26 Prince Henry (Clare Dunne) trying on a crown made of beer cans, in the Donmar Warehouse production of Henry IV directed by Phyllida Lloyd, 2014

  Falstaff’s fear of losing Hal’s loyalty creates a tug of war between them that spills over to the prison. The prisoner ‘Falstaff’ often breaks character in the manner of a club comic and has to be admonished for it: ‘Take it seriously!’ barks the ‘King’ at one point. At a particularly sensitive moment, when Hal has just assured his father ‘I shall hereafter, my thrice-gracious lord, / Be more myself’ (Part One 3.2.92 – 3), he is interrupted by a loud fart emitted by Falstaff from behind a curtain. When the curtain is thrust aside and ‘Falstaff’ revealed, the prisoners playing the Prince and King protest that she is not a part of the scene. At such moments the audience is yanked out of the fiction and into the ‘real’ world of power dynamics within the prison. This Falstaff does not want Hal to leave him behind and, as a performer, has the power to call attention to the fictional nature of Hal’s promised reformation.

  The actress who plays Falstaff (Ashley McGuire) turns in a raucously vulgar performance that bravely draws attention to her gender. A ‘corpulent, cockney and comically delightful’ middle-aged woman (Dominic Cavendish, Telegraph, 10 October 2014), she is dressed in a vest, or ‘muscle shirt’ as it is called in the US, which unabashedly displays her rolls of flesh: her Falstaff is the real thing, not a thin man in a fat suit. She dares the audience to look at her unadorned body. Like a gangster, she also dares to bully her fellow prisoners with a ‘flash of Kray-style menace’ (Simon Edge, Daily Express, 11 October 2014). In the tavern scene (Part One 2.4), for instance, she physically intimidates the prisoner playing the Hostess, who, as the only Muslim in the cast, seems particularly vulnerable to ‘Falstaff’s’ abuse – a victim of the kind of racism rampant among prison populations. And so, when the newly crowned King Harry banishes Falstaff, the prisoner King is in fact using the play to chasten the prison bully, who ‘doesn’t deal well with the rejection of her character and has to be carried out in plastic handcuffs wailing’ (Edge).

  The cutting of the text is particularly severe in this production. The only scenes from Part Two that remain are that of the King’s death, played with devastating emotional commitment by Harriet Walter, and the rejection of Falstaff. The play ends with the new King’s uttering the opening lines of his father’s speech in Part One, an indication that he – or the prisoner who plays him, ‘wan with care’ after years of incarceration – is anxious to put civil brawls behind him (her) but uncertain that he (she) can. Apart from the final twenty minutes, the play is shaped by events in Part One, with particular focus on the combat between Hal and Hotspur, which is staged as a vicious boxing match between the physically imposing Hal and the wiry, ‘muscular, tigerish Hotspur’ who has been training with a punching bag in a gym (Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out, 10 October 2014). Indeed, Hotspur leads all the rebels in a strenuous work-out session before battle; and in a wryly humorous piece of staging, his observation that ‘The King hath many marching in his coats’ (Part One 5.3.25) is realized when those prisoners boxing in the King’s name don papier mâché masks bearing the imprint of Dame Harriet Walter’s face.

  Behind their masks, however, the diversity of the prisoners is made authentic by the diversity of the acting pool. While the King and the Prince are played by white actors, the rebels – Hotspur, Mortimer and Worcester – are black, and Northumberland, Asian. Rebellion thus wears a dark face, and the performance seems to be making a statement about racial tensions within the prison population as well. But regional and ethnic accents reveal another form of diversity: socio-economic. While the King speaks in an enigmatically posh accent that lapses occasionally into the New York tones of a Robert DeNiro gangster, Hal speaks with an Ulster brogue, Falstaff with a Cockney swagger and Kate Percy – a large woman who comically overwhelms her slightly built husband – with a working-class Glaswegian accent. The prisoners and the actors who play them thus represent the different races, ethnic histories and types of poverty and oppression to be found in the UK today. The Henry IV plays themselves, of course, are about building a nation in all its sixteenth-century diversity – English, Scots, Irish, Welsh; but as Susannah Clapp observes, ‘In this abridged version you hear few disquisitions about the state of the nation. Instead, the state is embodied onstage’ (Observer, 11 October 2014).

  27 Soldiers in the royal army preparing for battle, wearing boxing gloves and masks of the King (Harriet Walter), in the Donmar Warehouse production of Henry IV directed by Phyllida Lloyd, 2014

  For the past fifty years, performances of the conflated texts of Henry IV have foregrounded the evolution of Hal from scapegrace prince to king with an economy scarcely possible when both parts are performed in their entirety. One consequence of this compression of the plays to provide a consistent narrative focus, however, has been to suppress those other narratives – those of the tavern low-lifes, the country justices and recruits – that give Part Two its special character and have the power to subvert the ‘official’ version of events dramatized in the political plot. Nevertheless, recent productions of the conflated texts have revealed new potentials for Henry IV to speak with surprising urgency to contemporary social and political concerns. The Donmar’s all-female production set in a women’s prison and the African American film set in gangland Los Angeles, by culturally reinventing the Henry IV plays, have given to Shakespeare’s Plantagenet history new life and purpose.

