Henry IV, Part 2
Page 18
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 Reaper.
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 in 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.
…
Henry believes him—or is taken in by him…but whether it’s genuine or not, Henry believes him. So the last thing I say to him is to…“Go and beat up the French, like we always used to, to take your subjects’ minds off the problems at home; go to the Falklands and beat up the Argentinians and get re-elected; give them something to shout and cheer about”…And Hal takes my advice.
…
For my Henry…in spite of all the hopes and yearnings, there was never going to be an arrival in a Jerusalem of any kind: he died as they were carrying him off the stage.70
Although we do not see the death of Falstaff, we know by the end that, rejected and humiliated in front of the people he wishes to impress, Falstaff has not long to live—a fact confirmed by Mistress Quickly in Act 2 Scene 3 of Henry V—“The rejection of Falstaff is, as it should be, a crucial moment, encapsulating much of the evening.”71
In 1982 the stately dignity and solemn procession of the coronation was interrupted by Falstaff’s embarrassing shouts:
In the final sequence, Joss Ackland sustained both his awareness of mortality and his vigour, revived from senility by the prospect of power. The rejection was electrifying. He maintained an upright dignity as he was publicly rebuked, and his first “My lord” to the Lord Chief Justice had all the old defiance; with the second “my lord” he at last fell silent. There was one final telling moment. The Lord Chief Justice was obviously moved to sympathy with Falstaff, reacting with shock not only to the harsh treatment of another old man but also to the extent to which the King’s zeal for justice exceeded his own: already the pupil had left the master far behind. In such moments, this Henry IV responded fully to the rich implications about human behaviour that so distinguish these two plays.72
Ackland’s Falstaff did not crumble until the King had gone and the order arrives to carry him to the Fleet, making it “a powerful and moving scene…in its presentation of the crushing of an individual by the panoply of the regal and political organisation.”73
In the following extract, Desmond Barrit’s description of the rejection scene encompasses many of the ideas central to Part II: of disease connecting and spreading from the monarchs of court and tavern; fatherhood to Hal; and how the political machine crushes the personal:
The king, we soon learn, is very ill, so Hal has had to be preparing himself for kingship. Falstaff, too, is ill—very clearly so, in our production—the pox and the gout having manifested themselves on his body…I always work on the assumption that the audience doesn’t know the play, and I certainly did that for the rejection scene…Whether Falstaff has any deeply hidden, sub-conscious inkling of what is going to happen to him it is hard to say, but in no way is he consciously expecting it; he’s the sort of person who always goes for the optimistic option. I think he believes that now Henry IV is out of the way he can at last become Hal’s father…Falstaff’s silence is the really extraordinary thing about this meeting…I think that, for once in his life, Falstaff was going to beg for forgiveness…is going to appeal to him to remember their past, their great friendship, the good times they have had together. But he isn’t given the chance to speak at all…He then starts trying to convince himself that he mustn’t worry about it, that Hal is only behaving like this because he has to do so in public: “I shall be sent for soon at night” [5.5.86–87]. I used to say that, not to the other characters on stage, but to myself. He’s trying to be firm with himself…But, of course, he knows that they won’t be and that there will be no going back…the crime for which he is being imprisoned is that of loving someone too much, the crime of being a good friend—well, and a bit of a rogue as well. Hal has to move on; there is no choice. And Falstaff, I’m sure, dies of a broken heart.74
William Houston’s Hal showed “no vestiges of fondness for his old low-life companions as his coming of age leads him to dwell on his imminent assumption of power. He has a propensity for paranoia, and his grin is maliciously vulpine.”75 Benedict Nightingale pointed out how his “heart is clearly moving on to another plane,” feeling that he will, as he assured his father, become a responsible king. However, Houston’s performance gave the audience cause for concern in handing power to such a “cold fish”: “That’s a gain, but maybe also a loss. Was I imagining the tiny worried look Clifford Rose’s ultra-honest Lord Chief Justice gave when Houston and his chilling brother, Dickon Tyrrell’s Prince John walked off?”76
The dehumanizing effect of power was symbolically visualized in Terry Hands’ 1975 production by Henry’s coronation robe:
5. Alan Howard, “all gold from forehead to toes” in his coronation robe, “lumbers like some gorgeous robot over to the palpitating [Brewster] Mason” as Falstaff in Terry Hands’ 1975 RSC production.
In comes [Alan] Howard, all gold from forehead to toes, and lumbers like some gorgeous robot over to the palpitating [Brewster] Mason. He wears a mask, and it seems that the mask has trapped and depersonalised him. But, after a few moments, he lifts it, and it’s the same Hal underneath, saying what he must and hating himself for saying it: man as well as totem, but totem as much as man. As Mr Howard sees it, the character is constantly trying and failing to achieve human wholeness, an integrity of personality in which public and private selves are reconcil
ed.77
In a haunting last image:
Hands stresses the finality of Falstaff’s decline with a short tableau. The stage has been cleared of kings, courtiers and riff-raff: only the tangled, white branches of a dead tree stretch across, wall-to-wall bones. The massive figure of Brewster Mason’s Falstaff stands, head bowed, beneath them. He could be dangling in the drying wind.78
In order for Hal to rule he must eliminate the former division of his self—between court and tavern, duty and extravagance. The necessity of casting off Falstaff is never really in question. As much as the audience enjoy the adventures of this extraordinary character, Shakespeare never lets them forget what a rogue he truly is:
As Hal distances himself from the tavern and is reconciled with his father, the signs of Falstaff’s rejection are there to be read. In consequence of Falstaff’s opportunist recruiting activities and the unleashing of his predatory instincts towards Shallow, the audience has in a sense been prepared for his inevitable rejection.79
Hal’s rejection of [Falstaff] is, thus, a tragedy in miniature, and not just for the sake of Sir John’s feelings. “If I had the choice between betraying my friends and betraying my country,” E. M. Forster once wrote, “I hope that I would have the courage to betray my country.” Hal thinks otherwise; and that is his tragedy, inevitable perhaps, even creditable, but painful, nonetheless.80