Shakespeare may or may not have conceived Henry IV as a two-part play from the beginning. But there’s no question that when he came to write the second play, he had something very different in mind. Gone are the roistering high jinx of Part 1: instead we have a series of meditations on old age and the unavoidability of that fell sergeant Death.
The characters are shaken up and redistributed in new groups. The King and Prince Hal don’t even show up until well into the second act; actually, the King doesn’t really show up until the third act, and then he only appears a couple of times and is clearly dying. When Hal first appears, he is not with Falstaff but with Poins; when Falstaff first appears, he isn’t a foil for Prince Hal but for the serious, hard-nosed Lord Chief Justice.
In the course of the play, Shakespeare indulges in one of his favorite tricks: skipping over scenes that lesser playwrights would never dare to leave out. Part of the dynamic of the play comes from an incident we never see: the Lord Chief Justice berates Prince Hal about his association with Bardolph, and Hal strikes him in anger. In doing so, he has indirectly offended the majesty of the King himself, and the Lord Chief Justice has Prince Hal arrested and committed to the Tower. When Prince Hal later ascends the throne as Henry V, the Lord Chief Justice assumes his goose is cooked. Falstaff does too: part of his glee in rushing to London for the coronation is his expectation that he will finally be able to triumph over this long-standing opponent.
What a rude shock he has when Prince Hal turns his back on him and the Lord Chief Justice, rather than cowering in the face of a newly empowered Falstaff, arrests him and his cronies and drags them off to the Fleet.
Shakespeare is taking a big chance by not showing the scene where all this began, and modern audiences are likely to be confused by it. His source play, The Famous Victories of Henry V, does include the scene, and he may have counted on their familiarity with this and other popular lore about Hal’s riotous living as a kind of shorthand. In any case, the point is that we are in a very different universe here than we were in Part 1. The characters are the same, and many of the elements of the plot are the same, but at the same time nothing is the same. Hal has so little to do with Falstaff in this play that it’s a puzzle why the fat knight didn’t begin to get the message. Long before the end of the play, he was already being ghosted.
There seems to be a sense in which Part 1 can stand on its own in a way that Part 2 can’t. Certainly there are more audio versions of Part 1 than of Part 2. And in my own experience of playgoing, it’s been easier to find productions of the first part on its own than of both parts together, and I can’t imagine anyone doing the second part on its own.
For purposes of this essay, the productions in question are unabridged performances from Argo and Arkangel; a slightly abridged production from the BBC Radio Shakespeare series; and an odd production from LA TheatreWorks that conflates Part 1 and Part 2 into a single play that doesn’t actually resemble anything that Shakespeare ever wrote. (I realize by saying that I’m already giving the game away on that last one, but I’ll get to the details in due course.)
The play
As numerous scholars and critics have pointed out, Part 2 repeats many of the structures of Part 1: there is a tavern scene; a big confrontation between King Henry and Prince Hal; scenes involving conspirators; and a military campaign against the rebels. But the repetition comes with a significant difference. The focus in Part 1 is on honor and friendship; here it’s on old age and death, on loneliness and the demands of office.
It’s a coldly cynical play. People act in bad faith from one end of it to the other. The most egregious example is Prince John’s negotiation with the rebels at Gaultree Forest. He gets them to dismiss their army after agreeing to meet all their demands, and only when their army is gone does he bother to tell them that meeting their demands does not include allowing them to keep their heads. They assumed it did, but he points out that he never actually used those words. This is what we get as a substitute for the heroics of a battle like Shrewsbury. It leaves a sour taste in Falstaff’s mouth — and in ours.
Everything in the play seems tired in comparison to Part 1. Instead of the brilliant set piece in the tavern, with Falstaff and Hal taking turns playing King and Prince, we get Hal and Poins playing tapsters long enough to eavesdrop on Falstaff complaining about his aging body to Doll Tearsheet. The “high jinx” of Gadshill and the subsequent exposure of Falstaff is reduced to a single line: “Anon, anon, sir!” as Hal and Poins jump out of the shadows and reveal themselves. Everybody laughs — and then everybody shrugs, including the audience: big fucking deal. And once again the action is interrupted by news from the court, but this time the news is far more serious: this time the King is actually dying. Sadness and death hang in the air everywhere and over everyone. Even the irrepressible Falstaff begs Doll not to remind him of his own end. When Falstaff does finally get a chance to soliloquize, what does he choose as a theme? In Part 1, he offers a brilliant disquisition on Honor. Here, he sings a hymn to virtues of being addicted to sack.
