Review: Shakespeare's Henry IV, parts 1+2 · 3:53am Dec 17th, 2014
This is a strange play or pair of plays. (I consider it a single play, though this is controversial. Harold Jenkins made a convincing case that Shakespeare planned to do it as one play, then changed his mind in the middle of Part 1, Act IV.) An editor, judging it by today’s standards, might say it was hopelessly broken and ill-conceived. Yet, like War and Peace, it has a different kind of greatness to it than is fashionable today. I expect this play will perform well by my measure of greatness, which is how often I'm reminded of it when thinking of other things. It left me feeling more charitable toward Shakespeare than I have lately.
If you want an adventure story with a villain to boo and a hero to root for, you won’t find them in Henry IV. The play’s "hero" is Prince Hal, who becomes Henry V at the end of Part 2. The characters consist of Prince Hal, plus Falstaff and the villains and rogues he associates with on one side, and/or King Henry IV and the even worse villains he associates with on the other.
Falstaff & Co. aren't really on the King's side; the King hates them, and their service to him is worse than none at all. There are three teams on the field, and you can't root for any of them. The King is unjust; Falstaff is repulsive; and the order of events frames the rebels as the antagonists.
Hal is less dissolute than Falstaff, and less bloodthirsty and honorless than his father and brother. Falstaff and his companions are brigands who rob and murder, then spend what they’ve taken on food, drink, and whores. King Henry IV is a usurper who murdered the former king, and like Stalin after him, reflected that anyone who helped him become king might someday help someone else become king. At the start of the play, he faces a rebellion because his former friends are convinced he means to kill them all one by one. At the end of Part 2, those rebels who survive surrender to Hal’s brother John of Lancaster, under a promise of amnesty, and he waits until their army has dispersed and then murders them.
Here are three bad things and three good things about Henry IV:
Three Bad Things About Henry IV
I'm going to ignore the historical inaccuracies and anachronisms, such as having pistols in 1403, which are still a cause of consternation for English historians. I’m also not going to cut Shakespeare any slack for writing in 1597. It’s only fair to Shakespeare to note that nobody else writing at the time would have done any better; but it’s only fair to writers today, as long as they’re held lower in esteem than Shakespeare by critics, to hold him up to the same standards they regularly meet.
1.The bad guys win, and we’re supposed to cheer for them. I think.
The only admirable characters other than Hal are Hotspur, Douglas, Colevile, and perhaps Vernon and the Archbishop. The good guys kill all of them but “the Douglas” over the course of the play. Hal cleverly spares him by asking for permission to dispose of him and then setting him free.
If I were to pick one scene that conveys the mood of Henry IV, it’s Part 1, Act 4, scene 3. Colevile, an honorable knight, yields to Falstaff, apparently meaning some honor to Falstaff, who is so fat, lazy, cowardly, and winded that any man alive could beat him. They exchange words, Colevile showing his honor and Falstaff his ridiculous yipping-dog pride. Then John of Lancaster walks by, casually orders Colevile’s execution, expresses his scorn for Falstaff, and walks on. Then Coleville is taken away, and Falstaff monologues about… the virtues of hard drinking. The two villains condemn the noble man to death and immediately forget him. Falstaff is aware of his own moral depravity but doesn’t care, and is only anxious that he should get some preference out of John for capturing Colevile. John of Lancaster, like his father Henry IV, rationalizes his evil actions with lies. Falstaff is a coward in the face of battle. J of L (and Henry IV) are cowards in the face of the truth. Each of them has only scorn for the other.
This was not accidental. It’s one entire scene, and that’s all it consists of. Falstaff’s monologue about drink might be seen by insensitive louts as comic, but it’s vile coming only seconds after Falstaff has sent his better off to death. I believe Shakespeare wrote this scene only to highlight how nasty the victors of Henry IV are. Why?
One might speculate that this was for political reasons, but no: Queen Elizabeth I was a Tudor, and her claim to the throne was through the House of Lancaster. Possibly Henry IV is all a set-up in order to show, in the upcoming Henry V, that Hal is all the more noble for having grown up straight among only crooked weeds. I don’t know. I haven’t read it. But S. didn’t write Henry V until about 2 years later.
