6 Mistress Quickly (Rosalind Atkinson), Falstaff (Anthony Quayle) and Doll Tearsheet (Heather Stannard) in a production directed by Michael Redgrave at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1951

  Quayle himself played a Falstaff who, while larger than life in the tradition of his predecessors, was less benign and more flagrantly licentious: his was not a comic performance, but that of a straight man playing comedy – a thin man in a fat suit – his bonhomie, like his girth, seeming more prosthetic than real (Shaughnessy, 65 –7). Made up like a ‘gargoyle’ (Cecil Wilson, Daily Mail), he looked ‘rather grotesque than laughable … and his smile when it appears is a painted smile’ (Ivor Brown, The Times). To the critic of the Manchester Guardian, Falstaff seemed ‘supremely conscious of his own depravity’; ‘beneath the padded belly, the swollen legs and the slightly too clownish pink and white paint on the face’ hides ‘a pathological Fat Knight’ who does not ‘believe in his own bluster’; and the Times critic concurred that Falstaff was ‘never for a moment sentimentalised. … He is superbly funny but openly contemptible.’

  Quayle’s flamboyant style of acting stood in sharp contrast to the more naturalistic acting of newcomer Richard Burton, whose performance as the Prince was most notable for its watchful calculation and intense introspection: ‘deep, reserved, assured but essentially complex’, this Harry ‘knows where, in the long run, he is going’ (Worsley & Wilson, 51). He ‘maintains [his] detachment with a hard smiling grace’ (Ivor Brown, The Times), and ‘never seems to laugh with Falstaff, but always at him’. Almost as an allegory for the direction the play would take in the next half-century, this Prince was torn between two fathers – the King of ‘surging command’ and dignity (David, Shakespeare, 199), played by Harry Andrews, who ‘carried the epic story, fiery into grey, with unbroken power’ (Manchester Guardian), and the roguish knight whose company Harry could enjoy but whom he knew from the outset he would one day banish. Burton thus delivered his ‘I know you all’ soliloquy (Part One 1.2.185 –207) not as a rationalization for his past behaviour but with a strong ‘sense of destiny’ (Ivor Brown, Times); his emotional distance from Falstaff allowed him to act the play-extempore with such seriousness of purpose that his ‘I do; I will’ (2.4.468) registered as a threat or even a decision already made; and the rejection scene, when it came, was played dispassionately, not sentimentally, as it had been for more than two centuries. Young Burton thus ‘out-manoeuvred … the established actor’ who played Falstaff: next to Quayle, whose performance was ‘visibly and conspicuously a product of theatrical artifice’, Burton’s Prince seemed ‘authentic and real’ (Bragg, 71–2) – a clash of acting styles in which Burton’s pointed to the future as surely has Quayle’s harked back to the past (Shaughnessy, 66).

  7 King Henry IV [part 2] Act IV sc. IV [4.3]. Painted by Henry E. Corbould; engraved by John Parker Davis (1832–1910); published by London Printing and Publishing, mid-nineteenth century

  The conception of the plays as a unified cycle whose ‘true hero’ is the Prince has had consequences for the way Henry IV has been staged ever since; for if the plays are viewed as a coherent history culminating in the legendary reign of Henry V, then inevitably one may read the end in the beginning, and retrospectively, the outcome of Part Two informs the tone and colouration of Part One. One’s gaze is trained from the first on the use to which the Prince puts his tavern days as he grows in political acumen, and one’s delight in the comic triumph of Falstaff in Part One is tempered by a knowledge that the older, more corrupt knight in Part Two will be banished from the court. Productions of the history cycle for the past sixty years have typically foregrounded the story of the Prince of Wales as the king in waiting, and political and domestic conflicts have often trumped comedy.

