William Shakespeare : Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 9781847600400

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Literature Insights

General Editor: Charles Moseley

William Shakespeare

Henry IV Parts 1 & 2

C. W. R. D. Moseley

‘Falstaff, this aged whoremaster and drunkard, this gluttonous coward, thief, extortioner and murderer…’

Publication Data © C W R D Moseley, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published in 2007 by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-040-0

William Shakespeare: Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 C. W. R. D. Moseley

Literature Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author Dr Moseley is Fellow and Tutor of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, and Director of Studies in English for that College and for St Edmund’s College. He teaches Classical, mediaeval and Renaissance literature in the English Faculty of the University of Cambridge, and has written many books and articles, not all in his specialist fields. He has lectured and taught frequently in the United States and Europe. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the English Association. A member of the Society for Nautical Research, he has travelled widely in the Arctic, and is a member of the Arctic Club. In this series, of which he is General Editor, he has so far written Insights on Shakespeare’s Richard III, and The Tempest, as well as a companion to our Shakespeare Insights entitled English Renaissance Drama: a Very Brief Introduction to Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time, which he hopes you will enjoy and find useful.

Contents Introduction 1. William Shakespeare: a Brief Life 2. Some Elizabethan attitudes 2.1 History and Politics 2.2 The Model of the World 2.3 Free Will and the Fall of Man 2.4 Macrocosm and Microcosm 2.5 The Failure of the Model 3. Expectations of Drama 4. Henry IV: Structure, genres and literary strategies 4.1 Sequels and sequences 4.2 Themes 4.3 History, Tragedy and Chronicle 4.4 The Shadow of Tragedy 4.5 ‘Bi-polar’ structure: Henry IV and re-inventing the Morality 5. Metaphor, symbol and themes: Henry IV and its sequence 6. ‘This royal throne of Kings’ 6.1 Educating Hal: Honour and Hotspur 6.2 Educating Hal: Policy and John 6.3 Educating Hal 3: Falstaff and Folly 7. A Trim Reckoning: Language And Rhetoric 7.1 Rhetoric 7.2 A Confusion of Tongues: language, speech, metaphor in Henry IV 7.3 A rhetoric of rule 8. (In)Conclusions 9. Further Reading Appendices

Introduction Elizabethans expected plays to amuse and divert them. If they did not, their authors and the companies they worked for did not make a living in a very cut-throat market. In the new permanent commercial theatres of the later Elizabethan period, attitudes to drama and expectations of its conventions had been formed by centuries of religious and ritual drama – the Mystery and Morality plays. And although by definition what we see on the stage is not ‘the real thing’, but a representation, neither that nor its amusement value prevents theatre being a highly self-conscious and serious intellectual pursuit, recognized as such by audiences and playwrights, actors and critics. The profundity of Shakespeare’s concerns and their analysis in his plays may be unusual in degree, but those concerns are shared by his fellow-dramatists. This book deals with only one (large, two-part) play, but that play is very much part not only of one man’s work with a particular group of actors, but also of a general theatrical culture which was one of the only two mass media of the period, to which everyone, more or less, went and to which nobody could not have an attitude. (The other was sermon.) I therefore RECOMMEND STRONGLY THAT THIS BOOK BE READ IN CONJUNCTION with my English Renaissance Drama: a Very Brief Introduction to Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time (hereafter Very Brief Intro.) in this series. What follows is based in some degree on the assumption that it will be. Those familiar with what we know about Shakespeare the man and the background of Elizabethan culture can skip Chapters 1 and 2 and go straight to the discussion of the play, always bearing in mind the close connection in that society between theatre and politics: theatre provided one of the few spaces where the undiscussable could be discussed through a fable and a large number of people at once could in the ritual space of the theatre face the problems of the real world transmuted into fiction. No wonder the authorities were so nervous of the theatres, and keen at the same time to use to their own purposes. The audience’s interest in history at all suggests not  There was quite a fashion in the 1590s for two or even three part plays, performed (so it seems) on consecutive afternoons. The commercial advantage was that the audience came twice, paying each time. There were, as we shall see, artistic bonuses too.

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mere curiosity about the past—which could be much more easily satisfied than by a play—but rather an attempt to understand the nature of the political and moral issues that beset them in their own time by, so to speak, isolating them in the test-tube of history. This was an age, after all, when the relationship between the ruled and the ruler was of passionate and overwhelming interest—to the point where death itself was not too high a stake; when the obligations of the one to the many (and vice versa) were problems not merely of morality but of politics too; when a sense of distinctive nationhood was fostered by insecurity at home and trouble abroad; when, finally, men and women were hesitantly but to at least some extent consciously mapping out the sort of society they felt to be just and to strike the right balance between the things that are of Caesar and those that are God’s. The old image of the body politic acquires a new force; it is made up of its many members, but how are those members to agree together in a common purpose? The body politic’s distempers in the past may suggest a better understanding for those in the present. Shakespeare’s vision of English history is no unthinking acceptance of any Panglossian myth that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds as long as a Tudor finally gets the throne. He is very aware that Tudors too are fallen beings who judge wrongly and destroy things of value: the dignity he gives Wolsey in his fall and the heroic patience and pathos he gives Queen Catherine in Henry VIII make that clear, and his endorsement of Henry Tudor at the end of Richard III looks pretty perfunctory. Even his political victors and heroes are flawed. He shows a Bolingbroke who never knows peace, mental or political, after Richard II’s death; the opposition to him would literally dismember the body of England to satisfy their own desire for power; his son Hal is aware almost to despair of the huge moral burden the king must bear as a ruler as well as of his inherited burden of guilt and injustice. Shakespeare is exploring, it seems, the very nature of rule and of political relationships in the body politic. One of the greatly interesting aspects of the plays dealing with historical material lies in the way that material opens up the issues of order and harmony in a state, which are all very well when outlined theoretically—as they are by Ulysses, whose speech I quote below. But, alas, the theory rarely accords with the observed practices of men. As will be clear, I discuss this play from the perspective of its place in a sequence. It would therefore be wise for readers of this book to know Richard II and Henry V, as I shall have to refer to them frequently.

1. William Shakespeare: A Brief Life We know far less—though not nothing—about Shakespeare than we do about almost any other European writer of stature since the Middle Ages. As a result, far more has been written about him, his life and his deepest thoughts than almost anyone else. The speculative to the bizarre been well represented, and the ‘authorship question’ has added to the gaiety of nations. He was born in 1564, probably on April 23, at Stratford-on-Avon, to John Shakespeare, a substantial citizen of that religiously conservative town, and his wife Mary Arden. He died there in 1616. Shakespeare was a man of the later renaissance in the peculiar form it took in England. We do him a great disservice if we ever ignore that fact. His lifetime coincides with a period of rapid, painful and far-reaching changes and uncertainty in matters of politics and religion, and in ideas of the nature of the world and of man. Old certainties, if not abandoned (as they were not entirely), were being radically redrafted; new ideas, new structures, new pressures had to be accommodated. This was not a happy time. Religious divides ran deep, extending to execution and judicial torture, and often coinciding with the fault lines of interest and bad-tempered political allegiance. Shakespeare cannot have not shared the anxieties of his time. His father was certainly a Catholic all his life, and suffered for it; William had relatives (through his mother) who were martyrs; he could well have been a Catholic too, though, even more so than for many folk, his own views are elusive—and one thing you cannot do is read off certainties about the life and beliefs of the writer from the extraordinarily complex co-operations that made plays in this period. Shakespeare was also something of a Johnny-come-lately, an outsider, for unlike nearly all his fellow poets or dramatists, he was neither noble, nor from the universities of Oxford or Cambridge or the law schools of the Inns of Court. His education stopped, so far as we know, with the very good grammar school education of Stratford, which gave him the grounding  Useful biographies, making as much of the evidence we have of his life and his context as possible, are those by Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford, 2000) and Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare (Arden, 2001). See also the suggestions advanced by Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare (2005) and Clare Asquith, Shadow Play (2006). See also my brief essay, ‘William Shakespeare’, in The Continuum Encyclopaedia of British Literature, ed. S. Serafin¸(Continuum: New York, 2000) .

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in the Latin Classics that formed the common bedrock of reference, the templates for understanding, of any person of even moderate education in the Europe of his day. He had no advantage from any connection with any noble house. He made his way simply by his extraordinary facility with words and what they could do. Yet we know almost nothing about even the facts, let alone the inner life, of Shakespeare the Man. We have no letters, no diary, a tiny amount in his handwriting, a problematic will. We have some enigmatical sonnets, which have often been taken, but on very shaky grounds, as a distorted mirror of some of his deep affections. We have two assured and stylish up to the minute poems written for clever-clever young men, of which he was obviously proud; and we have a clutch of plays, none of which he ever bothered to see through the press. He wrote less than some other major authors of his time— and most of what he wrote was in the rather down-market form of plays, not regarded as serious writing at all until the very end of his career. He left no body of theoretical or critical writing behind him, as did Lope de Vega or Ben Jonson. He does not even seem to have had a particularly high reputation as a writer of plays during his working life, though his company was certainly regarded as the foremost. He was, and (and if the evidence of the dedication of Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece is anything to go by) wanted to be thought of as, a writer, a poet, in the line that stretched back through Chaucer to the great poets of Rome: especially Vergil and Ovid. He clearly read deeply in Vergil and Horace and, especially, Ovid: their influence, even direct borrowings, is apparent not only in those early poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, designed for a cultivated audience—where one might expect such echoes—but also all over plays designed for much more heterogeneous audiences. It is important to recognise how alert Shakespeare was to Classical culture, and expected his audiences to be so too. Not only was knowledge of Vergil and Ovid well diffused even among those with no Latin, but the history and politics of Rome, the memory of its Empire, helped form the models on which Renaissance people articulated their understanding of their politics and their theories of the state. The Christian culture of sixteenth-century Europe relied for its educational materials almost entirely on the pagan Classical inheritance: an intriguing irony. But it is more than that: for the Christian, with the benefit of Revelation, resembles a dwarf sitting on the shoulders of the giants of Antiquity. He could not see at all without their support, but can see further than they can. And so Ovid, Vergil, Cicero, Livy, Seneca, are properly brought into the service of a Christian culture, a Christian world view, that sees all world history as a narrative that will eventually end with Apocalypse. There are many writers, thinkers and rulers in Shakespeare’s lifetime—including, perhaps,

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the man himself—who really thought that Apocalypse might be very soon, and that in it, England, that ‘other Eden, demi-Paradise’, as John of Gaunt in Richard II calls it, would have a special role to play. There are several years when we have no idea what he was doing, and so much can be, and has been, written. But by the late 1580s he was in London, connected with the intelligentsia, a world of writing, often for the new theatres (a place of some risk, given the dour attitude of the authorities to theatre and players), where fortunes could be made and powerful patrons found. For most aspiring writers, to find an aristocratic (and rich) patron was the first step to security, as the commercial world of writing, where fortunes depend on sales, is only just being born. Possibly Shakespeare’s two ‘Ovidian’ poems, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece (1593/4), dedicated to the young, extraordinarily rich Earl of Southampton, and both calculated to appeal to young, male, classically educated readers, were attempts to secure such a patron, at a time when earning from the theatre was nil as the theatres were closed because of an outbreak of plague. They are, actually, the only two works he ever bothered to see through the press and sign. They certainly, in some sense, replied to fashionable Ovidian poems like, for example, Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. (‘Anything you can do…’). If, as is likely, many of the Sonnets date from this period, we may glimpse in them something of the rivalry for patronage between talented writers, of the deployment of the extremest language of affectionate friendship that attended a relationship with a patron, and something of the benefits Southampton, or any patron, might gain from having a writer in his circle: a lot of kudos and a sort of immortality—as Shakespeare puts it, ‘So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’. But Southampton, who was not the cleverest of fellows, did not bite, and Shakespeare ended up not as a great man’s secretary, but as a dramatist. By the early 90s he is being noticed, enviously, in that strange new world of the commercial theatre. Wholly new in 1580s London were the purpose-built theatres that entrepreneurs, often heavily involved in other entertainments like brothels and bear-baiting, erected in the suburbs, outside the jurisdiction of the City’s hostile magistrates. John Brayne built the first of which we know, the Red Lion, in 1567; James Burbage built The Theatre in 1576. These buildings, often designed with a good deal of symbolism—the Globe (1599), for example, apparently had a ground plan based on a cosmic diagram, and the three levels of its stage could represent, as needed, Heaven, Earth and Hell—were instantly successful with Londoners and even foreign visitors, and were huge: the first Globe could, and often did, hold 3000 people (about 2%–3% of the population of England’s largest city). This audience had an endless appetite

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for new plays, and the company in which Shakespeare eventually became a major shareholder and chief writer, the Lord Chamberlain’s (later King’s) Men, might have 50 plays in repertoire in any year. Writers (often themselves actors—Shakespeare, we think, played the Ghost in Hamlet and the Archbishop in Henry V) were under pressure to come up with new material to win audiences from competitors, to reply to rivals’ plays. And theatre was an important way of influencing public opinion and therefore of consequence—dangerous—politically. Powerful people might—did— use theatre to seek influence, and the political controversies of Elizabeth’s last decade can be seen very clearly echoed in Richard II, I and 2 Henry IV, and Henry V. Theatre was often as topical as today’s milk, and an important space—the only space, in that culture—where the unthinkable could be thought by many people at once. This man, variously referred to by contemporaries as ‘an upstart crow’, ‘our Roscius’, ‘sweet Mr Shakespeare’, known as a poet, a writer of more or less successful plays, and as a very shrewd buyer of real estate, is quite an interesting chap to write about. People have done so for centuries with varying degrees of inventiveness, for he matters: the corpus of work he left behind him changed the language and the way people think – could think – for ever. (There is a book, in some ways far more interesting, to be written about that.) But the facts of his biography seem certain to remain sparse, and the plays are a poor guide to his innermost thoughts: you do not look to find the cook in the pudding.

