Sandwiched between the two Northumberland scenes is a brief comic squabble over debts between Falstaff and the Hostess extracted from Part Two (2.1); otherwise, Falstaff appears only in the rejection scene, in which he is granted a scant four and a half lines. Gone are Falstaff’s scenes with the Lord Chief Justice, with Doll Tearsheet and with the Ancient Pistol; gone, the scenes of Falstaff’s recruiting soldiers, drinking and reminiscing with Justices Shallow and Silence. Dering allows nothing to impede the conclusion of the main plot: the illness and death of the King (a clever splicing together of 3.1 and 4.3); Prince Harry’s accession and reassurance of his brothers (a reduction of 5.2); and, immediately following as part of the same scene, his rejection of Falstaff in a speech that concludes with five rather clumsily interpolated lines wherein the new King vows to ‘change our thoughtes for honour and renowne’ and set his sights on ‘the royalty and crowne of Fraunce’ (5.10.77 – 8).6

  Dering’s conflation thus uses portions of Part Two – most of them from Acts 4 and 5 – to provide a swift resolution of the royal narrative dramatized in Part One, culminating in the reformation of the Prince of Wales, who has already proved himself in battle at Shrewsbury, as a responsible King. For this reformation, it was unnecessary that the Falstaff scenes from Part Two be included, for they add nothing to the relationship Prince Henry has had with him: they dramatize a Falstaff who, capitalizing on his ‘honours’ falsely won at Shrewsbury, presides over a comic world that can no longer include the Prince. Dering’s abridgement of the two texts thus offers a coherent dramatic action that some scholars speculate may have been Shakespeare’s original design for Henry IV, before he realized that he had too much chronicle material to include in one play, or before the character of Falstaff grew out of all compass, prompting him to end his play at Shrewsbury and, as a result, leaving little history to be dramatized in the sequel (See Introduction). Given Dering’s emphasis on the royal narrative, it is not surprising that less than a quarter of his play is drawn from Part Two.

  Orson Welles’s Falstaff

  In recent decades there have been frequent attempts to perform Henry IV as a conflation of the two parts. As with Dering’s abridgement, such attempts have tended to foreground the narrative of Harry’s coming of age as a triumph of the state over forces of anarchy, and consequently to suppress those aspects of Part Two that would call such ideological certainty into question. The earliest and best known of these conflations is Orson Welles’s 1965 film Falstaff, released in the US two years later as Chimes at Midnight. Based on two short-lived stage adaptations which Welles had attempted in the US in 1938 and Ireland in 1960,7 it offers a complex portrait of Falstaff, its emphasis falling heavily on both the comic resourcefulness and the inevitable tragedy of a great but mistreated hero, and its ingenious cutting and splicing of the two Henry IV plays including more of the social panorama from Part Two than Dering allowed. In carefully arranged segments of the tavern scenes, Mistress Quickly, Doll Tearsheet and the Ancient Pistol are all allowed to revel with Falstaff, and Falstaff visits Justice Shallow’s farm twice, once to recruit soldiers, and later to bilk Shallow of a thousand pounds. The title itself comes from Falstaff’s wry acknowledgement to Justice Shallow, in a moment that opens the film, that their youth has passed: ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow’ (3.2.214 – 15). Age, remembrance and a sense of loss pervade the film and heighten the sympathy one feels for Falstaff.

  Nevertheless, although Welles foregrounds his own performance as a huge, genial, cunning and dangerously intelligent Falstaff, the overall dramatic arc of his film is determined primarily by the royal coming-of-age story. All references to the Northumberlands and to the Prelate’s Rebellion are expunged following the royal victory at Shrewsbury, and the portion of the film drawn from Part Two soon narrows to Harry’s emergence as a ‘true prince’. Rather than political history, Welles explores the psychology of the father–son triangulation, with Harry craving the affection of a surrogate father, Falstaff, who stands between him and the approval he seeks from the emotionally remote King (elegantly played by John Gielgud), and eventually emerging unscathed by ‘the two fathers who threaten to submerge his own unique identity, either through guilty rule or guilded license’ (Crowl, 72).