  8 Prince Henry (Richard Burton) addressing the crown over his sleeping father (Harry Andrews) in a production directed by Michael Redgrave at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 1951

  Indeed, directors have used history cycles to address issues of contemporary relevance and to serve overtly ideological agendas. French director Roger Planchon, for instance, adapting the Henry IV plays for the opening of his Théâtre de la Cité in a working-class suburb of Lyon in 1957, employed alienation techniques practised by Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble to expose ‘the cruel realities of the French colonial war in Algeria, then entering its final phase’ (Guardian, 20 May 2009). The plays were pared back to their ‘bare social bones’, according to Kenneth Tynan, ‘and each scene was prefaced by a caption, projected onto a screen, that summed up the import of what we were about to see’ (New York Magazine, 8 January 1959).31 The old king was played as a ‘political adventurer’, the Prince as ‘utterly ruthless’ and Falstaff as a cynical opportunist who embodied ‘the hard materialism of the new age’ (Daoust). Yet Planchon’s didactic Marxism led him to subject individual characterization ‘to the larger image of declining feudalism’, and he interpolated mimed scenes ‘suggesting the sufferings of the common man or the harshness of the ruling classes’ (Jean Jacquot, ‘International notes: France’, SS 13, 1960). His ‘political intention was readily acceptable to the industrial audience of Villeurbanne’ (Robert Speaight, 73); and the productions’ success led to their revival in Paris in 1959.

  Five years later, in 1963– 4, Peter Hall and John Barton of the recently formed Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) also embraced the Berliner Ensemble’s epic style to advance the idea that the plays of both tetralogies dramatize a ‘Grand Mechanism’ of history in which ‘the drama played out between [kings] is always the same’ (Kott, 9) and individual will is always overborne by the inexorable crush of political events.32 In Hall’s words, the plays expose ‘the corrupting seductions experienced by anyone who wields power’, and he believed that their depiction of ‘one of the bloodiest and most hypocritical periods of history would teach many lessons about the present’ (Addenbrooke, 127). In Hall’s staging of the two parts of Henry IV, performed on the same monolithic set of steel that had reinforced the brutality of the first tetralogy, the Prince (Ian Holm) was motivated by a ‘cold-blooded’ machiavellianism; he was ‘unpredictable, given to bouts of withdrawn and uncongenial behaviour’ (McMillin, 62), at times betraying an almost modern sense of alienation; he used his companions for political advantage, and his relationship with Falstaff (Hugh Griffith) was far from warm. Falstaff, for his part, was less genial than menacingly opportunistic; and the ‘remote and unapproachable’ King (Eric Porter) was a man who now lived with the consequences of having given in to the seductions of power which, in Hall’s view, undergird the plays’ portrayal of history (McMillin, 63).

  Performances of the history cycle by the English Shakespeare Company (ESC) two decades later, 1986 –9, had a more contemporary ideological agenda. Seeking to offer a counter-cultural alternative to the hegemony of the RSC, founders Michael Bogdanov and Michael Pennington saw in the histories a gloss on the abuses of the Conservative government which would appeal to audiences whose view of politics and ‘official history’ had grown increasingly sceptical in the wake of Thatcherism’s opportunistic grasp of the social contract and its promotion of predatory forms of privatization. ‘We are in the era of New Brutalism’, Bogdanov asserted, ‘where a supposed return to Victorian values under the guise of initiative and incentive [has] masked the true goal of greed, avarice, exploitation and self.’ He made the connection to the Henrys even more explicit: ‘Boardrooms may have replaced the Palace at Westminster, Chairpersons (mainly men) replaced monarchs, but the rules [are] the same’ (Bogdanov & Pennington, 24 –5). In this context, the two parts of Henry IV seemed to reflect the Realpolitik of government with clinical precision – a study, as Stephen Greenblatt put it a year before the plays were staged, in how power ‘is based on predation and betrayal’; and ‘what appeared as clarity’ to Tillyard, who saw in the histories a reinforcement of providential order and degree, may turn out to be no more than ‘a conjurer’s trick concealing confusion in order to buy time and stave off the collapse of an illusion’ (34).33

