Falstaff versus history

  Playing Part Two as one of a cycle of history plays, therefore, has come at the expense of the sublimely resilient Falstaff for whom the play was once prized. Falstaff’s role is subsumed in a larger story of royal family politics which focuses on a tortured Prince whose emergence as Henry V must be prepared for by a seriousness of purpose which, even in Part One, creates a palpable tension between him and Falstaff. This tension is amply evident in The Hollow Crown, the four-play cycle filmed by the BBC, first broadcast in 2012, and distributed worldwide. Directed by Richard Eyre, the two Henry IV plays vividly dramatize this tension between the political play and the Falstaff play. Eyre’s film of Part Two focuses most intently on the relationship between the King and the Prince. In a reversal of what Betterton did three centuries earlier, Eyre manipulates the text to introduce the King early in order to foreground his concerns about the Prince, which in the text are not mentioned until 4.3. Here, the first 80 lines of that scene are moved to a position very early, in Act 1; the King, played by Jeremy Irons as a ‘paranoid and mercurial’ older man ‘given to bursts of rage at any hint of waking up the past’ (Kelly Newman O’Connor, Shakespeare Newsletter, Spring 2013, 100), sits at a table in Westminster inquiring of his sons the whereabouts of the Prince of Wales, and, hearing that he dines with his usual companions in Eastcheap, gives vent to powerful anger. The King’s soliloquy on sleep is also moved forward from Act 3 to a position prior to the tavern scene in Act 2, where it stands alone, a tragic meditation in which the King registers despair over his own spiritual ills: ‘the correlation between the health of the body politic and the health of the king has rarely been more eloquently portrayed’ (Matthew Lyons, wordpress.com, 16 July 2012).

  Eyre’s rearrangement of these scenes prepares more forcefully for the confrontation of father and son. When the Prince enters to find his father seemingly dead, he removes the crown lying on the pillow and takes it to the adjacent throne room, where he sits on the throne and, tears streaming down his cheeks, crowns himself – an act of auto-genesis which looks deeply incriminating to the King when he bursts into the throne room. Crucially, the King does not berate Harry in private, as he does in the text. Rather, he does so in front of Warwick, Westmorland, guards and his other three sons who, alarmed by his fury, have followed him. Eyre thus films the scene as a public humiliation of the Prince; and when Harry launches into his speech of self-exculpation, he speaks not just to his father, but to the audience of his brothers and nobles to whom his eyes keep returning. Harry’s declaration of loyalty thus becomes a public performance. His father recognizes the value of that performance when, having crumpled on the dais, he acknowledges that God must have put it in Harry’s mind to steal the crown so that he could acquit himself ‘so wisely in excuse of it’ (4.3.309), a tacit recognition of the rhetorical and political skill which, in Henry’s eyes, will qualify his son for kingship.

  The casting of Simon Russell Beale as Falstaff is symptomatic of the sobering effect that playing the Henry IV plays as part of a cycle has had. A stocky man with an unkempt white beard and a face that grows increasingly red with drink, Falstaff resembles a gnome more than a traditional Lord of Misrule. Considerably shorter than other characters and particularly so alongside the lanky, matinée-idol Prince of Tom Hiddleston, he looks like a man who is constantly trying to measure up to others, but failing. His vulnerability is emphasized by his limp, his being perpetually out of breath and his impotence with Doll, for which he apologizes with a self-deprecatory ‘I am old’ (2.4.274). Even in his reminiscences with Justice Shallow, ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight’ (3.2.214), Falstaff in close-up looks haunted by the idea of death, his ‘lack of levity’, as one critic observes, tinged ‘with a rueful awareness of his own mortality’ (O’Connor, 201). In the opinion of another, Beale charts a ‘slow descent into the desperate melancholy of age and failure’ but shows too little of the ‘beguiling, quixotic charm’ that has historically been the hallmark of great Falstaffs (Lyons).