The Earl of Northumberland is finally exposed as the snivelling coward he is. In Part 1, his absence from Shrewsbury is ambiguous: the doctors really are concerned about his life, we’re told. (Of course, that doesn’t explain why he doesn’t send his army under someone else’s command.) But in Part 2, not only is there no question that he was “crafty sick” — throwing away his cane and coif at the first opportunity — but he compounds the problem by going into hiding again, exposing a second set of conspirators to his self-interested machinations, dooming them to failure and death as he doomed his own son. Ultimately he simply disappears from the play as he disappeared from history, dying on the lam somewhere in Scotland — yet another significant development in the story we hear about in a single line of exposition, as an anticlimactic afterthought.
It’s as if Shakespeare sat down with his quill and asked himself: I’ve written the play I wanted to write; now how can I take that same structure and subvert it? How can I use the same material to write an anti-play?
There are textual issues here, issues that resemble those in Richard II: a significant number of lines appear in the Folio text that are missing from the Quarto. It’s not always clear why. Some scholars have speculated that many were omitted because they touch too explicitly on the reasons for the rebellion. Maybe; but why would that be any less touchy a subject in 1623, after the rebellion of Essex and the Gunpowder Plot, than when the Quarto was printed in 1600?
In some cases the cuts may represent second thoughts, just as they do in King Lear (which I’m convinced underwent significant revision between the two printed versions). For example, in Act 1 Scene 3, in one of the passages that was cut, Lord Bardolph gives his lecture on project management:
When we mean to build,
We first survey the plot, then draw the model,
And when we see the figure of the house,
Then must we rate the cost of the erection,
Which if we find outweighs ability,
What do we then but draw anew the model
In fewer offices, or at least desist
To build at all?
But at the end of the speech, in a portion that was not cut, he repeats the idea more economically.
We fortify in paper and in figures,
Using the names of men in stead of men,
Like one that draws the model of an house
Beyond his power to build it, who, half thorough,
Gives o’er, and leaves his part-created cost
A naked subject to the weeping clouds
And waste for churlish winter’s tyranny.
Authorial revision or censorship? Who knows? In any case, editions that print only the Quarto text (like the Norton) or only the Folio text (like the RSC) are giving the non-professional reader too little information. I prefer the approach taken by the Pelican: base the text on the Quarto, and enclose the missing lines from the Folio in brackets.
Argo
As with Richard II and Henry IV Part 1, the Argo production of this play suffers from poor sound quality. The overall effect is barn-like, as if it were recorded on a cavernous soundstage with three or four microphones hanging from booms at strategic locations. Little effort is made to signal entrances or exits or even scene transitions.
The Argo performers are competent and graceful, but few of them give fiery or inspired performances: this is vanilla Shakespeare. (I shouldn’t say that, because I’ve long argued that “vanilla”, my favorite flavor of ice cream, is anything but “plain”; but the wisdom of the ages is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not alter it.) Speeches are recited as speeches rather than spoken as lines that grow out of the dramatic context. (In saying that, once again I realize I’m betraying my bias and training regarding the proper job of the actor, influenced as it is by Stanislavski’s adherents in the US.)
Even one of the more “emotive” performances in the recording — that of King Henry himself — is marred by this disconnect between speeches and their “given circumstances.” In one late scene, the King is rattling off advice to his sons about how best to deal with their brother Hal when he becomes king. The point of course is that Henry is dying, and he knows it, and he’s desperate to dispense with a last few words of wisdom while he still can. Yet these lines are delivered as cheerfully as Polonius blathering on to Laertes; you can almost hear the actor’s gentle, benevolent smile in his voice. Faced with Hal’s supposed intransigence, he describes his “grief” as stretching beyond death itself, yet there is not a trace of anguish in his voice as he says it.
It’s possible this is how the original audience heard the lines spoken from a raised platform with hundreds or thousands of people grouped around the stage. But it hardly suits the action to the word or the word to the action; what it does is suit the word to the word and the speech to the speech, as if every moment in the play were a miniature standalone pageant.
