AN: It’s unavoidable, isn’t it? All you have to do is read the play. It’s totally and utterly in your face. It’s a constant reminder to the audience of what the danger of Prince Hal’s behavior is, that he is messing up big-time, because it’s a dominating dramatic presence. Hotspur is such a charismatic man. He’s a natural leader, he has such command of language, and he has all the other things that audiences want kings to have, like a good wife, a great sense of humor, the ability to deal with his elders in a fair, just, but respectful manner. He’s got all of those things; they’re there like this great big elephant in the room.
MB: Our Percys were descended from Shakespeare’s earlier father-and-son duo in Henry VI: the Talbots. By now the honorable code of chivalry of this pairing has become warped. The father caves in horribly in Part II and the son is bold but arrogant and reckless. Chivalry is stone dead by Henry IV.
Prince Hal moves in the other direction, from selfish, hedonistic criminality to a new contingent morality which will find its fullest paradoxical expression in Henry V (and then of course in Hamlet).
To answer the question: Geoffrey Streatfeild’s Hal was more of a decadent dandy in Part I and Lex Shrapnel’s Hotspur a glamorized vision of martial prowess.
It’s sometimes said that in Part I Hal learns the military virtues of the true prince, in Part II the civic virtues. So Hotspur is a key opponent in Part I, the Lord Chief Justice a key figure in Part II. Was that a productive way of looking at it for you?
7. “O, Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth!” Geoffrey Streatfeild as Hal and Lex Shrapnel as Hotspur in Michael Boyd’s 2007–08 RSC production.
MP: That didn’t occur to me, and I don’t think Shakespeare writes that programmatically. The developments in his characters are more subtle, less easily explained. And I’m not sure Hal learns any virtues really, only pragmatism—how to handle everybody effectively, in fact. The Lord Chief Justice is his third father figure, after Falstaff and the king—Falstaff is the one that loses out of course.
AN: Not at the time, but yes, that’s quite interesting!
MB: No, but it is one template to apply to the plays. It feels more like the Lord Chief Justice’s template than Shakespeare’s, and it makes the royalist assumption that “becoming a true prince” is Shakespeare’s subject.
Having staged all the histories, I began to realize that the drive for power and the yearning for the crown is one big politically acceptable MacGuffin [plot device] that allows Shakespeare to examine the nature of humanity under pressure. Shakespeare is consistently skeptical and critical of those in power, and this famously nonjudgmental author makes an exception for any character showing signs of being over-influenced by Il Principe.*
In Part I Hal wrestles with authority and his father, trying to find/avoid his place in life. In Part II Hal confronts the mortality of the very man he has defined himself against and therefore confronts his own mortality. And he kills Falstaff.
Another difference between the two parts is that, simply in terms of size of parts, Part I is dominated by Hal, Falstaff, Hotspur, and King Henry, whereas Part II has a far larger number of substantial roles. Does that suggest that they are very different kinds of play? Part I a star vehicle and Part II an ensemble vision?
MP: They’re both ensemble pieces—fabulously so. Hotspur’s death and Hal’s withdrawal from events in Part II makes room for Shallow and Silence and the rest, and there’s much more Falstaff too. I think Part II is just Part I rebalanced—not essentially different, except that there’s definitely a sense of imminent change, and loss, with the king dying; the tavern scenes have less vitality and Hal generally keeps away from Falstaff, as if he was preparing himself for his future.
AN: The second half is for me the great director’s challenge, because it is symphonic. Some plays work as concerti, with a series of solo turns, and some operate more symphonically. This is particularly true of the eight history plays. Henry VI Part I, Part II, and Part III operate symphonically. My mistake when I did Richard III, as the last of that tetralogy, is that until I started rehearsing it I thought it also operated symphonically, but it doesn’t: it’s written in a completely different manner to the Henry VIs. It’s written as a series of concerti: one after the other, somebody stands up and plays the violin, plays the viola, plays the cello, plays the trumpet. Edward IV, Clarence, Hastings, one after the other they all stand up. It’s not true to such an extent with the two parts of Henry IV, but it is to a degree.