  Welles is careful to avoid the back-sliding in Harry’s relationship with the King in Part Two that often puzzles those who expect narrative consistency with Part One, as if the Prince had never redeemed himself on Percy’s head and won the confidence of his father. Rather, he shapes their encounters in Part One to suggest that the King is unpersuaded by evidence of his son’s sincerity: distant and cold at their meeting in 3.3, the King scarcely credits Harry’s offer to engage Hotspur in single combat, and his expression of pleasure in his son’s heroic resolve, ‘A hundred thousand rebels die in this!’ (3.2.160), is eliminated. Even more tellingly, Welles omits Harry’s rescue of his father from Douglas at Shrewsbury, a rescue which in Part One salvages the Prince’s ‘lost opinion’ (5.4.47) and provides irrefutable evidence of his loyalty to the King. Most significantly, in a tactical revision of Part One that allows the alienation between the Prince and King to continue into Part Two, Falstaff claims to have killed Hotspur while the King is present to hear him. Believing that his son has falsely taken credit for Hotspur’s defeat, the King turns his back in disgust, obviating any possibility for protest from Harry.8 The purpose of such textual manipulation is to postpone the reconciliation of father and son to the King’s deathbed scene in Part Two; but it also allows Harry to prolong his decision to relinquish Falstaff as a surrogate father.

  Harry signals his growing displeasure with Falstaff ‘four times during the movie’, according to Welles, each instance adding cumulative force to the final rejection.9 The first time, Harry delivers his ‘I know you all’ soliloquy so that Falstaff can hear him, thus changing the dynamic between the two men (as the camera reveals in Falstaff’s reaction to Harry’s words) and anticipating the more explicit threat of banishment in the ‘I do, I will’ concluding the play-extempore. The third time – notable because it was invented by Welles – occurs at Shrewsbury when, after the King has left in disgust, Falstaff attempts to placate Harry with the false bonhomie of his paean to sherris sack (transposed from 4.2.94 –123). The Prince, no longer amused by the corrupt knight who has discredited his rightful claim to chivalric rehabilitation in the eyes of his father, turns his back on Falstaff and walks away, casting aside the proffered cup of sack as he goes. Thus, however one is encouraged to regard Welles’s film as Falstaff’s tragedy, with his stark final banishment and long, solitary exit followed by a poignant account of his death borrowed from Henry V,10 ultimately Falstaff’s fate is subsumed in the Prince’s coming-of-age story, just as it had been in Dering’s abridgement, to clarify the play’s focus on royal succession and what has to be sacrificed to maintain the order of state.

  John Barton’s When Thou Art King

  John Barton’s adaptation of the two Henry IV plays, performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company as a Theatregoround production in 1969 and revived in 1970, was tellingly titled When Thou Art King.11 Although it may have been inspired by Welles’s film released only four years earlier, it is in spirit much closer to Dering’s abridgement, with which Barton may have been familiar. He divided Henry IV so that each part was given an act, though the act for Part One was significantly longer than that for Part Two.12 Barton’s rehearsal notes printed in the programme reveal how deeply indebted he was to Dover Wilson’s view of the play as allegorical history:

  Henry IV reflects the Morality school: enter at one door the young Prince Hal; at the other, the Reverend Vice Falstaff – the tempted and the tempter. It is a Catholic conflict: to achieve salvation you have to experience and overcome sin… . Falstaff embodies every aspect and degree of Vanity. A self-indulgent whoremaster, a thief, a liar, a cutpurse, a cheat, a braggadocio, in love with himself and his own company, immensely and seductively attractive. If Hal can survive such a mountainous attack on the senses, then it is certain that Vanity will one day be outfaced.

  (RSC programme, When Thou Art King, 1969)

  Barton’s emphasis fell squarely on Hal’s growth to moral maturity. As in the RSC history cycles which Barton himself co-directed with Peter Hall in 1964, he insists that the rejection of Falstaff in When Thou Art King is ‘clearly provided for throughout’. Indeed, he argues, the rejection itself ‘is not so surprising as the moderation of the sentence’; and to underscore the new King’s moral maturity, he omits the lines in which the Lord Chief Justice commits Falstaff to the Fleet. ‘Justice is done,’ Barton comments, ‘but this time with humanity.’