  In the ESC productions, a mixture of styles and periods immediately signalled that this would not be the kind of history audiences had come to expect. By eschewing historical verisimilitude, the productions’ eclectic costuming – a jarring juxtaposition of modern, 1930s and 1940s, Victorian, Elizabethan and medieval – would ‘free the audiences’ imagination’ to make associations among different cultures and periods and to deny ‘the pastness of the past’ (Hodgdon, Part Two, 127; see also Bogdanov & Pennington, 28–32). The Prince’s costuming was revelatory. In Part One, he dressed in torn jeans and looked like a social drop-out at odds with his efficiently bureaucratic father. For Shrewsbury, he donned medieval armour. And when he first appeared in Part Two, drinking a beer with Poins, he wore cricketing trousers, an open-neck red shirt and plimsolls, the image of a bored public-school type. At forty-three, however, Pennington was too old to play the Prince as a young man uncertain of his future. His sardonic wit and superior attitude branded him as a closet Conservative of a Thatcherite stripe, waiting for his moment to come; a ‘nasty young man who has little capacity to care about anybody’ (Ray Conlogue, Globe and Mail, 25 May 1987), ‘darker, craftier [and] altogether more sinister’ than Princes past (Thomas M. Disch, The Nation, 25 June 1988). Opposite him, John Woodvine’s ‘huge, charming George Formby of a Falstaff’, sporting a 1930s ‘deckchair-striped blazer’ (Conlogue; Michael Ratcliffe, Observer, 28 December 1986), was a dapper gentleman whose excesses were those of the indolent, pleasure-loving upper classes. By rejecting him, Harry was in effect killing off the ‘old England’ of class privilege and moral lassitude and replacing it with an amoral political efficiency that British audiences would easily recognize.

  In these productions, furthermore, the discursive structure of Part Two, which offers a welter of alternative histories to rival the ‘official’ history of men in power – those of the women, menials, peasants, unemployed and hangers-on who populate Falstaff’s world – was seen to promote a Marxist understanding of history from the bottom up, as a depiction of class struggle and hegemonic oppression, rather than from the top down.34 Those characters who offered so much of the production’s amusement – Mistress Quickly as a savvy businesswoman determined to collect her due from Sir John; a feistily vulgar, leather-mini-skirted Doll Tearsheet who carries a knife in her belt with which she threatens Pistol’s groin; a Punk Pistol who wraps himself in a Union Jack to celebrate Harry’s coronation; and a doddering Justice Shallow, steeped in sack, who cagily intends to use Falstaff for his own advancement – now appeared not simply as comic diversions, but as parodic reflections of the self-interest and political hypocrisy of those in power. In the words of Barbara Hodgdon, ‘Falstaff’s comic world … was revealed not as history’s amusingly playful carnival alternative, but as its dangerous double’ (Part Two, 132).

  Other productions, however, eschewed political ideology. In 1975 Terry Hands staged a Henriad (as the second tetralogy without Richard II came to be called) for the RSC which instead focused on the domestic drama of Harry’s dysfunctional relationship with his father. Brewster Mason’s Falstaff posed little threat to the Prince: he was beguilingly gentlemanly, ‘softer-centred than he might be’ (Robert Cushman, Observer, 29 June 1975); and while his behaviour may have been immoral, he lacked his predecessors’ pleasure in licentiousness and hovered only ‘at the margins of family dynamics’ where the true centre of the play lay (Hodgdon, Part Two, 82). The Prince faced a more serious threat in his father. Emrys James’s King was a ‘devious, self-pitying politician, a temperamental exhibitionist’ (David, Shakespeare, 199) who projected his own self-loathing onto his son, while Alan Howard played the Prince as a moody introvert – keenly intelligent, caustically ironic and emotionally estranged from the father who has given up on him. The strained relationship between them dominated the two plays. In taking the crown from his father’s pillow, Harry enacted a parricidal fantasy that drew on the Oedipal myth, eliciting from his father a scalding denunciation which exposed the raw nerves of their discord – the King’s guilt for his sins and disgust with his son; the Prince’s craving a love and approval his father has too long withheld. As the emotional climax of the play, this scene served to motivate Harry’s reformation and to explain his behaviour in the production of Henry V that had opened the cycle: it dramatized his learning to improvise, to play expedient roles and to manipulate others to gain what he desires, but always uncertain of himself, never confident of the outcome. This staging of the two parts of Henry IV as plays in which national politics are thrashed out in the intimate arena of domestic conflict has had a deep influence on subsequent productions.

