← In Our Time
In Our Time
Henry IV Part 1
00:51:05
Shakespeare's powerful exploration of power and succession with Hotspur, Hal and Falstaff.
Loading summary
Transcript120 lines
- [00:00]
Lawrence Publicova
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
- [00:06]
Misha Glennie
The best B2B marketing gets wasted on the wrong people.
- [00:09]
Emma Smith
So when you want to reach the right professionals, use LinkedIn ads.
- [00:12]
Misha Glennie
LinkedIn has grown to a network of
- [00:14]
Emma Smith
over 1 billion professionals, including 130 million decision makers.
- [00:18]
Lawrence Publicova
And that's where it stands apart from other ad buyers.
- [00:21]
Emma Smith
You can target your buyers by job
- [00:22]
Misha Glennie
title, industry, company role, seniority, skills, company
- [00:25]
Lawrence Publicova
revenue, so you can stop wasting budget
- [00:27]
Misha Glennie
on the wrong audience.
- [00:29]
Emma Smith
It's why LinkedIn Ads generates the highest B2B return on ad spend of major ad networks. Spend $250 on your first campaign on LinkedIn Ads and get $250 credit for the next one.
- [00:40]
Misha Glennie
Just go to LinkedIn.com Broadcast that's LinkedIn.com Broadcast. Terms and conditions apply.
- [00:47]
Lawrence Publicova
This is not the future we were promised. Like how about that for a tagline for the show from the BBC?
- [00:53]
Misha Glennie
This is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.
- [01:00]
Lucy Munro
This isn't about qu quarterly earnings or about tech reviews.
- [01:03]
Misha Glennie
It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your
- [01:08]
Lawrence Publicova
everyday life and all the bizarre ways
- [01:11]
Misha Glennie
people are using the Internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4. And this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description. Wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1 asks who will succeed to the throne and why. Now, for his Tudor audience, that was a very pressing question because Elizabeth I had named no successor. So playwrights who were banned from openly exploring that disturbing fact turn to history to consider themes of power, legitimacy and succession. And when you add Henry IV's relevance for the Tudors to the vivid characters of Falstaff, Hotspur and Hal, the tensions between noble fathers and sons, it's no wonder this play was one of Shakespeare's most popular. Then and now with me to discuss Henry iv, Part One are Lucy Munro, professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature at King's College London, Lawrence Publicova, Associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Bristol, and Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, University of Oxford. Emma, simple question to start. Can you summarize the plot of the play?
- [02:45]
Emma Smith
Absolutely. So shaken as we are so won with care. So the play begins in a downward beat turmoil and. And it's all about the attempts of Henry iv, the Title character really to assert himself both in the kingdom, which is at civil war, as a consequence of the way that Henry came to the throne by deposing his cousin Richard, and in his family where his heir Harry or Hal, is not behaving as a royal presumptive heir ought to do, or perhaps in some ways is behaving exactly in that way. That's to say he is avoiding political and national obligations and enjoying himself in the taverns of Eastcheap. So the play goes from the aftermath of one battle and ends up in the aftermath of another. It's held in this moment of civil turmoil and by the end we've got a kind of stasis, not a conclusion.
- [03:44]
Misha Glennie
Now you mentioned the Boar's Head Tavern and that's where Hal encounters his friend Falstaff. Now when Shakespeare conceived of Falstaff originally, I presume he thought it was uncontroversial, but it turned out not to be.
- [03:59]
Emma Smith
So who knows whether Shakespeare was doing this tongue in cheek or not. But yes, he takes a character who in the historical sources was called John Oldcastle. Oldcastle was a friend of the historic king and was also had become by the Elizabethan period a sort of proto martyr for the Protestant cause. Foxe's great big book known as the Book of Martyrs was all about the pre history of Protestantism. Everybody good in the past basically had been a Protestant, including John Oldcastle who was a Lollard. So he was a martyred. The historical Oldcastle on, on whom Shakespeare seems to base his Falstaff was a martyred figure, a figure of principle and a figure of. Of upright righteousness. So that's everything that Falstaff isn't. But we think that the original name for Falstaff was directly Old Castle. There's a reference to my old lad of the castle, which is a rather pointless phrase if that's. If it' not punning on the name. And unsurprisingly, perhaps the modern day descendants, that's to say the Elizabethan descendants of the Oldcastle family, did not take kindly to this representation of their illustrious Puritan ancestor. And it seems on those grounds that in between perhaps the first performance and certainly the publication of the play, the name is changed from Oldcastle to Falstaff.
- [05:20]
Misha Glennie
I see. So Lucy Munro, let's talk about the history plays as a genre in the 1590s. What do we need to know about them?
- [05:31]
Lucy Munro
I think the first thing we need to know about history plays in this period is just how popular they were. It's arguably the most popular Genre of the later 1580s, the 1590s, propelled to some extent by a company called the Queen's Men, who were set up to represent the crown in some respects, did a lot of touring around the country. And their repertory seems to have been really rooted in historical drama. And it's a company that Shakespeare seems to have had some connection with, because a lot of of his plays, including the Henry IV plays and Henry V, are based on plays that were performed by the Queen's Men or have their inspiration in place to form the Queen's Men. So the Queen's Men do a King John play, they do a Richard III play, they do a Henry V play, they do a King Lear, for example. And then by the 1590s, you have a whole range of companies who are performing history plays. So if you're a playgoer, you could go to a different playhouse on a different afternoon and see a different bit of the earlier history, a different bit of the late, two rival versions of the same historical narrative. And the other important thing about the history play is that it's very, very varied. So we often tend to think of history plays as English histories. The first Folio edition of Shakespeare's plays from season 23 has been really influential here, that it categorizes plays as comedies, histories and tragedies, and it puts all of the English histories into the history play category. It puts the plays that are based in other countries, other kind of periods, in the tragedies section or in the comedies section. But actually, the history plan, 1590s is global histories, it's early medieval histories, early British histories. It's a complete range.
