The Oxford Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part 2 (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

  The RSC Shakespeare

  Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen

  Chief Associate Editors: Heloise Senechal and Jan Sewell

  Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro,

  Dee Anna Phares Henry IV Part II

  Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen

  Introduction and Shakespeare's Career in the Theater: Jonathan Bate

  Commentary: Jan Sewell and Heloise Senechal

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin

  In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings), Jan Sewell (overview)

  The Actor's Voice and the Director's Cut

  (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright): Michael Pennington,

  Adrian Noble, Michael Boyd Editorial Advisory Board

  Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Director,

  Royal Shakespeare Company

  Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK

  Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,

  Western Australia

  Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,

  Universite de Geneve, Switzerland

  Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman's Christian University, Japan

  Jacqui O'Hanlon, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company

  Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA

  James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,

  Columbia University, USA

  Tiffany Stern, Professor of English, University of Oxford, UK

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Tragical-Comical-Historical-Pastoral

  "The Prince but Studies His Companions"?

  The Language of Time

  The Reformation of England?

  About the Text

  Key Facts

  The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, Containing His Death and the Coronation of King Henry the Fifth

  Synopsis of Henry IV Part I

  Textual Notes

  Quarto Passages That Do Not Appear in the Folio

  Oaths from the Quarto

  Scene-by-Scene Analysis

  Henry IV in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

  Four Centuries of Henry IV: An Overview

  At the RSC

  The Actor's Voice and the Director's Cut: Interviews with Michael Pennington, Adrian Noble, and Michael Boyd

  Shakespeare's Career in the Theater

  Beginnings

  Playhouses

  The Ensemble at Work

  The King's Man

  Shakespeare's Works: A Chronology

  Kings and Queens of England: From the History Plays to Shakespeare's Lifetime

  The History Behind the Histories: A Chronology

  Further Reading and Viewing

  References

  Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

  INTRODUCTION*

  TRAGICAL-COMICAL-HISTORICAL-PASTORAL

  Shakespeare's art of mingling comedy, history, and tragedy reached its peak in the two parts of Henry IV. As history, the plays paint a panorama of England, embracing a wider social range than any previous historical drama as the action moves from court to tavern, council chamber to battlefield, city to country, Archbishop and Lord Chief Justice to whore and thief. As comedy, they tell the story of a prodigal son's journey from youth to maturity and an old rogue's art of surviving by means of jokes, tall tales, and the art of being not only witty in himself, but the cause that wit is in other men. As tragedy, they reveal the slow decline of a king who cannot escape his past, the precipitate demise of an impetuous young warrior who embodies both the glory and the futility of military heroism, and the heartbreaking dismissal of a substitute father who has loved a prince with a warmth of which his true father is incapable.

  The action of Part I had begun some time after the events that ended Shakespeare's earlier play, Richard II. Henry Bullingbrook has usurped the throne of King Richard, who has been murdered. But now the rebels who helped Henry to the throne have turned against him. Whereas Richard II conformed to the traditional structure of tragedy--the story of the fall of a powerful man--the Henry IV plays adopt a wider perspective. Richard II had been written entirely in verse, the medium of royal and aristocratic characters, whereas long stretches of the Henry IV plays are in prose, the medium of the common people. The scenes with Justice Shallow in his Gloucestershire orchard are the closest that Shakespeare ever came to a stage representation of the rural England of his own early life in Stratford-upon-Avon.

  Though the language of King Henry IV as he approaches death is deeply tragic in tone, the deep structure of the two parts of Henry IV is that not of tragedy but of pastoral comedy. They were written around the same time as Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It, when Shakespeare's comic muse was at its zenith. They are his most enjoyable history plays because they are his funniest--and in the figure of Sir John Falstaff they introduce his greatest comic character--but they also share with the comedies a technique of counterpointing the intrigue of court and power politics against what has been called the "green" or "festive" world.