  * * *

  1 To shape his history, Caird, working from a script adapted by Michael Hastings, liberally interpolated material from Richard II, Henry V, Henry VI, Part 3 and Merry Wives, as, for example, when he concludes with Falstaff’s death – a borrowing from Henry V also used by Orson Welles in Falstaff. For brief accounts of this Henry IV, see BFI Screenonline: Henry IV (1995) and Weis, 76 – 7.

  2 H.R. Coursen objects to Caird’s use of montage to underscore verbal echoes as ‘much more heavy handed’ than television can accommodate. Coursen’s detailed analysis of various sequences in the production is valuable, even if one discounts his argument that Caird’s ‘reordered, chopped-up version’ ultimately confuses the historical chronology and thematic patterns of the plays (42 – 52).

  3 As was true for many directors before him, Caird’s overriding concern in the Henry IV plays was ‘the way in which they talk about inheritance and father/son relationships’: see Lisa Vanoli’s interview with Caird, ‘Fascinating time spent with Henry’, The Stage (5 October 1995), 34. See also A. Davies.

  4 See the Williams and Evans facsimile edition (Dering, viii). The back of a scrap of paper containing eight lines of text to be inserted in the King’s speech following 1.1.20 includes an apparent cast list, drawn from among Dering’s friends and relatives, for a private performance of Fletcher’s The Spanish Curate at Dering’s Surrenden estate. The Spanish Curate was licensed to be played in 1622, and Francis Manouch, whose name heads the cast list, moved away from the region in 1624, thus providing the dates within which Dering’s performance of Henry IV must have been intended to occur.

  5 I am indebted to Williams and Evans for their comprehensive review of Dering’s use of Part One (Dering, viii–ix).

  6 Hodgdon assesses Dering’s conservative abbreviation of the play’s final scenes and the function of the Prince’s last lines as an anticipation of the ‘Chronicle deeds’ to be dramatized in Henry V (End, 168 – 9).

  7 For discussion of these stage versions, see Hapgood, 39 – 52. Welles’s script has been published as Chimes at Midnight: Orson Welles, Director.

  8 The device of having the King credit Falstaff, not his son, for Hotspur’s defeat was borrowed by Michael Bogdanov twenty years later for his English Shakespeare Company history cycle, denying Part One its customary resolution and signalling that a sequel in which the King and Prince would reconcile was still to come.

  9 See Hapgood, 50; also Cobos & Rubio, 159.

  10 Welles’s ‘overriding visual and structural emphasis … to signal farewell’ to Falstaff has achieved iconic status. For the most articulate analysis of that cinematic emphasis, see Crowl, 369 – 80.

  11 The programme for When Thou Art King when it was performed at the Roundhouse in London in 1970 explains the rationale for the RSC’s Theatregoround productions. Based ‘on the principle of the Elizabethan touring company which often used small casts and condensed texts’, such productions were bare-bones, with minimalist sets and a heavy use of doubling. Thus they were economically viable to tour to regional theatres, civic halls, schools and universities as well as playing seasons as main house repertoire in Stratford-upon-Avon and London.

  12 Each part was given a title: Part One was ‘The Battle of Shrewsbury’, Part Two, ‘The Rejection of Falstaff’. Eventually Barton added an act for Henry V as well, titled ‘The Battle of Agincourt’; but in any given performance only two acts were presented, and most often they were the two parts of Henry IV, the abridgement of Henry V having been drubbed by critics as no more than ‘a brief précis … with all the best bits in’ (B.A. Young, Financial Times, 17 July 1969).

  13 Quotations are from the promptbook for When Thou Art King, Shakespeare Centre Library, Stratford-upon-Avon. The King’s actual line in R2 is ‘Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son?’ (5.3.1).

  14 Matthews, from the introductory essay to his adaptation, 7 – 8.

  15 Marilyn Ferdinand, reviewing H4 for the Chicago International Film Festival (CIFF) on 17 October 2013, at http://www.ferdyonfilms.com/2013/ciff-2013-h4-2014/19767/.

  16 The therapeutic value of having prisoners perform Shakespeare has been promoted for at least two decades. A 2005 American film, Shakespeare Behind Bars, documents the work of a non-profit organization of the same name which has been in existence since 1995, and whose mission is to offer ‘theatrical encounters with personal and social issues to incarcerated and post-incarcerated adults and juveniles, allowing them to develop life skills that will ensure their successful reintegration into society’ (www.shakespearebehindbars.org). For her production, Lloyd collaborated with Clean Break, a British theatre company that works with women affected by the criminal justice system. The therapeutic value of performing Shakespeare in prisons has also been taken up by academics such as Jean Trounstine, Amy Scott-Douglass and Laura Bates.