I’d wanted to do Henry IV Part I and Part II for years, but for me you don’t even start until you’ve got Falstaff, which I was very fortunate to get in Robert Stephens. That’s the character that not only sets half the agenda of the plays, but is also the person who attracts all the other actors. If you don’t have a genius Falstaff, then you won’t get a brilliant Henry IV, and if you don’t have a brilliant Henry IV, then the spine of the two plays is very shaky. Hal and Hotspur are much easier. It’s for Falstaff, Henry IV, and Shallow that you really need people at the top of their game to fulfill the majesty of those two plays.
MB: Not really. Part II was in part conceived as a vehicle for the runaway success of Falstaff as a “turn” in Part I.
Does Falstaff change between the two parts?
MP: In Part I, Hal and he are wonderfully matched, especially in their capacity for (more or less) friendly insults. Falstaff feels Hal’s absence in Part II very keenly—he knows in his heart the best times are past. Falstaff talks about him all the time, wistfully.
AN: He matures somehow and gets wiser in the second part. I think the reason he appears to get older in the second part is because he has the Page. That’s why Shakespeare gives him a young person to walk about with, so you realize he’s old. Also in Part II he associates much more with people of his own age, particularly with his fellow students from when he was a law student at Temple. By hanging out with Silence and Shallow, on the one hand, and with a twelve-year-old boy, on the other hand, we get a strong whiff of mortality coming off Falstaff in Part II, which we don’t so much get in Part I.
MB: Falstaff has become a star in Part II because of his false success in Shrewsbury, and his real success in the theater in Henry IV Part I. Shakespeare promotes him to the courtly world and gives him exchanges with the most powerful people in the land, but then punishes him with cynicism, gout, and mortality.
He’s a force of nature in Part I, and in Part II he’s someone clinging on to influence, and opportunity, and life.
What did you learn in the process of rehearsing the great playacting scene in Part I—the preenactment by Hal and Falstaff of Hal’s confrontation with his father? And did it teach you things that you could use when working on the actual encounters between the prince and his father?
MP: Not so much that, but the two successive scenes are at the center of the part. The scene in the Boar’s Head has terrific tension—how far will Hal go in mocking his father? How far will he let Falstaff go? The onlookers don’t know how loudly they’re allowed to laugh. It’s a great relief to Hal to make fun of his father; then he goes to see him for real and is very disappointed. He apologizes to the king and promises to toe the line but gets little thanks for it. Hal is very frustrated by his father. It’s interesting that he takes Falstaff into battle with him and even lets him take credit for the death of Hotspur—it’s as if he were serving notice that he’ll do his duty by his father but he’s not giving up his old ways that easily.
AN: Not particularly. It’s most important because it stands as a rehearsal of the denial of Falstaff; that seems its main function to me. It was fun and funny—it couldn’t not be that and I made it that—and I made it very anarchic, but my main purpose related to the denial of Falstaff. I remember feeling it was profoundly wrong that Hal engaged in this playacting. The whole idea of impersonating the monarch had a slight whiff of danger about it, and I think for an Elizabethan audience it would have been almost obscene: a very dangerous thing to do and very disrespectful. Th
e dice are loaded very heavily against Hal in Part I and I think that’s why it is such a dramatic piece: it’s because he turns the stakes around, he overturns the odds, that it is remarkable.
MB: Clive Wood had already shaped his testosterone-fueled, reforming Bullingbrook in our Richard II, so we already knew that Hal’s encounters with his father would be bruising and straight out of Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams.
There was a moving mismatch of styles in the playacting scene: David Warner’s Falstaff revealing an old-fashioned delicacy that had no place in Bullingbrook’s actual cold, pragmatic palace.
