The three-act structure is mounted on the triple rejection of Falstaff, each rejection more serious and more painful for the Prince. The first occurs in jest – at the end of the extempore play in the first major tavern scene; it is the climactic moment of my Act One. The second, an intensely personal leave-taking, occurs on the battlefield of Shrewsbury, when the Prince discovers the body of Falstaff lying next to Hotspur’s corpse; this farewell to an (apparently) dead comrade is the climax of my Act Two. The third rejection occurs right after the coronation, and is public, painful, and final. This is the climactic moment of my Act Three.14

  The first and third of these rejections, of course, are in the Shakespearean text. Matthews is disingenuous about the second, however. When he alludes to the Prince’s ‘farewell’ to an apparently dead Falstaff, he doesn’t use the word ‘rejection’: the reason, I think, is that he wants to avoid drawing attention to lines he himself wrote for this scene in which Harry actually does reject Falstaff. In Shakespeare’s text, when Falstaff comes back to life carrying with him the corpse of Hotspur, Harry’s generous sanctioning of his behaviour is the last he speaks to Falstaff in Part One: ‘Come, bring your luggage nobly on your back. / For my part, if a lie may do thee grace, / I’ll gild it with the happiest terms I have’ (5.4.156 – 8). Matthews keeps these lines, but then adds an exchange in which the Prince, in exasperation, turns his back on Falstaff, as he does in Chimes at Midnight (76):

  FALSTAFF. Well, Hal – and shall we to the west together, to baste the devil Welshman with his own leeks?

  PRINCE HENRY. No. No, ’twere best to part; go then with my brother John; for heaven ’t witness, I have no care to fight with thee. Farewell.

  These pseudo-Shakespearean lines explain Falstaff’s appearance at Gaultree with Prince John’s army in the final act and thus serve a function required by the conflation. But in them, Matthews also chooses to fabricate a repudiation of Falstaff unwarranted by the text of Part One, in which the Prince’s final words grace Falstaff’s lies. Matthews thus works against the Shakespearean text to achieve the structural balance and thematic coherence he desires.

  Like previous adapters, then, Matthews acknowledges that his primary intention is to ‘tell of the transition of power from father to son’ in which ‘Hal is the real focus of the narrative’ and for which Part Two is important largely because ‘it ties up all the loose ends left dangling from the first play’ (5). Yet Matthews also admits that in abridging the plays, he was loath to relinquish ‘that handful of magnificent scenes from Part Two’ (7) – scenes not essential to the political plot – in which, for example, Lady Percy eulogizes Hotspur, Falstaff confronts the Lord Chief Justice and extols the virtues of alcohol, and Falstaff recruits soldiers in Gloucestershire. ‘All these would pass unseen and unheard into oblivion’, Matthews insists (7), had he not chosen to keep them, though in abbreviated form. However laudable his preservationist impulse may be, he does not preserve the scenes as Shakespeare wrote them. Instead, he picks and chooses parts of scenes – though less artfully than Welles did – so that the resulting text plays like a ‘greatest moments from Henry IV’, fattening Falstaff’s role while reducing the characters who surround him to mere caricatures. Mistress Quickly, Doll Tearsheet, Bardolph, the Ancient Pistol and Justices Shallow and Silence, who in the full text of Part Two create a rich alternative world to that of the court, are robbed of life – and most of their lines – in Matthews’s adaptation.

  Matthews grafts some of the best material from the first three acts of Part Two onto scenes in Part One. To the lively tavern scene early in Matthews’s second act (taken from Part One 3.3) – on the eve of the march to Shrewsbury – he transfers highlights from the long tavern scene in Part Two (2.4). Falstaff’s banter with Pistol and Bardolph, his being overheard and called to account by the Prince and Poins disguised as drawers, and his affectionate farewell to Doll are all interpolations from the later play. Mistress Quickly’s comic complaint about Falstaff’s promise to marry her is interpolated from an earlier scene in Part Two (2.1). By grafting this material onto the tavern scene from Part One, Matthews argues that he saves colourful characters and unmatchable dialogue that would otherwise have been sacrificed. Yet the effect is not, as it is in the full text of Part Two, to dramatize the stories of marginalized people who had no voice in the recording of ‘official’ history. Instead, the interpolations succeed only in beefing up the role of Falstaff as a great comic adversary for Harry, much as Orson Welles foregrounded Falstaff by diminishing the roles of everyone around him.