- [07:15]
Misha Glennie
But as we've heard, these plays had to avoid any discussion of contemporary politics. But for the audience, for the Tudor audience, how much would the contemporary political context be in their minds?
- [07:30]
Lucy Munro
Nonetheless, I think it would be quite pressing. And there is an acknowledgement in the period that when you represent a historical period on stage, you're saying things about your contemporaries as well. So there's a dramatist called Thomas Hayward who writes a pamphlet about the theater called Napolegifractors in the Jacobean period. And he says that, you know, when we represent history, we're representing things that allow us to see examples of how virtuous our historical forebears were or how vicious they were. So he offers history as a didactic thing, something that teaches you, but it also gives you a means of thinking about politics and thinking about political process. And it's really, I think, vividly present in the 1590s. The idea that the historical past can offer you a kind of mirror of sorts for what's happening in the present, even if it's a disappointment, distorted mirror, or it's represented at a remove.
- [08:27]
Misha Glennie
And why were the 1590s so important, really?
- [08:30]
Lucy Munro
Because Elizabeth I is aging and she's declined to name an heir, I think for quite good political reasons. Because if she was to name an heir, it would make her vulnerable in certain ways. But the longer we get into the 1590s, and Henry IV, part one was probably first performed around 1596, 1597, Elizabeth's getting into her 60s, the pressures on her are increasing, the pressures on the kingdom are increasing. And so these plays about historical periods of instability around rule, so instability about who will succeed, but also, you know, what the ruler does when they get in, become very prominent in that period.
- [09:13]
Misha Glennie
Thank you, Lucy. Lawrence Publicova. If we take this to be a play about Prince Hal and it's a big if, I admit, then it's arguably a coming event, do you think that could have been Shakespeare's intention?
- [09:28]
Lawrence Publicova
Yes, I think so. I mean, there are lots of centres of interest in this play. I think there's Hal, but there's also Falstaff and there's Hotspur and there's the King. But if we're following Hal's trajectory and he is sort of, in a. In a technical sense, he's at the heart of the play because he moves between the worlds of the tavern and the court and the battlefield. And it does seem that that's what holds the play together. And in that sense, I mean, I suppose we have to see what he's rejecting in order to understand that trajectory. So that's why the play begins in the tavern world, perhaps not actually in the tavern in Act 1, Scene 2, but with Hal and Falstaff together. If you think of the play as part of a sequence of plays, which is another big if, is this the right way to approach it? But the previous play in the sequence, Richard ii, was about a man who starts as a king and is unkinged by Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV. Whereas the plays that follow our play, Henry IV Part 1 and then Part 2, and Henry V, show us instead a man becoming a king. And Shakespeare seems interested in what's involved in that trajectory. So I suppose if we're more sympathetic with how we might see it as something that he has to give up, that all this fun that he has in the tavern world and the linguistic exuberance, the throwing back and forth of insults with Falstaff all the disguise and merriment and so on, is something that he needs to close off in himself in order to become the king that his father expects him to be. That's the sympathetic reading, I think the less sympathetic reading of how is that he's a very good political operator and that he's in the tavern world for other reasons, one of which might be, and this is expressed by certain characters in the play, that he's studying these companions, he's learning from them. He's almost like a sort of ethnographer who's going in there with a rather cynical reason of, in the end, wanting to be able to lead or manipulate these figures as he does eventually on the battlefield at Agincourt in Henry V and the other way of seeing it. And this is the version that Hal gives us himself in his very strange first soliloquy at the end of the. Well, his only soliloquy, really, at the end of the second scene, is that the reason he's in the tavern world is because he knows that this is sullying his reputation, and therefore, when he does emerge from it, it will be all the more dramatic, all the more spectacular. So he's using these tavern companions as a foil for his later redemption.
- [11:46]
Misha Glennie
Yes. That soliloquy that you refer to in Act 1, Scene 2 in. It's kind of odd because Hal appears to map out everything that you're about to see in the. In the play. Can you tell us a bit more about that, about what his motivation is?
- [12:02]
Lawrence Publicova
Yeah, it's a fascinating speech. It's a really awkward speech. I think a lot of us don't really know what to make of it, but it does set the trajectory for the play that follows. I mean, one thing to say about it is actually its structure. People tend to speak prose in the tavern world, really exuberant and imaginative prosecutors. But prose versus more the language of the court and the battlefield, the language of chivalry and politics and so on. So the fact that Hal speaks what is the only verse soliloquy in the play, in the tavern world or the tavern sphere, just after all of his companions leave, is significant in itself. It's as though that's an indication that he's having to trammel himself, shut himself down in some way, one way of coming at it, which goes all the way back to Samuel Johnson in the 18th century. He thinks that this is a natural picture of a great mind offering excuses to itself. And I quite like that sense that Hal is trying to convince himself of something that perhaps he doesn't entirely believe
- [12:57]
Misha Glennie
so, Emma, in those rioters boar's head scenes, I'm not sure what we're looking at. Are we looking at a comedy, at a tragedy, or what?