  APPENDIX 3

  Casting the play

  Shakespeare’s plays typically have far larger casts than plays written in later centuries. Henry IV, Part Two has one of the largest, with fifty speaking roles, including Rumour and the Epilogue which bookend the play. In addition to two mute characters, a full production requires supernumeraries – court attendants, servants, soldiers, a captain and musicians – in non-speaking roles. It is unlikely that even a prosperous theatre company such as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men could have afforded to hire a separate actor for each role, so just as occurs today in performances by Shakespeare theatres around the world, doubling roles was no doubt a necessity.1 Companies in Shakespeare’s London would have had ready access to a large pool of journeyman actors; thus doubling may not have been quite so demanding on actors as it would have been when these companies toured the provinces with a smaller troupe, and when an individual actor may have had to play several roles during a performance.

  There is no way of knowing whether doubling occurred only among those actors who played secondary roles, or whether those in primary roles also assumed doubling duty when necessary. If they did not – and today’s star-system encourages us to believe that a major actor would never have been asked to double in a minor role – then a company would have had to be flush with actors even when it toured, unless plays were cut substantially; and in Part Two, which has many roles that might qualify as major, the acting troupe would have had to be unrealistically large. It is reasonable to surmise, then, that even principal actors would on occasion have doubled in minor roles. A number of actors might have played as many as six or eight different roles, so long as they had time to change from one costume to another, with a single garment (a jerkin, a cloak, a hat) often sufficient to signal the entry of a new character. No doubt audiences then as now were adept at suspending disbelief.

  Scholars who have recently explored the practices of casting Elizabethan plays have arrived at different solutions for the casting of Part Two. T.J. King, in a thorough review of the casting needs of both Q and F texts, concludes that for Q, ‘[t]welve actors can play twenty principal male roles; four boys play four principal female roles and the Epilogue’, and a further ‘eight men’ are required to ‘play twenty-four minor speaking parts and twenty mutes’, for a total of twenty-four actors. The needs of the F text are similar, he reasons: twelve principal actors and four boys, though a company could make do with only ‘six men’ to play ‘twenty-two small speaking parts and four mutes’, for a total of twenty-two actors (Casting, 85–6 and Tables 51, 52). In either case, while such a sizable cast might have been possible in London, it certainly would not have been feasible on a provincial tour. David Bradley’s view is a bit less expansive. Arguing that the Lord Chamberlain’s company had ‘a settled composition of sixteen men’ throughout the 1590s, he suggests that this number, however ‘uncompromising’, might have been insufficient to meet the needs of Part Two; and in addition, he lists six boys as requisite to round out the cast, for a total of at least twenty-two actors (Bradley, 234). John Jowett demonstrates greater sensitivity to the economics of theatre in his casting chart for the Folio Part Two, showing how a cast of ten principal actors, one hired man, and three boys – a total of fourteen – could, with frequent doubling, have performed the full text, though he neglects to assign actors to the roles of the five Gloucestershire recruits (‘Cuts’, 295).

  In the following doubling chart, I attempt to show how a company of only nine men and three boys could perform the play in its entirety. Possible only through extensive doubling, this scheme would require all the principal players but Falstaff to shoulder additional roles. On occasion I have attempted to have an actor’s doubled roles resonate in interesting ways, as, for example, when the actor playing the King doubles as the Lord Chief Justice, or when the actor playing Prince John doubles as two officers, Snare and the Beadle, who arrest followers of his brother Harry. In Shakespeare’s theatre, furthermore, boy actors could readily switch genders, moving effortlessly from women’s roles to those of young men; so it makes sense for the two boys playing the Hostess and Doll, Lady Northumberland and Lady Percy, also to double as the King’s two youngest sons, Humphrey and Thomas.

  Theatre companies today usually avoid plays with large casts owing to budgetary constraints, unless the number of actors can be significantly reduced by cutting the text or doubling roles. While the amount of doubling my chart suggests requires some quick costume changes and may not be ideal, it would nevertheless allow the play to be performed by a pool of only twelve actors without cuts. The only speaking role not included on the chart is that of the Third Strewer, who has one line at the opening of 5.5, a scene that requires all twelve actors to be present on stage. This line could easily be assigned to the First Strewer. Alternatively, since Falstaff’s Page is present but mute in the scene, the boy actor could play a Strewer instead, and the Page never be missed.

  DOUBLING CHART

  Role

  Ind

  1.1

  1.2

  1.3

  2.1

  2.2

  2.3

  2.4

  3.1

  3.2

  4.1

  4.2

  4.3

  5.1

  5.2

  5.3

  5.4

  5.5

  Epi

  1

  Falstaff

  x

  x

  x

  x

  x

  x

  x

  x

  x

  2

  King Henry

  x

  x

  Lord Ch. Justice

  x

  x

  x

  x

  Sir John Blunt*

  x