  The same thing happens two scenes later when Matthews, like Welles, preserves another scene from Part Two: that in which Falstaff arrives at the Gloucestershire farm of Justice Shallow to recruit soldiers. To a degree, his decision to relocate this scene to serve as a prelude to the Battle of Shrewsbury makes sense, for by doing so he is quite possibly returning the scene to the position it may have occupied in an early draft of Part One, whereas Falstaff’s stopping to recruit soldiers in Gloucestershire on his way to Yorkshire makes no geographical sense. Matthews thus may have had some justification for preserving and transposing the recruitment scene, yet he ransacked it in much the same way he ransacked the tavern scene in Part Two – for good bits to flesh out Falstaff’s role. He radically reduces the conversation between Shallow and Silence about country life and Shallow’s years at the Inns of Court, and the rag-tag recruits from whom Falstaff must choose – each brilliantly individualized by Shakespeare – are seen but not heard.

  In sum, the scene is shorn of the details of quotidian life which help to imprint the Gloucestershire idyll so indelibly on the memory. Instead, Matthews moves quickly to Falstaff’s acceptance of bribes from the two recruits who can afford to buy out their service (bribes here, as in Chimes at Midnight, only reported by Bardolph) and to his settling for the least likely recruits instead (‘food for powder’, Part One 4.2.64 – 5). Moreover, as a coda to this action, when Shallow and the others have exited, Falstaff delivers a portion of the soliloquy from Part One in which he confesses that he has misused the King’s press, something Matthews has just dramatized: first he shows, then he tells. Although there is little logic in this redundancy, Matthews clearly wants the play to be about Falstaff, and that he succeeded in making it so is amply evident in the enthusiastic critical response to Kevin Kline’s performance at Lincoln Center. Yet he also wants to contain Falstaff’s anarchic energies within the bounds of the narrative of the Prince’s reformation. In a sense, then, the fattening of Falstaff’s role at the expense of everyone else’s makes him a more formidable influence on Harry, and this heightens the significance of Harry’s repeated rejection of him – the structural premise of the whole adaptation.

  Matthews’s conflation of the two parts of Henry IV, then, is consistent with the conception that emerged more than a half-century ago of these plays as part of a grand history cycle. Ideologically conservative, it is a text bent on foregrounding the royal narrative and suppressing those other narratives – of the tavern low-lifes, the country justices and recruits – that have the potential to subvert the ‘official’ version of events. Today, when staging Part Two as a counter to Part One – as a study of political opportunism and how history is constructed by those in power – could have a cautionary influence on audiences who have grown cynical about government, Matthews’s adaptation has the effect (as Harry has on those former companions who, by his order, wind up in the Fleet) of silencing the voices of opposition in Part Two.

  An African American H4

  Voices of opposition, however, have been ringingly heard in more recent – and more daring – conflations of Henry IV. In these versions, a play about white male power and privilege has been appropriated by actors traditionally sidelined in its performance history – women and people of colour in particular – whose casting in the roles of English nobility brings an unusual cultural immediacy to the play. A film called simply H4, produced by Giovanni Zelko and actor Harry Lennix, who plays the King, and directed by Paul Quinn, refashions the plays to foreground dynastic power struggles within an urban African American community. Completed in 2013, the film has been shown at various colleges and independent film festivals in the US and at professional Shakespeare conferences in the US and the UK, but has not yet been released commercially or made available on DVD.