  9 Falstaff (Simon Russell Beale) and Mistress Quickly (Julie Walters) in Henry IV, Part Two (2.1) for the BBC2 tetralogy, The Hollow Crown, 2012

  Beale, an actor noted more for wit than for warmth, offers a keenly intelligent performance whose naturalism is ideally modulated for the medium of television. The camera’s focus on his expressive face, and particularly his eyes, which throw ‘baleful looks of recognition of the frailty of his position’ (oughttobeclowns.blogspot.com, 15 July 2012), frequently captures a kind of pleading for acceptance which registers as early as his first scene with the Prince in Part One when he begs, ‘When thou art king … do not hang a thief’ – and more forcefully in ‘Banish not him thy Harry’s company’. In their one tavern scene together in Part Two, caught having made derogatory comments about the Prince and Poins, Falstaff repeatedly utters ‘No abuse, Hal’ (2.4.317–27) with increasing anxiety in a voice that turns treble with fear, like a child afraid of chastisement. This exchange has little of the buoyancy that used to characterize their relationship: Falstaff responds with desperation to the Prince’s censure, and Hiddleston conveys no sense of fun in having caught Falstaff in a lie one last time. He has already banished him, as Falstaff clearly apprehends.

  The relationship between Falstaff and the Prince is never one of equals in Eyre’s Henry IV, and their scenes together have little of the geniality traditionally associated with them. One always detects an anticipation of future division between the two men, always in the Prince a ‘coldness’ and an ‘emotional distance’ towards his old companion (civiliantheatre.com, 15 July 2012), always in Falstaff a fear of losing Harry’s protection. As one critic observes, Falstaff ‘is never far away from panic’, and, objecting to such vulnerability in a character traditionally played as brashly resilient, adds, ‘Falstaff should have more confidence and lust for life’ (O’Connor, 102). Thus, when the rejection scene comes, his pleading eyes and his suppliant posture are things the audience has seen before; the inevitability of this moment has been telescoped in scenes as early as Part One, and his tears of disbelief allow him no time to regain the composure, as more confident Falstaffs do, to assure his followers convincingly that he will be sent for soon at night.

  The last image of the film, of soldiers thrusting Falstaff out of the doors of Westminster, the camera lingering over his distraught face in close-up, puts emphasis on Falstaff’s tragedy and on the ruthlessness of state policy under the new King. Just as Prince John’s soldiers have done at Gaultree – and the film shows them on horseback slaughtering rebel soldiers who flee on foot – the King’s soldiers here round up the scattered stray in London: first Doll and the Hostess; now Falstaff and his followers. The sombre tone of this conclusion is of a piece with the rest of the production. It marks the ultimate capitulation of Shakespeare’s most exuberantly comic character to the demands of playing Henry IV as part of a cycle; it seals the defeat of the plays’ festive spirit by the inexorable force of chronicle history. The tragedy of Falstaff serves the purposes of state. Eyre’s production is the culmination of decades of suppressing comedy in the interest of dramatizing how power is gained and preserved. For a new generation of audiences, Eyre foregrounds the politics of repression and expulsion. The film thus requires a Falstaff whose interiority is as compelling as that of the Prince or the King. It also denies Falstaff his comic heart.

  This is not to say that all recent productions of Henry IV have been this dark. Occasionally, especially if there is no Henry V to which they must build, productions have preserved a better balance between the play’s scenes of comedy and chronicle history. With great comic actors such as Kevin Kline in a performance of the conflated Henry IV plays at Lincoln Center in 2003, or Roger Allam in a rousing performance of both parts at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2010, or Anthony Sher in a robust staging of them for the RSC in 2014 –15, the play has achieved a satisfying tonal unity between the royal family saga and those scenes of festive merriment which offer an alternative to it. Indeed, Sher’s Falstaff, padded so grossly that he moves at a snail’s pace, is a throwback to Falstaffs of previous generations in his overweening self-confidence and his ability to out-manoeuvre others with wit and wordplay. His command of every situation is evident in the pace of his delivery: Sher’s ‘pukka-accented Falstaff delivers his witty speeches with an imperturbably unhurried, self-relishing deliberation’ and with a comic ‘refusal to change gear’ even when, unaware that the Prince has moved on, his situation changes (Paul Taylor, Independent, 18 April 2014). Thus marked by an arrogant ‘inability to … adapt’ (Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph, 17 April 2014), he is floored – and speechless – when the new King banishes him.