It’s mostly a male world, but, small as they are, the female parts—Hotspur’s wife, Quickly, Doll—seem very significant, don’t they? What was your take on the women in these plays?
MP: I think Doll’s little scene with Falstaff in Part II is a real love scene—both of them at their best; open, honest, and affectionate in ways they aren’t elsewhere. Mistress Quickly represents one kind of female constancy in her love of Falstaff, and in a sense, Lady Percy the other, in her anger at Hotspur’s withdrawing from her and her grief at his loss. They’re very good parts, all three of them.
8. Robert Stephens as Falstaff and Joanne Pearce as Doll Tearsheet at Hostess Quickly’s tavern in Eastcheap in Part II of Adrian Noble’s 1991 RSC production.
AN: They’re wonderful parts and you can do fantastic things with them with the right people. I was very lucky and we did great things with those parts. What Shakespeare does is genuinely present a great portrait of a nation. Look at the language of the scene of the two Carriers in Rochester: it’s a couple of lorry drivers at Watford Gap services, it’s a couple of guys who have done an overnight stay in a B&B somewhere. What he creates with that language—and of course it’s distilled and slightly heightened—is the cadence of Elizabethan England. Shakespeare perfectly captures it: people working in an industrial situation. Now compare that with the sound of Shallow and Silence. Again, the cadence there is extraordinary. It’s a remarkable soundscape, probably of Warwickshire when he was a boy, and that’s part of the richness of the play. The Henry VI plays don’t attempt that at all: you get little snippets of them with Cade and Dick the Butcher, but they are only snippets. In Henry IV they are in-depth portraits of a nation. You get the clergy, you get the courtiers, you get the tapsters, you get the prostitutes. Doll Tearsheet is an amazing portrait of a prostitute. Shakespeare captures the language in an extraordinary way.
MB: And Glendower’s daughter possibly wins the war for Bullingbrook.
Ann Ogbomo’s Kate Percy was an intelligent, beautiful, and feisty sketch for Shakespeare’s later leading women, Rosalind and Beatrice.
As Mistress Quickly, Maureen Beattie brought her own instinctive understanding of comedic rhythms from Scottish variety to a much-loved character that can trace its ancestry to Noah’s wife, the Wife of Bath, and beyond. Together with Alexia Healy’s Doll, she maintained a haven of imperfect warmth in the cold world of Bullingbrook, until at last Eastcheap was literally dismantled in Part II.
Shakespeare’s friend and rival Ben Jonson mocked his history plays for representing battles by means of nothing more than “three rusty swords”—and modern audiences are used to the epic battles of the Hollywood screen, complete with hundreds of extras. In light of this, how do you set about staging the battles convincingly? What balance between stylization and realism?
MP: That was quite snobbish of Jonson—they couldn’t afford anything else. And Shakespeare always forestalls that argument, as he does in the first chorus in Henry V—the means are limited but, as he knows, his imaginative suggestiveness is great.
I think the battles should be as realistic as possible, especially the Hal/Hotspur—traditional one-to-one combat, sweating it out, like Richard III and Richmond; Hamlet and Laertes, too, if you like. They’re cathartic confrontations. The difficulty is greater in the general battle scenes and skirmishes; the rhetoric can be a bit thumpy and there’s a lot of rushing around without much character (though when Falstaff is on the battlefield there’s terrific comic counterpoint). Sometimes directors stylize Shakespeare’s battle scenes—slow motion, banners, mime, and so on. I don’t much care for it myself, but I appreciate why it happens. I think you have to create the fog of war as realistically as you can. Interestingly enough, in the ESC version, though we used guns often, the big one-to-one set pieces we always did in chainmail and armor and broadswords, two individuals timelessly slugging it out to the death.
9. The battle scenes dramatized the essential qualities of a conflict with “three rusty swords” and the audience as extras in Michael Boyd’s 2007–08 RSC history cycle.