2. Prince Hal’s character is unbelievable
Hal is a contradictory character. He’s not complex, merely incoherent. Hal was Shakespeare’s warm-up for Hamlet. Like Hamlet, he’s an active, intelligent, introspective prince who feigns wantonness while keeping his own counsel so closely that the viewer never really understands him. Like Hamlet, his primary motivation is that he judges himself by how well he honors the rules about inheritance and bloodlines, which is perfectly relatable to any viewer who is also a medieval prince.
The plays are about Prince Hal’s transformation from wastrel to noble king. Classic hero’s-journey stuff, except that instead of an Obi Wan to lead him he has Falstaff to mislead him. Also, there’s no transformation. We’re told Hal is a wastrel at the play’s start. Then he says in an aside to the audience that he has done all this to deceive people, so that he might have all the more honor when he reforms; and he behaves only honorably when we see him (possibly excepting when he steals his father’s crown). Then, a little later, in a separate and contradictory explanation of his actions, he resolves to reform to win his father’s respect. I would rather the first explanation had been omitted, for I doubt anyone in the history of the world has ever lived that way deliberately.
I find no good way of making sense of this Hal who spends his life with a small set of boon companions, then coldly sends them off to prison at the end of Part 2. Who has lived his entire life as a lie for no convincing purpose, and/or is a paragon of virtues which he acquired overnight with no convincing cause.
This is made worse by the long and painfully-phony odes to Hal that Shakespeare has Vernon deliver in two separate parts, each time telling his lord and Hal’s rival for the crown, Hotspur, how noble and godlike that rake Hal has suddenly become. They’re just… so very purple, inappropriate, and implausible. They’re like the requisite ode to the proletarian worker inserted into a play sponsored by the East German communist party.
To “fix” the play, you’d need to show Hal’s transformation and its causes, not just tell us he has reformed, or that he was faking it all along (Hal says both, in different scenes). This is one of Shakespeare’s key problems: He strongly prefers telling to showing.
However, the play might not be about Hal. It seems clear to me, but Hal wasn’t even considered a central character until the 20th century. It also isn’t clear that Hal transforms into a good king. The scene near the end of Part 2 where he takes his still-living father’s crown is hardly admirable, and his actions seems more plausible to me as realpolitik than as reform.
3. Falstaff is two-dimensional
Falstaff personifies what I find so puzzling about how people react to Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s works are supposed to exemplify literature. Yet many of the characters and plays that people love him for--Falstaff, Lear, Lady Macbeth, his comedies--are what you find in “commercial fiction”, which is regarded today as the “opposite” of literature. They are loud, larger-than-life, simple, and memorable. They’re interesting in the way colorful noisy things flapping in the wind are interesting to livestock.
Shakespeare wrote plays, not literature. Literature means, at least, stories written down in order to be read. Epic poems are a more appropriate model for literature than plays are.
A play, like a movie, is a large part spectacle. Drama overlaps with literature, but is different, in the ways that the J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson versions of The Hobbit are different. Many of the things we call good in movies, we call bad in novels. Characters especially so. A play’s stage is slanted toward the pit. Simple characters play better on the stage than on the page. The most exciting drama is when an actor’s emotions are so clear that the muscles in your face tense as his do, bringing those same feelings into your head. This doesn’t work with subtle or conflicted characters. This was even more true on Shakespeare’s stage, where the audience, lacking glasses or electric light, probably could barely make out the players’ faces. So a Lear on stage, railing into the storm, carries us with him, and we feel he has greatness because his emotions are great; whereas thoughtful reflection on the words he speaks profits us little, and may impress us more with what a great ass he has been.
At least, that’s one of my theories. Another is that the type of person who goes to plays or watches movies is different from the type of person who reads books. But for whatever reason, bold simple strokes are more respectable in drama than in literature. This would be no problem, except that people keep taking things from Shakespeare that may be great drama, and insisting they are the marks we should aim at to make great literature. This muddies the water for any writer trying to figure out how to write.
If you love Falstaff, you’ll love Shakespeare more than I can. He’s bold, brash, and spouts witty sayings nonstop. He is all fireworks and spectacle outside and hollow inside. It’s interesting to see how he will turn each situation to his advantage. It’s interesting to see Hal characterized by his reactions to Falstaff, especially at the end of Part 1 when Falstaff tells Hal that he killed Hotspur, without knowing Hal was the one who killed him. His opinions on honor and drink are cleverly-worded enough to rise, for some (though not for me) to the level of humor. But his character is so predictable and so monotonously depraved, and his speech so padded out with sex puns, that it’s tedious for me to get through scenes with him in it. Har, har, “thrust” has a “ribald second meaning” for the third time in this scene; thank you, Signet Classics. And Falstaff has more words in this play than any other character. Too many for me. The notes in my edition say that Falstaff’s role was greatly extended from the original play because the audiences loved him best, so perhaps Shakespeare agreed with me.
