Betterton altered The Sequel of Henry the Fourth in various ways, most notably by making Falstaff the only character of any consequence in the first three of its five acts. All references to Hotspur and to the rebellion in the north so central to Part One were expunged: the Induction and the opening scene in which Northumberland receives word of his son’s death were cut entirely, as was the scene in which Northumberland is urged by his wife and daughter-in-law to flee to Scotland. With these scenes removed, connections between Part Two and the climactic Battle of Shrewsbury in Part One were severed. The political action of Betterton’s first three acts involved only an abbreviated scene to introduce the Prelate’s Rebellion in Act 1 and a conflation of the Gaultree scenes to conclude it in Act 3. Furthermore, the scene that introduces the King (3.1) was omitted, as it had been in the first issue of the Quarto, and instead the insomniac King’s soliloquy concluding ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’ (3.1.4 –31) was transposed to the scene of his death. The result of such alterations was to create, for the first three acts, a prose comedy in which Falstaff holds the stage for all but a minor and quickly quelled political rebellion; and notably, his great tavern scene (2.4) and his recruiting scene at Justice Shallow’s farm (3.2) were juxtaposed, as they had been in the first issue of the Quarto, yielding 658 lines of Falstaffian comedy uninterrupted by any chronicle history.

  Betterton’s compression into one act (Act 4) of the climactic scenes at court – the King’s illness and death and the new King’s confrontation of the Lord Chief Justice – may have been prompted by the same neo-classical impulse to avoid unnecessary changes of locale that caused Dryden to reduce the number of scenes in his adaptation of Troilus and Cressida. Arguably, though, Betterton was more concerned with the decorum of genre and intended to segregate the ‘tragick part’, as Samuel Johnson called it,19 from the rest of the play as a discrete dramatic unit, tonally distinct from the prose comedy that had preceded it. The practice of segregating the chronicle plot from the comic scenes continued throughout the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, as John Bell’s acting edition of 1773 and John Philip Kemble’s of 1804 attest.20 Indeed, even the most celebrated production of the play as royal history – mounted by William Macready in 1821 to commemorate the accession of George IV – which embellished Harry’s coronation with four scenes of ceremonial spectacle and music added at the end, drew on a text that rearranged the play in the same way as Betterton, allowing Falstaff to dominate the stage until the scene of the King’s death.21

  While Betterton’s alterations permitted Part Two to be performed as an autonomous Falstaff play, it is worth noting that he enhanced its autonomy not by revising the text, as so many Restoration and eighteenth-century producers did with other Shakespeare plays, but by less intrusive cuts, transpositions and scenic rearrangement. The independence of Part Two as a Falstaff play was always already implicit in Shakespeare’s text, and this version was revived repeatedly – without Part One – until 1744, with James Quin replacing Betterton as Falstaff for thirty years, joined by Colley Cibber as a celebrated Justice Shallow in 1720 and later by Cibber’s son Theophilus as the Ancient Pistol.22

  1 Playbill for Macready’s King Henry the Fourth – Part the Second, featuring an elaborate coronation scene, performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, 1821

  2 Stephen Kemble (1758–1822) as Falstaff. Drawn by G. Harlowe; engraved by J. Rogers; published by G. Virtue, 1825

  3 Samuel Phelps (1804 –78) as Henry IV: ‘How many thousand of my poorest subjects / Are at this hour asleep!’ [3.1.4 –5]; photograph c. 1864

  It was not necessary, however, for the text to be so altered in order to stand on its own as a performable play. As early as 1736, Shakespeare’s original text was revived, and it played in rivalry with Betterton’s Sequel for nearly a decade in roughly equal numbers of performances. By the 1750s, only Shakespeare’s text of Part Two was regularly performed, and in 1758 David Garrick managed by the brilliance of his playing the King to restore something of the balance between Falstaffian comedy and chronicle history that had been forsaken during the previous half-century. Garrick’s version was acted sixty times up to 1784, the last recorded performance of the play in London in the eighteenth century (Hogan, 2.276 –7); and its popularity demonstrates that Part Two as Shakespeare had written it proved stageworthy and accessible to audiences nearly two hundred years after its first performance, without having to be revised, rearranged or, above all, performed only as the second part of a two-part play. The same alternation of versions of Part Two – as a Falstaff play that benefits from cuts and transpositions, or as a history play that can stand without alteration – was played out in England and America for the next century and a half.23

