No matter how comically poignant these Gloucestershire scenes are, therefore, they depict an unweeded garden whose nature is often as rank as that of the London streets. Despite the traditional view of Shallow’s farm as Shakespeare’s paean to a passing world of innocence and communal trust, corruption flourishes as much among the gentry and yeomen in the country as among the prostitutes, swaggerers and old soldiers in the city, or, indeed, among the lords who are vying for power in the play’s chronicle history. To a degree, rural England turns out to be not so much an idyllic alternative to the tavern world as an extension of it.

  The rejection of Falstaff

  The scenes leading up to the rejection of Falstaff proceed with a keen sense of tragic irony. Both of the scenes on Shallow’s farm in Act 5 are preceded by scenes of the royal family newly come into focus – that is, with the confirmation of Harry as his father’s son and worthy heir. The emotional reconciliation of the dying King with the repentant Prince in 4.3 immediately precedes Falstaff’s return to Gloucestershire to cheat Shallow out of a thousand pounds: Falstaff’s delighted boast that he will ‘devise matter enough out of this Shallow to keep Prince Harry in continual laughter the wearing out of six fashions’ (5.1.76 –8) is naively ironic, because we have just had proof that the reformed Harry will no longer be be amused by such matter. Even more pointedly, the new King’s reassurance that he has cast aside his former self (5.2.121–32) and will embrace the Lord Chief Justice to be the tutor to his youth sets in bold relief Falstaff’s claim in the following scene, upon hearing news that the old King is dead, that ‘I know the young King is sick for me’ (5.3.135). His delighted assumption of royal privilege, therefore, sounds ominously premature:

  Master Shallow – my Lord Shallow – be what thou wilt: I am Fortune’s steward… . Let us take any man’s horses: the laws of England are at my commandment. Blessed are they that have been my friends, and woe to my Lord Chief Justice!

  (129 –38)

  Shortly thereafter, the new regime’s determination to clean up the stews by arresting the Hostess and Doll Tearsheet (5.4) demonstrates that Falstaff’s friends will have no protection under King Harry. Shakespeare thus prepares his audiences, as surely as Sophocles prepared audiences in Oedipus, for the final tragic irony: Falstaff’s fall from grace at the very moment he thinks that riot will be enthroned.

  Falstaff’s interruption of the King’s coronation procession presumes on a privilege that the audience knows is no longer his. Aware that he is inappropriately dressed for the occasion, his clothes ‘stained with travel’ (5.5.24), he convinces himself that ‘This poor show doth better’ because it ‘doth infer the zeal [he] had to see’ his minion crowned (13–14). More audaciously, his calling out to ‘King Hal’ as ‘my sweet boy’ (39, 42) stops the royal procession. It is offensive not just because he claims too much familiarity, but because by yoking his private nickname for Henry to the title King, he is guilty of an egregious breach of decorum.73 Morally, the audience knows that Falstaff should not be permitted to come within the compass of Henry V’s court. The King of course must banish plump Jack – as he has promised to do in Part One – and retain the Lord Chief Justice if he is to gain credibility among his subjects. ‘Make less thy body hence’ (51), he commands, asserting ‘a new regime of trim reckonings … mobilized against decaying aristocratic corpulence’ (Goldberg, 172). His rejection of Falstaff, while harsh, is a political necessity; and it begins with an ironic echo of his ‘I know you all’ soliloquy in Part One (1.2.185): ‘I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers’ (46).

  16 The rejection of Falstaff (Brewster Mason) by King Henry V (Alan Howard), in a Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Terry Hands at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1975