 See the excellent discussion by S. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). Sometimes it is important to remind ourselves not to re-make him in our own currently fashionable image, be it Marxist, Cultural Materialist, post Colonialist, Feminist or any other –ist. However great he was, he did not second guess the passing orthodoxies of later ages.

2. Some Elizabethan Attitudes 2.1 History and Politics Henry IV is one of many ‘Jacobethan’ plays about (mainly English) history. (Shakespeare himself wrote at least nine before 1600—a quarter of his whole canon of thirty-seven plays, and several others draw subjects from British or Roman history.) Indeed, although Henry IV can stand alone, and though its two parts can even be played as single plays, it is important that at the start to stress that it is part of a sequence reaching from the misrule of Richard II to the apparently successful conclusion of his French War by Henry V. Furthermore, the audience could safely be assumed to be familiar not only with the events of Henry IV’s reign, but also with the longer narrative in which they were part consequence, part cause. For their past fascinated the Elizabethans, who sought in it diagnostic models for a present and guidelines for a future, both of which seemed fraught with danger. In the first place, the old Queen was without a clear heir, and refused to have the succession discussed. There were several rival claimants: the house of Scotland, descended from Henry VIII’s elder sister; the house of Suffolk, descended from his younger sister, and to whom he had willed the throne in a will which broke many legal rules and definitions and which he had forced his cowed Parliament to ratify, and the Plantagenet claimants, represented in England by the house of Somerset and abroad by the senior branch, represented by the (Catholic) Infanta Isabella of Spain. So the question—and nobody knew how urgent it might be—was much aired in various roundabout ways of 1) who should legally succeed;  This ugly word is convenient: while there are changes in emphasis, there is a seamless continuity between the theatrical cultures of Elizabeth’s and James’ reigns. Shakespeare’s career and output divides almost equally between both.  The will ignored important and much discussed problems about the nature of the kingship: was it a piece of moveable property, owned by the possessor, and able to be given at will? Was it real property, inalienable from a particular pattern of legal inheritance? Ought it to descend by strict primogeniture? What was the role of Parliament? So plays (like Shakespeare’s Richard II or King John, which are very close in date) where the nature of the crown is an issue – and in one of them the king actually resigns the crown to someone else) were daringly topical indeed, once you read the code.

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2) who could; 3) and whether in fact the best successor might not be the man most fitted for the job. Nervously, Elizabeth saw parallels between herself and the Richard who had been deposed two centuries before: soon after the Henry plays were written she said to the scholar William Lambarde, ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that, Master Lambarde?’. There were those who saw in her last favourite, Robin Devereux, earl of Essex, her Bolingbroke—and he probably had such dreams himself. Her reign had seen constant unrest at home and abroad. Although she managed to keep the loyalty of most of her Catholic subjects—after all, the admiral who defeated the Armada in 1588 was Catholic—the religious question was bubbling away like a pressure cooker, and it seemed it could at any time tear the commonwealth of England apart (especially after Pope Pius V in 1570 encouraged good Catholics to conspire against and assassinate Elizabeth). One had only to look at France and the Low Countries to see the havoc caused by religious strife between Catholic and Protestant; there was no guarantee it could not happen in England. Civil war, dynastic or religious, was really possible when the Queen died, and of course eventually in 1642 it came—though not for the expected reasons. Francis Bacon remarks, in his unfinished Beginning of the History of Great Britain, that in the 1590s many persons, for a variety of motives, used to argue that after Queen Elizabeth’s decease there must follow in England nothing but confusions, interreigns, and perturbations of estate, likely far to exceed the ancient calamities of the civil wars between the houses of Lancaster and York, by how much more the dissensions were like to be more mortal and bloody when foreign competition should be added to domestical, and divisions for religion to matter of title to the crown. The Elizabethans’ fear of this most terrible of conflicts was reasonable: recent English history included a century of piratical Lancastrian and Yorkist nobles wrangling over the crown, and the wrong done to ‘this noble realm of England’ is the text to which nearly all chronicle or history plays of the period are glosses. The orotund opening sentence of Hall’s Union of the Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and York (1548), a source for many history plays, expresses the revulsion: What mischief hath insurged in realms by intestine division, what depopulation hath ensued in countries by civil dissension, what detestable murther

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hath been committed in cities by separate factions, and what calamity hath ensued in famous regions by domestic discord and unnatural controversy, Rome hath felt, Italy can testify. France can bear witness, Beaume [Bohemia] can tell, Scotland can write, Denmark can show, and especially this noble realm of England can apparently declare and make demonstration. And, finally, the last ten years of her reign were pretty miserable. The old guard, the men she trusted, who had worked with her pretty well since her accession, died off one by one. The new men she never really trusted, and they were a quarrelsome lot. Court was not a nice place to be. The euphoria of the defeat of the Armada of 1588 was soon lost in fears of fresh attempts, and in 1599 fear of a third Armada almost panicked the Privy Council into sinking blockships in the Thames. There was a series of bad harvests, and people really did starve, and some blamed the failure of the harvest on the infertility of the Queen. Inflation, with all its dislocating effects on social structures, was high, and no-one then understood why. Consequently the mood was ugly, and people blamed the people near to her—her ministers—as ‘wasters’ of the commonwealth as Richard’s counsellors had been blamed two centuries before. We too readily forget that when she died in March 1603 the Londoners lit bonfires in the streets to celebrate. So the discussion of history, especially that of the deposition of Richard and its consequences, became a touchy matter. In 1599 the Bishops of London and Canterbury issued an order forbidding the publication of any work dealing with English history. (But plays were not texts…) Now­adays history’s social and political importance is easily forgotten, when the subject seems, for most, to have been reduced from the high philosophic search for humane understanding to gossip about grandparents, but George Orwell’s 1984 expresses chillingly an idea which every generation until our own would have understood: ‘Who controls the past controls the present; who controls the present controls the future’. The seriousness with which totalitarian regimes, whether fictional or as regrettably real as Hitler’s Germany or Soviet Russia, take the past indicates its importance in form­ing social and moral values and acting as a yardstick for the present. The Elizabethans, in their taste for history plays, were not merely curious, or wanting a romp through the glamorous exploits of their more successful heroes, like Henry V. They sought to understand and evaluate the present, and history plays reached more people more often than any other form of historical discussion. History plays allowed a relocation of pressing issues into a safely distanced area where the authorities could not so easily accuse a writer and his company of sedition. The phenomenon of these plays’ existence is a historical and cultural fact of

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major consequence. No attempt to understand the nature and morality of human societies can avoid assuming some theory of the nature of man and the world we lives in. The Greeks and Romans saw history as a series of cycles, where ultimately all returned to its beginning and started again. The Jews, followed by the Christians, by contrast, saw history as linear, where God Himself intervenes, and that it would one day come to an emphatic end when the meaning of all would be made plain, as the last paragraph of a novel fits the last piece into the puzzle. (The Marxists happily took over the idea of history as a progress to a goal, but ditched the spiritual and theological aspects that gave that goal infinitely extensible meaning.) It is, of course, the Christian understanding of human life on earth we have to assume in reading Renaissance literature of any kind, and Christian thought heavily influences the model of the universe, which accounted for all the known scientific facts at that time, that had developed over many centuries. This point matters, for many people attempt what is impossible: to understand the literature, art and politics of the Re­naissance—or any other period—with only the sketchiest knowledge of a) what Christians believe and b) the Bible. For the Bible is, with the remains of Classical literature, unquestionably the basis of Western culture and values, constantly fertilizing the minds of succeeding gene­rations, providing values that really do affect men’s behaviour. Any student expecting to be taken seriously, therefore, should get a Bible and read it. We also do our forebears great disservice if we do not bother to find out what understanding of the nature of Man in Christianity it was for which and by which they lived, died—and killed. 2.2 The Model of the World The world model can be summed up in the word ‘Degree’—an order or rank in which everything in the universe, from the highest seraph to the lowliest element, had a specific place, a specific job which only it could do for the glory of God. Virtue, basically, consisted in doing that job, working with the grain of the universe, singing in harmony with it. The idea, current for several centuries and still leaving fossils in our language, is powerfully expressed in 1.iii of Troilus and Cressida: The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre, Observe degree, priority, and place, Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order. And therefore is the glorious planet Sol

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In noble eminence enthroned and sphered Amidst the other, whose med’cinable eye Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil. And posts like the commandment of a king, Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planed Is evil mixture to disorder wander, What plagues and what portents, what mutiny, What raging of the sea, shaking of earth, Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors, Divert and crack, rend and deracinate The unity and married calm of states Quite from their future! O, when degree is snaked, Which is the ladder to all high designs, The enterprise is sick. How could communities, Degrees in schools, and brotherhoods in cities, Peaceful commerce from dividable shores, The primogeniture and due of birth, Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels, But by degree stand in authentic place? Take but degree away, untune that string, And hark what discord follows! Each thing meets In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores, And make a sop of all this solid globe; Strength should be lord of imbecility, And the rude son should strike his father dead; Force should be right, or, rather, right and wrong — Between whose endless jar justice resides — Should lose their names, and so should justice too. Then everything includes itself in power. Power into will, will into appetite, And appetite, an universal wolf, So doubly seconded with will and power. Must make perforce an universal prey, And last eat up himself.

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This speech assumes a universe with a spherical earth at the centre of a series of concentric spheres, each dominated by living beings whose physical manifestation we perceive as the planets. Those planets move in a harmonious dance through the heavens, making the mathematical music of the spheres, inaudible to the ears of those clothed in this ‘muddy vesture of decay’, as Lorenzo tells Jessica in The Merchant of Venice 5.i. They pour down on the earth the combined power of their ‘influence’. The mainspring of the uni­verse is love: the love of God that calls it into existence, the love that his creatures return to him and give to each other. The universe is utterly hierarchical, in a ladder of degree that reaches up to the angels who sing around the throne of God Himself. At the bottom is mere physical matter, composed of its four elements, devoid of life and merely existing. Then come those creatures with the power only to grow and reproduce: the plants, which have a ‘vegetable’ soul. Next are creatures that are not just alive, but have senses: the animals. Man combines these two souls, ‘Sensible’ and ‘Vegetable’, with a third, the Rational—the ability to reason and understand, and Man is at the summit of the material creation. Above him are spiritual beings, who are defined by rationality, which they share with man, and the intuitive faculty. Those spiritual beings, angels, rise through Nine Orders to the highest ranks of all, the cherubim and seraphim who are in the presence of God. Within this basic hier­archy, each order of being has a subsidiary order: the oak is King of trees, the lion of beasts, and man himself is ordered into states and polities headed by a ruler whose position is analogous to God at the head of the entire creation, and analogous also to the heads of all other orders. (This concept is a fruitful source for the expression of all sorts of ideas, from political persuasion to heraldry to the imagery of plays and poems.) The model therefore implies an understanding of the nature of the universe and human life within it where order, the keeping in one’s proper station, is fundamental to peace and harmony, as Ulysses in this speech demonstrates: ‘untune that string, /And hark what discord follows!’ 2.3 Free Will and the Fall of Man But if this were all the truth, there would be no room for the calamities that overtake  This substance, infinitely varied in its mix of what each planet gives, has great effects on earth, both good and bad. An epidemic inexplicable before you have a theory of germs, for example, is attributable to what the Italians called ’influenza’.  According to Aristotle, Earth, Air, Fire and Water.  In descending order Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels and Angels.