  Although the history plays lost some of their allure for prudish Victorian audiences who took offence at the mixing of regal kings and vulgar clowns, Falstaff continued to be a role coveted by actors ambitious to achieve the summit of Shakespearean comedy: Stephen Kemble, John Fawcett and an American who won audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, James Henry Hackett. Samuel Phelps made a name for himself as a great Falstaff in 1846 and held the stage for nearly thirty years. In 1864, to celebrate the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth, Drury Lane staged both parts of Henry IV, with Phelps playing Falstaff in Part One and doubling the King and Shallow in Part Two – the first attempt to offer the play as a two-part epic to commemorate Shakespeare as a national hero (Odell, 1.299 –300). But if Phelps’s intention was to combine the plays as one integrated royal history, he missed the mark. Switching actors in key roles of course impeded a sense of continuity. Furthermore, Part One opened on Easter Monday, but Part Two was not staged until the autumn in a version cut and rearranged much like Bell’s, with the chronicle material heavily curtailed in order to foreground the comedy of Falstaff and his companions.

  The two parts of Henry IV were thus, as they had been for more than two centuries, performed independently; and so they would be, with few exceptions, well into the twentieth century. A survey of productions by Frank Benson’s Stratford-upon-Avon company, for example, reveals that Part Two was performed frequently – in eleven of thirty-three seasons between 1894 and 1923 – but that only once, in 1905, was Part One performed during the same season. Clearly, the success of Part Two on the stage had never been dependent on Part One, which was not performed at all in Stratford between 1909 and 1923; and, acted in versions that were for the most part faithful to Shakespeare’s text, Part Two had established itself by 1932 – the year in which the two parts were performed together to mark the opening of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre – as a history play that could flourish on the Stratford stage quite independent of its by then less-often-performed first part.

  The rise of the two-part play

  ‘The superbly generous girth of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays’, wrote Dominic Cavendish in his review of the productions at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2010, gives them the breadth of ‘a warts-and-all national epic about the England he loved, ranging from nobility to riff-raff, from battlefields to brothels, from the city to the countryside, and from high politics to low humour’ (Telegraph, 15 July 2010); and they have indeed been embraced by generations of English as a celebration of their manifold identities. Both parts of Henry IV are enriched when they are performed together. Staging them as one play in ten acts benefits the chronicle history by bringing the story of the northern rebellion to a conclusion, by fleshing out the decline of the King from a vital participant in the war against the rebels to an anguished, dying monarch, and by tracing more fully the arc of Harry’s growth to kingship. But the real beneficiary is Falstaff; for the complex and often emotionally ambivalent relationship between him and Hal in Part One helps to justify the new King’s banishment of him in Part Two which otherwise, in a play that permits them only one brief meeting before it, can seem insufficiently motivated.

  When the two plays are performed together, Henry IV almost inevitably becomes the story of Falstaff. As Peter Orford writes, Falstaff is the character whose role bookends these two plays: the plot traces his rise and fall, and therefore, structurally, ‘the hero of this two-part story [is] the fat knight’ (93). The movement to stage Henry IV as one ten-act play in two parts began early in the twentieth century, and by all accounts these productions foregrounded the fortunes of Falstaff, not the maturation of the prodigal Prince. When the Old Vic staged the plays together in 1920, for example, the allocation of parts by the two directors, Russell Thorndike and Charles Warburton, revealed their conviction that Falstaff, not Harry, was the pivotal role. Warburton played Hal in Part One but the Lord Chief Justice in Part Two, with the actor who played Hotspur being promoted to Hal, thus robbing the Prince of any credible continuity for audiences who saw the plays in successive weeks. Thorndike, however, played Falstaff in both parts and thus provided the thread to stitch the two parts together: the ten-act play was about him, not about the Prince.24 The same was true when William Bridges-Adams staged the plays in Stratford in 1932. Conceived as a grand national epic for that occasion, Henry IV was in fact received, as it had been in earlier two-part productions, as the history of Falstaff, with the King and Prince playing lesser roles.25 Despite the novelty of presenting the plays in sequence as a continuous historical narrative, therefore, early two-part productions such as these attested to the abiding importance of the actor playing Falstaff to their overall success.