  But as centuries of audiences would attest, such necessity is dramatically unsavoury, for the Prince appears in his coronation as the impersonal manifestation of state will, and Falstaff, the all-too-human victim of a callous political system. It was Falstaff, after all, who in soliloquy aptly characterized Prince John as cold-blooded but held out some hope that Harry, because he drinks ‘good store of fertile sherris’ (4.2.119 –20), might put a more humane face on government. As King, however, Harry becomes as ‘sober-blooded’ (85 – 6) as his brother. When he warns Falstaff that ‘the grave doth gape / For thee thrice wider than for other men’ (5.5.52–3), he recalls the feigned death of Falstaff at Shrewsbury, over whose corpse he delivered an affectionate epitaph: ‘Death hath not struck so fat a deer today’ (Part One 5.4.106). Here, he speaks no epitaph and his allusion to Falstaff’s size is cruel. As Warburton shrewdly observed in a note to Theobald’s edition (3.539), however, the King risks ‘falling back into Hal’ with this mocking reference to his old friend’s ‘Bulk’; ‘but He perceives it at once, is afraid Sir John should take the Advantage of it, so checks both himself and the Knight with “Reply not to me with a Fool-born jest” ’ (Vickers, Shakespeare, 2.534). This observation hints at the depth of the young King’s struggle to maintain an emotional detachment in the face of a man who once appealed, and may still appeal, to his need for paternal acceptance and his desire for a release from royal obligation.

  Falstaff, of course, must be removed as an impediment to Harry’s exercising the law of the land, and the public nature of the rejection may be advantageous to the new King’s authority being seen as legitimate. Falstaff’s public indiscretion merits a public rebuke, and critics who view the play as being primarily about the education of a Prince are quick to condone it. Drawing on the King’s promise that Falstaff will be given ‘advancement’ according to how he ‘reform[s]’ (5.567–9), Samuel Johnson reasons that ‘if it be considered that the fat knight has never uttered one sentiment of generosity, and with all his power of exciting mirth has nothing in him that can be esteemed, no great pain will be suffered from the reflection that he is compelled to live honestly’ (Plays; in Vickers, Shakespeare, 5.122–3). Such moral justification for Falstaff’s banishment fed Dover Wilson’s judgement that the young King’s ‘choice between Justice and Vanity’ had made Falstaff’s rejection ‘inevitable’ and his committal to the Fleet – ‘a prison of a special and superior kind’ reserved for the ‘temporary custody’ of important notables – neither ‘a hardship [nor] a disgrace’, but rather ‘a compliment’ (Fortunes, 117–20); and Wilson in turn influenced A.R. Humphreys’s assertion that ‘the opposed evolutions of Falstaff and Hal’ should ‘dispel any notion that Falstaff is scurvily treated… . Falstaff’s hubris positively demands a public scene; he flaunts his way of life for all to see, and boasts that it will be the King’s, too. The public disgrace is the appropriate nemesis, and the punishment is lenient’ (lix).

  Such rationales for Falstaff’s rejection have been adapted more recently by anthropological critics who have viewed him unsympathetically as a site of carnivalesque misrule which must be overborne by the forces of order, for ‘the antihierarchical chaos he embodies, conceived according to the satiric anti-Puritan model, has rendered him too dangerous a voice for inclusion in the serious business of governance’ (Tiffany, 278);74 and by new historicist critics such as Greenblatt, who, while suspending moral judgement, nevertheless argues that the power of state in Part Two is preserved by a series of ‘squalid betrayals’, of which the King’s rejection of Falstaff is the ‘final, definitive betrayal’ out of which his ‘formal majesty’ is secured (40). In other words Falstaff, who has appeared throughout the two plays to have undermined royal authority, turns out paradoxically to have been its prop; or, in Barbara Hodgdon’s succinct phrasing, ‘while Hal and Henry IV are history, Falstaff serves it’ (Part Two, 15).

  Critics concede that Falstaff’s punishment could have been worse: after all, he is not to be detained long at the Fleet, and the King grants him an allowance sufficient to live on, holding out the possibility of advancement if he reforms. But clemency is not the dramatic impression one is left with. An Elizabethan audience would have been acutely aware that Queen Elizabeth habitually imprisoned favourites simply for incurring her displeasure. Furthermore, the vast humanity of Falstaff’s role militates against the ‘historical’ reading of the rejection scene in which what Falstaff represents, rather than who he is, becomes the justification for his banishment: it accounts for the displeasure of audiences and readers who, unwilling to view dramatic character reductively as merely having a schematic moral or political function, find his rejection unpalatable. As Moody E. Prior argues, Falstaff’s rejection ‘amounts … to the crushing of a comic figure whose natural fate is not to go down in defeat but in triumph’. A ‘magnificent’ comic hero such as this was ‘not created for such ends. No matter by what critical avenues the rejection of Falstaff is approached, the unpleasantness of which so many have complained cannot be argued away’ (166 –7).