  The traditional comic pattern turns on the successful effort of a young man to outwit an opponent and possess the girl of his choice. The girl's father, or some other authority figure of the older generation, resists the match, but is outflanked, often thanks to an ingenious scheme devised by a clever servant, perhaps involving disguise or flight (or both). The union of the lovers brings a renewed sense of social integration, expressed by some kind of festival at the climax of the play--a marriage, a dance, or a feast. All right-thinking people come over to the side of the lovers, but in Shakespearean comedy there is usually a party pooper, a figure who refuses to be assimilated into the harmony--Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, Jaques in As You Like It, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. The key to the two parts of Henry IV is that they take the comic structure and apply it to Prince Harry--with the difference that instead of his courtship (which ends up being tacked on very briefly at the end of Henry V), the action turns on his maturation from wild youth to exemplary warrior prince and statesman. And, in a brilliant reversal, the figure who is isolated at the end is not the party pooper but the very embodiment of the festive spirit: Sir John Falstaff. Comedy is thus placed in opposition to the march of history. Beside the sense of waste and exhaustion in the figure of the dying king, the necessity to reject Falstaff in the name of historical destiny and social order is why the final resolution is tinged with the feeling of tragedy.

  The distinctive feature of pastoral comedy is that the action develops by means of a shift of location from the everyday world of work, business, politics, patriarchy, and power to a "green" or "festive" place of play, leisure, anarchy, feminine influence, and love--the wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Belmont in The Merchant of Venice, the Forest of Arden in As You Like It, rural Bohemia in The Winter's Tale. After the comic resolution is achieved, there has to be a return to the normative world, but recreative change has been effected by the values of the festive world. In Henry IV Part I, a tavern in Eastcheap has played the part of the festive world. In Part II, there is a reprise of that setting, but also a journey into a rural green world. As in the comedies, the shuttle between contrasting worlds and contradictory value systems creates the dialectic of the drama. But because of the calling of the prince to power, there can be no reconciliation between the value systems. As Prince Hal has announced in his first soliloquy back in Part I, his time of "playing holidays" and "loose behaviour" will be but an interlude b
efore he takes upon himself the mantle of historical duty.

  "THE PRINCE BUT STUDIES HIS COMPANIONS"?

  Henry IV believes that one of the failings of his predecessor Richard II had been to seek to make himself popular, thus eroding the necessary distance that creates awe and gives mystique to the monarchy. But King Henry's own distance from public life--he is nearly always seen surrounded by an inner circle of courtiers or closeted alone in his chamber--causes power to ebb from him. His son, by contrast, comes to know the common people, developing a rapport that will enable him to inspire and lead his army in Henry V. The point is made through the very linguistic medium of the drama: all Shakespeare's other English kings speak entirely in verse, whereas Prince Hal has command of a flexible prose voice, with which he reduces himself to the level of his people, an Eastcheap trick that he repeats when he goes in disguise among his men on the night before the battle of Agincourt.

  The king's trustiest follower, the Earl of Warwick, reassures him that Prince Hal's intention has always been to throw off his companions when the time is ripe:

  The prince but studies his companions

  Like a strange tongue, wherein, to gain the language,

  'Tis needful that the most immodest word

  Be looked upon and learned, which once attained,

  Your highness knows, comes to no further use

  But to be known and hated. So, like gross terms,

  The prince will, in the perfectness of time,

  Cast off his followers, and their memory

  Shall as a pattern or a measure live,

  By which his grace must mete the lives of others,

  Turning past evils to advantages.

  According to this account, the prince works according to the principle articulated by the cunning politician Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida: a man "Cannot make boast to have that which he hath, Nor feels not what he owes, but by reflection, As when his virtues shining upon others Heat them and they retort that heat again To the first giver." That is to say, we can only make value judgments through a process of comparison. In Part I, by temporarily ceding glory to Henry Hotspur, Prince Henry shows himself all the more glorious when he eventually triumphs over his adversary. His whole strategy is revealed in the imagery of his first soliloquy in Part I, "I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humour of your idleness. Yet herein will I imitate the sun...": the sun seems brighter after cloud and a jewel on a dull background will "show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off." The offsetting of the prince against his various foils is the structural key to the progression of the two-part drama.