The tavern scene on the whole is a disappointment. Swaggering Pistol seems tired and bites off his snatches of bombastic verse by rote, as if he is rehearsing lines in his kitchen rather than trying to cut a heroic figure amongst his fellows (and failing ridiculously). The swords-out quarrel with Falstaff slips by with barely a clatter of steel. The only distinguishing note in the scene is the lovely music that breaks in when Falstaff calls for it. It’s melancholy and fits the surface meaning of Falstaff’s words — fits it better than Falstaff’s own emotional tone, because this Falstaff begs Doll not to play the death’s head with the same offhand shrug that he employs when speaking to his page. It’s a competent performance but not a sparkling or varied one. It seems consistent with the overall intent of the series: get the words out, make them clear, hit the treble notes, and leave the bass notes to take care of themselves.
Another major disappointment is Mistress Quickly’s attempt to arrest Falstaff for debt and breach of promise. This is a rambunctious scene, full of action, shouting, and even swordplay, and almost none of that comes across in this audio. There is no ambient noise in the scene, no sense of movement; voices are barely even raised in anything resembling anger. In that respect the scene resembles the Argo’s failed attempt to depict the Battle of Shrewsbury. The absence of a narrator certainly contributes to the problem, but the problem goes far deeper than that. It would be impossible for someone listening to this audio to have any idea what’s actually happening in the scene, unless they already knew the play or had the script in front of them.
On the other hand, the scenes with Justice Shallow are surprisingly good. He and Silence work well together and their interaction with Falstaff has some of the spark that’s missing from Falstaff’s interactions with Hal. Shallow’s endless repetition, repetition, repetition is played to good comic effect, and in the kind of individuating touch unusual in the Argo series, the sad recruit Feeble is given a lisp.
I wondered, as I was listening to Westmorland’s negotiation with the rebels at Gaultree, what difference a better sound quality would make. And that reminded me of the technology Peter Jackson used on the Get Back documentary, where inaudible dialogue was made plain, instruments were separated out from voices, and the barn-like echoes of Twickenham were rendered as intimate as my own living room. And it left me wishing that someone had the money and interest to invest in doing the same to this collection of Shakespeare performances. I think my dismay at the artificiality of some of the line readings would disappear if I could hear them with at least some of the excessive “reverb” removed. And then it might be possible to appreciate this collection for what it truly is: an archive of performances by some of the greatest Shakespearean actors of the twentieth century.
In other words, it’s possible that some of the subtlety of the original has been lost because of the poor technology.
And of course, I have to say this: it would be nice if we actually knew who some of those greatest actors of the twentieth century were. But none of the documentation that accompanies the recordings includes information about the cast. A handful of names can be gleaned from here and there on the Internet, including the standalone volumes for each play in the Argo series; but even then, none of the names are matched with the roles they actually play. Shame, shame, perdurable shame, nothing but shame. Somebody had this information in front of them, or knew where to find it — or should have known — and didn’t think it was worth the trouble to add it to the description.
(Since writing this, I was able to locate some additional information on the Discogs web site. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but according to Discogs, some of the cast members are as follows: Falstaff: Donald Beves; King Henry: Anthony Jacobs; Prince Hal: Gary Watson; Mistress Quickly: Vivienne Chatterton; Doll Tearsheet: Diana Chadwick; Bardolph: Philip Strick; Pistol: Tony Church; Shallow: William Squire. Derek Jacobi, Clive Swift, Ian McKellen, and Corin Redgrave are credited with minor roles. The text is credited to John Dover Wilson. My point remains that there is no excuse for not including full credits with the recording itself. If Discogs has access to the information, so does Argo.)
Arkangel
As with the other plays in the tetralogy, the Arkangel production comes in like a breath of fresh air. It isn’t perfect, and I’ll have a few words to say about the flaws, but on the whole it’s an engrossing audio experience that pulls out most of the stops in an effort to create a sense of reality. The music is wonderful, and the sound design is virtually flawless. In the opening scene, for example, the Lord Bardolph stands before the echoing pile of Northumberland’s castle with crows cawing in the distance. The scene in Gaultree Forest is another particularly striking example of how the effective deployment of ambient sound can make a scene come to life: it sounds like it was recorded out-of-doors. Footsteps to and fro sometimes indicate changes of position on “stage,” and the opening and closing of doors is used at times to signal entrances and exits that would otherwise be “invisible” to the listener. And in virtually every scene, good use is made of stereo separation to help the implied grouping of characters.