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earthly existence and for the active evil that men do. When God made the world through His love, He gave His creatures freedom, according to their capabilities, to choose to love Him, or not. Only if a creature has the capability of not loving, of rejecting love, is any love it does give of any reality. A universe of automata would know no evil; but it would know no good either. Moreover, God gave the universe and everything in it an existence that ran according to certain intricately linked rules— which our ancestors would have called Nature or ‘Kind’, and we might call physics; the universe is thus subject to cause and effect. No action, however small, is without consequences which themselves have consequences till the last syllable of recorded time. The freedom of God’s creatures necessarily implies that if they freely give back the love He gives them, the universe runs beautifully, but if they don’t, the universe goes sour. And God, by His own rules, His own generosity in giving creatures the dignity of agents, cannot just intervene with a cosmic fire-engine to damp down the trouble that rejection of Him, on whom everything depends, inevitably brings. Cause will have effect; all moral beings—angels, or men—can do is seek to follow His will even if they are fallen, and all God can do is become Man Himself in a rescue operation from within the revolted state. Free Will therefore entailed necessarily the possibility that some creatures would reject the role God had planned for them. That rejection would dislocate the whole system, and go on doing so, to an extent that reflected the importance of the offender. Lucifer, brightest of the angels, denied his nature or kind, his creaturely relationship to his maker, becoming Satan, forever racked by the pain of his rejection of what still sustained him. He became the Enemy, a thing of shadows and darkness. Yet Satan still had the power to tempt others by false words and false appearance. And when Eve fell for Satan’s wiles in Eden, all the creation given into her and Adam’s charge was affected too, just as what is on the bottom half of a rope ladder is bound to fall if the upper fails. Man’s fall brought woe into the world, and Adam’s sin is passed on to, warps the existence of, all his descendants. But the mercy of God still operates in the free world He gave to His creatures. He still loves and sustains even those who curse him, and the lineaments of the original design are everywhere to be seen, giving glory to God. 2.4 Macrocosm and Microcosm This model, with the idea of the Fall, is originally theological and philosophical. But it is also has special applica­tions. The alchemists, to whose work we owe a good part

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of the development of modern science, built their theories of the nature of matter on it; the political thinker relied on it to understand how human states worked; the physician and surgeon understood the operations of the human body in terms of a proper balance of the four basic bodily fluids, the Humours. their susceptibility to planetary influence, and their proper ordering under Reason, the King of the soul. For the shape of the greater world, the macrocosm, was reflected in every detail within it, and man himself was a little world, a microcosm, organized exactly like a polity, or the revolutions of the spheres. Thus a Prince in his parliament is like the sun throned among his planets, at the head of the hierarchy of his kingdom, and the symbolism with which Renaissance men customarily expressed this idea survives even in the shape and ceremonial of the British Parliament today. A body out of order could be diseased; and so, by an easy transference of ideas, could the state. Similarly, if a King—like Lear—abrogated his responsibilities, that breaking of order would be reflected in the non-human world: the King’s madness is illustrated by and causes the tempests on the heath. But the inertia of the system was such that, like a spinning top momentarily deflected in its smooth revolution, it would try to right itself and purge the disorder. In that righting the human costs to innocent and guilty alike would be huge. So Richard II’s deposition was understood to have sparked off the entire sequence of crime and revenge in what Shakespeare taught us to call the Wars of the Roses. That deposition disturbed the movement of the dance to a degree that could only be put right by general catastrophe that affects the whole of his and his successors’ kingdom; and once introduced, disorder or sin persists unto the third and fourth generation. Eventually, in the fullness of time, the discord of man’s sin will be resolved into the unbroken concord of the young-ey’d cherubim, just as Lear’s madness is eased by music. But  Melancholy or black bile, Phlegm, Blood, and Choler.  John Donne has a sonnet (Holy Sonnet V) beginning ’I am a little world made cunningly/Of elements…’.  Rebellion, for example, is customarily described in precisely the medical term, ‘coming to or making a head’, that would be used of a rash of spots, or a boil, breaking out on the skin. A Prince could fail of his duty; his subjects then had the difficult moral choice whether to be obedient and put up with his rule, or to attempt to right it by revolt. In Shakespeare’s Richard II, the prequel to our play, Gaunt says that even a bad King may be best left alone: But since correction lieth in those hands Which made the fault that we cannot correct Put we our quarrel to the will of heaven; Who, when they see the hours ripe on the earth, Will rain hot vengeance on offender’s heads. (Richard II, 1.ii.4-8)



The body politic, sick by the action of its head, might well suffer greater disease, for more likely than the taking of Gaunt’s advice was that the subject would rebel.

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the disorders of nations and states are not tractable to sackbuts and hautbois. Blood, violence, war are the purgatives that cleanse the body politic—just what we watch in Henry IV, and just what Shakespeare’s company had so profitably played in the threepart King Henry VI and its sequel, Richard III: the later events in the Wars were the material for the earlier group of plays. 2.5. The Failure of the Model The imaginative force of the model is due not only to its having developed over centuries into an intricacy now hardly imaginable but because it accounted for many of the mysteries of human existence. But it did not account for all, and as we all can now know, in certain fundamental respects the model was plain wrong. (That is not to say it has not still got a moral or mythic truth we could attend to with profit.) As a physical description of the universe, it was increasingly attacked in the sixteenth century; as a theory on which to base technological work, it was challenged, eventually successfully, throughout the seventeenth century; as a way of understanding politics and human behaviour, it was simply not accounting for all the facts—and it never had done, however beautiful the theory. In Richard II, I and 2 Henry IV, Henry V, Shakespeare devotes much attention to the validity of the model as diagnosis of the human condition, and suggests only equivocal answers. Later, in Troilus and Cressida, that powerful speech of Ulysses I quoted is in a context ironic in the extreme, for the play is one which examines in the way men behave as moral and political animals the break-up of these very ideas. (It is spoken, moreover, as a debating point by a man who refuses to be bound by them.) This leads us to one of Shakespeare’s most perceptive metaphoric tropes, the reversible cosmic metaphor. ‘Reversible Cosmic Metaphor’ That common assumption in sixteenth century political thought that the order of the heavens was reflected in detail on earth gave rise to the idea of correspondences, metaphors. The whole creation is metaphorical: the king is a sun, his nobles are stars, and so on. This complex of images sun/king/order of heavens/order on earth is nowhere more used by Shakespeare than in the Richard/Henry plays. Richard deploys it on landing from Ireland in 3.ii:

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…This thief, this traitor, Bolingbroke, Shall see us rising in our throne the east, His treasons shall sit blushing in his face, Not able to endure the sight of day… Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm off an anointed king … God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay A glorious angel; then, if angels fight, Weak men must fall, for heaven still guards the right. But the plays seem to demonstrate how human society is not obedient to these rules of order, at least in the short term. And in the sequence of History to which Richard II belongs, we know  that God’s angels did not fight for Richard  That his conduct as a king was not that of a god on earth, as the Duchess of York calls a Bolingbroke showing mercy in judgement, and he would not have deserved the support of angels  That Bolingbroke was in fact quite a good king, who fathered Henry V, to Elizabethans the greatest of mediaeval kings The play asks us to examine how the metaphor is hopeful rather than factual. If it is ultimately invalid, how valid is a theory of the human polity and the cosmos from which that metaphor is derived? The metaphor then becomes reversible. From the idea that macrocosm and microcosm reciprocally affect each other derive ideas of order, stability, hierarchy in each, each reflecting and in causal linkage with Natural Law in the other. But, if in the event in the stars in their course do not fight for the deposed king, that linkage is broken—which leads to a questioning of the basis of human hierarchies and of the validating cosmic (‘law of nature’) metaphor by which it is conceptualised. So either that linkage is not there at all, in which case we are in a much more problematic world; or if it is there, we have got the way it works wrong— and it might be a much more unfriendly world, driven by mere appetite. Shakespeare was a man of his time. He undoubtedly felt the emotional and moral force of the old ideas that formed the model, but he was also aware that men who refuse to be bound by this vision of order have, ipso facto, a terrible power against  Cf Carlisle in Richard II, 4.i 124ff. and Bolingbroke at Flint, 3.3.61ff.

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those who do. The resourcefulness of evil is un­bounded; good by its very nature is vulnerable even if, generations of innocent suffering later, it is ultimately victorious. And what sort of a victory is it that has to be established by the pointless suffering of the innocent? King Lear gives us a terrible vision of the universal wolf’s career before the balance that alone makes societies workable is in some way restored. But the suffering that precedes and conditions that res­toration is so appalling that it simply cannot be forgotten, nor its meaning fully understood. To discern a pattern of justice in human history, particularly against this back­ ground of cosmic, moral, theory, is therefore fundamentally im­portant to how people understood the world they inhabit: an understanding that partly conditions, or determines how they can see, that world. Shakespeare never lost interest in the topics of guilt, innocence and consequence: The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones (Julius Caesar, 3.i.80) At the end of his career, in The Tempest, he returns to discussing the relationship between the suffering of the past, and the possibility of future fruitfulness.

3. Theories of Drama Playwright and audience shared the expectation that as well amuse and divert a play might raise serious moral issues, and not to do so would be as significant as doing so. The inheritance from the Morality tradition (see Appendix) determines one sort of expectation of drama author and audience would have. But the more educated would be aware of the growing body of theoretical philosophical criticism that took drama seriously, and Aristotle’s Poetics was rediscovered in the late fifteenth century. That book relates drama to psychology and moral philosophy, and Renaissance commentators on Aristotle are much exercised to elucidate the views of one who had enormous weight as a major founder of Western philosophy. Francisco Robortello, for example, writing in 1548, sees drama as offering examples of mor­ality and virtue for imitation by an audience whose emotional response has engaged them with the characters. The influential Julius Caesar Scaliger in 1561 argues that writers have a responsibility for the moral education of audiences, teaching them how to avoid bad actions in favour of good. Poetry—which includes drama—is for him very much a part of ethics and politics, and by representing good models, helps the community towards the achievement of harmony or happiness through proper and virtuous action. This discussion—more complex than I have indicated—was certainly known in England; Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (printed 1595) shows thorough understanding of the debate’s terms, and Shakespeare clearly knew all about it too. For Sidney and Shakespeare the high art of the poet lies not in mere imitation of things as they are, but in the representation of things as they could or should be—an expression of an ideal which will fire the imagination to virtuous action. The application of these ideas to plays dealing with historical event is complex. The contemporary understanding of history and historiography, and the nature of the history play—even if not described as a ‘tragedy’, as Richard II is—will considerably affect an audience’s possible response, and set some limits to the playwright’s freedom in writing it. If, moreover, a play is defined as a tragedy, a literary form related to history, further expectations are triggered.

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3.1 History and Tragedy Dionysus of Halicarnassus made the often quoted remark that ‘History is Philosophy teaching by examples’. We should remember that for our ancestors philosophy—the pursuit of wisdom—was one of the highest human endeavours. Wisdom is not just knowledge, but understanding the context and meaning of that knowledge; ultimately it aims at a moral, even a theo­logical or devotional end. There is good Biblical authority for the im­portance of this quest in the Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon, and good pagan authority; see Plato, or Aristotle, or Epictetus. If history is then subservient to philosophy it follows that reading history will ultimately be a moral activity, an attempt to understand the nature of our pre­dicament by studying individual examples. The historian’s job was not primarily with chronology, or even with the mechanisms of society: it was to range across the wide fields of Time, gathering men and events and seeking to understand the principles of human conduct. English history is included in the concept of history as a purposive process. Modern people are deeply affected by their forefathers and would equally deeply affect their children. The issues topical in Shakespeare’s day could only be discussed using the evidence they had, that from history. A playwright who tackles the difficult ideas of political legitimacy, of the nature of kingship, of the relationship between Prince and country—all much discussed in the very unhappy 1590s—will be drawn inescapably to history. The history of England that Shakespeare uses allows author and audience to come to terms with themselves, to formulate, express, evaluate their values in a communal and serious activity. The playwright, then as now, both responds to and modifies preoccupations and issues in society and formulates them (it is arguable which comes first). A society much concerned about legitimacy of suc­cession, succession itself, and the nature of the ruler’s title must discuss these issues. In its understanding of the past—or at least isolation of its problems—it may well find the means to discuss those contemporary problems which, because they were too intimate, too important to be easily handled openly, could not be approached by any other means. Now consider the notion of tragedy and the expectations the word carried for a  Aristotle’s remark in the Poetics that tragedy is more philosophical than history is rather important in the context of this book: both are concerned with the pursuit of wisdom, but because tragedy, which is based on happenings (or what might happen), escapes the demands for factual accuracy that limit history, it is freer to search for significance and meaning and express those things through its form and shape. Aristotle is also suggesting that tragedy teaches wisdom in its own right, and is thus closely related to the highest discipline, philosophy.