  What is the basis of political rule? Orthodox Tudor theory propounded that kings and magistrates were God's representatives on earth, their authority sanctioned by divine law. But the Elizabethan stage had another possible answer. Christopher Marlowe's tragedy The Jew of Malta, written in about 1589 and well known to Shakespeare, has an extraordinary opening. The prologue is spoken by an actor pretending to be the Florentine political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli. He voices a series of deeply subversive suggestions about the nature of sovereignty. His riposte to political orthodoxy is that the only basis of effective government is raw power:

  I count religion but a childish toy,

  And hold there is no sin but ignorance...

  Many will talk of title to a crown:

  What right had Caesar to the empery?

  Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure

  When, like the Draco's, they were writ in blood.

  Religion as an illusion; the idea that human knowledge does not require divine sanction; the notion that it is "might" not "right" that decides who rules; the proposition that the most effective laws are those based not on justice but on the severity exemplified by the ancient Greek lawgiver Draco (from whose name we get the word "draconian"). French and English thinkers of Shakespeare's time demonized Machiavelli for holding these views, but for Christopher Marlowe the act of thinking the unthinkable made Machiavelli a model for his own overreaching stage heroes.

  Shakespeare's history plays are steeped in the influence of Marlowe, but politically he was much more cautious--he would never have risked suffering Marlowe's end, stabbed to death by a government spy while awaiting questioning in a heresy investigation. But that did not stop Shakespeare from recognizing the theatrical charisma of the Marlovian Machiavel. He created a string of such characters himself--Aaron the Moor in Titus Andronicus, Richard III, Iago in Othello, Edmund in King Lear. What attracted him to the type was not so much the subversive politics as the stage panache of the unapologetic villain. Political orthodoxy is staid and solemn. The Machiavel is nimble and witty. But is he necessarily brutal and irreligious?

  Prince Harry is a man of the future; his father is haunted by the past. Both parts of Henry IV are suffused with the memory of the "by-paths and indirect crooked ways" by which Bullingbrook "met" (or rather took) the crown. The king is revealed at his most vulnerable halfway through Part II, in a scene that may have troubled the censor: sick and sleepless, he meditates on the cares of state, the fragility of office, and the weight of his past sin. A usurper himself, Henry IV has no ground on which to base his authority over the rebels who were once his allies. The only basis of his power is victory on the battlefield. In each part, this is achieved by means of a trick. At Shrewsbury in Part I, the device consists of dressing several different men as the king in order to confuse the enemy. Having slain one of the impersonators, Douglas assumes that he is addressing another of them: "What art thou, / That counterfeit'st the person of a king?" This time, however, it is the king, not a counterfeit--which beautifully dramatizes the point that the king is a counterfeit because of his usurpation. In Part II, the king is too sick to fight his own battle, so at Gaultree Forest the Machiavellian strategy of reneging upon the terms of a negotiated truce is carried out by his second son, Prince John of Lancaster. Does that make Prince Harry into the true follower of Machiavelli, who advised that the effective prince is one who gets someone else to do his dirty work for him?

  At the beginning of Part I, the king says that he must postpone his Crusade to the Holy Land because of the new civil broils at home, the fresh wound upon the earth of England. His dream of expiating his sins by liberating Jerusalem from the heathen is never translated into action. The prophecy that he would end his life there is only realized ironically: he dies in the "Jerusalem chamber" of his own palace. Henry IV's fear, apparently borne out by the bad company that Prince Harry keeps, is that the sin of the father will be visited upon the reign of his son:

  For the fifth Harry from curbed licence plucks

  The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog

  Shall flesh his tooth in every innocent.

  O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows!