- [13:07]
Emma Smith
I think we're looking at scenes of merriment. I love the fact that Falstaff is introduced in Act 1, as we're just discussing now asking what time it is, and Hal replies, you know, what does it matter to you what time? It's because you never do anything, and goes through a great long, wonderful, bravura speech about how pointless the question is. But it's also a question which is anti history. I mean, history is all about, you know, what time is it in some larger sense. And the fact that in the tavern scene we don't care about that these values are all suspended. Not least that the tavern scene is broadly a kind of Elizabethan setting, not a 15th century one. So there's a sort of temporal slip there. I think we're watching a play enact its own premise, which is to say it looks a lot more fun to be in Eastcheap, whether you're Hal or the audience members, than it does to be buffeted by constant civil war and terrible, monstrous, unspeakable Welsh women desecrating corpses, which is what's worrying Henry IV and his leaders. So the play enacts that premise and I think in that makes the inevitable reformation that Hal sketches out that Lawrence has just described a bit of a mixed sort of narrative blessing. In a way, it's reassuring. Don't worry, after all this turmoil, the succession is assured. There will be a good king who understands that something of his responsibilities. He's waiting and he's going to come. And on the other hand, the cost of that is going to be the end of, he's cheap, no more of that.
- [14:44]
Misha Glennie
Yeah. So that seems to imply a tragic trajectory for Falstaff. Want to get a little more into Falstaff, Lucy, about that relationship with Hal, how are they impacting on each other?
- [14:59]
Lucy Munro
Yeah, we've been talking a lot about Hal, but I'm really interested in the question of what Falstaff is getting out of that relationship or what he thinks he might get out of that relationship. And there is a sense sometimes that Falstaff is hoping for preferment when Hal eventually becomes king, so he'll get some kind of presumably quite easy and well paid gig for his retirement or whatever. But at the same time, there does seem to be a personal spark and a personal link, and it depends to some extent how you Play it. How emotionally involved Falstaff seems to be, how calculating he seems to be. There's a wonderful line in one of those earlier scenes where Falstaff is pretending that it's Hal who's corrupted him. And he says, you know, I knew nothing before I met you, but now I'm, you know, little better than one of the wicked. So that sense, yeah, that sense that he is the one who has been wronged here, but he clearly cares about that relationship. And Hal at certain moments really seems to care about their relationship, despite what he said in the soliloquy that Lawrence was discussing. You know, when Hal thinks that Falstaff is dead on the battlefield, he says, I could have better spared a better man. So there is that sense of an emotional spark between these two characters.
- [16:16]
Misha Glennie
So is Hal right to blame Falstaff or is Falstaff right to blame Hal for their fate?
- [16:23]
Lucy Munro
They're probably, probably as bad as each other. But there is that very clear eyed sense that Hal will have to reject Falstaff at some point. And it's partly because the play is dealing with the narrative of the prodigal son. You know, the person who has this period when they're enacting all of the vices and all of the fantasies, but then has to be reformed and brought back into the family, or in this case, the rightful place in the succession. And that line that Hal has in the play, extemporary scene, sort of later into the play where Falstaff says, you know, banish plump Jack and banish all the world. And Hal says, I do, I will. Which is just such a wonderfully weighted line. And I think partly the shift of tenses as well, which just makes it
- [17:09]
Misha Glennie
so powerful, so over to the other world, the world of chivalry and real politics and civil war. Lawrence. We have Hotspur, much praised by everyone, as an example to the dissolute Hal. But he's an example of what exactly?
- [17:26]
Lawrence Publicova
Of chivalry. But in a very particular sense. I mean, he's a very significant figure in the play, really. I mean, he appears, unlike Hal, on the title page of the first quarto. In fact, he appears twice with two names, Henry Percy and Henry Hotspur. And I suppose it's quite clear that Shakespeare is setting him up as a sort of foil for Hal, as someone from whom Hal has to learn. Because historically, Hotspur is a lot older than Hal. In fact, he's older than Hal's father. But Shakespeare sets them up as contemporaries and Hal makes fun of Hotspur. Chivalry, that is his Emphasis on martial exploits, honour, incredibly important word in this play.
- [18:06]
Misha Glennie
Yes. And Hotspur comes across as quite priggish sometimes.
- [18:10]
Lawrence Publicova
Yes. And sort of so fixated on honour that he loses sight of everything else. I mean, it might help to hear a little bit of his language. One of the most famous speeches that he speaks is at a moment when his father says that he's imagining some great exploit. And he says, by heaven, methinks it were an easy leap to pluck bright honour from the pale faced moon or dive into the bottom of the deep where fathom line could never touch the ground and pluck up drowned honour by the loc. So this very sort of high register heroic language. But what's interesting, I mean in some ways that's the greatest expression of a martial masculinity. And yet he's then said by his relatives to be in a woman's mood when he speaks these lines. And he's later said to have a want of government. And I think that's an important distinction to make between statecraft and chivalry. That as a good statesman it's good to be able to speak within the chivalric language because it gets people onside and excited and wanting to fight for you. But at the same time there's something about chivalry that can sometimes be a rather sort of prickly sense of honour that loses sight of the bigger picture. And there's something about Hotspur that feels a bit haunted as well. I mean, you know, he's not performing his marital duties, as we learn in the scene with his wife. He's watchful, you know, he can't sleep, he's sort of shouting out things at night. So it's had an effect on him and those around him, this absolute dedication to chivalric honor.
- [19:32]
Misha Glennie
We've heard, Emma, that this is part of a sequence. Richard ii, Henry iv, Part one, Part two, Henry V. Did the audience understand it as a package, the Henry iv, Part one, Henry iv, Part two, Henry V. Or was it something that Shakespeare came up with later, the sequel?