Think of any vaguely similar character from literature--say, Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones, or Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22. Which one is more interesting? If you say Falstaff, you’re not interested in the same things I am.
I will say one thing in favor of Falstaff as character: He exemplifies the banality of evil. I’m tired of grand villains seeking empires, or cackling evilly as they tie damsels to railroad tracks. Falstaff wants nothing but drink, food, and women, and that is what makes him evil. Not the wanting of physical pleasure, but the not caring about anything else. He wishes no one ill, not really. He just doesn’t care. Commercial fiction would be several notches greater if it used fewer Nazis and more Falstaffs.
Most critics don’t consider Falstaff evil at all, but merely comic:
The grandiose humorous effect of a figure like that of the fat knight SIr John Falstaff rests on an economy in contempt and indignation…. His doings are on the whole harmless, and are almost excused by the comic baseness of the people he cheats. We admit that the poor fellow has a right to try to live and enjoy himself like anyone else…
-- Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious
Falstaff’s wit is an emanation of a fine constitution; an exuberance of good humor and good nature; an overflowing of his love of laughter and good-fellowship; a giving vent to his heart’s ease, and overcontentment with himself and others.... we no more object to the character of Falstaff in a moral point of view than we should think of bringing an excellent comedian, who should represent him to the life, before one of the police offices… for no mischevious consequences do result…. The truth is, that we could never forgive the Prince’s treatment of Falstaff…. Whatever terror the French in those days might have of Henry V, yet, to the readers of poetry at present, Falstaff is the better man of the two."
-- WIlliam Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays, 1818
We see that Falstaff is a professional highwayman, a career unlikely not to result in corpses in 1403. We see him bankrupt his regular inn-keeper by conniving her, through false promises of marriage, into lending her everything she has. But all that’s trivial compared to the body count Falstaff racks up in Part 1. Falstaff has authority from the King to conscript men into military service. He uses this authority to conscript only men too sick, old, or feeble to serve, to frighten them into bribing him into letting him go. He takes 300 pounds in bribes and ends up with 150 sickly conscripts who couldn’t pay their way out of it, mostly from prisons. Hal comments on their pitiful appearance, and Falstaff says,
Tut, tut! good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder. They'll fill a pit as well as better.
By the end of Part I, Falstaff tells us that all but three of them are dead, and those three so maimed they’ll do nothing more but beg at the end of town. Falstaff is noticeably not dead, so we presume he led his men from behind.
Would you believe a Fantasy Counterpart Culture Nazi Falstaff?
In Harry Turtledove's Darkness series, about a World War II equivalent in a Magitek fantasy world, there is a Constable Bembo, who originally is more of a opportunistic rogue (mildly corrupt cop) than a true villain. During the story, he is put in a position by the Nazi-like regime of Algarve, where he does some truly great evil -- and at the same time, is sometimes merciful, not because he's good, but because he's too corrupt and hedonistic to be truly devoted to evil.
There's a good point here, that often the real problem comes not from the insanely-malevolent, but the merely-callous given an opportunity by people of greater malevolence.
Fuckin' Bad Horse with your... reading Shakespeare and shit.
(Why don't more people read Shakespeare? Why haven't I read anything beyond a few of his more famous works? It's not like he's still in copyright... No excuses.)
Can you compare it to Flannery O'Connor for me?
Most of what I've heard about Shakespeare is raving about his supposedly deep insight into human nature, much more than about his mastery of literary craft. Like, "Shakespeare invented the human". That kind of stuff.
Shakespere's tendency to Tell instead of Show relates to the difficulties of the stage. You have some no-talent hack out striding across the boards, mangling your lines and hamming it up, and you still want your vision to be clear to the audience. This is made worse by Hamlet and other complex characters having one 'face' for their enemies, and a second internal personality. They tend to talk to themselves a lot. Plus your audience tends to be.... how shall we say, less complicated individuals, perhaps?