  For the past several decades, directors have often allowed the family psychodrama of unrequited royals to take centre stage. The Prince has become a role coveted by young actors. He has been played by Gerard Murphy (RSC, 1982) as an immature ‘high-class lout’ (Jim Hiley, in Trussler, 58) with no interest in kingship and no instinct for majesty, frustrated by the disapproval of an ascetic, penitent father who feels only disdain for him; by Will Houston (RSC, 2000) as an enigmatic young man with ‘a propensity for paranoia’ who ‘betray[s] … a suppressed craving to be loved’ (Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph, 21 April 2000) but who, when confronted by his father, may have been ‘merely playing for emotional advantage’ (Michael Dobson, SS 54 (2001), 279); by Matthew Macfadyen (NT, 2005) ‘as a brooding solitary who hangs out in taverns as a way of gaining his father’s attention’ (Michael Billington, Guardian, 4 May 2005); and by Geoffrey Streatfield (RSC, 2008) as an unseasoned actor who ‘hadn’t worked out the plot’ (Carol Rutter, SS 62 (2009), 355) and whose apparently ‘cold, time-filling indifference’ disguised a ‘solitary … quest for surrogate fathers’ (Billington, Guardian, 17 April 2008). Unsurprisingly, given this psychoanalytic approach to the tension between father and son, the King has gained new prominence as well, so much so that in Michael Attenborough’s staging of the Henry IV plays in 2000, David Troughton’s ‘remarkably forceful portrayal’ (John Peter, Sunday Times, 30 April 2000) of the King as ‘a psychotic thug who suddenly finds himself troubled by a remorselessly gnawing conscience’ (Spencer, Telegraph) became the ‘pivotal performance’ and ‘defining presence’ of the play (Billington, Guardian, 20 April 2000; John Peter, Sunday Times), his ‘power and authority … establish[ing] a new centre of gravity’ (Robert Hole, whatsonstage.com, 20 February 2001).

  In the shift to regarding the two parts of Henry IV as primarily an investigation of domestic dysfunction, Falstaff has moved perceptibly to the margins. In many productions he has shrunk from a huge bombard of sack from whose size sprang much humour to a man who is simply and impressively large. Fat, after all, is no longer a laughing matter. This change is consistent with a more realistic and psychologically nuanced conception of Falstaff as a knight fallen on hard times, a down-at-heel aristocrat desperate to preserve a shred of dignity. Actors now play Falstaff with an introspection of a Stanislavskian stripe, eschewing, as Robert Shaughnessy notes, ‘the representational conventions of Shakespeare’s text’ that once gave definition to the fat knight’s performances (68). Together with Part One, Part Two traces the dramatic career of a melancholic knight who often betrays a sense of tragic inevitability that edges his performance with a dispiriting darkness.

  As played by Robert Stephens (RSC, 1991), Falstaff has become a ruined and bitter man who ‘veer[s] melancholically between bouts of hedonistic indulgence and darkly scathing fits of insecurity’ (Michael Coveney, Observer, 21 April 1991) ‘a solitary hedonist yearning for a son’ (Billington, Guardian, 18 April 1991), who, ‘desperately pained by his isolation and the self-awareness that went with it … search[ed] for an embrace’ that the Prince ‘found it so difficult to give him’ (Peter Holland, SS 45 (1992), 143); as played by Desmond Barrit (RSC, 2000), ‘a complex, rather sad figure for whom the tragedy of disappointment and rejection is clearly just around the corner’ (Hole, whatonstage.com, 20 February 2001), a man ‘with a haunted horror of mortality and a desperate need to be loved’ whose jokes betray ‘a terrible loneliness’ (Spencer, Telegraph); as played by Michael Gambon (NT, 2005), a ‘deeply melancholic’ old man, (Paul Taylor, Independent, 6 May 2005), ‘darkly afraid of death’ (Matt Wolf, New York Times, 11 May 2005), who ‘vainly reach[es] out to [the Prince] for a gesture of affection that never quite comes’ (Taylor, Independent, 6 May 2005); and at the extreme, as played by David Warner (RSC, 2008) a ‘morose’ opportunist (Rutter, SS 62 (2009), 355) with a world-weary ennui and ‘a leonine melancholy’ that infect the whole production. A Falstaff such as these, conceived as ‘only one part of the fabric of the play, not its centre’ (Billington, Guardian, 4 May 2005), can embody the comic spirit of the Henry IV plays only fitfully. Instead he has acquired a disturbing pathology which has transformed his character into something quite different from what it once seemed to be.