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Renaissance audience. In late medieval tradition, tragedy simply meant, as Chaucer makes his Monk put it, Tragedie is to seyn a certeyn storie, As old bokes maken us memorie. Of him that stood in greet prosperite, And is yfallen out of heigh degree Into miserie, and endeth wrecchedly. (Canterbury Tales, VII, 1973ff., B83163ff.) There is no question here of any particular moral type of person: it is the fall that matters, and the fall of the great exemplified the great power of Fortune in human affairs. Tragedy is thus both historical and cautionary; the chief lesson to be learnt is the instability of the world. It is to a great extent this sort of tragedy, and this sort of expectation of it, that makes up the much read, and cautionary, narrative collection of the Mirror for Magistrates, an important source for many plays. But new ideas were being explored. The tragedies of Seneca, the Roman poet and Stoic philosopher who, once tutor to Nero, was forced by that ungrateful emperor to commit Stoic suicide, were known to people of education, At a time when Greek drama itself was hardly known, all his extant plays on stories from Greek mythology were translated between 1559 and 1581, and were admired and imitated. Seneca designed his plays to inculcate the ideals of Stoic philosophy—the pursuit of virtue, resignation in the face of catastrophe, a disregard for most of the things men commonly seek, like health, wealth, success or pleasure, so that reason could be followed undisturbed by the lower emotions of pain, pleasure, desire or fear. The stories of Hercules or Medea were admirable vehicles for this, and much in Stoic moral philosophy is attractive to a Christian society. Moreover, Seneca’s authority as a major writer of Antiquity (who until the later Middle Ages was believed to have corresponded with St Paul and even to have become a Christian) made people take seriously what he had to say, and imitate his methods of saying it. In his plays he gives his characters a high, even exaggerated, style; their declamatory speeches are rhetorically complex; their dialogue frequently falls into the rapid exchange of balanced, patterned lines known as stichomythia; and their action is framed by a Chorus that comments on and provides a context for the action. The plays are full of narrated horror, bloodthirsty details, ghosts, magic. It’s clear that there is much Senecan influence in the writing of plays like Shakespeare’s Richard III: the important thing is that the Senecan tradition redoubles the insistence on drama as moral and philosophical

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instruction. Furthermore, the interest in Aristotle’s analysis of Greek tragedy in the Poetics gave rise to much serious consideration of the theory of drama as a whole. Aristotle emphasized that if tragedy was to achieve in the audience what he saw as the desirable effect of the purifying of the emotions of pity and fear (i.e. their redirec­ tion from trivialities to the serious issues of the human condition, and a sense of the dignity of man), certain things were necessary: the hero must be important, but he must also be recognizably a man like ourselves, who is neither impossibly good nor impossibly bad; his fall must spring from some flaw in his character, and must be the result of a chain of events that do not merely follow each other but are causally linked. His fall must also be just, however terrible it may be. This again stresses the moral nature of tragedy: moral in the motivation of the plot, moral in the examination of the problem of the justice of events and moral in the effects on the audience. Tragedy thus becomes a means of interpreting our human predicament, not merely of contemplating the instability of Fortune. When Richard II is called a tragedy, then, we have to take all these views into account. At the very least the audience is asked to contemplate the vicissitudes of human life; by drawing on well-known, topical English history, the subtle barrier between what can be conveniently categorized as ‘story’ and what is painful in the here and now is removed. Richard II and his clash with Henry Bolingbroke—Henry IV—really mattered in English history, and no Eliza­bethan could not have a view about him or be ignorant of the disasters to which his reign and its end led. Just as Greek tragedians took their plots from mythical history that everyone knew and accepted as in some way paradigmatic of the puzzle of existence, so Shakespeare takes his from history he could count on his audience knowing, and makes them examine the nature of the world—political, ethical, moral, cosmic—they take so readily for granted.

4. Henry IV: structures, themes, and literary strategies One of the things that marks Shakespeare out from the majority of his fellow dramatists is the inventiveness and aplomb with which he adapts and re-invents the genres and literary strategies that were available. This is a large claim, and there is no room here to demonstrate in detail the evidence for it from across his career. Henry IV, and the plays with which it makes a sequence, however, certainly show this originality and verve. 4.1 Sequels and sequences The genres of these plays, different as they are, and handled with great originality, are complicated by the fact that sequels are of the essence of history, and it is impossible to see Henry IV wholly in isolation from its preceding play or its successor. There had been several plays on that period from other pens and other companies which audiences would have known, so even if they had not seen Richard II or, eventually, Henry V, they knew the ‘story’ preceding and following Henry IV, just as when watching Richard III they knew what followed his deposition. No element in the drama’s narrative could escape that teleology. Anybody could read Holinshed’s Chronicles, as Shakespeare did. The number of plays about English history testifies not only to audiences’ familiarity with it but also to the freedom with which playwrights borrowed from each other. There is ample evidence of the plays being planned as a group over several years: sometimes critics for convenience call then the ‘Second Tetralogy’ (second in point of time of composition), the ‘Ricardian plays’ or—my own preference—the ‘Henriad’. (It’s pretty clear that Part 2 followed on Part 1 on stage, though the First Quarto of  The anonymous play Woodstock seems to be in some way related to Richard II, and Part 2 and Henry V draw heavily on the coarse crowd puller, The Famous Victories of Henry V.  The word alludes neatly to the Iliad and Aeneid, the national epics of Greece and Rome. Samuel Daniel, in his Ciuile Warres (1595) said that if ever England had a national epic, ‘newe Iliades’ could be written from the saga of the consequences of the deposition of Richard, with Henry V as the Hero.

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Part 2 did not appear until 1600, while the Quarto of Part 1 was rushed out in 1598.) For example, Richard’s tragedy to all intents and purposes is over by Richard II, 5.v. All that is left for Richard is to die. But while in Shakespeare’s later tragedies there is indeed nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon, Richard II ends in scenes which, far from tying up the issues raised, deliberately extends them forward in time beyond the play’s end. The new king is concerned about his ‘unthrifty son’ and the company he keeps, and that son’s real character will be one of the main issues in Henry IV. Furthermore, Richard had to pay for the time he wasted as ‘gardener’ of his realm (see below 5.1), and while divine ordination justly shortened his tenure of the kingly office, it is human action that unjustly shortened his days as a man. That must have consequences; it must be paid for too. So in those last scenes of Richard II, which gather the four major figures and open some chief concerns of Henry IV, Shakespeare was clearly planning the plays that followed about two years later. He pushes us forward into a continuing saga of misrule, insurrection and response. He invites us indeed to see close parallels between the two reigns. There are banishments and confiscations in each; the new king, now Henry IV, has at least the potential for tragedy, and finds that his most admirable quality—the ability to motivate men—lays him open to the tragic mistake of motivating Exton; Hotspur, whose real age Shakespeare quite deliberately and unhistorically altered so that he could act as a parallel both to Prince Hal and to the young Bolingbroke, is led by his sense of personal injustice to a crime very like Bolingbroke’s in motivation and action. But it is unsuccessful, whereas Bolingbroke’s was not. The constant references to the deposition of Richard in Henry IV colour the entire action. At the end of Henry IV, again, we are kicked forward into the next play: the new king promises a glorious campaign in France, and the Epilogue also promises that the greatly attractive comic figure of Falstaff will be taken to France too: Our humble author will continue the story with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katherine of France, where, for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat [venereal disease]… (Part 2, Epilogue 18ff.) In the event, that did not quite happen, for plans had to be changed because of prob Giorgio Melchiori argues in his Cambridge edition of Part 2 (2006) that Part 2 was not planned with Part 1, but was written quickly to cash in on the success of Falstaff in part 1. Shakespeare was certainly an opportunist, but it is hard to reconcile the much less funny and attractive Falstaff of Part 2 with the idea of a play being built as a vehicle to exploit that success..

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lems with the censor (see below, ‘Oldcastle’), but the intention—and the puff for the next play—is quite clear. This design indicates not only that the playwright is counting on his audience’s knowledge of the events, but also on their knowing the preceding plays. Figures in one play (say, Northumberland or Henry IV in Henry IV) have to be seen in the light of their function and character in Richard II. Furthermore, the plays are linked by a strand of imagery which we shall examine later (see 5.1), and that imagery becomes in effect a theme. There are constant references to farming and gardening: the king is a gardener, a farmer; his realm the plot that needs managing and weeding if it not to bring forth bitter fruit. The cumulative force of this powerful idea, like the repeated hearing of a leitmotif in music, holds the sequence together and comes to resonate in our minds with ideas not just of Richard’s failure and fall but of the Fall itself. When Man failed as a Gardener, he became a farmer, condemned to unremitting sweat and toil. This strand of imagery runs from Gaunt’s speech in Richard II to Burgundy’s at the end of Henry V. Seeing the plays as a sequence, or serial, suggests other interesting ways of approaching them. Consider the issue of actors and acting. As I stress in my Very Brief Introduction, the illusion to which we are used on stage now was then impossible, and actors deliberately never ‘became’ the characters they acted, as in Method acting; they ‘played’ them. So the actor who took the part of Richard, which demands the skill of one of the company principals, might well have played Hal and Henry V. So our visual memory links the failing young king, who could not manage his realm, who could not control potential traitors, whose foreign war in Ireland was a disaster, being separated from his wife, explicitly a symbol of his kingdom, at the end of Richard II, and a successful young king, who does unite his realm, who does deal with traitors, who does conduct a foreign campaign successfully, united with his wife, explicitly linked with France, at the end of Henry V. Between these two very different plays lies Henry IV. Clearly, performing the whole play in a single afternoon would be impossible— and nor would it be good business. Some evidence suggests that two-part plays were  The palpable differences between Renaissance ideas of dramatic character and ours, both of which are reflections of current ideas of the self, are discussed in my Very Brief Introduction, and summarised in the Appendix.

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played on successive afternoons. What is beyond question is the design of the whole over ten Acts, where each Part, like the wings of a diptych, relates to the concerns of the other. Consider:  Each part has a different rebellion (though they are far from unconnected: see Part 1, 4.iv); in each a different sort of challenge by a different set of rebels is dealt with.  Both parts develop the career of Falstaff, with his apparent high point occurring after Shrewsbury, and each Part requires the other to present a complete picture of him.  In each Part, Act 2. iv is a major scene for Falstaff in the Boar’s Head  Both share the theme ‘uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’—especially if that crown was won unjustly.  In both Parts the relationship between Hal and the Crown is a developing and central concern, underlined by the way at the end he is seen outdoors in a grand, public, triumphal procession as King, neatly balancing the first time he appears, accompanied only by Falstaff, indoors, cracking funny but rather unkingly wisecracks. Furthermore, looking at the play as a whole suggests puts the problematic opening of Part 2, Rumour ‘painted all with tongues’—an allegorical/Morality figure if ever there was one—in a new light. His speech about the unreliability of report and the uncertainty of truth now becomes the centre of the ten-act structure—indeed, of the whole sequence, which we can see as a huge symmetrical design. The diagram (next page) inevitably oversimplifies: there are many more lines of comparison, contrast, counterpointing, holding these episodes together. History, our knowledge of the past, is far less certain than we often think it is: it is based on report, what people say, what has become accepted as true. Rumour reminds us of that, and it is an issue greatly relevant to the concerns of these plays. (After all, we never do find out the truth about Gloucester’s murder in Richard II, and when Aumerle is challenged by the assembled nobles in 4.i., there is at least one person, Surrey, prepared to support his truthfulness and honour.)

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 Rumour like Janus, looking both ways Richard II

What really happened in Calais? What was the truth about Richard’s Kingship? Richard, the young king who fails, divides the realm because of his tyranny, and is separated from his wife/kingdom

Part 1

Part 2

Henry V

Rebellion 1 Rebellion 2 Hal compared to Hal compared to John What lies behind the Hotspur Falstaff’s clowning, resistance to Henry V? Falstaff’s clowning, and his take on honHow ‘true’ is the myth and his take on hon- our, politics, authority of this ‘mirror to all our, politics, authority ‘The truth about Hal?’ Christian Princes?* ‘The truth about Hal?’ Henry, the successful young king who apparently unites his realm, acts justly, and is united to his wife/kingdom *NB: the action is ‘presented’ by Chorus, who promises we will ‘see’ certain things - but we never exactly do.

Indeed, Rumour’s allegorical dress, his position ‘outside’ the play—for he is no character ‘in’ it—makes him function rather like the exactly similar figure of Time in A Winter’s Tale, similarly placed at the exact centre of the play, holding the two parts together as a visual symbol of one of the major issues and acting like a presenter of a masque or an impresario. The use of an important allegorical ‘Morality’ figure ought not to surprise us, given the recent origins of Elizabethan dramatic language, and it gives us a clue to how we might assess Falstaff, a figure whose physical appearance is similarly tightly defined in the text.