Arkangel never shies away from filling out active scenes with sounds that indicate the action. This is a world where that action often spills out into the streets. The scene where Master Fang arrests Falstaff for debt and breach of promise at Mistress Quickly’s behest is packed with brawling voices and rattling swords. And in a moment that emphasizes Shakespeare’s symmetry, the scene where the beadles arrest Doll and Quickly for robbery and murder — a scene that could conceivably be played for laughs — is filled with its own more subdued and far more disturbing sounds of rough handling.
Arkangel continues the Henry IV saga with the same cast as Part 1: Julian and Jamie Glover as father and son, Richard Griffiths as Falstaff, Elizabeth Spriggs as Mistress Quickly, Sidney Livingstone as Bardolph. And they add several outstanding new members to the mix, including Geoffrey Bayldon and Christian Rodska as Shallow and Silence, Eve Mathieson as Doll Tearsheet, with Rodska doubling as the Lord Chief Justice, and the delightfully swaggering Edward De Souza as Pistol. De Souza flares up so brilliantly, so theatrically, that it’s easy to overlook the fact that the character has virtually no impact on the plot.
As noted in my review of Part 1 productions, there are a few weaknesses in Griffith’s portrayal of Falstaff. He catches his bluff good humor and his occasional flashes of anger, but he doesn’t really plumb the depths of Falstaff’s melancholy. This is especially apparent in the tavern scene with Doll Tearsheet. Do not play the deaths head with me, he says at one point. Do not remember me mine end. It’s a telling moment in Falstaff’s evolution as a character — he’s terrified of dying — but Griffiths tosses it off as an afterthought.
One other slight glitch in the casting: Falstaff’s page is repeatedly described as diminutive, clearly intended as a role for a precocious child. And I can understand the reluctance to cast children to play Shakespeare. But voices do convey a certain physicality, and Chris Pavlo, who plays the Page — and who does it well, as far as it goes — sounds like a lanky adolescent, and some of the humor of contrasts is lost in the process.
The Glovers, on the other hand, catch fire in this play in a way they were unable to do in the earlier one. Their scene at Henry’s deathbed is heartbreaking, and Julian Glover seems to have captured some of the kingly rage that eluded him in Part 1. And Jamie Glover is here, as he was in the previous play, a gratifyingly effective Hal.
But even so, listening to this section of the play, I had to wonder about some of the roads not taken. When King Henry finally runs out of steam and Prince Hal has a chance to respond, Jamie Glover speaks gently and with filial gratitude. But here are the words:
But for my tears,
The moist impediments unto my speech,
I had forestalled this dear and deep rebuke
Ere you with grief had spoke and I had heard
The course of it so far. There is your crown;
And he that wears the crown immortally
Long guard it yours!
The Oxford stage directions indicate that when he says “There is your crown,” Hal hands it back to him (or places it on the bed). But what if he flings it back in anger? “THERE is your crown!” — Of course, the rest of the speech does convey a sense of filial piety, but one current of emotion doesn’t rule out the other. To me, there is something resentful about the “ere you had spoke so far” tenor of the first part of the speech.
One note about the performance of this scene and how sound, in the absence of any visual cues, can still effectively supplement the action: it ends with a loud and prolonged death rattle from King Henry. There is no question as the incidental music comes up that the old king is gone forever.
There are occasional grace notes with minor characters — bits and pieces of individuation that aren’t called for by the script, strictly speaking, but support it and enlarge the world of audio we’re inhabiting. One that comes to mind in this regard is the tiny role of Mouldy, one of the soldiers conscripted in Gloucestershire, who weeps in real despair when he is “pricked.” Doll Tearsheet, with the slightest nonverbal signal, indicates in the tavern scene that she is clearly in on the Prince’s joke, and is deliberately goading Falstaff to say something that will get him into trouble — in the nicest possible way, of course.
As before, the play is performed uncut, using the first edition of The Pelican Shakespeare as copy-text. Bits of dialogue have been added here and there to clarify the action: specifically, characters who are being addressed (“my liege”) are named in direct-address fashion when they are not so named in the text — a small but welcome concession to the needs of the listener who has no visual information to go on.