  In what was widely praised as the best production of the plays in the first half of the twentieth century, John Burrell’s staging of Henry IV for the Old Vic in 1945 showcased two performances which have become the stuff of theatrical legend: that of Ralph Richardson, who played Falstaff with a gentlemanly dignity (Observer, 30 September 1945) and ‘a greatness of spirit that transcended the mere hulk of flesh’ (Williamson, 158); and that of Laurence Olivier, who played both a stuttering Hotspur and a humorously fastidious and lecherous Justice Shallow.26 The comic genius of Olivier’s portrayal of Shallow suggests how centrally the Gloucestershire scenes figured as nostalgic representations of a merry Elizabethan past which, in the aftermath of the Second World War, reminded audiences of all that was worth preserving about an England that had nearly fallen to an enemy whose bombs had destroyed too much of its cultural heritage. In contrast, the maturation of Harry seemed to matter little. Nicholas Hannen’s King Henry was so ‘well-meaning, kind, sincere, and decent’ a father that the Prince had ‘nothing to rebel against’ (McMillin, 28); and scant critical attention was paid to Michael Warre, an actor whose Prince Harry lacked psychological depth and who, ‘prompted to play the Prince in such society as [Richardson and Olivier], inevitably remains in the junior school. How otherwise?’ (Observer, 30 September 1945). This Part Two was primarily, as it had been for centuries, a play about Falstaff, with the King, the Prince and Plantagenet history reduced to subordinate roles.

  4 Laurence Olivier as Justice Shallow in a production directed by John Burrell for the Old Vic Theatre Company, at the New Theatre London, 1945

  In these and countless subsequent productions of Henry IV as a two-part play, in both Britain and North America, the audience’s attention has continued to be drawn to those idiosyncratic characters who give the greatest theatrical pleasure: Hotspur, Pistol, Shallow and, above all, Falstaff. As recently as 2005, by which time performing the two parts together had become de rigueur, Nicholas Hytner, whose staging for the National Theatre drew acclaim for Michael Gambon’s Falstaff, confirmed that ‘it all started off with Michael. Though I suspect that every production of Henry IV should start there, because if you don’t know who’s going to play Falstaff there’s no point in doing them’ (in Merlin, 2). The impulse to stage the two plays as one with Falstaff as the centre of attention has inevitably led producers on occasion to conflate the texts with sufficient abridgement to allow them to be performed in only three hours. As I detail in Appendix 2, such conflations have a long history, beginning with a text prepared for private performance by Sir Edward Dering, c. 1622; but they have become more common in the past half-century, first with Orson Welles’s enormously influential 1965 film then called Falstaff,27 in which the text was shaped to foreground the exploits and repeated rejections of Welles’s hugely fat and dangerously compelling Falstaff, and later in such productions as the popular Henry IV at Lincoln Center in 2003, which, by combining Falstaff scenes and curtailing the plays’ chronicle material, provided a vehicle for the comic talents of Kevin Kline. Such conflations have achieved what many assume Shakespeare initially set out to do: create a single play about the reign of Henry IV, erasing any awkward duplications and inconsistencies inherent in the two-part play.

  5 Orson Welles as Falstaff in his film Falstaff (American title, Chimes at Midnight) made in Spain in 1965

  The play as part of a cycle

  In contrast to the centuries-long tradition of performing Part Two as a Falstaff play, either on its own or paired with Part One, a critical movement in the mid-twentieth century intent on linking Shakespeare’s English histories together as a cycle relegated Part Two to a status subordinate not only to Part One, but to the other plays in the second tetralogy as well. Despite the fact that these four plays, unlike those in the first tetralogy, are formally and stylistically different from one another and probably were not intended for serial performance (Grene, 28–9), the insistence on prioritizing their chronicle history resulted in the subjugation of the peculiar merits of Part Two as an anomalous history of marginalized social groups to the demands of an overarching royal narrative.