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4.2 Themes It may be helpful, before going further, to summarise some of the main concerns in the political plays Shakespeare wrote for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the middle to late 1590s. Discussion of them can then come where it should, and where it does as we watch the play: in looking at the texture of the script and its structural force. The King: What makes a good monarch? What qualities does he need? (Henry V, versus Richard II, Octavian versus Antony) What is the personal cost of serious kingship? (Henry IV, Henry V) How far can he enjoy the other affections, pleasures and pursuits that other men legitimately do? (Henry V, Henry IV, Antony) Can a good ruler be, in simple terms, a good man? (Henry IV, Octavian) (The only saint Shakespeare ever portrayed was Henry VI, arguably the most incompetent ruler, up to then, ever to enjoy power in England.) Can the King be separated from his office? And if so, who/what is he? (Richard II’s agonised perception) The Crown: How should it descend? Is it able to be given/ given away/resigned at will? (Richard II, Lear) Who has title to it? Consider King John, where we have a) a king in possession, to avoid the disaster of a child king, under a questionable will; b) a man with kingly qualities in plenty – the Bastard, who has no chance at all of being king as he strictly has no legal existence; c) a would-be king by conquest; and d) a king (Arthur) by primogeniture of descent. The importance of order Put bluntly, what happens when you let genies out of bottles? One of the most terrible iconic scenes in Shakespeare is in Henry VI, Part 3, where Henry sees a confrontation between a son who has killed his father and a father who has killed his son in the civil war unleashed by his misrule. What is the cost of the re-assertion of order, without which no society can function? Do people learn anything from it? (King Lear)

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The people’s duty and obedience If a king fails in his office, or flouts the law by which he himself enjoys legal inheritance (like Richard II) what should the people do?  Grin and bear it, in perfect obedience, as argued by the Book of Homilies, by law read in every parish Church?  Wait for Providence to put things right in Christian patience? For is not rebellion a terrible dislocation of the universe (see above), a crime against God as well as Man?  Or has the king, by failing in his office, not forfeited the right to be considered God’s vice-gerent on earth, and do not the people have a duty to do God’s will in replacing him?  Has he not also broken his contract with his people, releasing them from their duty? These are the very arguments rehearsed in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, a twelfthcentury ‘Guide for Rulers’, from which the motto we traditionally assume to have been the Globe’s was taken: totus mundus agit histrionem, ‘the whole world plays the actor’. Consequences: the pattern (is there one?), or Providential justice Serious questions about Providence and History: does Providence intervene? Is there really a providential pattern? Do the good (and bad and ugly) get their deserts? And finally: Truth, how we know All these historical plays, and the comedies, are full of people reporting things, remembering things, being told things, referring to a past often before the play began. All these plays also stress how ambiguous and uncertain such communication can be: yet on such evidence crucial decisions have to be taken: there is no choice not to. 4.3 Types of plays: History, tragedy and chronicle In Renaissance theories of art outward form, or genre, ought to reflect the inner nature of things. The structure of a play, therefore, is likely to be intimately connected with

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what it is setting out to do and with what category or genre it should be classed. Richard II, for example, clearly comes within Polonius’ category ‘tragical-historical’: equally clearly, neither Henry IV nor Henry V would. The Quartos call Richard II, the first play in the sequence, a tragedy; the 1623 Folio groups it with the Histories. These labels, history and tragedy, don’t imply rigid divisions of genre and therefore of expectations and areas of interest—indeed, the whole Henriad indicates that Shakespeare was experimenting with different combinations—but they are not meaningless, and do imply different areas of emphasis and attention. When we analyse the main fields of imagery, all the sequence is linked to ‘historical-pastoral’. But what do we do with the Falstaff elements in Henry IV? Renaissance moral thought recognized a distinction between the ethical issues affecting a private person and the political morality governing his public life. Spenser’s letter to Ralegh that prefaces the incomplete Faerie Queene illustrates just this: the twelve private virtues will be discussed in the person of Prince Arthur and, after he has become King, the twelve politic virtues. Now the discussion of Tragedy by Aristotle and his commentators, as well as the evidence of existing Renaissance plays, suggests that while the subjects of tragic drama may well be persons of political im­portance, the interest is firstly on what the course of events does to them as people and, secondly, on how we respond to their suffering. Thus Tragedy could be said to deal primarily with the moral world of the individual at the centre of events. History and History- or Chronicle-plays, by contrast, necessarily see the individual (who might well be proper material for tragedy) as contributing to a large-scale sequence of events where the interest is primarily in the meaning of the historical process. The distinction is illustrated by Richard II and Henry IV. In the former, we are interested in the nature of Richard as he relates to his role as King, in the growth of his understanding of that rôle—particularly when he can no longer discharge it —and in his understanding of his personal responsibility for the chaos into which his rule has fallen. He is genuinely tragic in both the medieval and Aristotelian senses. But Richard’s tragedy is part of a historical process extending over a huge span of time, long beyond his death. Its meaning cannot be seen within any one lifetime. And so Henry IV, while allowing potentially tragic status to Henry IV (he could have been the hero of a tragedy), is designed to make us repeatedly see the events against a  Polonius in Hamlet 2.ii.379ff. is made to have aspirations to literary theory, and he recognises not only ‘history’, but also ‘historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral’; Shakespeare could count on his audience recognising that plays could be written in different modes and that those modes would carry certain expectations with them.

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backdrop of extended time and the characters as ironized by what we know and they cannot. One of Shakespeare’s most brilliant strokes is to use an image-cluster constantly recurring through the two plays so that the real reference point of indi­vidual action becomes a nebulous but powerful figure of personified England, bleeding with the wounds of her children. As a result, we are much more interested in the issue of ‘What is this doing to England?’ than ‘What is it doing to X?’ So a convenient lumping these plays together as ‘histories’ skates over real difficulties, and ignores the almost automatic pre-suppositions their ostensible genres might have elicited in their contemporary audiences. They are self-evidently not the same in style, or treatment of their material. 4.4 The shadow of Tragedy In a moment we’ll explore the great originality of the structure of Henry IV. But first, we should pursue the idea of tragedy a little further. Shakespeare, glancing over his shoulder, perhaps, at how he had treated Richard, built into Henry IV something that might well be called a tragic substructure. That substructure centres round Hotspur in Part 1, and (so Catherine M. Shaw argued) Falstaff in Parts 1 and 2. Both of them (particularly Falstaff) have clear symbolic importance (see below) but as persons their careers have at least the potential for tragedy. Both rise to positions of apparent security and power; both gamble on their luck; both are ruined by the logical extension of characteristics in themselves. Hotspur has admirable qualities and great gifts. His energy is attractive, his concern for honour (however qualified later), expressed in magnificent if hyperbolical language (Part 1, 1.iii.195 ff.) and his impulsive generosity (3.i.131) give him at least some of the magnanimity of the potential hero. A born leader, capable of inspiring affection and admiration, in Part 1 he is very like the young Bolingbroke. Henry IV himself compares him favourably to his own son at the end of Richard II, wishes that he not Hal were his son, and sees that parallel with himself. But he has bad qualities too; just as Richard said of Bolingbroke and Mowbray, High-stomach’d are they both and full of ire, In rage, deaf as the sea, hasty as fire (Richard II, 1.i.18-19), Hotspur is heir to that ‘harsh rage’ and ‘want of governance’ in Bolingbroke’s character which led him ultimately to usurpation. Worcester and Northumberland underline  ‘The Tragic substructure of the Henry IV plays’, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985) pp.61–8

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his similar failings: his impetuousness, impatience, anger, sense of injury and lack of self-control (I Henry IV 1.iii.215f, 235ff). Worcester spells his weaknesses out in no uncertain terms in I Henry IV 3.iii.175ff: In faith my lord, you are too wilful-blame; And since your coming hither have done enough To put him quite besides his patience. You must needs learn, lord, to amend this fault; Though sometimes it show greatness, courage, blood And that’s the dearest grace it renders you Yet oftentimes it doth present harsh rage, Defect of manners, want of government, Pride, haughtiness, opinion, and disdain; The least of which, haunting a nobleman, Loseth men’s heart and leaves behind a stain Upon the beauty of all parts besides, Beguiling them of commendation. Lord Bardolph later reminds us of where these weaknesses led him—to rebellion and defeat and death: [He] with great imagination, Proper to madmen, led his powers to death, And, winking, leaped into destruction. (2 Henry IV, 1.iii.31ff) Those very qualities that make him attractive are political liabilities and destroy him; it does not seem mere coincidence that Lord Bardolph is given the energetic and impetuous verb ‘leaped’, for it reminds us of Hotspur’s most memorable lines, said when at his most admirable and attractive: By heaven, methinks it were and easy leap To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac’d moon; Or dive into the bottom of the deep, Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, And pluck up drowned honour by the locks (Part I, 1.iii.201ff)  Shakespeare underlines the irony of Hotspur’s career here by making him connect personified Honour with the instability of the moon, image of Fortune, and the changeable sea, governed by the changing moon.

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However ambiguous he may be, we care about the attractive, almost heroic, Hotspur, who risks and dares; his fall and death is emotionally very powerful. It is significant that Hal, the adversary he holds in contempt but whom we know him to have seriously misjudged (as Richard misjudged the seriousness of Bolingbroke), feels real compassion for the man he has just defeated, and speaks over him an elegy that, while it in no way glosses over the grievous sin of ‘illweav’d ambition’, underlines the great and serious loss of such a man: This earth that bears thee dead Bears not alive so stout a gentleman.... ... take thy praise with thee to heaven, Thy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave, Be not remembered in thy epitaph! (I Henry IV, 5.iv.92ff.) So powerful is this moment that it subsumes emotionally the falls of all the other rebels. We see symbolised in Hotspur the payment for all the crimes of ‘gross rebellion and detested treason’. His fall is not only personal but paradigmatic too; it underlines within the framework of historical event what ought, in a simple world, to have happened to Bolingbroke. Hotspur’s fall, too, is a result of the chain of circumstances initiated by Richard’s misrule, the shadow of which lies as long as the shadow of his murder. Falstaff operates in a number of complex ways, and later we’ll return to him. Here I want to examine certain traits in his career which point to his use to illuminate the nature of misrule, usurpation, and its ultimate Nemesis. He has reference to the persons of both Richard and Henry IV. Look first at the interesting parallel with Henry IV. Falstaff, in his disordered and riotous life, his contempt for all authority except his own desires, is of course a symptom, or consequence, of a national breaking of order. He has won to his company the heir to the throne, away from both his father and, explicitly, his duties. Just as Henry IV is thus led to see Hotspur as a preferable, even ideal, heir, Falstaff sees what he thinks Hal to be as an ideal king—one who will subvert the settled rule of law, hang no rogues in England, overturn the authority and hierarchy of government. Eastcheap, Falstaff’s milieu and almost creation, thus comes to symbolise Falstaff’s kingdom—a kingdom he explicitly and parodically plays king to in Part I, 2.iv. With breathtaking lèse-majesté he guys the actual figure of Henry, and Shakespeare gives him speech which though prose is not dissimilar to the sententious public utterance of Henry IV in I.i. He acts out in visible form the moral reality of a kingship, like Henry’s, without

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the sanction of divine grace or due succession. In him we see the extension to a horrific conclusion of the misrule we saw in Richard and the usurpation it called forth. For him, rule is rapine, the magnifying of the self and its appetites at the expense of the commonweal, not the husbandry of a garden but its looting. He is, in fact, a King of Misrule, and Eastcheap is a glimpse of his kingdom. For a time he has the illusion that power will soon be realised. Hal seems to him to treat him as a father, seems to promise—though he never does—what he wants. He trades on these expectations appallingly, misuses the king’s press cynically and cruelly, mutilates the body of the fallen Hotspur, lies about his own prowess, claiming—quite seriously, I think—an advancement in the hierarchy of rank that is different only in degree from that achieved by Henry IV and attempted by Glendower, Hotspur and Mortimer. Yet Hal in Part 2 chooses a new father in the Lord Chief Justice, embodying loyalty, justice, order, the antithesis to both his real father and to Falstaff; and all that is left to Falstaff is the memory of the illusion of glory and power. His fall, externally (and dramatically) necessary as it is, is internally motivated, the fruition of his own ironic insight about the impermanence of the world in the very first moments of his first appearance in Part I 1.ii. He has indeed, as ‘the minion of the moon’, ‘ebb[ed] and flowed like the sea, being governed, as the sea is, by the moon’: Prince Hal replies to him with an irony that cuts deep through Falstaff’s own. Just so has achievement of the forbidden fruit turned to dust and ashes in Henry’s mouth. But his reference in his fall extends beyond Henry to Richard. His weakness mirrors Richard’s, as Hotspur’s does Henry’s. He and Richard both live off their realms, in actuality or intent. Both are egocentric, both charm others and deceive themselves with words, each constructing and believing in a world that is quite other than the one that is actually around them. God’s angels don’t descend to fight for Richard, despite his confidence (Richard II, 3.ii.60ff.); Falstaff’s own image of his England is a lie and a cheat that he falls for. Both are blind to the signs of real danger: Falstaff ignores the explicit warning and detailed prediction given by Prince Hal in Part I, 2.ii.475, as Richard ignores, even fuels by his smiling remark, Bolingbroke’s ‘high pitch’ that is to destroy him (Richard II, 1.i.109). He comes to a public humiliation, as Richard does, and also to an internal recognition of what his real state is. Richard comes publicly to the one, and alone in prison to the other; with Falstaff, it is simultaneous, his public fall coinciding with his private realisation of his aloneness, his only companions the aptly named Shallow  Richard is given a striking image, whose irony only we, with our historical knowledge, can perceive; Bolingbroke, subliminally, is a falcon, flying at game—Richard.