  If Sher’s performance eschewed the pathology of Falstaffian self-doubt and unrequited longing that had evolved during the latter half of the twentieth century, Dominic Dromgoole’s rehabilitation of Falstaff as a comic hero was even more theatrically compelling. His staging for Shakespeare’s Globe, in which the entire theatre served as a playing space, allowed a fluidity of performance and a level of audience involvement such as might have been common when the Henry IV plays were performed at the Curtain more than four hundred years ago. Dromgoole began Part Two, as he had Part One, with a mummers’ play. A group of actors mounted a scaffold at the rear of the yard and began a broadly pantomimic enactment of the Battle of Shrewsbury, ‘involving plenty of knock-about, daggers of lath, exaggerated death and miraculous resurrection’ and above all, Falstaff, celebrated killer of Hostpur, sporting a huge erect phallus, ‘metamorphosed in the popular imagination into St. George killing the dragon’ (Carol Rutter, SS 64 (2011), 345). Audience members were cast as medieval spectators receiving news as a form of entertainment. As Will Sharpe observes, ‘the Globe frequently employs similar tactics’ to encourage ‘actor/audience relationships’, thereby validating ‘the perception that Renaissance playgoing was a boisterous, interactive affair’. But Dromgoole had more in mind, for spectators were being alerted to the ways in which history is framed and disseminated for popular consumption. The mummers’ play thus anticipated the speech of Rumour, which was divided among several actors who spoke from different points in the theatre to recount as tragic narrative the history they had just enacted as comedy, using the ‘locale and dislocation from events’ to insist upon ‘the impossibility of meaningful historiography’ and to expose how ‘fragmentary chaos’ ultimately yields to ‘the communal shaping of historical record’ (Sharpe).

  In a space such as the new Globe, Falstaff has the opportunity, as the first Falstaff no doubt had at the Curtain,35 of directly addressing the audience, appealing to their sympathies and making them complicit in his strategies. Roger Allam took full advantage of that opportunity. A dashing actor with an impressive bearing, impeccable comic timing and a baritone voice ‘so fruity you want to bottle it’ (Cavendish, Telegraph, 16 July 2010), he restored the sense, too often forgotten in recent productions, ‘that this wonderfully reprehensible character is also a life force’ (Spencer, Telegraph 15 July 2010). Though padded, he had ‘the stature to realize a larger-than-life character’ and to earn the Prince’s accusation that he is a stuffed cloak-bag of guts even without being corpulent (Peter Brown, London Theatre Guide, 14 July 2010); and his quick wit, clever asides and ‘ripe, roguish charisma’ (Spencer) earned him the audience’s allegiance from the start. Allam’s entrance is anticipated by street vendors who throng the stage, setting up their stalls and singing a ballad about the brave deeds of Falstaff at Shrewsbury. When he enters to their applause, ‘fully the swaggering showman’, he slyly motions for the audience to applaud as well and to join him in another jubilant chorus of ‘’Twas Falstaff that carried the day’.

  10 Roger Allam as Falstaff in Dominic Dromgoole’s production of the two Henry IV plays at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, 2010

  Allam’s Falstaff traces a remarkable dramatic arc from the jovial knight in Part One to the cynically self-promoting arriviste of Part Two, now decked out in fine clothing and dining out on his reputation for valour at Shrewsbury. He delights in his own verbal dexterity as he spars with the Lord Chief Justice, knowing that his reputation for valour at Shrewsbury will buy him a reprieve; and he manages to keep up the pace of verbal sparring even as he thrusts and parries with the officers who try to arrest him at the Hostess’s suit. Aware of how charismatic he is, this formidable Falstaff plays shamelessly to the crowd; but he is also dangerously manipulative. So confident is he of his command over others, including the Prince, that it never occurs to him to doubt that he will eventually play a prominent role in Henry V’s court. Thus the public repudiation by his ‘sweet boy’, when it comes, is the more powerful for taking him by surprise. His ‘limbs shaking uncontrollably’, he hears his rejection as a death sentence (Cavendish).