BBC Radio
Like the Arkangel recordings, the BBC productions make full use of music and sound design to create a sense of an inhabited world. The crowd scenes are crowded; there are shouts and murmurs and snorting horses. When characters are outside — as in Gaultree Forest, for example — the birds are chirping and there is, barely audible but there in the background — almost subliminal — the sound of moving air. When Falstaff delivers his speech praising the virtues of sack, he pauses a few times to audibly drink from a bottle: there is nothing abstract about the advice he would give a son, if he had one. In some of the more action-packed scenes, like Falstaff’s arrest by Sergeant Fang, the production allows the brawling to dominate the audio, running the lines over top of each other — and drowning the details of the dialogue out with music and sound effects. Even when it is not so “in your face,” that use of music within a scene is one of the key differences between the Arkangel and the BBC “house style.” In the Arkangel productions, music is basically limited to scene transitions. In the BBC productions, music functions more like a film score, often appearing within a scene to underline the emotion of the words being spoken.
That willingness to sacrifice some of the details of the dialogue for effect is another key difference. In a way, Arkangel was an attempt to do in audio what BBC Television tried to do with the plays in the late 1970s and early 1980s: create “definitive” productions of all of them. The BBC Radio series was never interested in doing “definitive” productions of the plays — or in doing all of them, for that matter. Although it’s less apparent in this play than in some of the others in the series, there are some cuts here and there. For example, the BBC Henry IV Part 2 includes the Prologue — Rumour painted full of tongues — but not the Epilogue; other speeches have been shortened or dropped. There are, however, no cuts so drastic as in their production of The Taming of the Shrew, where the whole framing device is eliminated and a couple of the minor characters in the main plot are dropped; and there are no rearrangements of scenes, as in the splitting of John of Gaunt’s exposition in the production of Richard II. (Mentioning the cuts and rearrangements in other productions does not imply a criticism. If you read my comments on audio productions of Richard II, you’ll know that I actually liked what they did with Gaunt’s exposition. And while I miss the framing device with Christopher Sly, I’m perfectly happy with dropping one or two of the servants from Taming of the Shrew — in any case it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that the BBC completely rewrote Kate’s closing speech.)
In Henry IV Part 2, there are some modest additions to the text as well — usually interjections by a character to clarify a reaction that would be visible onstage but is otherwise invisible in audio. For example, when Falstaff hands his prisoner Coleville of the Dale over to Prince John, he fumbles over his name and has to be reminded by the prisoner himself. And it seems clear that he expects to get something more tangible as a reward for his exploit than simply praise at court. He is shocked at the casual way Prince John sends Coleville off to his death.
Send Colevile with his confederates
To York, to present execution.
Blunt, lead him hence, and see you guard him sure.
The BBC has Falstaff interject, in surprise: “To present execution??“ Is he simply shocked at the callous brutality of the command, or was he hoping for ransom? It doesn’t matter; either would fit the character of Falstaff, especially as Timothy West plays him; either way, his reaction feeds into his disillusion with the cynical young Prince and sharpens the contrast with the more jovial Hal — a contrast that in turn sharpens the rude shock awaiting Falstaff when he realizes the brothers are not all that different after all.
By the way, in both this production and in the Arkangel production, when Prince John leaves — having promised to speak “better” of Falstaff at court than he deserves — Falstaff angrily shouts after him: “I would you had the wit; ’twere better than your dukedom.” Falstaff clearly intends John to hear him, and it seems from the staging in both cases that John must have done so. I think this is a mistake. Falstaff has just been begging the Prince to “stand my good lord in your good report,” and the Prince has agreed to do so. Why would a desperate hanger-on like Falstaff risk whatever benefit he might obtain from that promise by responding with an insult? He might have been able to get away with that kind of dig with Prince Hal, who would simply respond in kind; but he has no reason to think Prince John would take an insult like that in stride — and in fact he says as much in his very next line: “Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me, nor a man cannot make him laugh.” I can’t imagine Shakespeare intended Falstaff to utter the line “I would you had the wit” in any way other than bitterly and under his breath.
As with most of the productions in this series, the play has a brief introduction by Richard Eyre, where he ponders whether Shakespeare intended the play to have two parts from the beginning, or whether he discovered, in the course of writing, that there was just too much material to fit into one. And the rejection of the fat knight? It breaks our hearts, says Eyre, but our heads know it’s the right thing to do. (Maybe his head does, but mine is still working on that one. I’m sorry, but I hate and despise Prince Hal, and the events of Henry V don’t change that.)