- [19:53]
Emma Smith
I think it's a bit of a post hoc construction, the sort of box set, as Trevenant the great director called it, the box set of Shakespeare's histories. Not least because this play is always called Henry Ivan, not Part one, just Henry iv. So Henry iv Part two seems more like a sequel, like for the want of argument, Legally Blonde 2 or something. That's to say a reprise of what was wonderful in my view about the first episode rather than a two part play. And it's the first Folio that Lucy already mentioned, posthumously printed, that constructs this narrative of English history by organizing the plays on the reins in historical order and by organising, you know, Part one and then Part two. I think it's actually absolutely clear that Shakespeare intended to use the next bit of the historical material he finds mostly in Holinshed's Chronicles, in another play. But many critics have felt that between them, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V might have originally been planned in Shakespeare's mind as a single sequel, a single second play, two part plays were quite common in telling big stories. Christopher Mahler's Tamburlaine perhaps is the great exemplar of that. And I think it's what we've already been talking about. It's the popularity of Falstaff, which interposes this additional play in the sequence. I think that some people who saw Henry IV would have previously seen Richard ii, but we've got no evidence that the plays are all put together in a kind of catch up session, as they might be now. Nor is there a sense that the plays are structured as we're quite used to seeing serials, where there's a bit that says, you know, in case you missed it, this is what's important. There's a little bit of that you can pick up as you go along. But I think these were self standing plays and the shape of them is the shape of an, of a single afternoon's entertainment.
- [21:50]
Lawrence Publicova
This is not the future we were promised. Like, how about that for a tagline for the show from the BBC.
- [21:56]
Misha Glennie
This is the interface, the show that explores how tech is rewiring your week and your world.
- [22:03]
Lucy Munro
This isn't about quarterly earnings or about tech review.
- [22:06]
Misha Glennie
It's about what technology is actually doing to your work and your politics, your
- [22:11]
Lawrence Publicova
everyday life and all the bizarre ways
- [22:14]
Misha Glennie
people are using the Internet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Lucy. There's a lot of geography in this play, in particular about how England relates to Wales and to Scotland and the borderlands. What's the point of that? How's it running through the play?
- [22:36]
Lucy Munro
I think one of the things it does is create that sense that King Henry is being beleaguered on all sides. So you have this sense of the threat from the north, this sense of the threat from Wales as well. But it's important, I think, that England has quite different relationships with those two countries in the period that's represented historically and in the present moment of the 1590s. So Wales has been invaded by the Normans in the 11th century has been made part of England. Scotland is a separate kingdom. So those relationships are quite different in the 1590s. It's not until James VI first comes to the throne in 1603 that you have this initially very ad hoc kind of union between England and Scotland. But the play is interested, I think, in where England sits in relation to the other parts of the islands. In Richard ii, the earlier part of the narrative, you know, we've seen something of the English activities in Ireland in that period as well. But one of the most fascinating things, I think, in Henry IV Part 1, is the way in which the map is brought onto the stage and it's going to be divided up between Mortimer and Glyndua and Hotspur, you know, between Wales, between the north of England and the south of England.
- [23:47]
Misha Glennie
Laurence, you wanted to come in there.
- [23:49]
Lawrence Publicova
There's quite an interesting parallel to draw with King Lear, which also has a moment where a map is brought out and a kingdom is divided into three. And in King Lear, there's a very unspecific sense of exactly what is contained within those three parts of the kingdom. There are plenteous rivers and so on, but there isn't really a clear and precise sen of location. Henry IV is very different. You. You have a very clear sense that the kingdom will be divided up, with Glendur getting the bit to the west of the 7 and Mortimer getting the bit to the south of the Trent and Harry Percy getting the bit, Hotspur getting the bit to the. To the north of the Trent. So there's a much more distinctive sense of a kingdom. There's even an argument over the course of the Trent that Hotspur seems annoyed that it cuts him out of a bit of land because of where it bends around. And so he talks about recoursing it in order to get a bit more land. And I think. I think more generally, Henry iv, compared to some other plays, just has a very distinctive sense of the kingdom. There are lots of place names. Holmden, Ravenspur, Shrewsbury, Bristol, Burton, Bridgnorth, Gloucestershire, St Albans. There are others. It has a very precise sense of geography.
- [24:53]
Misha Glennie
Lucy.
- [24:54]
Lucy Munro
But also in these scenes, we have the speaking of Welsh on stage. So Glyndwr and Mortimer's wife, who's Glyndwr's daughter, speak to each other in Welsh, but there's no dialogue specified in the printed texts that have come down to us.
- [25:07]
Misha Glennie
So you mean the director could. Right, I want you to say, actually, we're going to betray Henry IV here, or we're going to betray.
- [25:15]
Lucy Munro
Well, so there's quite a sizable Welsh community in London at the time. But there's nothing in the text that the plates come down to us that specifies what the actors say. There are just stage directions saying that Glyndua and Lady Mortimer speak in Welsh. You know, the lady speaks in Welsh. And so productions have had to devise dialogue for those moments. We think there were probably a couple of Welsh speakers or people who could at least pronounce the words in Shakespeare's company at the time for that dialogue. So if you had Welsh spectators at the theatre in the 1590s, they could have presumably got something slightly different from the play than the monoglot English speaking audience would have got from it.
- [25:57]
Misha Glennie
Lawrence Pablikova what does the play tell us about the nature of power?
- [26:02]
Lawrence Publicova
I think one of the things it tells us is that. That it's incredibly important to some people and less important to others. You know, you've got Falstaff as the, perhaps the spokesperson of those. I mean, it's not that he doesn't want things Falstaff, you know, preferment coming his way, but I think he's less sort of invested in the rise to power or the maintenance of power than some of the other characters around him. But I think the play also thinks about how power operates. I think one of the great is where Hal and Falstaff act out Hal going to his father to answer for himself. And there is a moment where Falstaff sort of says, well, okay, take this joint stool as my throne and this pillow will be my cushion, and so on. And it makes you think about, okay, well, how does one exert power? Is power partly about performance and imposing that performance on others? Is it something that you perform, that you inhabit identities rather than always having them? As Emma started off by saying, you know, this is a play where. Where Henry IV comes to the throne and his power is very insecure. And so much of the play is about the maintenance of power, but also about its legitimacy.