  H4 foregrounds political rivalries – and gang warfare – between different black groups in contemporary Los Angeles: the Welsh and Scots become immigrant Haitians and Jamaicans who fight the native-born African Americans (the English) for territory. The script, adapted by Shakespeare scholar Ayanna Thompson, substitutes local place names and black cultural references for those in the play. Lords become Brothers and Sisters (five men’s roles are re-gendered as women: Northumberland, Mowbray, the Lord Chief Justice and the King’s two youngest sons); King Richard is murdered when he returns from his Cuban (not Irish) expedition; and dialogue is peppered with references to neighbourhoods in Los Angeles. The rebels meet at Willowbrook (Wales); Coleville is ‘of Burbank’ (‘the Dale’); the Prince dines with his companions at Cranshaw (Eastcheap); he assures his siblings that ‘This is Inglewood, not Guantanamo’ (‘the English, not the Turkish court’); and most tellingly, his title is Prince of Watts, not Wales.

  Though pared down, the script is nonetheless coherent. It begins with the ambush of the previous ‘king’ (Richard) who is lured into an alley, brutally beaten and killed by young Henry and his gang. As a Chicago critic observes, the dying Richard ‘with a parting shot … sends a point of his crown into Henry’s eye’, a ‘metaphor for the blind ambition of the usurper’,15 but also an injury which causes Henry to wear a black eye-patch when, twenty years later, he appears as a troubled middle-aged King whose political wars have not ended. As in previous conflations of the two plays, H4 primarily follows the structure of Part One, with brief scenes from Part Two – Falstaff and Doll discussing age (2.4) followed by the King’s soliloquy on sleep and his conversation with Warwick (3.1) – tucked between the final meeting of the rebels before Shrewsbury and the Battle of Shrewsbury itself, here played out as a war with switchblades and baseball bats in what appears to be an abandoned warehouse. The royal victory is followed in quick succession by the rebels’ plotting with the Archbishop (here, ‘of New York’), their defeat by treachery, the King’s death and finally Harry’s accession.

  Interestingly, although almost all the major roles are played by black actors, Falstaff is white. There is little explanation why a fat but articulate derelict like him would hang out at a black inner-city bar, nor why the Prince would find him so attractive, though it is possible, in a stretch of the imagination, to see Falstaff as representing an ‘American consumerist culture … that keeps black men down with the hefty weight of centuries of white oppression’ (Ferdinand). But if this is what the filmmakers had in mind, little is made of it. Little is made, too, of the robbery at Gad’s Hill, which passes almost unnoticed, and Falstaff’s banter with Hal is severely curtailed. Furthermore, Falstaff does not even sound American. As played by Scottish actor Angus Macfadyen, he speaks his lines – apart from his ‘performance’ of the King during the play-extempore, when he channels Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone – with a posh trans-Atlantic accent in sharp contrast to the black ‘street’ accents used by the other denizens of the Boar’s Head. In other words, Macfadyen’s Falstaff is less a presiding deity than an odd-man-out in this culture of African American drop-outs.

  Even more interestingly, the film uses an alienation device that blends filmic realism with theatrical artifice. It begins with graphic violence in the streets of LA, and all the scenes written in prose – in the bar, at the robbery, even at the ‘Shrewsbury’ warehouse – are filmed on location, with footage of police in riot gear interspersed among them. But once such realism is established outside the ‘court’ and the King begins his opening speech, ‘So shaken as we are’, the political scenes are filmed on a stage – bare except for the occasional prop (a desk, a piano) – so that the formality of the verse is matched by the deliberate artifice of the setting. On this stage, before a black curtain, the King quarrels with the rebel leaders; on this stage, behind a nineteenth-century red tableau curtain, Hotspur hears of his mother Northumberland’s flight to Jamaica; on this stage, the Prince vows to his father that he will reform; and on this stage, the Prince’s rescue of his father and his combat with Hotspur are played out with swords and medieval bludgeons.

