Hal and His Pal
The Convoluted
Relationship between Prince Harry and Falstaff in
Henry IV Part Two
This is
another one of those plays that inspire several ideas for further
exploration – in this case lying, aging, fathers, and more – but
in which one glaring aspect has to be dealt with before going on to
others: the relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff. It was
plenty complex in Part One. In Part Two it becomes
positively torturous. Poor Hal. Poor Falstaff. Who's the good guy?
Who's the bad guy?Haven't we asked this question before? Doesn't
Shakespeare always do this to us? Well, yes. So we know the answer
before we even start. Both are both. But that only makes it more
interesting to look at.
We've
already observed the boisterous relationship between Hal and Falstaff
in the altogether more comical Part One. Although they were
already at loggerheads with each other the tone was generally that of
good, wild, prankish fun. At least sometimes. Hal, in spite of his
early monolog in which he told us that he was just playing around
with his plebeian gang and that he would grow up and return to his
proper place, we could easily forget that in the rest of his romps
with Falstaff et. al. Hal was sharp-witted, energetic, one of
the boys. Falstaff was rambunctious, funny and, in his “honour”
monolog, heroic.
Part
Two is something else. The play is filled with ”many images of
sickness, disease and old age, [and] permeated with intimations of
mortality...” (Howard, p. 1323). Rarely funny, this play is
“melancholy” and “somber” (ibid). Falstaff is no longer the
mischievous and wise anarchist, he is a fat, old, pathetic and often
cruel drunkard. And Hal is realizing that not only does he love his
father from whom he has chosen to be estranged, but that old dad is
dying and he will soon find himself – abruptly and shockingly –
king.
Friendship
can get messed up for less.
What we
have here isn't merely the parting of ways of an old man in decline
from a young man in ascension. It is the separation of the world of
the tavern in which the working class characters know “that
staying indoors by a warm fire with good company, food and
drink was infinitely more sensible than braving the dangers of
traveling at night or fighting a battle” (Egan, p. 18), from the
world of courtly power, pomp and circumstance and, as we are told
(and already know if we've seen or read Henry V) war with
France.
But
even this is not simple. The cozy world of the tavern of Part One
was really a rather sinister place of petty theft and quarrels and in
Part Two the “warm
, roistering noise overheard in the tavern – noise that seemed to
signal a subversive alternative to rebellion – turns out to be the
sound of a whore and a bully beating a customer to death.
And Falstaff, whose earlier larcenies were gilded by fantasies
of innate grace...” (Greenblatt, pp. 47-48), now romps about with
Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet but we don't find him loveable
any more. Instead he is revealed as a two-timer and a long-term
sponge who has borrowed money from Mistress Quickly while promising
to marry her then calling her a madwoman (one wonders why she would
want to marry him, she seems to be doing pretty well on her
own). Still, he is caught between the tavern and the battlefield and
in his blustering braggart way, already sensing perhaps that he's
living in a fantasy, he boasts that though old and fat he is a man
“of merit...sought after” (Act 2.4) as he heads off on his
recruiting mission.
This is
not Falstaff's best moment of shining nobility. He mocks the poor
sods he's sending off to a more or less certain death and happily
lets himself be bought off by those who can afford it. This
“recruiting scene [is] one of the most brilliant passages
Shakespeare ever created [but] we don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Of course the five potential recruits are ludicrous. Falstaff' jeers
at them, rather leadenly...Yet is is hard for us not to smile too.
Does this not make us partly complicit in Falstaff's chicanery?”
(Poole p. xliv). Yes, it does. We laugh, and cringe, at this
cruel Sir John.
Just
one more example of “Falstaff in decline” (Poole, p. liv):
his long-winded monolog about the splendid qualities of sack in which
he claims that “...valour comes from sherry...Hereof comes it that
Prince Harry is valiant...If I had a thousand sons, the first human
principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations,
and to addict themselves to sack” (Act 4.2). As
Poole writes, “Does he know what nonsense he's talking?” (p.
liii)
While
Falstaff is embarrassing himself, and us who quite liked him (oh!
where is the Falstaff of the honour soliloquy?), Prince Hal – how
banal and yet how grand – is growing up. And sobering up in more
ways than one.