  To narrow the focus of his play to the royal Bildungsroman, Barton significantly curtails the scenes of rebellion in Part One, preserving only those portions involving Hotspur and Northumberland, whose father–son tensions parallel those between the King and the Prince. He eliminates Worcester, Glendower, the scene in the Welsh camp and the scene with the Archbishop. He splices together portions of the rebels’ scenes at Shrewsbury; eliminates all of the scene in which Worcester confronts the King and the Prince except Falstaff’s speech on honour, which is appended to an earlier scene (4.2); and merges the scenes remaining in Act 5 into one seamless denouement, with the deepest cuts coming in the rebels’ dialogue. In fact, Barton does not introduce the rebels until the play is well under way. Where, in Shakespeare’s text, Northumberland, Worcester and Hotspur confront the King in Act 1, Barton postpones that confrontation until nearly a third of the way into his abridgement of Part One. Prior to it, he signals his focus on the conflict between the King and the Prince by having the play open with the King asking a question adapted from Richard II, ‘Can no one tell me of my wayward son?’,13 that leads to an exchange in which he contrasts his own dishonourable Hal with the heroic Hotspur (adapted from Part One 1.1.77 – 89). In this exchange, however, Barton substitutes for Westmorland the Lord Chief Justice, who reports that the Sheriff has sent Hal and his companions to prison.

  Barton then provides evidence of Harry’s madcap youth never dramatized by Shakespeare. As he had done brilliantly in his 1963 – 4 adaptation of the Henry VI plays titled The Wars of the Roses, for which he drew on various sources to insert pseudo-Shakespearean scenes of his own devising, Barton includes a legendary episode that was dramatized in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth but to which Shakespeare alludes only fleetingly in Part Two. When the Lord Chief Justice has arraigned Bardolph for a crime, the Prince enters the chamber, demands Bardolph’s release and, when the Lord Chief Justice refuses, strikes him ‘on the cheek’ (Shakespeare reports it as a ‘box of the ear’, 1.2.194), for which he is committed to the Fleet. Following this, in a scene clearly inspired by Harry’s play-extempore with Falstaff, Francis the drawer and the newly freed Bardolph re-enact the arraignment in sport, with Francis taking the role of Bardolph and Bardolph, the role of the Lord Chief Justice. This scene establishes a tone of comic anarchy in anticipation of the scene in which Falstaff asks Harry (now released from prison) what will happen ‘when thou art king’ (Part One 1.2.22). In answer to that question, Harry’s ‘I know you all’ soliloquy promises the reformation that, as Barton argues, is prepared for throughout the play.

  If, in Barton’s abridgement of Part One, the northern rebellion is narrowed to a personal rivalry between Harry and Hotspur, rebellion is all but absent from his abridgement of Part Two. The scene of Northumberland’s receiving news of Hotspur’s death is drastically reduced, as is his scene with Lady Percy; and, as in Dering’s Henry IV, the Prelate’s Rebellion is cut entirely: there is no aggrieved Archbishop, no royal double-cross at Gaultree. The effect of this abridgement is to tighten the dramatic focus on the contest between the King and Falstaff for Harry’s soul – the son torn between two fathers, rather like an Everyman who is tugged by the forces of good and evil: the one father cold but politically astute, the other warm but morally corrupt.

  Barton keeps enough material from the early scenes of Part Two to foreground Falstaff as the abstract of all sins. He cleverly splices together portions of the scenes in which Falstaff tries to borrow money from the Hostess and then from the Lord Chief Justice (whose role continues from the first act), and he leaves intact most of the long tavern scene in which Falstaff consorts with Doll Tearsheet and the Ancient Pistol. But the scenes at Justice Shallow’s farm in Gloucestershire are eliminated, and with them, a more genially rounded portrait of Falstaff. Instead, Barton turns his gaze on the King’s illness and his final reconciliation with the Prince. In a conflation that harks back to Betterton’s, Barton merges 3.1 – the King’s soliloquy on sleep and subsequent musings on the state of the kingdom – with 4.3, in which the King asks, ‘Where is the Prince, my son?’ (an adaptation of “Where is the Prince your brother?” at 4.3.13). The question is asked of the Lord Chief Justice, for Barton, intent on keeping his cast to a minimum, has eliminated the King’s other sons, Clarence and Gloucester, and chosen to move quickly to the King’s falling into a swoon, the entry of the Prince and his exit with the crown. Some of the longer speeches in the tense confrontation of father and son are pared down, but the scene itself provides an emotional climax for the play. It marks Harry’s ultimate choice to accept his father’s mantle and to abjure his former life.