For the most part, the cast is first-rate, as might be expected. Julian and Jamie Glover repeat their performance as the Henries father and son, and Jamie repeats his achievement as an effective and extroverted Prince. On the other hand, one of the signal weaknesses of this production is that it robs Julian Glover of two of the best moments he had when playing the role for Arkangel: his final scene with Prince Hal and his death scene. Both were passionate and convincing in the Arkangel production; but not here: his performance here is on the same weary, monotonous level throughout. He has been badly misdirected. Timothy West, who remains my favorite Falstaff in any of these productions, captures the fat knight’s descent into death’s-head melancholy far more effectively than Richard Griffiths did for Arkangel. Prunella Scales plays Mistress Quickly; Lucy Briers is Doll Tearsheet (who vomits rather grotesquely in her first scene, where the dialogue simply has her saying “hem!”); and one of my favorite performers, one of the most versatile actors I know — Richard Briers — plays Justice Shallow. (Lucy Briers is his daughter.) Michael Cochrane is a finely blustering Pistol, although maybe not quite as blustering as Edward De Souza.
There’s another point of comparison between the Arkangel and BBC productions, and this is something that all three dramatized versions I’ve listened to — the Argo included — seem to have missed the boat on. The BBC mishandles it worse than the other two, but it’s a matter of degree rather than a qualitative difference.
When we see King Henry in this play, he’s dying. And he knows he’s dying. As I noted earlier, when he talks to his sons and gives them advice in this play, it’s deathbed advice. He knows he may never have a chance to talk to them again. Here’s what he says to his son Thomas, worth quoting, I think, at length:
He loves thee, and thou dost neglect him, Thomas.
Thou hast a better place in his affection
Than all thy brothers. Cherish it, my boy;
And noble offices thou mayst effect
Of mediation, after I am dead,
Between his greatness and thy other brethren.
Therefore omit him not, blunt not his love,
Nor lose the good advantage of his grace
By seeming cold or careless of his will,
For he is gracious if he be observ’d,
He hath a tear for pity, and a hand
Open as day for meting charity;
Yet notwithstanding, being incens’d, he is flint,
As humorous as winter, and as sudden
As flaws congealed in the spring of day.
His temper therefore must be well observ’d.
Chide him for faults, and do it reverently,
When you perceive his blood inclin’d to mirth;
But, being moody, give him time and scope,
Till that his passions, like a whale on ground,
Confound themselves with working.
This is not Polonius rattling off conventional wisdom to a son who’s leaving for France. This is a man desperately telling one son how to manage the man who is going to be the next King — a man he has serious doubts about. And yet all of these productions have Henry deliver this speech in a quiet, genial tone, almost as if he’s smiling while he speaks. He should be in agony as he contemplates his approaching death: this speech should be tinged with desperation.
One regret I have is that the BBC hasn’t seen fit to include Henry V in this series, especially with Jamie Glover in the lead. Was the play too jingoistic for their tastes, or were they afraid it might be thought too jingoistic? If so, that’s too bad, because I think Henry V is actually pretty ambiguous on the score of whether Henry is actually a hero or a villain. Cuppele gorge and all that. But we’ll come to that point eventually. Whether they wanted to include Henry V or not, I’m still baffled as to why, when they packaged their radio plays in anthologies, the BBC included Richard II and the two Henry IV plays with. . . Pericles?? If they didn’t want to include Henry V, couldn’t they have pulled up a production of Richard III from the archives to fill out the package? Surely they must have one tucked away somewhere.
There’s one more production to consider: a kind of hybrid that conflates the two parts of Henry IV. Unlike Orson Welles’ film Chimes at Midnight, which focuses on Falstaff, this one focuses on the relationship between King Henry and Prince Hal. As you will have gathered already, I didn’t like it. I thought about discussing this odd production in the context of Part 1, but I decided to wait until now, since the relationship between father and son is really only resolved in this play.
LA TheatreWorks: The Shadow of Succession
I can understand wanting to combine the two parts of Henry IV: directors don’t seem to get a chance to do either play very often, and it’s hard to imagine doing Falstaff without wanting to show his rejection scene. I think it can be done. I’m just not sure it can be done well. And while the LA TheatreWorks adaptation certainly takes an interesting approach, and the performances are all excellent — it features one of the best King Henries in the group — it doesn’t really work for me. I regret saying that, partly because David Bevington is one of the people who worked on the script, and Bevington is one of my Shakespeare scholar-heroes. But ultimately I think too many of the wrong things were cut, and too much emphasis was placed on the psychological rather than the political aspects of the story.