- [27:11]
Misha Glennie
So when you talk about it being performative, are you saying that it's important for these characters to assert their narrative?
- [27:20]
Lawrence Publicova
I think that's certainly the case for Hal. You know, what gives him legitimacy? I mean, the play starts off with Henry iv, his father, doubting Hal's capacity for coming to power and properly ruling the kingdom. He even wishes that he had Hotspur as a son rather than Hal. So one of the things Hal learns how to do in this play is to adopt the right language and the right behavior to appear a legitimate ruler. And a lot of that has to do with stealing the honour off Hotspur, particularly on the battlefield. I mean, it's significant that there's a single combat which Howe wins. I mean, as we know from other parts of the dialogue, really the reason the King wins at Shrewsbury is that the army of the rebels isn't as large as they would have liked it to be. But there's something about Howe's performance of chivalry in that moment that grants him a legitimacy that he wouldn't otherwise have.
- [28:09]
Misha Glennie
Emma. A lot of male characters in this play, not so many women. Why not?
- [28:14]
Emma Smith
It's a really interesting question. Because actually, in previous history plays, Shakespeare has amplified women's roles. In Richard iii, famously, for example, he keeps Queen Margaret alive when historically she was out of the picture. And that's because the voice offers something. So it is really interesting to think, why not here? In some ways it's too simple, but I'll say it anyway. I mean, this is really a play about daddy issues. It's Hal and the King or Halen. Falstaff. It's Hotspur and Northumberland. These are men understanding themselves in relation to fathers or sons who overshadow them or undermine their authority or something. There isn't much room for women in that very patrilinear narrative. Lawrence mentioned that we do get the wife of Hotspur, Kate. Shakespeare likes Kates and often makes them quite feisty women, but her feistiness is really only employed to say, why, you know, why have you sort of shut me out of everything? So it's a little cameo which almost reinforces the absence of women elsewhere. So I think this is really a play about male relationships. And it's interesting maybe to think when Shakespeare comes closest back to this kind of narrative, which I think he does in Hamlet, another coming of age story, he does actually want to triangulate that much more with a powerful female character in Gertrude, Lucy.
- [29:43]
Misha Glennie
What were the challenges for the first actors performing this play and what opportunities does it offer to the performer?
- [29:52]
Lucy Munro
I think one of the most important things about this play is the extent to which it's an ensemble. So there's a relatively even split between the leading roles in terms of numbers of lines and things. So Falstaff has about 20% of the lines, Hal and Hotspur both about 18%, the King around 11%. And it demands really strong casting. I think, top to bottom, you can't get away with having one very charismatic lead actor who's carrying the rest of the cast. It's a play that poses challenges, maybe in terms of its shifts tonally. Lawrence talked earlier about the way that you have this mixture of prose and verse, there are possibly sort of technical challenges for actors in those. But it's interesting that one of the scenes that has often been most popular in 20th, 21st century productions, which is that the play extempore sequence, where Hal and Falstaff take turns at playing Hal and the king, and the king lecturing Hal on his bad behaviour, which is an incredibly powerful, really funny scene in performance. It actually didn't figure on the stage for a while in the 18th and 19th centuries. And there's an anecdote that Abraham Lincoln actually had an actor who'd been in a production of the play to the White House. And one of the questions he asked him was, you know, well, this wonderful scene, one of the best scenes in the play. Why is it not staged? And the reply of the actor is very interesting because he said, there's never anything distinctive enough about the actor playing Prince Hal to make the impression interesting, to make the impersonation interesting. So presumably at that point Hal wasn't really being viewed particularly as a leading role, it was being under cast a bit. Whereas if we move on into the 20th and 21st century, Hal has often been seen as a really important, you know, dramatic centre of the play, has often been very strongly cast by an up and coming actor.
- [31:49]
Misha Glennie
Emma, how much is that extempore scene, the scene where Hal and Falstar exchange roles? You know, at one point Falstaff is playing Henry iv, at one point Hal is playing Hal and then they swap roles. How important is that for the play, that one scene?
- [32:06]
Emma Smith
I think it's fabulously important. It shows, as Lawrence has said, that kingship seems to be a matter of convincing props. So the actual king in the play may not look all that different from the pretend king because he too is pretend. In the wider context of the theatre, I think it's very important. It's a way that Hal and Falstaff articulate anxieties about their relationship through the guise of these other characters. Because it's in that guise that Hal is able to acknowledge what Falstaff most fears that in fact he will have to reject him, as we've already discussed. And it brings the whole seriousness of the history play genre into a brilliant saturnalien kind of upturning. I love the moment when they swap and Falstaff says, depose me. And you think we've had one of the most serious tragedies, historical tragedies, in Richard ii, all about this, and here it's just a throwaway kind of Wonderful joke for the swapping of parts. So I think it's. It's thematically serious and revelatory, but also great fun, great theatrical fun.
- [33:15]
Misha Glennie
So after that, we go to the crucial Battle of Shrewsbury. Lawrence, we've got Falstaff there, Hal there, Hotspur, all of their ideas of honour, their varying ideas of honour, are put to the test which one wins out in the end.