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and Silence. His erstwhile companions Pistol and Bardolph become followers of the new king, as Aumerle left Richard. He utterly deserves this fall, as Richard did his, as Macbeth does; yet he is pitiable and pathetic. Though he is not tragic, the outline of his career has the shape of tragedy and clearly echoes in a comic/grotesque mode some major elements in the natures and careers of the main political figures. Why this substructure is there at all in a play that emphatically is not tragedy is intriguing. After all, Shakespeare seems to have thought it important; he altered the historical record he worked from pretty severely to allow the parallel between Hotspur, Hal and Bolingbroke to be developed, and virtually invented the Falstaff plot. The problem returns us once more to the idea of the history play. Given titles as they are that suggest single heroes, nevertheless the real subject of these plays is not Richard or Henry or Hotspur or Hal, but England; they are about a real people caught in a trap of real history, a trap that actually happened. That people, England, suffered from generation to generation, expiating the original guilt of its revolt and acting out and suffering the inevitable consequences, until somehow the blood sacrifice is paid. Hotspur is one such sacrifice. But just as, as a result of Original Sin at the Fall, humankind is unable to regain that state of innocence, so the deposition of Richard, specifically linked to the Fall (Richard II, 3.iii.76ff.), casts its shadow over all succeeding human life. Carlisle’s prophecy (4.i.115ff.) is fulfilled to the absolute letter; Richard’s own, in Richard II 5.i.55ff, is quoted by Henry IV in Part 2, 3.i.70ff. to underline the entail of guilt into which they are all locked. He takes that guilt on his own head—and has to carry himself, alone, the guilt of murder (Part 2, 4.v.184ff.)—and clears Hal, but the fall is not undone, the soiling remains. Hotspur and Falstaff are the symptoms of the disorder he caused, and agents of new trouble in their own right. The consequences of this primal act may remit for an interim, as in the reign of Henry V, but he remembers the blood of Richard just before his greatest triumph; his son loses the throne Henry’s father had usurped. The fallenness of Man’s nature makes his finest qualities the seeds of his downfall. That hint of tragedy thus underlines for us the profundity of Shakespeare’s understanding of the human condition and of the political life in which we are all inescapably involved. 4.5 ‘Bi-polar’ structure: Henry IV and re-inventing the Morality An obvious feature of both Parts is the consistent alternation of the action between two worlds: the political milieu, and the world dominated by Falstaff. The only character

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truly common to, free in, these two antipathetic worlds is Hal. The only other play in the canon that has anything like this bi-polar structure is Antony and Cleopatra, to which I shall return in a moment. The political scenes, separated from the interwoven Falstaff scenes, constitute a recognisable Chronicle play, where we are watching and are being asked to judge political behaviour in a historical context: the narration of events in time sequence is of the essence. (The simplicity of the idea should not suggest that the response need be simple.) What is more problematical is the relationship of the Falstaff scenes to these; clearly it matters a lot, or Shakespeare would not have so carefully intertwined them over that huge ten Act structure. Henry IV has other elements signalling the literary strategies and genres it uses and thus warning the audience about the type of responses that may be demanded. But we need to be on our guard. The Falstaff scenes, particularly in Part 1, are some of the funniest writing that has ever graced an English stage. They are therefore utterly memorable, and there is evidence that, like Charles I renaming Much Ado About Nothing ‘Beatrice and Benedick’ in his copy of the First Folio, the plays were remembered and referred to by the names of ‘Falstaff’ or ‘Oldcastle’ (see Ch. 8). But such comedy can easily blind us moderns to the realisation of the sort of comedy its audience would have recognised in it; and that recognition intimately affects the relationship with the political scenes. Falstaff’s dramatic ancestors inhabit the Morality tradition. Phrases applied to Falstaff like ‘that old white-bearded Satan’, ‘Vice with his dagger of lath’ and so on can seem mere hangovers from this. But there are excellent grounds for thinking that Shakespeare was deliberately writing something very close to a Morality himself in these scenes, or, at the very least, giving his audience a nudge to suggest they consider them in a similar way. If we take a central issue of Parts 1 & 2 to be a discussion of the ‘Education of a Prince’ (see below)—a Morality theme if ever there was one—we can easily see how the Falstaff scenes represent the ‘Temptation of the Prince’ to misuse of power and self-indulgence—using the old word, to ‘Riot’. Now no temptation has much chance of succeeding if it is not believable and attractive, and Falstaff has to be felt to be damnably so. The writers of mediaeval allegories, sermons and Moralities knew this well, and there is no greater vividness to be found anywhere than in some of the detailed portrayals of abstract qualities like  Using this word recalls the allegorical portrayal of this quality in the splendidly Falstaffian person of Ryotte in Skelton’s Bowge of Court (c.1498). Skelton also wrote a rather good Morality drama about the nature, duties and vulnerabilities of a king, Magnyfycence.

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Lust or Pride or Sloth as if they were real people. Moreover, Shakespeare gives us clues throughout, so that behind the illusion of the vast, pulsating, sweating bulk of Falstaff we are to see him being referred back to the allegorical character (see below); we have already seen how he and his milieu symbolise the disorders in the realm of England itself. Behind the ‘realistic’ figure, then, lies something which in its symbolism and values relates closely to the Morality drama. Indeed, several characters in the ‘clown world’ of Eastcheap have names which betray their allegorical, almost cartoon, nature: Shallow, Silence, Doll Tear-sheet, Mistress Quick-lie, Ancient Pistol (Pizzle). Even their costume may have reinforced this, for by convention whores dressed in a recognisable way, and clowns seem to have worn a huge cod-piece with a phallus. To so clothe Pistol gives an extra pun to his line, ‘Pistol’s cock is up’. So to equip Falstaff would link him iconographically (perhaps too obviously) to the Moralities and the customary clothing for the Devil/Vice. This use of the Morality tools should not surprise us, for people—audiences—expected drama to discuss abstract moral issues through symbolic character and action. What is striking is how boldly and imaginatively Shakespeare uses these techniques and frameworks. But this is not significant simply to a discussion of Falstaff. The alternation of dramatic worlds is consistent and noticeable. If one set of scenes is ‘moralistic’ in the way I suggest, and if, as they do, the two sets eventually integrate at the crowning of Henry V, when everyone in the play drops the masks they have consciously or unconsciously been wearing and takes on their true roles, it makes very good sense to see the Falstaff scenes as making manifest the issues underlying the apparent rationality of the political scenes; indeed, to see the interweaving as a means of maintaining a choric commentary on the political action. The disordered ‘kingdom’ of misrule in Eastcheap is the consequence of the usurpation of Henry. I now return to the structural similarity to Antony and Cleopatra. Rome and Egypt represent not only opposite worlds, but opposite values, even languages: not unlike Westminster and the Boar’s Head. Antony tries to inhabit both, and his fatal final choice of Egypt throws political sense to the winds and destroys him. Cleopatra, to put it as sharply as possible, plays Falstaff to his Hal; only, in this play, unlike Henry IV, the Prince chooses the primrose path of dalliance. Yet ironically, though we might find Antony a much more congenial companion with whom to go out on the town for  Exactly as he uses them in the porter scene in Macbeth, 2.iii; that scene has direct verbal allusions to the comic scene in the Harrowing of Hell plays where the Castle of Hell is guarded by a drunken porter who responds with comic chitchat to the knocking at the gate. He opens it to let in Christ. This is no small clue to what has happened to Macbeth, Scotland, and to the significance of Macduff.

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an evening, we would far rather be ruled by Octavian. Both plays engage with that concern for the education of a Prince into fitness for rule. This issue is often conceptualised in visual, emblematic, terms: the story of Hercules’ dilemma, ‘the Choice of Hercules’ originating in Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (which describes the education of the emperor Cyrus the Great) is a favourite and common emblem, repeated time and again and part of the very currency of thought.

Figure 1 Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (Leyden, 1586)

Figure 2 George Wither’s Collection of Emblems (London, 1635)

Figure 1 is from Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (Leyden, 1586), which Shakespeare may very well have known. Years after Shakespeare died, George Wither re-used the idea in his Collection of Emblems (London, 1635) in a way perhaps even

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more pointedly applicable to both plays (Figure 2). ‘Πότερoν’: ‘which of the two?’ In both plays, the audience knows how the choice will fall out, but the characters do not. And therein lie both the tension, and the high stakes for which they are playing. The structure of the two plays, it seems to me, brilliantly adapts this dialectic into expressive narrative form. ♣ In watching Henry IV, then, I think the audience is being given a number of overlapping categories into which to fit it. The first (in point of response as well of importance) will be the recognition that whatever else it is this play is chronicle drama relating to real events in real time. Almost immediately will follow—probably expected, in view of the legends about Prince Hal—recognition of the Morality elements in the Temptation and Education of a Prince (plus the irony that the audience know about, expect and indeed desire Falstaff’s eventual fall). Later the alternation of scenes will make them view the chronicle elements in a Morality light too—almost as if the chronicle elements are acting as exemplars for the generalised moral reflection prompted by recognition of Falstaff’s ancestry. Finally will come the recognition of the tragic substructure that thematically links these plays back to their predecessor and bring into our minds Richard’s murdered body, gored by many wounds like the body of England itself which so strikingly recurs in the imagery. To treat Henry IV chiefly as jolly comedy, therefore, with an irritating intrusion of politics, is to get it about as wrong as possible. It is remarkable how often people who should know better have done just that, for in it we hear far more than the chimes at midnight.

5. Metaphor, symbol and themes: Henry IV and its sequence Given that this sequence of history plays deals with the consequences of a single primal event, the relatedness of their concerns is obvious. Equally we can accept, simply by seeing them, the fact that they can individually stand alone. But given the loyalty of audiences to particular theatres, which I outline in my Very Brief Introduction, we can assume an audience for Henry IV or Henry V would be familiar with the issues, the symbols, the metaphoric world, laid out in the earlier play(s). A striking image right at the beginning of 1 Henry IV looks back to the strife of Richard II and (with an irony of which King Henry is unconscious) forward to what is to come: No more the thirsty entrance of this soil Shall daub her lips with her own children’s blood: A mother greedily eating her own children is fit dominating image for a play following on from the casual carnage of the best blood in England that marked Henry’s accession (Richard II, 5.vi) and including within itself the death of so many nobles and commons. Yet the image is more than grotesque: it is pointedly unnatural, is meant to be so by Henry, and derives its unnaturalness not just from the idea of a motherland but from the idea of the body politic. This image of the state as body remains with us throughout this play and the next. It is certainly glanced at in the bloated form of Falstaff, creation of these distempers and distempered himself. It is hinted at again in Canterbury’s beautiful speech in Henry V, 1.i.187ff. about the harmonious kingdom of the bees. But King Henry continues, No more shall trenching war channel her fields, Nor bruise her flow’rets with the armed hoofs Of hostile paces...  The image echoes, surely, Richard II 3.iii 96-100  King John, probably written slightly earlier, exploits imagery of the state and polity as a suffering body to a remarkable degree.

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Here our point of reference has been shifted. The ‘soil’ has led us to gardens, husbandry and agriculture. Shakespeare has linked up the basic idea of the Motherland/ Body Politic with the central theme that runs through all these plays, the Garden and how it must be cultivated. 5.1 The Garden Symbol We moderns have virtually forgotten the extraordinary symbolic power of gardens for Renaissance people, and we have to do something to recover the original force of the idea, for it is of central importance. An age better versed in its Bible than ours would recollect that, as Francis Bacon said, ‘God Almighty first planted a garden’, and gave it to Man to look after. That ‘happy Garden state’, where Man ‘knew not the doctrine of ill-doing’, remained a potent image of perfection for literally thousands of years. It was, naturally, elaborated: the change of seasons and their accompanying discomfort was unknown, the plants gave their fruits in due time, and the Lion lay down with the Lamb. But Man’s desire (or, to use the old and more correct term, his cupiditas led him to seek powers that God had not given him, and so he fell. With his Fall the whole creation was affected (see above, Ch.1.3), and nothing could ever again be innocent and perfect. He was cast out of the Garden, and condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow (Genesis ch.3)—in other words, work became the norm of his existence, and the failed gardener became a farmer. (This notion of farming as the best fallen Man can do is important, as we shall see.) The Biblical idea of an unfallen state of perfection received support from Classical sources too. Ovid, for example, in Book 1 of his Metamorphoses (which every schoolboy knew) describes the pristine state of the world, when evil was unknown. He also describes what happened when Man transgressed. These two strands (which are clearly, in some unimaginably distant past, related to each other) converge on the mediaeval and Renaissance idea of the garden-topos and contribute to its usual characteristics of singing birds, pleasant season, harmonious human relationships and 

Selfish desire as opposed to real love, self-giving and self-forgetting caritas—St Paul’s ‘charity’ of I Corinthians XIII.  For English readers, the finest statement of both the intuition of what the unfallen Garden was like and the consequences of the Fall is to be found in Milton, Paradise Lost IX and X  The word topos introduces a very useful concept. The Greek means ‘place’; and as with convention, the commonplace constitutes both a norm and sets out the area of agreement between author and audience. An author is thus free to evoke a set of responses very economically and to use them as he sees fits his present purpose. Pastoral uses many conventions and topoi.

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all other possible delights. Real gardens, of course, are in a fallen world, and thus can only glance at the ideal thing to which they refer. But in the formal Renaissance garden with its complex mathematics and patterns there is an attempt to evoke something of the perfection of Eden. We need to be very much on our guard, therefore, as soon as we stray near an Elizabethan flower bed; reconstructing the signals contained in the idea of ‘The Garden’ can lead us to some illuminating readings of poems and plays and pictures we thought we knew well. But in the Garden Man fell, and that changed the world for ever and a day; there is no undoing what once has been done. The Mercy of God, however, gave man work to do, so that from the ruins of his original destiny he could painstakingly build something of real value. Law and hierarchy were, according to the theologians, instituted by that Mercy to temper the effects of the Fall—as Augustine put it, in remedium peccatorum (‘for the remedy of sin/ sinners’). This has unmistakable general reference to the ideas of kingship discussed in these history plays; but it also has specific application to Richard II 3.iv, the Garden scene, which sets up a metaphoric trope running right through to the end of Henry V. John of Gaunt (Richard II, 2.i.40ff.) had first set up the idea of England as ‘other Eden, demi-paradise’, whose steward had gravely mismanaged it. The Garden Scene (3.iv) has no important narrative function, but, near the centre of the play, it makes explicit the force of the complex of agricultural images. It opens with the Queen asking two ladies how she shall ‘drive away the heavy thought of care’. She rejects all four suggestions that are made, and then draws aside to observe the conversation of the Gardener and two servants. The Gardener, as a good gardener should, is making proper use of his subordinates to look after his charge: to support the plants that need supporting, to prune the rank growth, and to uproot the weeds that harm the good plants. His imagery underlines the parallel between his role and that of a ruler. His man makes his drift clear: England is the ‘sea-walled garden’ (a reminiscence of Gaunt’s image of the moat) of line 43, but her gardener has neglected his duty and she is in a mess, running to waste. Her gardener has got his just deserts. The Gardener pushes the image a step further: Richard is more than just a gardener, he is a mighty plant, a tree that sheltered less worthy men, and is now uprooted. (Surely there is an echo here of Jesus’ warning that ‘Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit shall be  See, for example, the discussion of planting in Sir Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus (1658).  ‘Waste’ is more than just what we mean by the word; it is the evil misuse or misdirection of the goods of a state. Much mediaeval satire is directed against ‘wasters’, and Bushy, Green and Bagot are, in Shakespeare’s and his forefathers’ terms ‘wasters’.