  In 1944, as the war in Europe was entering its final phase and Burrell was preparing his Henry IV for the Old Vic, a scholarly work was published that would profoundly influence subsequent productions of the two Henry IV plays. In Shakespeare’s History Plays, Tillyard advanced the idea that the eight plays spanning the period from Richard II’s reign to the end of the Wars of the Roses had been written as a cycle to endorse the providential reading of English history he termed the Tudor Myth, and that in the Henry IV plays, Shakespeare emphasized the Prince’s evolution from prodigal son to chivalric hero as the culmination of England’s moral progress: Harry became the great hero king towards whose redemptive figure everything in the earlier plays pointed.28 In a book published the following year, Una Ellis-Fermor likewise found in the cycle of eight plays an insistent exploration of ‘the statesman-king, the leader and the public man’ (36) which would culminate in ‘the complete figure’ of Henry V (45). Such a view required that the two parts of Henry IV be treated ‘as a single play’ (Tillyard, 264); thus Part Two must always have been premeditated, and indeed none of the plays could be viewed as an independent work written without the goals of the whole cycle in mind. This argument, which rapidly gained acceptance as dogma, would have important consequences for the staging of the Henry IV plays and would forever alter the fortunes of Part Two.

  The belief that Shakespeare had written his histories as a cycle was not new to German scholars who had regarded them as such more than a century before Tillyard. In his 1808 lectures, August Schlegel had interpreted them as ‘an historical poem in the dramatic form, of which the separate plays constitute the rhapsodies’; in its totality, a ‘mirror of kings’ which, he urges, ‘should be the manual of young princes’ (419 –20); and in 1839, the philosopher Hermann Ulrici confirmed Schlegel’s romantic idea that the eight plays together constitute a national epic, discussing them as treatises on the reign of each of the five kings and therefore drawing no distinction between the two parts of Henry IV or the three parts of Henry VI (368–78, 385 –97, 403–16).

  In 1864, to celebrate the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s birth and dramatize the concept of national identity in advance of Germany’s unification in 1871, Franz Dingelstedt put Ulrici’s design into practice by staging the eight history plays as a unified cycle at the Weimar Theatre. Dingelstedt’s cycle, whose historical arc drew heavily on the classical five-act structure, privileged those plays that he saw as exposition (Richard II), climax (Henry V) and resolution (Richard III). The plays in the middle – the two parts of Henry IV and three parts of Henry VI – provided the connective tissue to hold together those plays that focused on individual monarchs, and thus in themselves were deemed less important.29 Tillyard, in contrast, regarded the education of the Prince as fundamental to the meaning of the cycle; for him, the two parts of Henry IV, integrally planned and masterful in their cohesion, foregrounded an element indispensable to the four plays he referred to as the second tetralogy: Harry’s Bildungsroman.

  The decision by Anthony Quayle and Michael Redgrave to stage a history cycle at Stratford in 1951, in celebration of the Festival of Britain, marked a shift in the fortunes of the Henry IV plays. Inspired both by Tillyard’s view of the history ‘sequence’ as ‘an organic whole’ (236) and by Dover Wilson’s argument that the two parts of Henry IV dramatize one of history’s great conversion stories in which ‘the technical centre of the play is not the fat knight but the lean prince’ (Fortunes, 17), this cycle placed the royal Bildungsroman front and centre. Part Two invariably diminishes in singularity when it is performed as a middle play dependent on those that surround it for context. With emphasis falling on the royal family rather than on the fortunes of Falstaff, what matters most in Part Two occurs in the last two acts. According to T.C. Worsley, critic for the New Statesman, ‘the great scenes of Henry IV’s death gain immeasurably from our having traced the relationship of father and son from its beginning’, and ‘Falstaff is brought into a proper proportion’.30 In this design, Falstaff represents a crucial obstacle to the Prince’s moral reformation, ‘typifying Vanity in every sense of the word’ (Wilson, Fortunes, 17), and thus his rejection can be regarded as ‘not a “priggish” repudiation … but a necessary step, indeed the sacrifice which we see Royalty exacting relentlessly from those worthy to assume it’ (Philip Hope-Wallace, Time and Tide). Part Two, therefore, began to be performed regularly with Part One as a history play whose comic digressions and carnivalesque subversions served only to justify the political imperatives of what had come to be known as the second tetralogy.