already a be killed with your hard opinions; for
Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man. My
tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you
good night.
King Henry V
King Henry V was first published in 1600 as The Cronicle History of Henry the fift. The printed play is about half the length of the one that would appear as the fifth of the histories in the Folio in 1623, lacking the choruses and omitting many passages and three entire scenes (1.1, 3.1 and 4.2). Possibly it is a ‘reported’ text, compiled by some process of recollection, probably by actors in a production; perhaps one based on a script abridged for performance on tour. The Folio text derives not from this early Quarto but from a manuscript, just possibly one in Shakespeare’s own hand. Thus it serves as the basis of all modern editions, though the Quarto may well reflect an early staging of the play.
Apparently written about 1599, King Henry V could have been the first play performed at the Globe. The Chorus’s apology for the limited resources of the ‘wooden O’ in which the action must be performed is perhaps an ironic reference to the fine new playhouse that had opened that year. The play contains Shakespeare’s only unquestionable reference to a current event, which allows us to date it with some precision. Speaking of King Henry’s triumphant re-entry into London after Agincourt, the Chorus compares the excitement that greets Henry to the enthusiastic response that would occur ‘Were now the General of our gracious Empress, / As in good time he may, from Ireland coming, / Bringing rebellion broached on his sword’. These lines probably refer to the Earl of Essex, who had been sent by Elizabeth to Ireland in late March of 1599 to put down the rebellion led by Hugh O’Neill. Essex, however, failed in his charge and returned to London in late September. He was put under house arrest for leaving his command and was tried and sentenced in June of 1600. If the Chorus’s lines are indeed a reference to Essex, the play must have been acted between March and September of 1599, between his optimistic departure and the ignominy of his return.
Essex’s adventure could not have provided the impetus for the play itself, which is the foreseen conclusion of Hal’s Bildungsspiel in the two parts of King Henry IV, though Henry V is the charismatic national hero that Essex aspired to be. Shakespeare’s play can indeed be seen as an examination of the claims of heroic achievement, imparting a mythic shape and significance to the history of Henry’s reign by organizing the historical material he found in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) along the lines mapped out earlier by Edward Hall in his chronicle with the heading ‘The Victorious Reign of King Henry V’. Henry leads a band of brave and loyal soldiers against a much larger force of arrogant Frenchmen, and the astounding victory at Agincourt confirms England’s military and moral superiority. If this does not exactly conform to the facts of history, it does conform to the poetic logic of giant killing.
But if the play allows us to see and enjoy the great military and political achievements of Henry, it enables us also to see their costs. Shakespeare allows alternative angles of vision to the heroic. While the Chorus speaks the language of heroic idealization, the comic plot that parallels and comments on the historical action shows us a world of baser motive. The very structure of the play depends upon such ironic contrasts; the promises of the Chorus introducing each act are inevitably frustrated by the action that follows, as when at the beginning we are told that we shall see the confrontation of ‘two mighty monarchies’ but see instead the political manoeuvrings of worldly churchmen urging the French war to avoid a confiscatory bill.
The lustre of the celebrated war will certainly be tarnished if it is seen to be motivated not by a principled desire to regain lost rights but by the self-interest of a Church desperate to retain its wealth. Indeed, it is precisely by allowing an audience to see the uncertain genesis of the famous victories that Shakespeare begins his exploration of the necessarily imperfect man who must play the King. Performances on stage and on the screen have not always wished to see this qualification of Henry’s heroic achievements; Laurence Olivier’s film version, completed during World War II, understandably ignored all the play’s darker tones. But Shakespeare’s play, though not cynical about heroic action, is always aware of the matrix of human falliblity in which it is grounded. ‘The king is a good king’, as Pistol says, ‘but it must be as it may’.
The 1995 Arden text is based on the 1623 First Folio.
LIST OF ROLES
CHORUS
KING Henry the Fifth
his brothers
Duke of EXETER
his uncle
Duke of YORK