- [33:32]
Lawrence Publicova
I think the ideas of honour, as they are expressed by the political figures of the play, are always being buffeted by other forces, comic forces or subversive forces. And you get this even before Shrewsbury. So in the tavern scene at the end of Act 3, where everyone has, as usual, been speaking prose and Hal comes in with the news of the battle to come and interrupts the. This prose world with verse. And it's an absolutely brilliant exchange he has with Falstaff. He says, the land is burning, Percy stands on high, and either we or they must lower lie. So he speaks, you know, a heroic couplet, which is meant to sort of gee everyone up and go off to fight. And Falstaff replies brilliantly, with rare words, brave world. Hostess, my breakfast come. Oh, I could wish this tavern were my drum. That is the drum, the place where he's going to recruit soldiers. So he sort of mimics Howe's. Howe's already left by this point. He sort of mimics Howe's style in a way that completely undercuts it as well. And that seems to be Falstaff's role in the play, really, to question, to probe these ideas of chivalric heroism and honour and the value of power that are expressed by other characters. And so, just before the Battle of Shrewsbury, Falstaff has his wonderful catechism on honour, where he wonders what it is. Does it have skill in surgery? No. What is it, then? It's a word. It's heir. Who has it. He that died a Wednesday. You know, the honour is actually detrimental to living. And for Falstaff, the important thing is life. Give me life. So you have all these different ideas about what honour is swirling around in the play. And I think Falstaff, usually in this play, at least gets the last word, as he does in that scene in the Eastcheap Tavern.
- [35:11]
Misha Glennie
But do you think Falstaff has an inkling that at some point fairly soon he's going to be thrown open?
- [35:19]
Lawrence Publicova
Yeah, that's a fascinating question. I mean, I think it is set up, as we've said, both in Hal's soliloquy in Act 1, Scene 2. So we know. But Falstaff also knows because of that scene that Emma and Lucy have both discussed the play Extempore in the Tavern, and that wonderful four such simple words that Lucy's already discussed. I do, I will. I mean, I guess the question there is, who is speaking those words? I mean, it's Hal impersonating his father. But it seems that in that transition between I do, I will, Hal goes back to being himself and seeing himself in the future. And that exchange can be played any number of ways. And I think it's been quite popular more recently for Hal, really become quite serious at that moment, so that Falstaff senses that something is afoot.
- [36:06]
Misha Glennie
Emma, you wanted to come in there.
- [36:08]
Emma Smith
I was just gonna say that Hal has the perfect excuse to do the deed with Falstaff, doesn't he? In Shrewsbury, Falstaff, I mean, very sensibly but distinct, unheroically lies down and pretends to be dead in the battle. There's a completely wonderful stage direction where Falstaff riseth up, which makes him feel like a principle of the springs. A person who can't be killed, you know, more than. More than human or something. But Falstaff, then, in a way which is not so cheerful, and let's have another cup of sack and bring me my breakfast, sees the body of Hotspur and stabs the body, body, the dead body, in order to claim the kill for himself. It's a despicable act, I think, in any value system. And Hal knows that this has happened. He knows that Falstaff has not in fact killed Hotspur. He has the moment when he could complete the reconciliation with his true father by rejecting his pretend father. But he doesn't. He keeps them in a kind of balance at the end. So it's all teed up for him to do precisely that rejection.
- [37:18]
Misha Glennie
But not yet, Lucy.
- [37:20]
Lucy Munro
Is that partly, though, because Shakespeare is keeping things open for the sequel. Yeah, but he's already thinking, well, I like this character. I'm gonna want to keep him around.
- [37:30]
Emma Smith
It's really interesting to think Falstaff lives to fight or not fight another day.
- [37:35]
Misha Glennie
But of course, I mean, that moment when Hal covers for Falstaff on the battlefield. He could easily. That could easily have been the moment where he says, you old fool, I'm not going to stand up for you anymore. This could have been a moment of change.
- [37:52]
Emma Smith
It seems completely straightforward in moral terms, doesn't it? This isn't looking him in the eye and saying, I don't want any more fun in Eastcheap. This is the battlefield. This is a different place. And Hal flunks that. Maybe. Maybe that's what. I don't know whether that's the way to see it, but you're absolutely right, Lucy. Shakespeare flunks it too, because we want more box office, more false stuff.
- [38:14]
Misha Glennie
So at this moment, Hotspur's dead. Hal appears to be reformed, or on the way to reform. Do we start cheering for Hal as the, you know, potential national hero that he becomes later on in Henry V, with Agincourt and all that?
- [38:30]
Emma Smith
I think at the end of the play, we almost don't have time. It sort of wraps itself up with a sense that Shrewsbury has been a victory for the King's forces, but that there is more trouble to come. You know, this is a bit battle, not the war, so I don't think we have quite settled to where our place is.
- [38:50]
Lucy Munro
I always wonder with that ending as well. I think to some extent, we are sort of on Hal's side at that point, nearly. He's the one who's had soliloquies. He's the one who we've been seeing in certain ways. But at the same time, Hotspur is incredibly attractive theatrically and is incredibly interesting. And so is there also that sense of, oh, but we were interested in him, we were interested in this actor's performance and Hal has kind of cheated us of that.
- [39:16]
Misha Glennie
Yeah. It's rather peculiar, Lawrence, that Hal appears to be a minor character initially.
- [39:22]
Lawrence Publicova
Yes. I mean, Hotspur is certainly. He gets his name twice on the front page. And I think the previous play in the sequence, if we want to think of it that way, as Emma mentioned, is a tragedy, is a sort of perfect tragedy, really. And if there is a tragic figure in Henry iv, Part one, it's Hotspur. I mean, he's the one who dies. He gets a very good, good death speech. And I think what's interesting about his outlook is that something is lost when he's gone. Because when you get to Part two, the chivalric language of Hotspur, which is always teetering into the comic but still fairly serious, becomes the language of pistol, which is a real pastiche of that chivalric heroism. And so there's some. There's something that's, you know, an energy or a principle of Henry iv, Part one, which feels a bit more optimistic that by Henry iv Part two, in Hotspur's absence, seems to have been lost and the world's been closed down a bit.