That he made one play that stood the test of time, let alone how many he did speaks volumes about his skills.
2658680 I'm reminded of The Dark Crystal, whose villains, the Skeksies, were so evil, so selfish, that the spent much of their time fighting each other. Despicable, shortsighted cretins who fully lived up to the idea of being the evil sides of complete beings. A book of lore I read about the movie described them as such: if they could work together, they could do more damage. If they were less evil, they could do more harm.
There is a point, if one were to graph one's evil against the harm one does, that the line starts going down. At that point, being more evil reduces the harm one does. A completely insane psychopath is certainly evil, but if they're so mad they can't connect to others or pass as a normal person or keep a steady job, their evil is inherently limited to the small scale. A few murders here and there. If they don't display positive traits like patience, foresight, or whatever, they are quickly discovered, caught, and stopped, one way or another.
A person actively seeking to harm works at a disadvantage. A person who harms as a result of accident or negligence is far more dangerous. As is the one who harms in the process of trying to do good. Some of the greatest harm in the world was done with the best of intentions, or with no intentions at all. This is because unlike harm done for pure malice, people go along with attempts to do good.
Am I bad at counting, or did you say "Four good things" and then only list three?
And yes, that's about the most intelligent thing I can add to this conversation.
2658802 I had 4 good things, but took one out. I was going to say something about what I thought Falstaff added to the play, but it got complicated.
I don't think there's anything wrong with having a Falstaff as a secondary character, used (as Falstaff is) as a foil or plot device for the prince and the king. But he expanded, and took over large parts of the play.
Have I posted this before? Yeah, probably. Oh well:
But then I'm implying that later on you'll hook up with that chick from Raiders of the Lost Ark. So it's all good.
I am a huge Shakespeare GeekTM, so please excuse the incoming wall of text. This may be a bit rambling, as I just want to comment on several points you have made.
On Shakespeare's "genius", bear in mind that he is called a genius compared to his contemporaries. Many of the main aspects of literature that we take for granted today were much more rare 400 years ago, and Shakespeare was a pioneer. In particular, complex characters with layers and motivations. Yes, many of Shakespeare's characters are flat or, at best, two dimensional compared to what we are used to, but they are positively rounded compared to the other popular plays of his day.
You brought up Shylock and The Merchant of Venice in an earlier review, how Shylock is how he is so that Shakespeare could have a character that would believably demand a pound of flesh. I agree with you, but I must point out that the other playwrights of his day would not have bothered. They would say "he's a jew, therefor he's evil, end of story." As an example, Christopher Marlowe's Jew of Malta is ridonkulously evil for no reason whatsoever other than "Jew". He's basically Mr. Punch from a Punch and Judy show turned up to eleven. He was also enormously popular, and many scholars believe that Merchant of Venice was written specifically to cash in on that popularity.
Speaking of cashing in... You are correct in that Falstaff had his part expanded in Henry IV Part II because of his popularity in part I, and in fact some believe the second part was written at all as a cash in (Hollywood didn't invent sequelitis). It's even worse with Merry Wives of Windsor, which was written because Queenie Liz wanted to see Falstaff "fall in love". He didn't, really, but that play is still terrible. It is also clear that Shakespeare grew tired of him, as in the next sequel, Henry V, Flastaff was written out of the play. He dies offstage, never actually appearing in the play, most likely to avoid having him take over the play like he did Henry IV Part II. Certain lines/actions that were probably originally intended for him were instead given to members of his entourage (Bardolphe, Pistol, and Nym), who do appear and form an important sub-plot.
Fun Fact: Falstaff was not originally "Falstaff". When Henry IV Part I was first put on, he was John Oldcastle, who was a real person from the time period. His still-living descendants complained, so it was changed to someone fictional. There are still a couple lines in the play that pun on the original name, and some of the lines don't scan right (they don't have the right meter) because Falstaff has a different number of syllables.
Moving on to the character of Prince Hal/King Henry V. I should point out that Shakespeare was a pioneering writer, but he wasn't necessarily a daring writer. He was very aware or whether something he wrote might offend the Crown, and he would gleefully change history in his plays to make Elizabeth's (or James's) ancestors look better. One place this is seen is in Prince Hal. It is historical fact that Prince Hal was kind of a rogue, wining and wenching and, possibly, robbing people. Shakespeare made up the bit about Hal "faking it" to try to make him seem like a clever ruler before he actually became king. It was pretty clumsy, and he probably would have preferred not to bother, but it was an attempt to make Elizabeth's ancestor seem less like an outright crook.