In the
first of only two scenes in which Hal and Falstaff are on stage
together we see that, as previously arranged, Hal and Poins are
disguised in order to spy on Falstaff. In an earlier scene, in which
Falstaff's page, provided by Prince Harry not so much to help the old
man as to spy on him, we see that if Hal has ever trusted Falstaff
(probably not), he doesn't now. He says to Poins: “How might we
see Falstaff bestow himself tonight in his true colours, and not
ourselves be seen?” (Act 2.2)
And so
they spy. And Falstaff insults him. The Prince, he tells Doll
Tearsheet, is, “A good shallow young fellow. A would have made a
good pantler” (the Norton edition explains: pantry worker).
Falstaff goes on to compare Hal to Poins as both having “a weak
mind and an able body” (Act 2.4).
When
Hal reveals himself Falstaff's first greeting is “Ha, a bastard son
of the king's!” Their bantering exchange of insults continues and a
deeper analysis of all the insults exchanged by the two in both plays
would surely yield a book. Suffice it to say here that Falstaff is in
fact disconcerted this time: “No no no, not so. I did not think
thou wast within hearing” and, quickly running out of the sharp
retorts he produced effortlessly in Part One Falstaff pleads,
“No abuse, Hal”. Six times. He tries ungallantly to turn the
Prince's abuse onto Mistress Quickly but Hal is having none of that.
Shakespeare wisely ends the exchange by the arrival of Peto
announcing the threat of war. The switch in Hal is immediate:
By
heavens, Poins, I feel me much to blame
So idly
to profane the precious time (all quotes Act 2.4).
As Poole
puts it, “The Prince turns from prose to verse and exits from
comedy into history, never to return...” (Poole, p. lv).
And indeed the next time they meet, Hal has become King Henry the
Fifth. And Falstaff?
“I know thee not, old man.” Perhaps the most heartbreaking, but
most inevitable, of all lines in Shakespeare.
Falstaff has been sure from the very beginning that once Hal has
become king, he, Falstaff will have it made. Life will be a bed of
roses, or more likely an endless fountain of sack. He has not seen
the signs of Hal's distancing himself from him and right up to the
very moment of King Henry the Fifth's entrance Falstaff - foolishly,
with us crying, “No, don't!” - rejoices:
God save thy grace, King Hal, my royal Hal!
...God save thee, my sweet boy,
...My King, my Jove, I speak to thee, my heart! (Act 5.5)
“Oh, Falstaff,” we want to say. “You
don't talk to a king like that, especially not in public. He isn't
your sweet boy Hal anymore. You foolish old drunk, how could you not
see this coming?”
We could. From the moment Hal left the tavern he was no longer Hal.
He disappears from the stage and doesn't reappear until Act 4.3 as
the prince to be reunited with his dying father. As he contemplates
the crown, does he give a single fleeting thought to his old pal
Falstaff? No. There is only the crown and his apparently dead father
to whom he says:
...Thy due from me
Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood,
Which nature, love, and filial tenderness
Shall, O dear father, pay the plenteously.
My due from thee is this imperial crown,
Which, as immediate from thy place and blood,
Derives itself to me.
[He puts the crown on
his head.] (Act 4.3)
Henry IV has not died however but awakens to the pain of what he
believes is the Prince's eagerness to ascend the throne. In his long
and bitter monolog to his eldest son we can't help but see the
hapless Harry as an ungrateful greedy pup, but then the soon-to-be
king emerges when he answers his father:
God witness with me, when I
here came in
And found no course of breath within your
majesty,
How cold it struck my heart! ...
Coming to look on
you, thinking you dead,
And dead almost, my liege, to think you
were,
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus
upbraided it: 'The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body
of my father;
Therefore, thou best of gold art worst of
gold:
Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,
Preserving
life in medicine potable;
But thou, most fine, most honoured: most
renowned,
Hast eat thy bearer up.' Thus, my most royal
liege,
Accusing it, I put it on my head...
(Act 4.3)
The king is overwhelmed with relief at hearing these words and
hastens to give some last advice: cultivate our noble and true
friends, confound the rebels by making war on France. He ends with:
How I came by the crown, O God forgive,
And grant it may with thee in true peace live! (Act 4.3)
The prince's reply:
My gracious liege,
You
won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me;
Then plain and right must my
possession be,
Which I with more than with a common pain
'Gainst
all the world will rightfully maintain. (Act 4.3)
Not a wisp of thought,
memory, feeling for the world of the tavern. In the next act, in his
confrontation with and acceptance of the authority of the Lord Chief
Justice, Henry V makes only the vaguest reference to his wild youth,
so recently ended:
...sadly I survive
To
mock the expectation of the world,
To frustrate prophecies and to
raze out
Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down
After my
seeming. The tide of blood in me
Hath proudly flowed in vanity
till now,
Now doth it turn, and ebb back to the sea,
Where it shall mingle with
the state of floods,
And flow henceforth in
formal majesty (Act 5.2).