  17 The rejection of Falstaff (Desmond Barrit) by King Henry V (William Houston), in a Royal Shakespeare Company production directed by Michael Attenborough at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 2000

  An objection to the King’s treatment of Falstaff was first recorded by Nicholas Rowe, who, in the essay prefixed to his 1709 edition of the plays, protests that since Shakespeare ‘has given [Falstaff] so much Wit as to make him almost too agreeable … I don’t know whether some People have not, in remembrance of the Diversion he had formerly afforded ’em, been sorry to see his Friend Hal use him so scurvily when he comes to the Crown in the End’ (Vickers, Shakespeare, 2.195). Corbin Morris, who regarded Falstaff as ‘entirely an amiable Character’, explained in 1744 that his ‘Imprisonment and Death’, far from being merited, were ‘written by Shakespeare in Compliance with the Austerity of the Times, and in order to avoid the Imputation of encouraging Idleness and mirthful Riot by too amiable and happy an Example’ (Vickers, Shakespeare, 3.122). This sentimental appreciation of Falstaff’s humanity was shared by Maurice Morgann, who lamented in his famous Essay on the dramatic character of Sir John Falstaff (1777), ‘we can scarcely forgive the ingratitude of the Prince in the new-born virtue of the King, and we curse the severity of the poetic justice which consigns our old good-natured delightful companion to the … dishonours of the Fleet’ (Falstaff, 149).

  A half-century later, William Hazlitt speculated with keen psychological insight that the reason ‘we never could forgive the Prince’s treatment of Falstaff’ (Characters, 155) is that ‘the imperfect and even deformed characters in Shakespeare’s plays, as done to the life, by forming a part of our personal consciousness, claim our personal forgiveness, and suspend or evade our moral judgement, by bribing our self-love to side with them’ (Lectures, 40). Such sentiments reached their apogee in an essay by A.C. Bradley in 1902, which argued in opposition to moralizing critics that ‘Falstaff’s dismissal to the Fleet, and his subsequent death, prove beyond doubt that his rejection was meant by Shakespeare to be taken as a catastrophe which not even his humour could enable him to surmount’ (253).75

  The final humiliation of Falstaff is his loss of the most potent weapon in his arsenal, the pun. Always the rapier he wields to talk his way out of awkward situations, here the pun is wrested from him and turned against him by Shallow, who realizes that he has been robbed of a thousand pounds. When Falstaff seeks to convince Shallow that ‘I will be the man yet that shall make you great’ (5.5.78–9), Shallow counters with a disparaging rebuttal – ‘I cannot perceive how, unless you give me your doublet and stuff me out with straw’ (80 –1) – turning a pun that Falstaff once applied to himself with ironic self-deprecation (1.2.137– 44) into a sour joke which insists that Falstaff is ‘great’ only in being fat. And when, in an attempt to recover, Falstaff reassures Shallow that the King’s banishment of him ‘was but a colour’ (5.5.85), Shallow’s retort shades ‘colour’ into a pun on ‘collar’ that signifies hanging – ‘A colour that I fear you will die in, Sir John’ (86) – to which Falstaff has no ready reply. Denied control of the pun, Falstaff is defenceless.

  The corralling of Falstaff and his followers, along with the arrest of Doll and the Hostess, effectively silences those voices that have provided socially diverse narrative histories ungoverned by the chronically sanctioned history of state. But if the play ends with a repressive assertion of hegemonic order, nevertheless those voices have been heard, and heard memorably, in some of the most idiosyncratically delightful scenes Shakespeare ever wrote. At the centre of these scenes is neither the King nor the Prince, but a fat knight who embodies a moral licence and an irrepressible vitality that are crushed by the apparatus of state – an apparatus which, if a force of historical inevitability, nevertheless is at odds with both human compassion and theatrical pleasure. In all but the most militant productions, the state does not win the audience’s sympathy. Falstaff does.