- [40:15]
Misha Glennie
Lucy, Henry iv, Part one, still a very, very popular, popular play. How popular was it in the 1590s when it first came out?
- [40:25]
Lucy Munro
As far as we can tell it's hugely popular. It's printed very quickly. The first edition seems to have been pretty much read to death. There's only one fragment of one copy copy that survives. And there's another edition again in the same year in 1598. Then there are seven more editions before 1623, when the folio is published. And it's also one of the more popular Shakespeare plays in terms of the number of recorded performances. And our information about recorded performances is incredibly patchy, incredibly sporadic. There's the additional problem with the Henry IV plays that if a play is noted down as being false to. You're not quite sure whether it's one of the two Henry IV plays or even Mary Wiser Windsor. But there are references to Sayre court performance of the first part of Falstaff. So that's probably the first part of Henry iv. It's also incredibly prevalent just in the discourse in the period. There are allusions to the play everywhere, allusions to Hotspur's speech that Lawrence quoted earlier, which gets parodied and recycled in other plays. Lots and lots of references to Falstaff, particularly references to the sequence in which he exaggerates the number of people who attacked him during the robbery at Gad's Hill, but also the honour speech. And so references to Falstaff on honour are really ubiquitous going right through into the 1640s, 1650s.
- [41:53]
Misha Glennie
Emma, we've heard how perceptions of this play change through the ages. Hal was unimportant to begin with, but becomes more important later on. Do you think the 20th and 21st century's interest in the relationship between father and son is a reflection of our times, or was it always there?
- [42:16]
Emma Smith
I think the way that we understand that father and son relationship is much more psychological, perhaps, rather than political or as well as political. So I think we can see this less as a play about a son who needs to prepare himself for the highest office in the land, and more about a son living with and living up to and challenging his father's preconceptions about. About what he will do. And that becomes a much more everyman kind of experience. And that's what we've done with Shakespeare's history is mostly we've either said that they're all about government and regime change, or they're about families who just happen to be kings and princes. But really their interest is in the psychology of families, which we can all share.
- [43:08]
Misha Glennie
And do you think anyone's got the balance right between that analysis of power and analysis of family relations?
- [43:16]
Emma Smith
You'd think that we should have got that right since it seems so contemporary to us that our own royal family has both its personal psychologies displayed to us as well as the kind of political ones. But my sense is that it's been difficult for us to manage a fully cast production which leans into all of those elements. We are, I think, in the age where we're in celebrity casting, aren't we? And celebrity casting tends to be around Falstaff.
- [43:47]
Misha Glennie
I think my thanks to Lawrence Publicova, Emma Smith and Lucy Munro. Next week it's 4,000 year old laws from Babylon and their impact then and now. Now that's the code of Hammurabi. Thank you for listening.
- [44:03]
Lucy Munro
And the In Our Time podcast gets
- [44:05]
Emma Smith
some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.
- [44:11]
Misha Glennie
What did we miss out? Emma, do you know what I was
- [44:15]
Emma Smith
thinking when we were talking was how we adopt the term, the name Hal for the, for the prince, I think in the text is called Prince Henry. His father calls him Harry and it's Falstaff who calls him Hal. So it's just so interesting to me that even in that way we name him, we're sort of pally with him in the eastcheap sense rather than leaning into the other relationships he has. And I suppose it's a way many people understand having different identities with different people, isn't it that different, different groups in their life have a different name or a different nickname for them and that. That's one of the ways that you understand that you're a slightly different person in this world and, and in this other world. And that seems very pressing about. About.
- [45:04]
Misha Glennie
Yes, I suppose as Lawrence was indicating about how he can switch his identity, what today we call code switching is very interesting how effectively he does that more so than other people, I would say say in the play Hotspur is just, you know, one directional and Hotspur is another Harry.
- [45:27]
Lawrence Publicova
And I think it's interesting that, you know, the king would rather call his son Harry as though he's sort of wanting him to be more like Harry Hotspur. And I think it is interesting that we continue to refer to him as how across the three plays in which he features, despite the fact it's only really Henry IV Part 1, where he's mostly Hal, isn't it? He's much more Harry.
- [45:45]
Misha Glennie
Yes. And I was also really interested about the play sequence, not, not just Henry iv part one, two and five, but the whole thing from Richard II in a way to Richard iii. If you look about it, there is a sort of season one, season two, season three. Element to it, wouldn't you say, Lucy?
- [46:06]
Lucy Munro
We don't think they would have been performed on consecutive afternoons. Sort of, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4. They might have been done parts one and two on consecutive afternoons. There's a little bit of evidence from things like Philip Henslow's account book or diary that sequels are occasionally kind of clustered together, but more often they would have been seen as single things. But there must have been some interesting things around. Who played who in what? Probably the same actor is obviously playing Hal Henry across the different plays. But what happens with an actor who. Who has a major role in one play and then doesn't appear in the next? Contemporary productions have quite often cast the same actor who plays Hotspur in part one as Pistol in Part two, so that Pistol really is functioning as a debased parody of Hotspur.
- [46:56]
Misha Glennie
And, Lawrence, you mentioned Richard ii. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I recall it, Richard ii, A six, gets his just desserts, or at least maybe not just desserts, but let's face it, he was a bad king. And Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV when he usurps the throne, is seen basically a good thing. And yet in Henry iv, Part one, he's carrying this original sin, as it were.