  The transformation of Prince Harry (Amad Jackson) from scapegrace to King is marked by this aesthetic shift from filmic realism to theatrical artifice. At the Boar’s Head, he speaks very much like an urban black youth, his accent suggesting the depth of his rebellion against his well-spoken father; and the script provides just enough ‘American’ substitutions to reinforce this rejection of his ‘courtly’ education. In the play-extempore scene, for example, just after Falstaff, speaking as the King, warns the Prince that there is such a thing as ‘bullshit’ (for ‘pitch’) and the Lord Chief Justice is announced, the Prince instructs Falstaff, ‘Hide thee behind my ass’ (‘the arras’). Such American vulgarities wrench Shakespeare’s script into the present day. Remarkably, then, once Hal has been called to account by his father in a scene filmed on the stage of an empty theatre, his accent shifts abruptly to received pronunciation. Especially at the King’s deathbed, he delivers blank verse with a precision and an emotional delicacy that mark how far he has come from the Boar’s Head. In the theatre, it seems, any miracle is possible.

  At his coronation procession, filmed in an ornate civic building, the new King reveals the public persona of a born politician. His skill is tested when Falstaff, having wrapped himself in an American flag for the occasion, sings his line ‘God save thy grace, King Hal’ (5.5.39) to the melody of ‘My country, ’tis of thee’, which of course was adapted from ‘God Save the King’, a brilliant irony that draws attention to the central paradox of using a play about feudal struggles in medieval England to comment on black political culture in contemporary America. But perhaps not only the political culture of black America; for as the camera cuts to the new King standing alone onstage, in a spotlight, delivering as public address lines imported from 5.2 that in the text he speaks only to a few assembled nobles, promising ‘To mock the expectation of the world’ and to ‘choose such limbs of noble counsel / That the great body of our state may go / In equal rank with the best-governed nation’ (125 – 36), the film moves beyond the realm of dynastic warfare in Los Angeles to invoke a moving image of a young Barack Obama.

  25 Prince Henry (Amad Jackson) at the bedside of the King (Harry Lennix) in H4, a film of the Henry IV plays directed by Paul Quinn and completed in 2013

  Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Henry IV

  The all-female Henry IV at London’s Donmar Warehouse tells another story. Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, whose all-female Julius Caesar provoked controversy when it opened at the same venue in 2012, this Henry used the framing device of a women’s prison in which the inmates perform the play as a kind of therapeutic release. The subject of ‘prison Shakespeare’ has been in vogue for some time, with claims that performing Shakespeare can be both morally enlightening and psychologically empowering for inmates who feel alienated from the society that locked them up.16 And so it is with the women who perform Henry IV – fourteen in all, from diverse backgrounds and of different races – women who, like the men in the play, have established power relations which Lloyd occasionally foregrounds. The society they have formed in prison gives a special resonance to relationships that develop in the Henry play they perform; and as they are assigned their parts by the dour, solitary but authoritative woman who will play the King – Harriet Walter with short-cropped hair and a crown made of beer cans – it becomes clear to the audience that the real empowerment for these women will come from their being able to act as men and to identify with the characters they play. The actresses are not cross-dressing. Rather, in their prison jumpsuits, they are playing women who are then asked to assume the roles of men in a play-within-a-play. This metatheatrical device makes the audience aware of the impact that playing Shakespeare is having on the ‘real’ women in the prison as well as on the actresses who are getting to act Shakespearean roles usually denied them. As one critic observes, ‘There’s an exhilaration that comes with watching a gifted cast of women tear into the male preserve of these texts’ (Matt Wolf, New York Times, 22 October 2014).

  As with earlier abridgements, this is very much the story of Hal, played by a tall, powerfully built prisoner (Clare Dunne) who speaks with an Irish accent. The play opens with the first tavern scene in Part One, in which Hal is snorting a line of coke with Falstaff, who gets it from Poins, the dealer. In this Eastcheap tavern, cocaine, not sack, is the drug of choice. The prisoner assigned the role of Hal is told at the outset that she is to be released in three weeks; thus she is aware throughout that she is only ‘pretending to be one of the “lads”, biding her time as much as doing time’; and her determination to be rid of the prisoner who plays Falstaff – the feeder of her drug habit – ‘is thus likely to release terrible passions in both the inner and outer plays’ (Paul Taylor, Independent, 10 October 2014).