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plucked up and cast into the fire’? (Matthew, III.10) The imagery of bad husbandry is sustained to l. 66 in a remarkable tour de force, which explores in memorable detail the duties of a king: the conceit is hammered into our consciousness as a potent way of valuing and understanding the fall of Richard and why it has inevitably happened. The gardener’s lines, too, are a not only an admonition in a play, not only of general relevance. They shoot straight out of the play and challenge the mighty of Shakespeare’s own day to defend their stewardship. The ideas of (and metaphors for) kingship stated here have to be borne in mind when we look at the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V, and this discussion connects with the ideas of the duty and person of the Prince’s Two Bodies, both as a mortal man and as the immortal symbol of the identity of the nation. At this point the queen steps forward. She makes quite open the point that has lain dormant ever since the Gardener entered: he is ‘old Adam’s likeness’ in a garden that has been entrusted to him, but is now speculating on things above his station. She sees this as paralleling Adam’s primal Fall, and links this naturally with ideas of his betrayal by the one he most trusted—Eve—who was betrayed in turn by the Devil. The imaginative force of this is profound: it links to Richard an idea that is developed in the rest of the play—an idea of innocence betrayed, that he is a man more sinned against than sinning. It supports the bold subliminal linking between the (supposed) betrayal of Richard with Judas’ betrayal of Christ (3.ii.130-134), and pushes our idea of Richard along the road to true tragic sympathy. But the crucial thing is that the Queen sets up in our minds the Fall of Richard as the primal, Original, sin of the Henry plays. Nothing can ever be the same again. The world is different from this point on, and only in incessant care shall a ‘shaken’ and ‘wan’ Bolingbroke keep his hollow crown. The idea of England as a Garden that through sin—Richard’s bad gardening, the Fall of Richard—becomes a farm, requiring hard work, takes us to the farming imagery. From the beginning of Richard II to the end of Henry V, it links them in a way quite unique in the canon. It’s useful to look at this imagery in the light of its probable source, the agricultural poems of Vergil. For there seems indeed to be a detailed correspondence between Vergil’s four Georgics and Shakespeare’s plays. There is no doubt that Shakespeare’s ‘small Latin’ (Ben Jonson’s sneer hides the  Recurrent images of betrayal, particularly in Richard II, often allude to the serpent’s betrayal in Eden; they strikingly recur in exactly the same terms, even to the inclusion of Judas, in Henry V’s impassioned speech in response to the intended treason of Scrope, Gray and Cambridge (2.ii.79ff.). Falstaff is also fleetingly seen as a devilish tempter - a ‘white bearded Satan’.  James C. Bulman, ‘Shakespeare’s Georgic Histories’ Shakespeare Survey, 38.

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fact that by our standards that probably means quite a lot) had coped with Vergil’s Georgics. This book was, after all, on every schoolboy’s reading programme, and even the Latinless could hardly avoid acquaintance with the poems since they were borrowed from extensively, and translated: Ben Jonson, who was a fine Classical scholar, owned a copy of Fleming’s version of 1589. Vergil wrote these poems, apparently of country life and good husbandry, after the end of the terrible civil war that began, originally, with the conflict of Marius and Sulla, and continued with that of Pompey and Caesar. It was extended by the murder of Caesar and the vengeance exacted by the uneasy alliance of Octavian (the future Princeps Augustus) and Mark Antony on his murderers, Brutus and Cassius, and only ended when Octavian defeated Mark Antony at Actium in 31 BC. Augustus’ task was somehow to bind up the wounds of a Roman world torn by three generations of internecine strife, to bring peace to ravaged Italy, to turn men who had been trained to a life of fighting their countrymen back into peaceful farmers and citizens. Vergil is fully aware of the magnitude of Augustus’ achievement in bringing peace, yet is also keenly conscious not only that that pacification has been achieved at huge cost, even to the dispossession of farmers from their fields to enable Augustus to pay his soldiers, but also that the suffering and bloodshed cannot simply be forgotten: the farmer’s plough turns up the bones of those who died at Philippi, and the shed blood is recalled in the redness of the new wine. His discussion of country life is therefore unavoidably political. Vergil sees history itself as a sort of agricultural process. The Georgics celebrate peace, but constantly remind us of the war that had devastated the land. The memory of that devastation lies behind every promise of fruitfulness and seems almost to be one of the conditions for it. The ruler—Augustus—may, by good rule, achieve a fruitful peace, but the Golden Age could never be restored and the settlement was always precarious. In the middle of Book 1, for example (I.316ff) a storm suddenly breaks just as the harvest begins. It is, significantly, seen in military terms, and its effects are described (322–334) in the terms of epic combat [translated next page]: Saepe ego, cum flavis messorem induceret arvis Agricola, et fragili iam stringeret hordea culmo, Omnia ventorum concurrere proelia vidi, Quae gravidam late segetem ab radicibus imis Sublime expulsam eruerent; ita turbine nigro Ferret hiems culmumque levem stipulas volantes. Saepe etiam immensum coelo venit agmen aquarum...

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(Often, just when the farmer was setting the reaper to work in his golden fields, just as he was touching the barley with its brittle stalk, I have seen all the winds rush together in battle, far and wide tearing the heavy crop from its deep roots and tossing it up in the air; in its dark whirlwind the storm carries away the light stalk and flying straw. Often too a great battle-line of the waters gathers in the sky...) Book 3, on managing animals, closes with a section (440ff.) on their diseases; and the fourth closes, surely symbolically, with the haunting story of the failed attempt of Orpheus the poet to win back by his love and music his wife Eurydice from Hades to the light and colour of the upper world, to restore that perfection and unity which had been lost. Vergil sees the farmer’s, and, by implication, the ruler’s life as a constant struggle against the forces of disorder and darkness: they are only just under the surface: Scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis Agricola, incurvo terram molitus aratro, Exesa inveniet scabra rubigine pila, Aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanes, Grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulchris (I.493ff) (Indeed, the time shall come when in those very fields the farmer, having worked the land with his curved plough, shall find spears turned up eaten away by rust, or with his heavy mattock shall strike empty helmets, and will wonder at the huge bones from the graves that have been broken open) A general debt to the Georgics in these plays, in images of agriculture, is clear. In Richard II 1.iii.127-8 we are reminded of Vergil’s image of the plough turning up the reminders of civil war; in 4.i.138 Carlisle’s warning to Bolingbroke recalls strongly Vergil’s plains of Haemus twice manured with Roman blood. The Gardener overheard by Isabel talks about the pruning of trees exactly in Vergil’s tones (3.ii 26ff.). In 2 Henry IV Shakespeare makes Henry use both gardening imagery (which reminds us strongly of Richard) and then bee-imagery to rebuke Hal (4.iv.54ff.), even picking up Vergil’s image of the bees’ nest in rotten carrion (Georgics 4 281ff.); he continues by seeing himself in terms of the industrious bee, which, ironically, finally  L. P. Wilkinson, The Georgics of Vergil, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969) pp.108ff, recalls the commentator Servius’ assertion that Vergil replaced a politically delicate passage with the Orpheus section.

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loses it has won. In Henry V these bee references (including those ironic ones linked to Falstaff, the sweetness of the honey of Hybla, 1 Henry IV 1.ii.37) culminate in Canterbury’s description of the bees’ commonwealth (Henry V, 1.ii.183ff.), which is built on Vergil’s discussion of the bees (with some dependence on Willichius’ commentary, first printed in the 1544 Venice edition). In 2.iv.38ff. the good gardening of Vergil’s husbandman is used to warn the French of what Hal’s harvest is like to be. But it is more interesting than mere borrowing of details; there are structural parallels of consequence. Vergil’s Book I is devoted to the tilling of the land, the second to planting, the third to animals, the fourth to beekeeping. The plays, as a whole exploring the moral sickness and the sterility of civil strife, seem to mirror Vergil’s four-part structure. Richard II uses images of tilling the land or garden extensively: Gaunt sees England both as a garden and, now, as a mismanaged ‘farm’; Richard in his prophetic lament (3.iii.161ff.) sees his tears as a storm that will lodge the corn and ‘mak[e] a dearth in this revolting land’; the two Parts of Henry IV plays are full of images of England’s earth gaping to receive the blood of her sons, and of animal passions. Canterbury’s model of an ordered commonwealth is a Vergilian beehive. Vergil’s perception of the tension in human life and politics between order and disorder seems to have helped Shakespeare to articulate his own political and moral vision, his own perception of the unresolved tension in English politics and history between ‘winning’ and ‘wasting’, natural and unnatural behaviour, progress and relapse. He seems to see human society as subject to brief interims of fragile order which grow out of previous suffering and themselves contain the seeds of future strife. He seems to conceive the history he handles as a precarious agricultural proc The fullest description is in Vergil’s picture of the good husbandman, who labours against his difficulties and is happy as a king with the beauty and goodness he has wrested from the hard earth. See Georgic IV 125ff.  Note the irony, however: Canterbury uses it to encourage Henry not to peace, but to war: as if the hard-won instant of peace in England can only be preserved by aggression against France.  He sees the very conditions of existence as full of struggle:

‘...sic omnia fatis in peius ruere ac retro sublapsa referri, non aliter quam qui adverso vix flumine lembum remigiis subigit, si bracchia forte remisit, atque illum praeceps prono rapit alveus amni.’ (I.199ff) ‘....labor omnia vincit improbus, et duris urguens in rebus egestas’ (I.145ff)

(‘So everything by Fate rushes to the worse, slips back. like a man who, just managing to row his boat upstream, if he should rest his arms for an instant, the boat carries him downstream.’ ‘Relentless labour overcomes everything, and in hard circumstances need is pressing’.)

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ess. For example, Hal is specifically made to be a Good Gardener in contradistinction to Richard who was not. Just when he is victorious and England knows a unity and peace and justice she has not had for a generation, Burgundy’s speech (Henry V, 5.ii.23ff.) pulls together all the images of agriculture in the plays in one huge and elegiac image of neglect and devastation needing healing. That a neglect and devastation that in both realms can only be repaired by the marriage of the king who has proved his ability to rule with the princess whose innocent and vulnerable femininity in that most masculine of plays reminds us of the vulnerable femininity of another princess of France, Richard’s Queen. Between those two women lies the image of the bleeding mother that is tormented England. And the irony is huge. For in the reign of their son, heir to both crowns, so ‘many had the managing’ (Henry V, 5 ii.11) of his state that all was again lost into a welter of kinstrife. It is interesting to recall the predictions of Elizabeth’s future greatness at the end of Henry VIII: the promise is genuine, but the experience of the audience must make it seem less than the whole truth. These plays do, after all, deal not only with models of what might or should be, but also with models of what problematically and untidily was. The central metaphor-cluster for these plays, then, draws on Biblical and Vergilian insights into the human condition. England is an estate to be managed, all too often woefully misused, fearfully dependent on her gardener. Gaunt’s speech is a complaint against the husbandman who neglected his patrimony and rented it out for private satisfaction; Henry IV’s bee-like diligence has taken place against the background of an England whose furrows run with blood; the rebels’ war aim in I Henry IV 3.i, made dramatically memorable by the prop of the map, is the literal dismemberment of Mother England. Two scenes in the sequence, moreover, are set in actual gardens, and discuss the management of them openly and symbolically; it is tempting to see them as deliberately contrasting. Richard II’s Garden Scene underlines what a king should do to tend his realm, what Richard has not done, and connects both ideas up with the irrevocable and in itself hopeless fallenness of human nature. In 2 Henry IV, in Shallow’s orchard, we glimpse the ordered life of the Gloucestershire countryside, a world where real work is going on: Shallow grafts his own trees; Davy interrupts seeking advice on the management of the farm, whether to plant the headland with red wheat. But the Court of Star Chamber had many cases before it of people behaving exactly as Falstaff and Shallow do, in misusing the Queen’s press—indeed, it was a perennial scandal, and problem, in those years when the impressments of soldiers for the Irish war was getting more and more difficult. The stewards of this Gloucestershire garden are foolish and unjust: Davy seeks favour, not justice, from

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the Justice; and Falstaff, gross image of that disordered growth the bad tending of the realm has allowed, irrupts into this world bringing disorder with him, and the memory of mis-spent youth—a time of wasting that foolish age longs to regain. The person of the gardener, then, is of central significance.