  This unabashedly extrovert Falstaff, so different from the melancholic Falstaffs of decades past whose humour thinly disguised their mortal fears, was matched in exuberance by the affable Prince of Jamie Parker. Far from the emotionally distant Harry who is tortured by self-doubt and yearns for his father’s love, Parker joins the exploits of his tavern companions in Part One with relish, and there is little sense that his pleasure in Falstaff’s company has diminished in the tavern scene of Part Two. Yet ‘stiff bristles’ are visible beneath his ‘boyish exterior’ and ‘childish pleasure in pranks’, according to one critic; ‘he isn’t so much sewing his wild oats as harvesting them all in one go, as if already well aware that he hasn’t got a lot of time left’ (Lyn Gardner, Guardian, 15 July 2010); and to another, his ‘affability is only skin deep and barely masks the steely calculation that lies beneath’ (Spencer). Ultimately, Parker’s Prince is ‘far shrewder than Falstaff, a man who … is so busy putting on a performance that he fails to notice that the script is changing’ (Gardner). Thus the audience does not share Falstaff’s surprise when the young King condemns in tones of ‘rapier steeliness’ Falstaff’s ill-judged interruption of the coronation procession (Gardner). This is a Harry whose star has risen, even as Falstaff’s has fallen without his knowing it; and although Falstaff holds centre stage with his richly theatrical performance, the threads of festive comedy and chronicle history are woven together with a seamlessness rarely achieved in productions of these two plays.

  Over the centuries, larger-than-life Falstaffs such as this have been allowed to dominate the play even if they have ultimately been contained by a power structure that spits them out. But such productions are increasingly rare. The Henry IV plays, particularly Part Two, have in recent decades come to be regarded as serious explorations of the performance of power; and in them, Falstaff is often reduced to a marginal figure tinged with anxiety and fatalistic melancholy, at odds not only with the Prince but with the buoyant Sir John – ‘the best of Comical Characters’, according to John Dryden in 166836 – whose popularity once prompted theatre companies to call the play Falstaff.

  FALSTAFF AND HIS FRIENDS

  Falstaff and the decline of festivity

  Neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff.

  (Samuel Johnson, 1765)

  Falstaff has been seducing audiences for more than four hundred years. Fat, old, dissipated and given to lying, Falstaff is a knight – Sir John – who, like many on the margins of the Elizabethan court, is impecunious and preys on others. He cheats, he whores and he eats and drinks to excess; but he does so with such joyful abandon and defends himself with such shameless brio that he has acquired a stature beyond that of any other comic character in Shakespeare.37 He embodies the spirit of hedonism, and although his days are numbered by pleasures of the flesh, he has managed to strike a responsive chord in all but the most moralistic of critics. As William Hazlitt wrote in excuse of his moral depravity, ‘Falstaff’s wit is an emanation of a fine constitution; an exuberance of good humour and good-nature; an overflowing of his love of laughter and good-fellowship; a giving vent to his heart’s ease, and over-contentment with himself and others … The unrestrained indulgence of his own ease, appetites, and convenience, has neither malice nor hypocrisy in it … and we no more object to the character of Falstaff in a moral point of view than we should think of bringing an excellent comedian, who should represent him to the life, before one of the police offices’ (Characters, 152).

  Above all, Falstaff has perfected the art of survival. If in Part One he invents a preposterous fiction to excuse his cowardice at the Gad’s Hill robbery and, even more boldly, claims to have killed Hotspur, in Part Two, bolstered by his reputation as a war hero, he engages in a battle of wits with the Lord Chief Justice and adroitly talks his way out of derogatory remarks he has made about Prince Harry and Poins. To create a figure this resourceful, Shakespeare rifled various stock characters from earlier drama. The miles gloriosus of Roman comedy served as a model for Falstaff’s inflated lies about his exploits at Gad’s Hill; the Vice of medieval Morality plays underlies his gregarious promotion of lewd behaviours in the Prince; and the tradition of electing a Lord of Misrule to displace legitimate authority during the Christmas revels in London allowed Shakespeare’s audience to link Falstaff to native holiday customs. Like a Lord of Misrule, Falstaff represents freedom from restraint – he becomes a site of social transgression who appeals to the anarchic instincts in viewers of every stripe. None of these sources, however, can account for the comic resourcefulness of a character who has the privilege of addressing the audience directly and offering commentary that often subverts the pretences which inform the behaviour of the play’s political figures.