  THE PLAY AS CHRONICLE HISTORY

  Shakespeare took risks in Part Two. Faced with constructing a sequel to Part One which had no obvious source of political tension following the defeat of the rebels at Shrewsbury, he searched the chronicles for a continuing threat to the monarchy which would serve Part Two as crucially as the Percy rebellion had served Part One. In doing so, he ‘omitted or pushed to the periphery … most of the political and military incidents’ given prominence in chroniclers’ accounts of the last decade of Henry’s reign (Thorne, 53): Glendower’s persistent marauding along the Welsh borders, French incursions into England’s territorial possessions, and an uprising led by Northumberland, whose defeat at the Battle of Bramham Moor would have allowed Shakespeare, had he so chosen, to dramatize the suppression of rebellion with a victory as heroic as that at Shrewsbury. Instead, he elevated the Prelate’s Rebellion to a greater significance than it achieves in Holinshed.

  Shakespeare may not have anticipated using this rebellion at all when planning Henry IV. His original idea may have been to follow Part One with a play about Henry V that begins with the death of the old king. When he decided to write a second Henry IV play, however, his choice to make theatrical capital of so relatively minor a conspiracy allowed him to foreground themes of time and chance, mistrust and self-interest which distinguish his portrayal of history in Part Two. Unlike Part One, whose king is firmly in command from the start and in which the royal narrative provides a firm scaffold on which to hang the historical events chronicled in the play, chronicle history in Part Two is introduced by scenes with the rebels, who are uncertain of their course and, in the case of Northumberland, quickly dismissed from the play. Thus the most powerful rebel in Part One, father of Hotspur, disappears from view in Act 2; his death is only briefly reported to the King late in the play; and the Prelate’s Rebellion, plotted in Act 1, does not resume until Act 4.76

  The Prelate’s Rebellion

  The allegorical figure of Rumour casts doubt on the reliability of chronicle reportage at the opening of the play. Dressed in a robe ‘painted full of tongues’ (Ind.0.1–2), Rumour may have cut a strikingly theatrical figure as ‘a vast, fearful monster’, like Virgil’s goddess Fama, ‘with a watchful eye miraculously set under every feather which grows on her, and for every one of them a tongue in a mouth which is loud of speech, and an ear ever alert’.77 Rumour’s slanderous tongues function to promote disorder ‘in every language’, ‘Stuffing the ears of men with false reports’, thus introducing the unreliability of speech as one of the primary concerns in the play (7–8). ‘Rumour is a pipe / Blown by surmises, Jealousy’s conjectures’ (15 –16), who warns that no news should be trusted; and this is borne out in the ensuing scene when Northumberland hears contradictory reports that his son Hotspur has won the field at Shrewsbury or has died there. False expectation among the rebels works its mischief further when Hastings and Lord Bardolph miscalculate the size of the opposing forces (1.3.63–80) and assume that Northumberland will bring reinforcements, despite their acknowledgement that ‘in a theme so bloody-faced as this, / Conjecture, expectation and surmise / Of aids incertain should not be admitted’ (22– 4). The danger of such expectation is dramatized shortly thereafter when Northumberland is persuaded by his wife and Lady Percy to fly to Scotland rather than bring reinforcements to the rebel army. Though Northumberland protests that his ‘honour is at pawn’ (2.3.7), he capitulates to Lady Percy’s impassioned plea that he should not ‘hold [his] honour more precise and nice / With others’ (40 –1) than with Hotspur, whom he failed to support with troops at Shrewsbury. This brief scene, Shakespeare’s invention, defies chronicle tradition by empowering aristocratic women – rare in the histories – and by exposing the precariousness of the rebel position. There is little faith among the rebels in this play, no pretence to honourable behaviour, and none of the nobility embodied in Hotspur. They live in a world of mocked expectations.

  The rebellion comes to an ignominious end in Act 4, when Prince John and Westmorland outsmart the rebels with a ruse at Gaultree Forest. They succeed because the rebel leaders – particularly the Archbishop, who tries to put a moral gloss on political action – momentarily lower their guard and choose to believe the Prince’s promise that their grievances will be redressed. Once they are tricked into discharging their army, John is free to arrest them for capital treason without fear of reprisal. This way of quashing the rebellion is dramatically risky: it denies audiences the thrill of an onstage battle such as Shrewsbury and frustrates their desire to witness individual heroism in a noble cause. Here, the victors are those who employ machiavellian policy with greatest skill. The Gaultree episode thus offers a view of history as radically contingent and amoral. It is devoid of the chivalric ethos which, albeit compromised, informed the military conflict in Part One.