- [47:26]
Lawrence Publicova
Yes, I mean, I think, you know, however successful a deposition is, it then leaves a question about legitimacy, doesn't it? I mean, you know, if you can no longer really speak, though Henry does his best about the divine right of kings, or. I mean, it's wonderful that the final scene of the play opens with him saying, thus ever did rebellion find rebuke? And you think that wasn't so much the case when you rebelled, was it? But, yes. I mean, I. And it's interesting how some people who are very critical of Richard during the play, Richard ii, then see him as this rather saintly king afterwards, when we get to Henry iv, Part one, when they're not so happy with Bollinger. So, yes, I think Bolingbroke is a character who I suppose is haunted by the fact that he's sawn off the branch that he's sitting on by deposing a king and Emma.
- [48:13]
Misha Glennie
We didn't quite get into the entertainment aspect of the Boars Head scenes. I mean, they're terribly funny, aren't they?
- [48:21]
Emma Smith
They're really funny. And they are. I mean, Justice Falstaff is so characterized by his expanse, you know, and all the images we use about him play into that, that he's larger than life or, you know, Taking over the something. So too, these scenes in the bull's head are really amplificatory. If you can make one insult, you would make 10 and that you pile them up and they become funnier and funnier through this litany of baiting and back and forth, kind of fat shaming as we would now probably call it. But you know, they often, if you don't play them as funny and if you see a more washed up, self interested tavern scene, which is also possible, then they're very, very attenuated in performance. They, you know, for them to work, I think they do have to be life affirming and funny. And there are just great things, I mean, when Falstaff is sleeping and they find the bar bill, which is, you know, a penny for bread and all this money on sack. I mean, it's just, it really, it needs. Doesn't need translating into the present in lots of really great ways.
- [49:26]
Misha Glennie
Lucy.
- [49:27]
Lucy Munro
They're also, I mean, they're the sort of closest that Shakespeare gets to representing contemporary London as well, aren't they? Even though they're set in an early historical period. And even things like the sack is, you know, the sack drinking sack is a very Elizabethan thing to do. So they are, it's that weird thing that the early modern history play does and Chase Rosso does of writing these plays that are about the historical past but are about the historical moment not just in terms of politics, but in terms of a lived reality and a kind of material reality.
- [49:59]
Lawrence Publicova
Yeah, I mean, I was gonna say something similar. I mean, because Shakespearean comedy is usually set in far flung places, we don't normally think of him as writing city comedy in the manner of say, Ben Jonson. This feels about as close as we get to Shakespeare representing the world through which he moved. And that does involve that anachronism. You know, Sack is Elizabethan, not something you would have been drinking in 1400. There's a reference to turkeys which don't arrive in England until the 16th century. And there is that reality effect, isn't there? Of all the superfluous detail, just this stuffy of those scenes, which I really enjoy.
- [50:29]
Misha Glennie
And I guess that's a way of Shakespeare signalling, actually this is about now
- [50:34]
Lucy Munro
in some ways, I think. Yeah. And the other way in which those scenes particularly, or actually the play in general is very much of its moment is linguistically. So, you know, it's full of neologisms. You know, it's not a play that's written in a cod medieval speak, even though Shakespeare and his collaborators do that sporadically elsewhere. So, like the Gower choruses in Pericles, for example, are written in Cod Middle English. But what you get here is very contemporary ways of speaking, particularly around swearing. So Falstaff swears a lot, Hotspur swears a lot, and they use Elizabethan oaths. So it's, you know, splod, which is a contraction of by God's blood, slid by God's eyelids. So that's swearing on different parts of the body of the crucified Christ, which is hugely offensive in this period. So offensive that in 1606, playing companies are actually banned from using that kind of bad language on stage.
- [51:29]
Misha Glennie
So how does he get away with it?
- [51:31]
Lucy Munro
Well, there's some evidence that the Folio version doesn't have a lot of those oaths, so there's some evidence that the company actually cut a lot of that bad language after this act is passed in 1606, so that they're not going to get into trouble. But it does seem to be sporadic and quite possibly the actors put them back in even when they've been taken out as well.
- [51:52]
Lawrence Publicova
And people are interested in how they swear as well, because Lady Percy gets told off for not swearing properly by her.
- [51:57]
Lucy Munro
By Hotspur.
- [51:57]
Lawrence Publicova
Yeah, yeah.
- [51:58]
Lucy Munro
Hotspur is, like, really potty mouthed in this play, but by Elizabethan standards, I
- [52:04]
Misha Glennie
think it could be time for a cup of tea.
- [52:06]
Lawrence Publicova
You need to be off and I know, Emma, you need to be off.
- [52:08]
Emma Smith
Does anyone Tea or coffee?
- [52:09]
Misha Glennie
I'd love a cup of tea.
- [52:10]
Lawrence Publicova
I'll have a cup of tea.
- [52:11]
Lucy Munro
Cup of coffee, be lovely. Thank you.
- [52:12]
Emma Smith
I'm fine, actually, thanks.
- [52:14]
Lucy Munro
In Our Time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. How does someone invent a political theory that reshapes the map of the world? How do you get to a scientific breakthrough that saves thousands of lives? Or create works of art that stand the test of time? How have brilliant thinkers through history done their best thinking? And what can we learn from them? From BBC Radio 4, it's the second series of Human Intelligence. With me, Naomi Alderman. From Karl Marx to Mary Queen Curie, from Emily Bronte to Leonardo da Vinci, how did those exceptional minds do their work? And are there ways of thinking we can emulate today? To find out, listen to Human Intelligence on BBC Sounds.