Gone is the juvenile
delinquent, who was only pretending all along. The new King has come
forth in his rightful role.
Therefore, what else can
King Henry the Fifth possibly say to the silly, joyous delusional old
Falstaff's “My sweet boy Hal” but, “I know thee not, old man”?
The tragedy isn't in Hal's
sudden meanness, the tragedy comes much earlier than the rejection.
It is in the inevitability of the breaking of Falstaff's
heart. Falstaff, the glorious anarchist who has spent his life poking
fun and guffawing and conniving – to our immense amusement – at
the powers-that-be, has metamorphosed into a lonely buffoon in a
fantasy world in which he is not old, in which he is important, in
which he and his great pal Hal will, stumbling and laughing, ascend
the throne with a flask of sack in one hand and a young Doll
Tearsheet by the other. Oh foolish Falstaff! Subversion doesn't work
like that. Everything Hal has done has been part of the power
structure of the Kingdom of England.
Yes, it is heartbreaking to
see (or imagine) the look on Falstaff's face at the words “I know
thee not, old man.” Yes, King Henry V regrets having to say them
and banish his former fellow-carouser. But what choice did he have,
really? He is bound up in the Great Mechanism that brought his
father to the throne and will in time bring the pathetic Henry VI to
the throne. In his repudiation of Falstaff, Henry V convinces us all
“to magnificent and crushing effect” (Poole, p lx)
that he is the king, and rightfully so. Falstaff may, as Jan Kott
(of Great Mechanism fame) describes him, personify “the Renaissance
lust for life and thunderous laughter at heaven and hell, at the
crown and all other laws of the realm...[and possess] a plebeian
wisdom and experience...” He may “not let history take him in.”
He may “scoff at it” (Kott p. 99). But he is still, like the
fierce Katherine and the enraged Shylock, crushed by the Great
Mechanism. His time, like theirs, has not come. Hal's has.
July
2012
Works cited:
- The Norton Shakespeare, based on the
Oxford Edition. Ed. Greenblatt,
Stephen et al. Second edition. 2008.
- Egan,
Gabriel. Shakespeare and Marx. Oxford
University Press. 2004.
- Greenblatt,
Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations, “Invisible Bullets”.
Clarendon Press. 1988.
- Howard, Jean E. in The
Norton Shakespeare, see above.
- Kott,
Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. W.W. Norton and Company.
1964.
- Poole,
Andrew. “Introduction” to the Penguin edition, 2005.
Films seen:
- BBC, 1979.
Director: David Giles. Cast: Prince
Hal – David Gwillim; King Henry – Jon Finch; Falstaff – Anthony
Quayle; Mistress Quickly – Brenda Bruce; Doll Tearsheet – Frances
Cuka. As in Part One,
Anthony Quayle is a masterly Falstaff, John Finch is perfect as Henry
IV and David Gwillim can simply not compete with Kenneth Branagh who
is forever and always Hal even though he never played him, at least
not on film.
- Chimes at
Midnight”, 1965. Director:
Orson Wells. Cast: Prince Hal – Keith Baxter; King Henry – John
Gielgud; Falstaff – Orson Welles; Mistress Quickly – Margareth
Rutherford; Doll Tearsheet – Jeanne Moreau. Combining both plays
as well as Henry V,
Orson Welles portrays a tragic Falstaff in this beautiful black and
white somewhat low key labor of love.
- My Own
Private Idaho, 1991. Director:
Gus van Sant. Cast: (Scott Favor) Prince Hal – Keanu Reeves; (Jack
Favor) King Henry – Tom Troupe; (Bob Pigeon) Falstaff – William
Richert; ) Mike Waters) Poins (or somebody) – River Phoenix. Truly
a strange movie, this too makes use of both Part One and
Part Two. Why Van Sant chose to
incorporate a great deal of the plays, often literally word for word,
into his story is a mystery to me but somehow it works. Sort of.
Seen
on stage: Yes! Seen at the Roundhouse in London on April 16, 2008, it
was the first complete Shakespeare play we had ever seen in English.
Had we but known, we could have seen more. The Roundhouse was
presenting all of the History Plays, but this was at the beginning of
our Shakespeare days, and we didn't have a clue. Still we saw this
one! And that was a giant step in the whole process leading to this
blog.