  Barton compresses the final scenes to build up the significance of Harry’s last encounter with Falstaff. Much of the ancillary material in Act 5 of Part Two is jettisoned. Falstaff, presumably on his way north following the Battle of Shrewsbury, says to Bardolph ‘we must a dozen miles tonight’ (adapted from 3.2.290), then delivers a composite soliloquy that begins by paraphrasing the speech in which, in Shakespeare’s original, he mocks the pretensions of Justice Shallow, but whose object of ridicule now is Bardolph, from whom he vows to ‘devise matter to keep the Prince in continual laughter’ (from 5.1.76 – 8). This speech segues into Falstaff’s unfavourable comparison of Prince John with Prince Harry (from 4.2.85 – 123), at which point Pistol enters with news of the King’s death and Falstaff proceeds to brag that the laws of England are at his commandment (an adaptation of 5.3.83 – 141 which now excludes Shallow). In an ironic juxtaposition, Barton moves directly to a compression of two scenes: the first, in which the new King rewards the Lord Chief Justice for honourable service to his father; the second, in which he banishes Falstaff, the decisive event towards which the whole play, according to Barton, has tended.

  While critics generally praised the ‘coherence and drive’ that Barton’s adaptation gave to the saga of ‘Hal’s relationship with Falstaff and his education in the art of kingship’ (Michael Billington, The Times, 4 November 1970), they also regretted the price that had to be paid to achieve such coherence. ‘We need to see the circumstances, the concerns of society from which the Prince appears to escape’, complained Nicholas de Jongh (Guardian, 4 November 1970): in particular, he lamented the simplification of political history and cultural contexts – ‘the internal dissensions, the complex of dynastic disputes and the spectrum of life’ – from which Harry would emerge as a popular but astute leader. This loss was most keenly felt in the abridgement of Part Two, which, more than Part One, offers a ‘panoramic vision of English society: thus we lose both the mellow comedy of Shallow and Silence and, at the other end of the scale, a crucial incident such as Prince John’s betrayal of his pardon to the northern rebels. The latter is particularly significant since without it, we never see in action the kind of treacherous political pragmatism that is no part of Hal’s concept of kingship’ (de Jongh). What Barton sacrifices in conceiving When Thou Art King as Hal’s Morality play, therefore, is the subtle balance Shakespeare provides between humane governance and political expedience, between chronicle history and cultural memory.

  Dakin Matthews’s Henry IV

  This tradition of sacrificing the peculiar merits of Part Two as social history to the interests of a coherent coming-of-age story was followed by American actor and playwright Dakin Matthews in his popular adaptation of the two Henry IV plays. Matthews’s ‘compilation’, as he calls it, was first workshopped at the Juilliard School in New York in 1972, just two years after the run of Barton’s When Thou Art King. It was performed at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1974; revised and performed again by the California Actors Theatre in 1980; further revised for performance by the Denver Center Theatre Company in 1990; re-adapted and lengthened for the 1995 season at the Old Globe in San Diego, where it was directed by Jack O’Brien; and reworked into its final form for the successful Lincoln Center production in 2003, directed by O’Brien and starring Kevin Kline as Falstaff. Since its 100 sold-out performances at Lincoln Center, Matthews’s adaptation has achieved a popularity unprecedented among recent adaptations of Shakespeare and played at numerous regional theatres throughout the US.

  Like the Dering manuscript and subsequent conflations of the Henry IV plays, Matthews’s adaptation draws more heavily from Part One. He divides the play into three acts – the first two compressing material from Part One, the third and shortest telescoping events from the final two acts of Part Two. With a direct debt to Welles, whose Prince signals displeasure with Falstaff at four key moments in the film, Matthews explains that he has structured his adaptation to foreground the increasingly strained relationship between Prince Harry and Falstaff, pointing the way to Henry’s rejection of Falstaff at the end of Part Two and thus, inevitably, focusing on the royal Bildungsroman: