Of late I’ve been living in the Henriad, that glorious quartet of Shakespeare plays that dramatize the turbulent times from the deposition of Richard II through Henry V’s trumph at Agincourt. Though they’re classified as histories, in fact the Henriad plays are tragedies that use English history for their springboard, but not for their brief. They’re at least as much fiction as fact, and with good reason: Shakespeare wasn’t writing a sober history (he could leave that to Holinshed and his ilk) but evocative, compelling theater. And that’s where the Henriad plays deliver in spades: they are entertaining, absorbing, funny, tragic, inspiring, depressing, amazing, memorable.
Consider the number of changes that Shakespeare rang on his characters and situations, all in the interest of heightened dramatic effectiveness. Harry “Hotspur” Percy, the bellicose yet oddly noble scion of the northern aristocracy, was a full generation older than Prince Hal, Henry IV’s son and heir to the throne. But Shakespeare needed to set the two men in opposition to each other as mirror contrasts, so with a stroke of a quill pen Hotspur and Harry were made the same age—thus to face each other at Shrewsbury as equals and contemporaries. Even Prince Hal’s riotous whore-mongering and barfly days are mostly an invention; history tells us that the honest-injun Henry V was a sober chap, much given to battle training punctuated by fits of spiritual contemplation. The real Henry V was probably an insufferable twit, but in Shakespeare’s portrayal he comes across as infinitely more interesting if no more admirable—filled with energy and humor, willing to go along with almost anything, but deep inside an uncompromising hypocrite whose hedonism was a carefully-worn mask, calculated to be cast off at the appropriate moment.
There is no greater play in the English language than Henry IV, Part One. Its sheer virtuosity never fails to astonish me, as Shakespeare peoples his vast canvas with consummate skill. Pure fiction intermingles with fact, history with fancy, all perfectly balanced between two contrasting pairs of characters: Henry IV and Sir John Falstaff, Prince Hal and Harry “Hotspur” Percy. Henry’s angst-ridden, joyless court is adroitly complemented by the boisterous tavern scenes in Eastcheap, bursting with those immortal and kooky fictional characters: motherly tavern-and-brothel owner Nell Quickly; heart-of-gold hooker Doll Tearsheet; grubby but stalwart followers Bardolph, Peto, and Ancient Pistol; sharp-witted hustler-on-the-make Ned Poins. All orbiting their local sun, the immense figure of Falstaff, his intelligence and wit matched only by his hedonism, his greed, his hard-headed self-interest, and his sincere substitute-fatherly love for Prince Hal.
But the Henriad is four plays, not one, and each has its glories. Richard II might be Shakespeare’s most beautiful play, filled with soaring language that emanates mostly from the most unlikely of sources—an air-headed, foppish young king who clutches in vain to his romanticized conceptions of kingly divinity while all around him the glacial progress of an England reluctantly emerging from the Middle Ages grinds on. He’s on his way down from the first scene of the play, while Henry Bolingbroke is on his way up. But that’s really the story of all four plays: you’re either on your way up or down. Richard, Henry Bolingbroke, Falstaff: they all rise and fall before us. Prince Hal becomes Henry V and ends the Henriad in triumph, but we know that he will die young, and his dubious achievement of uniting France and England under one crown will quickly turn sour and collapse into the ugliness of the War of the Roses. There are no absolute blacks or whites in the Henriad; Shakespeare respects his audiences far too much for that. We make up our own minds about his characters, whether they be sinners or saints or something in between. In fact, what they are is human—inconsistent, flawed, impossible to pigeonhole or pin down to neat sound bytes.
If I had to assign an overarching theme to the entire series of Shakespeare’s English history plays, starting with the Henriad, continuing on through the three Henry VI plays, and ending with the demonic Richard III hacked down at Bosworth Field, I think it would be blood toll. Even if Richard II was a lousy king, his deposition and murder by Henry IV triggered generations of strife. The natural progression of the kingship was destroyed when Richard, first in line for the crown via his father, eldest son of Edward III, was deposed by a cousin who was several steps removed from the legal succession. That set the various branches of the Plantagenets at each other’s throats. Only Richard III’s death, ending the hopelessly compromised dynasty, could wash the deed clean. Henry IV—never the rightful king by succession—spent most of his reign putting down revolts that had stemmed largely from his usurpation of the throne. His son Henry V conjured up militaristic bread and circuses in order to divert attention away from those same disturbances. Henry’s successors—feckless son Henry VI, competent Yorkist Edward IV, and hunchbacked villain Richard III, spent their reigns embroiled in unending civil war.
All of which makes these plays difficult to perform well. A recent filmed attempt at the Henriad, The Hollow Crown, falls sadly short, mostly I think due to a shortcoming of spirit. Its vision cannot embrace larger-than-life figures; it insists on everybody being domesticated, democratized, trimmed and coiffed and remade in a middle-class, bourgeois image—probably in the interest of appealing to the middle-class bourgeoisie amongst its audience. Shakespeare had no truck with such tunnel vision; his creative force encompassed vastness, and his characters followed suit. Only a grandiose, nearly overbearing Sir John Falstaff will make the grade, bumptious and grand and funny and bitchy and selfish, thus his horrible fall from grace at the end of the second Henry IV play is made all the more poignant. He must be appallingly attractive, in his greasy nastiness, in the first Henry IV play, just as he should sour in the second play, his once sparkling wit turned edgy, his once poignant affection for Prince Hal withered to only the greed with which he views the newly-crowned king. But the Falstaff of The Hollow Crown is a boring old fart from the get-go, earnestly seeking validation in Hal’s approval, devoid of the fire—pleasant or unpleasant—that has made him such a favorite down the years. Hal isn’t much better; he’s an attractively slender chap who comes across more like an earnest Ivy League undergrad who will take over the kingship as though slipping into the CEO slot at a tech startup. Thus The Hollow Crown offers the incongruity of a medieval England populated by modern-day Silicon Valley types. (Its Henry V is also pestered with a hopelessly wan musical score that threatens to suck what life clings to an already low-key production. Give me William Walton’s score to the Olivier film any day, or Patrick Boyle’s for Branagh.)
A stage production of the two parts of Henry IV at the Globe in London shows how to do it right. Without the trappings of an expensively-filmed production, the Globe actors take on the breadth and scope of their characters with gusto. They go big and then some. Prince Hal is robust, physical, sexy, and offers just the right amount of a young man’s heedless self-interest to make his eventual transition into an aloof young king compelling. And Falstaff? Giant, gloriously intelligent, loud-mouthed and quick-witted, he dominates every scene, an unabashed ham relishing each over-the-top moment. He’s a character in a play, and an actor having a ball playing that character, all at the same time. That’s my Falstaff, and I think that’s Shakespeare’s Falstaff as well. The Globe production lacks the pitch-perfect interiors of The Hollow Crown, the perfectly-executed costumes, the occasional CGI magic that transforms a small cast into an army at Shrewsbury. But it’s Shakespeare’s Henriad—big, blustering, fast, funny, tragic, a grand gallop in the finest theatrical tradition.
I understand that there’s a Henry V due from the Globe from the same folks who gave us the Henry IV diptych. I’ll be ordering the DVD as soon as it comes out.