One of the most obvious and regrettable cuts is the robbery at Gadshill. This incident is a key episode in Part 1, and it reverberates through Part 2 as well: the Lord Chief Justice makes reference to it in his confrontation with Falstaff. Early on in the LA TheatreWorks production, we see Poins and Hal hatching their scheme to trick Falstaff and his cronies; later we see them exposing Falstaff as a liar in the tavern scene; and later still, we hear Hal and Falstaff talking about having to return the money that was stolen. But we never see the robbery itself. If I weren’t familiar with the play, I might be tempted to ask: what money are they talking about?
Actually seeing what happened in Gadshill is important. We know as soon as Falstaff opens his mouth in the tavern scene that he’s lying, because we saw what happened with our own eyes. Without that evidence, we struggle a bit with the back-and-forth banter of the tavern scene; it becomes partly a game of he-said/she-said. And that’s not even taking into consideration the fact that excising the scene removes one of the most exciting and theatrical set pieces from the entire Henry IV saga. Why was it done? To shave 15 minutes off the running time? Or was it for more mundane budgetary reasons — because they couldn’t afford enough extras to populate the scene? Or because the stage wasn’t big enough? It couldn’t possibly have been because they thought it improved the narrative.
In any case, whatever the reason, it was a huge mistake. The Categorical Imperative of Abridgement is: when you cut an episode from a text, you need to cut all the other references to the episode as well. Otherwise you’re going to leave people scratching their heads in frustration, thinking they missed something. It’s the sledgehammer approach to abridgement.
Maybe they thought they were just following Shakespeare’s example. See the discussion above about Shakespeare deliberately choosing not to show Prince Hal striking the Lord Chief Justice, or said Justice committing him to the Tower, while still having a lot of their relationship hinge on that episode. But Bevington and Company aren’t Shakespeare; they lack his skill in exposition, and in any case they could only work with the threads Shakespeare himself left behind — and his scenes assume the audience has seen the robbery.
Other significant scenes are truncated are missing altogether. Of course some of this has to happen when you’re trying to boil two plays down to one — in this case roughly five or six hours of stage action down to two — but it’s possible to reach a point where the cost is too great. All the scenes involving the conspirators are gone, including Mortimer and Owen Glendower; Justice Silence is gone, Falstaff’s page is gone, all but one of Justice Shallow’s scenes are gone, all but one of the Lord Chief Justice’s scenes are gone. (Thank goodness Doll Tearsheet and Pistol are still in, but so many of Pistol’s absurd theatrical quotes have been cut that he is, to all intents and purposes, neutered. He does get to call Justice Shallow a “Besonian,” but that’s about it.) The joke that Hal and Poins play on Falstaff in Part 2 — where they pose as tapsters in order to eavesdrop on him — is lame enough in the original, but here it’s rendered virtually meaningless. The Battle of Shrewsbury is cut to the bone, retaining enough of the action to show Hal’s courage and swordsmanship and stage an effective duel with Hotspur; but Sir Walter Blunt is gone, and Hotspur has been reduced to a walk-on, with only a couple of brief scenes leading up to the battle, and any emotion that might be generated by his death is unearned.
One way the writers have emphasized the relationship between Henry and Hal is by making extensive changes to the early scenes. In the original play, King Henry’s first scene, a meeting with his council, includes one brief reference to his concern for his wayward son. In the LA TheatreWorks production, he is made to interrupt the council proceedings several times to express his anguish about Hal, using lines cribbed from other parts of the play and from other plays as well — Richard II and even, in one case, a completely unrelated line from King John (“grief fills the room up of my absent child”). Hotspur, in one of the few scenes he is given here, is undermined by Henry’s ongoing worry. When he tries to explain his reasons for not handing over his prisoners — the speech where Hotspur rants on about the “popinjay” — his voice fades into the background, and Henry, clearly not listening to him, soliloquizes about the absent Hal — and then a few moments later it happens again. The message is clear: in this scheme of things, Hotspur is a nonentity. Nothing he has to say is worth hearing.