AN: You’ve answered the question actually: you get a balance between stylization and realism. Very simple technology plus a lot of imagination can lead you to extraordinary things. You first ask the question, “What is the battle about? What is this one saying?” At the end of Part I it’s Shrewsbury: the subject of that battle is the throne, it’s a fight for the throne. There was a piece of technology in the old Royal Shakespeare Theatre that no longer exists, which I discovered when I was doing King Lear with Michael Gambon. There were two huge lifts running up to the stage, each one nine meters by four meters, that could hold about seventy people each. On certain occasions like Gad’s Hill I used the great hole onstage where the lift shaft was. At the Battle of Shrewsbury there were people talking downstage but the hole was down, and in the trap under the stage I’d loaded the throne surrounded by the whole of King Henry’s courtiers, and then, with a huge amount of music and drumming, this throne came out of the earth. Not only did this trap ascend to stage level, it went above it. So when it hit stage level it was attacked in quite a stylized way by Hotspur’s men, with the entire company onstage, and it carried on up into the air until it was about eight feet off the ground, and then it started to descend. Everyone was fighting, but they were actually fighting for the throne, and then when it came down to stage level it went into realistic swordplay. It’s a bit unfair of Ben Jonson to say that, but he is absolutely right. What we delivered was a quite spectacular battle based upon the technology of that theater. We were just very lucky that we had it there. I think I used that huge hole in each of the seven history plays I did.
MB: Over eight plays, we worked on the battles employing many approaches, including the following:
Shakespeare’s battles must serve the play in the same way as a song in a musical: they must move the story forward.
Renaissance dance was in part physical training for the men at court for battle. Our battles were to a greater or lesser extent all dances.
Our battles often carried a cosmological burden: i.e. they were a battle between heaven and hell fought out on earth. This combined with the spatial excitement of the Courtyard Theatre encouraged us to use four dimensions. Violence burst out from the grid, the stage, and the audience as often as from backstage.
Battles were staged with consciously shifting points of view, e.g. Shrewsbury was seen mostly from the rebels’ perspective and picked up on the practice of decoy kings. We dramatized the courage it took to challenge an “anointed” king by opposing Hotspur with an army of kings.
We wanted to celebrate the chief advantage of theatrical over filmic battles: we were not the slaves of naturalism pursuing ever more plausible wounds and dismemberments. We were free to attempt to dramatize the essential qualities of a conflict. The hundreds of extras were supplied by the audience.
*Il Principe (1513) (Italian) The Prince: Niccolò Machiavelli’s examination of Renaissance realpolitik.
SHAKESPEARE’S CAREER IN THE THEATER
BEGINNINGS
William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young Willia
m was educated at the local grammar school in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.
Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.
Shakespeare was an actor before he was a writer. It appears not to have been long before he realized that he was never going to grow into a great comedian like Tarlton or a great tragedian like Alleyn. Instead, he found a role within his company as the man who patched up old plays, breathing new life, new dramatic twists, into tired repertory pieces. He paid close attention to the work of the university-educated dramatists who were writing history plays and tragedies for the public stage in a style more ambitious, sweeping, and poetically grand than anything that had been seen before. But he may also have noted that what his friend and rival Ben Jonson would call “Marlowe’s mighty line” sometimes faltered in the mode of comedy. Going to university, as Christopher Marlowe did, was all well and good for honing the arts of rhetorical elaboration and classical allusion, but it could lead to a loss of the common touch. To stay close to a large segment of the potential audience for public theater, it was necessary to write for clowns as well as kings and to intersperse the flights of poetry with the humor of the tavern, the privy, and the brothel: Shakespeare was the first to establish himself early in his career as an equal master of tragedy, comedy, and history. He realized that theater could be the medium to make the national past available to a wider audience than the elite who could afford to read large history books: his signature early works include not only the classical tragedy Titus Andronicus but also the sequence of English historical plays on the Wars of the Roses.
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