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The Rogue’s Guide to Shakespeare on Film #45: Henry IV, Part 2 (2012)

01 Sunday Jan 2017

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Rogues Guide to Shakes on Film

45. Richard Eyre’s Henry IV, Part 2 (2012)

Let’s recap my assessment of The Hollow Crown so far. Episode 1 (Richard II) was excruciating, except for the monkey. Episode II (Henry IV, Part 1) proved to be quite good.

Henry IV, Part 2 simultaneously feels like a reboot and a sequel to Part 1, which turns out to be an odd sensation since this Part 2 is wonderful.

The royal plots and the themes are similar. There is a rebellion against King Henry, who is still in failing health.

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Prince Henry seems aloof and is mucking about on the wrong side of town rather than in the royal court.

The new development is that Falstaff is insistent upon his rise in social stature. While he is credited with being a knight, the actual provenance of his knighthood is uncertain, and one must suspect that Falstaff took the title upon himself. In Part 1, however, he was given credit for the slaying of the rebel Percy, even though the lie of this, too, seems to be an open secret. (Falstaff stabbed Percy, but only after Prince Hal had slain him in battle.)

With the prince’s good word and the gift of a very young page, Falstaff has been treated somewhat generously by the court, and he proudly wears red finery, in the same colors favored by the king and the prince in the battle from Part 1. Alas, Falstaff is running into trouble with Lord Chief Justice (Geoffrey Palmer, perfectly), who accosts him for those crimes committed before the war, and for continuing to be a corrupter of the prince.

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Falstaff insults him wittily, but the confrontation rankles, since the exchange brings to mind Falstaff’s shaky standing as a nobleman.

Matters are made worse when Mistress Quickly makes a scene outside her inn. Falstaff owes her a considerable sum, and he has, apparently, promised to marry her.

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In another affront to his dignity, he must mollify her, and arranges to have an evening of celebration in her house, with the prostitute Doll Tearsheet and some of his fellow associates.

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This farewell carousing will damn him with the prince, but will also be quite touching. Maxine Peake (who played Titiana in David Kerr’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream) gives Doll a remarkably mercurial mixture of vulnerability and toughness, and her affection for Falstaff moving rather than merely tawdry.

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For the most part, the prince is avoiding both the court and Falstaff’s circle, in order to continue to conceal his intentions to be an upright monarch without publicly besmirching his reputation with his old confederates.

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When the rebellion forces King Henry to prepare for war, Falstaff must conscript soldiers for the fight, and they are a sorry lot indeed. In the countryside, Sir John meets an old friend, Justice Shallow, a friend from his wilder, younger days. These scenes drag on peculiarly, as they do not drive the story forward, but deepen the characterization. What such scenes do, besides working like entertaining set pieces, is make us feel how far away from Falstaff the prince has become, and how old Falstaff actually is. He is, despite everything, a lovable rogue.

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Simon Russell Beale is one of the finest Shakespearean actors of our time, and Falstaff is one of Shakespeare’s greatest roles. While I wasn’t sure offering a realistic Falstaff rather than a broadly comedic one was the best idea in Part 1, the comedy works well with a light touch, and modulates so immaculately with the pathos of Falstaff in these scenes that it becomes some of the best Shakespeare ever filmed.

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Jeremy Irons as the dying king, and Tom Hiddleston as the prince who watches his father die, are also wonderfully performed.

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The confrontation between Falstaff and the new king at the coronation is exquisitely heartbreaking.

The war plot is much less important in Part 2, and this makes us feel much closer to the characters, at least the way Richard Eyre has filmed it.

Henry IV, Part 2 is a masterpiece.

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John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

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Shakespearing #17: The Merry Wives of Windsor

12 Sunday Oct 2014

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Shakespearing #17 by David Foley

The Merry Wives of Windsor 

17 Merry Wives of Windsor

The Merry Wives of Windsor was one of three Shakespeare plays I’d neither read nor seen when I began this project. (The other two were King John and The Two Noble Kinsmen.) I can’t say I was missing much. Riverside’s introduction repeats the tradition that it was written (in fourteen days) at the request of Queen Elizabeth. If so, she may not have been thrilled with what she got. James Shapiro speculates that Merry Wives might have been “the displeasing play” for which Shakespeare appears to apologize in his epilogue to Henry IV, Part 2.

Riverside says she’d asked for “a play about Falstaff in love,” and the imagination of a playwright being hard to herd, Shakespeare hasn’t come through as commissioned. Falstaff isn’t in love (we can wonder what it says about the Queen that she wanted or could even imagine such a thing). He’s being driven mostly by money and a little by lust, and if the Queen had a more sentimental idea in mind, Shakespeare might well find himself apologizing the next time the Christmas court entertainments rolled around.

So Merry Wives might be a lesson about the dangers of writing to order. Or it might be an early example of the chancy nature of the spinoff. Despite being “in the waist two yards about,” Falstaff is much diminished here. He’s shrunk in language. The insouciant verbal play in Henry IV, Part 1 is reduced to drollery, and the play as a whole is linguistically bare. Shakespeare has a couple of tiresome traits, and one is an apparently boundless faith in the comic possibilities of malapropism. Mistress Quickly who is comically inapt in Henry IV (“any man knows where to have me!”) is here given a stream of malapropisms. Perhaps the most tiresome scene in all Shakespeare is the one in which Evans instructs William in Latin while Mistress Quickly follows along with labored misprisions.