On the other hand, there is some hint that Shakespeare is trying to sneak in an anti war message in these plays about England's most popular war hero. Henry V in particular spends a lot of rhetoric on how Henry is a wise and just ruler fighting a glorious war for the good of England, but hiding under the surface you can see a near-sociopath who lies to people left and right and causes the deaths of thousands. Scholars still debate how much of that was deliberate on Shakespeare's part, and how much is just modern sensibility reading something into it that wasn't intended. Oh, spoiler warning, nearly all of Henry's "low born" friends from the first two plays, Falstaff's entourage, are dead by the end, many of them directly or indirectly by Henry's actions. Considering how popular they were, this was probably not meant as an entirely good thing.
Okay, I think that's enough. Till next time. :)
2658721 That bit's from a book by Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: Inventing the Human, where he basically argues that Shakespeare was the first writer evar to have realistic characters with complex emotions and motivations. Harold Bloom is a major bardolator, spending nearly 2000 pages sucking Shakespeare's... well, anyway, that stuff should be taken with a grain of salt.
In my opinion, the best way to experience Shakespeare is to see a well-produced play or movie version. They were intended to be seen, not read. Most of Kenneth Branagh's movies are good, if big and bombastic, or Lawrence Olivier if you want something more "classic". Julie Taymore's films are interesting, if really fricking weird.
Haven't read Tolstoy. I did read The Idiot though. Three hundred pages in I began to see Dostoyevsky's merits.
Then again that may just have been Stockholm Syndrome.
No but seriously: we both seem to feel that storytelling is a holy art. The difference is that you're in the Vatican and I'm at Stonehenge. So you see me as a primitive brute, and I see you as a dogmatic bureaucrat. Both stereotypes are to some degree true, and we're both perfectly good with that.
And I'm perfectly tickled by this dichotomy because we both get along so well. You're welcome to come over for mead and roast goat anytime, and I know I'm welcome in the bishoprical palace to have tea with the bishopricks.
2659329 I liked the one with Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo.
I bought the soundtrack.
2659324 Thanks for sharing your knowledge! I'm not well-versed in Shakespeare, so I'm happy just not to be called out as a fraud anytime I talk about him.
I've begun reading other English plays written between 1600 and 1800 that were popular in their day. It's as if MLP G1, G2, and G3 had all been written in imitation of G4. I've only read two so far. They both try very hard to imitate Shakespeare, instead of trying to be their own thing. Shakespeare commentaries from a few generations ago suffer similarly. Writers in the 19th and early 20th century still abused their grammar to capture some of Shakespeare's sound, and allowed themselves to write some very silly things, as long as they sounded grand.
2659891 Never worry about being a fraud with Shakespeare. Believe me, people with WAY less knowledge than you have expounded their ideas as absolute truth before.
For other playwrights, especially those from around the same time period, remember that they might not be imitating Shakespeare so much as following the same trends that he did. Lots of people forget that Shakespeare was part of a much larger community of plays and playwrights. He was also a major shareholder in his acting company, so he wrote what would make money, which means he wrote what was already popular. Elizabethan theatre is more akin to Hollywood than serious Literature, and Shakespeare was his day's Spielberg. (Including the occasional 1941.) His major tragedies like Hamlet were written at a time when big tragedies were the big draw, but he wrote The Tempest when pastoral comedies were all the rage.
Some quick suggestions for anyone who wants the context around Shakespeare:
Thomas Kyd, Phillip Sidney, and Christopher Marlowe were the playwrights most popular immediately before Shakespeare, and several of his early works are in direct response, or even imitation, of theirs. Ben Jonson was a friend of Shakespeare's (his company even put on a few of Jonson's plays, with Shakespeare acting in them), though at the time his writing was considered more educated/intellectual than old Billy's. Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker were also well-known contemporaries. John Fletcher was Shakespeare's official successor as main playwright of the King's Men, and they co-wrote a few plays together, though Fletcher was better known for collaborating with Francis Beaumont. John Ford and John Webster were the Next Big Thing after Shakespeare.
(One warning, though, that Kyd and Webster were both best known for their incredibly bloody tragedies. Comparisons to Eli Roth are not out of place.)