Yes, Prince Hal’s exploits at Shrewsbury are shown, in about as compressed a form as possible, but Prince John’s Machiavellian triumph at Gaultree Forest isn’t even mentioned. (And by the way, no, this production doesn’t solve the problem of making clear what happens between the Earl of Douglas and Falstaff at Shrewsbury. None of these audio productions do that.) The net effect of many of these cuts is to significantly reduce the sense of political instability that plagues Henry’s reign; there is, after all, only one significant rebel, and he’s quickly disposed of before the play is half over. Both of the original plays show the kingdom on the brink of insurrection and disaster, but only half of this version does. So it’s hard to understand why Henry, in the second half of the play, is still going on about the “unquiet times” and his “uneasy head.” And the cuts also undermine our sense of how deeply corrupt Falstaff has become: no reference is made to the way he seeks out men who are obviously unfit for military service and embezzles the fees for their conscription. He talks about this in Part 1, and we see him do it, at length, in Part 2: but there’s not a single trace of it here. We don’t see him robbing anybody, we don’t see him ripping off Mistress Quickly, we don’t see him callously sending unfit soldiers to their death (“food for powder, food for powder”): so why doe Hal find it so necessary to reject him? What’s he done that’s so awful? We never see it.
The absence of the Lord Chief Justice from most of the second half of the production robs the story of an important antagonist: in Henry IV Part 2, that official takes on the role of Falstaff’s main opponent; he has an anxious confrontation with Prince Hal where his own future will be decided; he is threatened with vengeance by Falstaff; and he is the very man who arrests the fat knight and drags him off to the Fleet. The LA TheatreWorks production eliminates that character arc altogether. We hear the Lord Chief Justice worry about his future, but when he says “what I did, I did in honor,” we have no idea what he’s talking about. The story comes out moments later when he finally faces Hal — reborn as King Henry V — but it comes out abruptly and without context and is just as quickly dispensed with. And why is it a problem for him if he has to “speak Sir John Falstaff fair”? We know nothing of their long-standing enmity or of Falstaff’s own intervention in the dispute between the Justice and Hal; this is the first we’ve heard of it. We’ve never seen the two men interact. All of Shakespeare’s careful groundwork has been dispensed with.
That lack of context plagues many of the scenes that remain. When Falstaff meets with Justice Shallow, we have no idea how he met him or why he’s there; we know nothing of his plans to fleece the old justice or that Shallow played any role in procuring soldiers for Falstaff’s “charge of foot,” since we never saw any of them either. If Shallow gets to utter a dozen lines in this adaptation, I would be surprised — I didn’t count them, but there wasn’t much there, apart from the “chimes at midnight” reference. He seems to be there mainly to tell Falstaff that he will “die in the color of his rejection”.
Despite the fact that it’s billed as The Shadow of Succession — implying that Prince Hal’s coronation is the end of the story, since that’s when the succession is accomplished — the play keeps going once the coronation has taken place: not with Shakespeare’s own epilogue, but with the “Arthur’s bosom” scene from Henry V, describing Falstaff’s death in detail; and it’s followed by Hal’s rousing “no King of England if not King of France” speech. Falstaff has already been reduced to a cipher, so why the big deal about his death? And why drag in the scene from Henry V, except to try to end the proceedings on a high note?
These are choices that can be defended on any number of grounds. But those grounds do not include results that accurately reflect anything like what Shakespeare wrote.
To sum up, then: Arkangel is the clear winner here, despite the fact that the BBC recording has a stronger Falstaff. The stronger Falstaff doesn’t compensate for the woefully inadequate way Julian Glover has been asked to play the dying King Henry. The LA TheatreWorks production is an interesting but, in my opinion, failed experiment in adaptation. What it made my “manly heart” yearn for is some time to sit down again and watch Orson Welles in Chimes at Midnight.
I haven’t wanted to get into film criticism in this blog, except for a few references here and there — especially some criticisms of the way The Hollow Crown handled the Henry VI plays — because I’m not really trained in film. The history plays are almost too tempting to resist, however. Besides the Welles film, the Olivier versions of two of the history plays (both of which I hate, by the way: Olivier is one of the most overrated actors of the twentieth century), Branagh’s Henry V, and The Hollow Crown, there’s an old old TV series called An Age of Kings, which I have on DVD but have never watched, and which adapts the two tetralogies into a series of half-hour black-and-white broadcasts. And of course there are also the old BBC Television versions, many of them plagued by a studio-bound stodginess but tempting nevertheless.
For now, though. . . Henry V. The audio versions there include Flo Gibson, Argo, Arkangel, Naxos (a fine version with Samuel West as the King), and SPAudio — SP being short for SmartPass: it’s a recording that was part of a Shakespeare audio study series, and has one unique characteristic: it has a narrator!
Tad's Shakespeare Diary 