As always, we have to remember how far we are from Shakespeare’s language. The Riverside notes are full of things like “Shallow’s meaning has not been satisfactorily explained” and “A crux.” (Until I read this play, I never knew that “crux” could mean “a particular point of difficulty.”) Just because the Queen didn’t like it, doesn’t mean the groundlings weren’t rolling on the ground when they saw it. But it’s a puzzle, isn’t it? Why has some of Shakespeare’s language become foreign to us while much of it remains so immediate?

There’s something here about language rising to the occasion, or perhaps language and occasion rising together. One fascination of Merry Wives is that you get to see what a Shakespearean first draft might have looked like. It’s almost all prose, with lines of verse popping up at odd moments. Some of these make sense—maybe we want verse in Fenton’s love scenes—but why does Pistol speak his few lines in verse? Towards the end, in the midnight fairy masque—the kind of thing that reliably gets Shakespeare’s juices flowing—we get big chunks of verse.

It’s pretty tepid verse, but you can imagine that in another draft we’d start to soar. We’d also have a new play. Whether you’re talking about Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace, the language of a great writer is bound up in the structure of the worlds he creates, and vice versa. (For this reason I tend to get impatient with novels and plays whose language is noticeably fine. If I’m noticing it, it’s become separate from the created world.) What world would Merry Wives have become with another two weeks?

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David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.

Shakespearing #16: Henry IV, Part 1

04 Saturday Oct 2014

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Shakespearing #16 by David Foley

Henry IV, Part 1

16 1 Henry IV

I wasn’t looking forward to re-reading Henry IV. It’s not that I don’t like it, but its central trope has become stale from a hundred Hollywood films: the wastrel son redeeming himself when the chips are down. Do we really need to run that tape again? And indeed the Hal/Henry plot strand is the least alluring element of the play—particularly since, like most of the history plays, Henry IV loses some steam when the battle’s engaged.

But before then, what fun! Falstaff has become so much his own trope that you forget the mercurial, intractable, hilarious life of him. If he’s a trope, we need more such tropes, especially since the mercury of his mind is made of language. The scenes between Hal and Falstaff are scenes about the protean pleasures of words. Between his “compulsion” and his “instinct,” Falstaff is a master of words not as parry and thrust but as evasive pirouette.

His match in linguistic agility is oddly not Hal (though the prince parries and thrusts like a pro) but Hotspur. Hotspur may be the real Hollywood hero of the play—the man’s man with no patience for the world’s milquetoast niceties. Cattle rustler or rogue cop, in a movie he’d save the world from itself in the final reel. He’s sexy, in a Mel Gibson sort of way. Like Gibson, he yokes the vivid soul of a poet to a cripplingly insufficient world view. Late in the play he says he has “not well the gift of tongue,” but this is just a man’s man’s boast. Even as he’s deploring a courtier’s effeminacy—“Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin new reap’d/Show’d like a stubble land at harvest home”—he displays a virtuosic satisfaction in word and image that rivals Falstaff’s. The problem, as Northumberland warns, is that he “[ties his] ear to no tongue but [his] own.”

That this is a kind of insanity is revealed in Lady Hotspur’s speech in Act II, scene iii. It’s strange that after the ferociously alive women of the Henry VI cycle the women here should be so pallid, so tristely subservient to their men. But, however wanly, Lady Hotspur limns the mental instability beneath her husband’s bravado. Not only has she been “a banish’d woman from [her husband’s] bed” (another trope: the faint suggestion that the man’s man is not all that interested in women), but when he sleeps “the beads of sweat have stood upon [his] brow/Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream.”

It occurs to me that Henry IV is about layers of personality. If Shakespeare is moving towards more psychologically complex methods of characterization, he seems to be doing it here by refraction, a kind of prismatic splitting. Why else would Hal’s speech in Act I, Scene ii, be so mysteriously moving? (“I know you all and will a time uphold/The unyok’d humor of your idleness.”) It seems like plot. Like foreshadowing. A utilitarian aside to the audience to let us know what’s coming. But it echoes down in the deepest things we suppose about ourselves: that we are more various than the world perceives.

This sheds some light on the deep melancholy of King Henry: the charismatic, destabilizing figure of Richard II, feels frozen now in kingship, while in a tavern somewhere Hal and Falstaff take turns playing him, shifting in and out of parts in a way that gestures at the freedom—both personal and political—that theatre models for us. As in a saturnalia, theatre allows us to imagine our roles as not fixed, but provisional, poised for new improvisations.

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David Foley

David Foley is a playwright and fiction writer living in Brooklyn. His plays include Cressida Among the Greeks, Paradise, Nance O’Neil, The Murders at Argos, A Hole in the Fence, and Sad Hotel, among others. His novel The Traveler’s Companion is available on Amazon. He teaches at New York University.