  When that my care could not withhold thy riots,

  What wilt thou do when riot is thy care?

  O, thou wilt be a wilderness again,

  Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!

  He imagines that the "riot" of the wayward prince will be translated into civil disorder when he becomes king. That is also Falstaff's hope on hearing that his beloved Hal is now Henry V: "the laws of England are at my commandment...and woe unto my Lord Chief Justice!" But he is in for a shock: Hal immediately adopts Falstaff's adversary, the Lord Chief Justice, as his new surrogate father. As in Part I he had startled the rebels by transforming himself from tavern idler to armed warrior on horseback, so in Part II he will prove that he has learned the civic virtues as well as the military ones.

  The prince's self-revelatory soliloquy early in Part I began with the words "I know you all." The newly crowned king's rejection of Falstaff late in Part II begins with the words "I know thee not, old man." The verbal echo is unmistakable: he has ceased to be Hal, he is now delivering on his promise that the time would come when he would throw off the companions and misleaders of his youth. As predicted in the soliloq
uy, Harry has succeeded in falsifying men's hopes. His reformation glitters over his fault. Falstaff and company suddenly seem to be no more than instruments in a princely conjuring trick, a theatrical act of self-transformation designed to impress a public audience.

  Radically opposing interpretations thus become possible. By one account, the politic march of history stands in violent contrast to the humane virtues of friendship, loyalty, good humor, sociability, verbal inventiveness, self-mockery, loyalty, and love. Humanity gives way to what the Bastard in King John called "commodity." History is a Machiavellian nightmare of violence and self-interest. The alternative view is that Falstaff embodies the temptations of the flesh. He scores highly for at least three of the seven deadly sins--gluttony, lust, and sloth. He is the Vice figure of the old tradition of morality plays and his rejection is accordingly Hal's final step on the path toward political and moral redemption. So it is that Hal can be played equally persuasively as a young man going on a journey toward maturity but still enjoying his departures from the straight and narrow path, or as one of Shakespeare's Machiavellian manipulators--energetic and intellectually astute, a brilliant actor, but intensely self-conscious, emotionally reined in.

  We may perhaps reconcile the opposing readings by supposing that, in the character of Prince Hal, Shakespeare--perhaps as his own riposte to Marlowe--set out to create a new and distinctive kind of "good Machiavel": a political realist who is prepared to take difficult, even brutal, decisions when it is necessary, but who, instead of being atheistic and self-interested, always tries to do what he takes to be God's will and so to serve the best interests of his nation and his people.

  THE LANGUAGE OF TIME

  The forms of Shakespeare's verse loosened and became more flexible as he matured as a writer. His early plays have a higher proportion of rhyme and a greater regularity in rhythm, the essential pattern being that of iambic pentameter (ten syllables, five stresses, the stress on every second syllable). In the early plays, lines are very frequently end-stopped: punctuation marks a pause at the line ending, meaning that the movement of the syntax (the grammatical construction) falls in with that of the meter (the rhythmical construction). In the later plays, there are far fewer rhyming couplets (sometimes rhyme only features as a marker to indicate that a scene is ending) and the rhythmic movement has far greater variety, freedom, and flow. Mature Shakespearean blank (unrhymed) verse is typically not end-stopped but "run on" (a feature known as "enjambment"): instead of pausing heavily at the line ending, the speaker hurries forward, the sense demanded by the grammar working in creative tension against the holding pattern of the meter. The heavier pauses migrate to the middle of the lines, where they are known as the "caesura" and where their placing varies. A single line of verse is shared between two speakers much more frequently than in the early plays. And the pentameter itself becomes a more subtle instrument: the iambic beat is broken up, there is often an extra ("redundant") unstressed eleventh syllable at the end of the line (this is known as a "feminine ending"). There are more modulations between verse and prose. Occasionally the verse is so loose that neither the original typesetters of the plays when they were first printed nor the modern editors of scholarly texts can be entirely certain whether verse or prose is intended.