6. ‘This royal throne of kings’ The tragedy of Richard, his divorce from his England, his reduction to non-entity, as he sees it, when he is separated from his role as king, arose out of his own nature, but the initiatives that led to that fall lie with Bolingbroke. In Richard II Shakespeare presented him not simply as a mere foil to Richard, but as a man whose own actions and nature are problematical and who is feeling his way step by step in a political maze: preparing, in fact, for what he will do with him in Henry IV. He is drawn on by the logic of his own actions to the point where he has to assume the name of king, as he has assumed the power of one. (I do not think we should see him as a Machiavellian plotter who was all the time aiming at the crown. That he is forced to assume it is supported by Part 2, 3.i.70ff. Northumberland, by contrast, clearly does contemplate the possibility of Richard’s deposition from the very beginning, and sees potential profit for himself in it—a neat foil to Bolingbroke.) At the end of Richard II most—not all—of our sympathies lie with Richard, valorous and full of royal blood, yet the last notes are given to a chastened Bolingbroke aware of his own guilt. This is the man who now has to take on ‘the manage of unruly jades’ (Richard II, 3.iii.179) and even already we have some sympathy for him. One problem clearly pre-occupied Shakespeare throughout his career, Henry VI to The Tempest: is it possible for high political office to be exercised properly without severe damage to the man exercising it, without a diminution of his freedom as a human being? What does power do to people? Henry is presented as a conscientious ruler, who cares deeply about his land, works extremely hard, and seeks peace with as much justice as is politically possible. But his early attractiveness (in Richard II) is gone; even the acts for which he deserves praise come to seem the result of ‘policy’  ‘Ay no, no I’: the bitter pun in Richard II, 4.i 201 rams the point home: what sort of self is there without a role? This is the issue Lear faces later. (This scene was never printed while the Queen was alive: it was too sensitive for a monarch who once said ‘I am Richard II’)  Richard recognises clearly Northumberland’s nature and motives. He sees that without him Bolingbroke would have been powerless, and that Bolingbroke (Northumberland having broken faith with the anointed king) will never be able to trust his loyalty to himself, nor will Northumberland’s greed allow him to be loyal (Richard II 4.i.55ff). The image of disease in the body politic is apposite (58-9).

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rather than virtue, and he is an old, cold figure, full of reproof. Yet he is more interesting than this summary suggests, for Shakespeare gives him, in his talks with his household and in his soliloquies hints, that behind the public figure there is a man and father who thinks and feels. He sees the crown as a heavy duty—as Richard never did—and can even envy his poorest subjects; he is in some sense poorer than they. He is aware that his path to the crown has left him morally tainted, his head lies uneasy, he cannot trust anyone, and seeks a peace of mind he glimpses only in death. He is a fundamentally decent man, betrayed by those whose hearts he won as young Harry Herford. He is paid in his own coin, and carries to his death the guilt of what he did to Richard. He presides over a realm torn by revolt, and his life is a constant battle against disorder. But his opponents in 1 Henry IV are hardly attractive. Worcester and Northumberland are clearly out just for what they can get, however they claim to be avenging Richard, and they are using the military clout of Hotspur for their own advantage. Northumberland, indeed, is calculating enough to wait and see the outcome of the Hotspur/Glendower campaign before commiting himself, and is prepared to see his own son go to his death. Hotspur is a political innocent, his rashness easily manipulated by these two terrible old men. The war aims outlined in Part 1, 3.i are the dismemberment of England, the parties cannot meet without acrimony and selfish pride causing quarrels, and we glimpse a future which, should they win, is chaos. What sort of country will it be where the course of rivers is taken as a personal affront, ‘robbing’ one of the rulers of what he wants, where husband does not trust wife (Hotspur and Lady Percy) and, further intensifying the hint of chaos, wife and husband (Mortimer and Glendower’s daughter) cannot even understand each other’s language? Hotspur is deaf to all harmony, be it the music of the world or the music of a Welsh harp. Yet the rebels are right, in both Parts: Henry is a guilty man, whose claim to their allegiance, once advantage is removed, is weak. Yet even so he is the crowned king, and their rebellion is as heinous as his was against Richard. He does defeat them and hold the realm together. The final paradox thus is that his troubled reign sees a successful mopping up of the internal dissension so that his son inherits a relatively secure throne. But the memory of Richard will not go away. Henry is haunted by Richard’s folly and unwisdom and waste, and sees his own son, apparently, repeating Richard’s mistakes. The political wisdom, a shrewdness of man-management, that he possesses his son seems not to want to learn—and the ironic parallel to Richard’s disregard of York’s and Gaunt’s counsel is complete. Quite genuine is the grief and fear that

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Shakespeare gives him on this account. All he has worked for, all his hopes, seem to founder on Hal’s dissoluteness. In the first scene of Part 1, the thought of the sharp contrast between the energetic Hotspur and his own Harry is too painful to dwell on (1.i.91). But it is here, in Hal, that the major interest of the play lies, and it is in and through his career that Shakespeare continues his analysis of the ‘king-becoming graces’. ♣ 6.1 Educating Hal: Honour and Hotspur We have already discussed the importance of the alternating political and ‘Eastcheap’ scenes, and the utility of the ‘Morality’ conventions for exploring the ‘Education of a Prince’. In Henry IV Shakespeare is exploring the maturing of a Prince to the point where it is with grave circumspection that he takes the crown he inherits with no personal guilt; he willingly and publicly embraces ‘Justice’ and ‘Good Counsel’ and exhibits concern for the welfare of his realm. It is with mercy, generosity and justice that he acts in dismissing Falstaff and his companions. In Henry V we see a study of that ‘Good Prince’ in action, and in both plays we glimpse what the human cost might be both of that education and of its putting into practice. Each Part of Henry IV examines a different aspect of this education. In each Hal is played against the figure of another young man—Hotspur and Prince John respectively—and over both Parts plays the opposition of the Lord Chief Justice and Falstaff as to which counsellor he will choose. Over the whole ten acts operates, too, an irony only the audience sees: it is historical fact that Henry V was a pious and successful king, that he rejected his bad companions and defeated a (much older) Hotspur at Shrewsbury. Furthermore, Shakespeare gives Hal at the end of his first scene a soliloquy (1.ii.190ff) which absolutely clearly explains to the audience the complex game he is playing:  Macbeth, 4.iii, Malcolm to MacDuff: ‘…the king-becoming graces, As justice, verity, temperance, stableness, Bounty, perseverance, mercy, lowliness, Devotion, patience, courage, fortitude…’  Shakespeare, in part 2, 5.ii.76ff. has the Lord Chief Justice, who does not know how things will turn out, give a very dignified and honourable statement of the necessity of the King’s adherence to Justice  That is not to deny the manifold and important ambiguities of that play.

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I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyok’d humour of your idleness. Yet herein will I imitate the Sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at, By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work; But, when they seldom come, they wish’d-for come, And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents. So when this loose behaviour I throw off, And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes; And, like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. I’ll so offend to make offence a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will. We tend to see this as pretty mean, but Shakespeare’s audience would see it as desirable political wisdom, remarkable and praiseworthy in one so young. Hal shows himself to be every bit as aware of public opinion and its relationship to power as is his father (cf.3.ii.39ff.)—and, indeed, a better psychologist. His imagery is of contrasting metals, of foils, of the regal sun breaking through clouds—images that alert us to the structure of his career as Shakespeare has composed it. It affects our reception not only of the Boar’s Head scenes but also the contrasts/comparisons that his father has just made between Hal and Hotspur and will make between Hal and John. What we see as Henry IV’s misjudgement might be seen as an example of that public opinion that is so easily misled, but which is one of the roots of real political power—a theme Shakespeare touches on several times in the ‘Henriad’ and also explores in  The reminiscence of Richard’s sun/king imagery is clearly deliberate.

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Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. The first reference to Hal in Part 1 (1.i.78ff.) picks up where Bolingbroke/Henry IV left off in Richard II, 5.iii.1ff. But now Hal is specifically compared to Hotspur; that contrast dominates Part 1. The theme of Part 1 is the revelation in the Prince of an honour and chivalry that is not simply as great as Hotspur’s, but also qualitatively different. There is never any doubt in our minds that it is there—after all, we know the future, and whatever dark shadows we can legitimately see in the portrayal of Hal/Henry V in these complex and double-voiced plays, it is hard fact that for most Elizabethans Henry V was an ‘ideal’ Prince, with whom Elizabeth herself and her father courted comparison. That is the baseline from which discussion starts. What the play explores, through the contrast, is the nature of kingly honour and chivalry, in action. Hotspur is in a real sense Hal’s ‘factor’—an agent gathering material for the owner. Thus this part of the play is strictly less about the Education of the Prince—his reclamation from (apparent) dissoluteness to stability—than the qualities that education should develop. (Other areas, indeed, are about the need for the Prince to know and recognise and reject vice and welcome virtue—though again the issue is never in doubt.) Hotspur is a splendid soldier and a brave man. He is attractive in his energy, and in his playfulness with his wife—though that should not blind us to the fact that he is treating her pretty shabbily. But his concept of honour, however glamorous, is utterly sterile. Notice how in 1.iii 158ff. his discussion of it grows out of anger, of hurt pride, and the ‘redeem[ing]/ Your banish’d honours’ (181) entails either the king’s abject surrender to his disgruntled nobles, or his deposition, or both. Worcester tries to use Hotspur’s energy to discuss a properly political course of action, but Hotspur’s hotheadedness again takes over, this time into the extraordinary, and silly, idea that danger is worth having for its own sake. The soaring images of his next speech (201ff.)— which ironically link honour with the instability of Fortune—rest finally on the idea of selfish pride: ...so that he that doth redeem her thence might wear Without corrival all her dignities. (my italics) Much spirit and little sense, and not much that is admirable. It is this sort of silly honour, the murmur of men’s admiring tongues, that is so firmly undercut by Falstaff’s reduction of the concept to empty ‘air’, that is useless even to the dead possessor, in  It is unfavourably illustrated, for example, in York’s description of the entry of Bolingbroke into London, Richard II, 5.ii.4ff.

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the battle at Shrewsbury (Part 1, 5.i, 134ff.): What is that honour? a word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? no. Doth he hear it? no. ’Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Moreover, notice how Hotspur’s honour is of very loose morals. He can without a qualm make alliance with his former opponent Douglas, his country’s enemy, but out of pride and pique he can’t easily keep friendly with his friends. His rudeness to Glendower and Mortimer in 3.i is not only inexcusably discourteous but politically silly. This man loves a quarrel for its own sake, and sees no more morality in honour than in a game of conkers. He is completely unsuitable as a potential monarch, and our memory flicks back to Bolingbroke, once young and glamorous too, who did exhibit those kingly qualities which Richard so signally lacked. Furthermore, his mean and ungenerous attitude to Hal gives us another line on what honour means to him. Even in Richard II he had without sensitivity or consideration gleefully told the king the worst about his son (5.iii.16ff.), and delightedly perpetrates the pun ‘unhorse/un-whores’. In this play his first reference to Hal is contemptuous—he accepts unthinkingly the common view of Hal, this ‘sword and buckler Prince of Wales’ (1.iii.230), whom he would ‘have… poison’d with a pot of ale’. Before Shrewsbury (4.i) comes another contemptuous reference: ... Where is his son, The nimble-footed madcap Prince of Wales? (94/5) and Vernon’s reply, describing a new Hal, suddenly revealed as a person to be reckoned with, gets no warm welcome: No more, no more; worse than the sun in March This praise doth nourish agues. (110/1) He seems to grudge Hal any praise that could be directed at himself, and immediately afterwards he takes off into exalted bombast about sacrifices and red-eyed maids of smoky war. Hotspur’s language betrays the unsubtlety of his mind—raw, oversimplified, violent, thinking in rhetorical clichés and ignoring the need for considered thought. (I shall explore this more fully later.) His uncle dares not relay to him, until it is too late to be accepted, Hal’s offer to

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settle the issue of the battle by single combat. He knows he would jump at this chance of glory without, as usual, a single thought about its political or military advisability. When told, and he in his turn wishes there could be single combat (5.ii.47ff.), it is for quite different motives than Hal’s. Hal sought to save innocent bloodshed (5.i.99), and urged it courteously (even if he thought it would not be accepted), with generous compliments to Hotspur (5.i.84), but Hotspur seems to want to fight out of hatred, and Vernon’s praise of Hal’s courtesy (51ff.) again elicits scorn, and mean puns alluding to Hal’s supposed sexual dissoluteness. Nor can he even, ironically, consider the possibility of his own defeat. When the two rivals (5.iv 59ff.) clash, Hal’s key idea is that they are both stars, and that England is not a sphere big enough for both—a generous and honest estimate of his enemy. Hotspur merely wishes, in effect, that Hal were worth fighting (70). Yet Hotspur’s honour is ‘cropped’ as Hal promised his father it would be: … for the time will come I shall make this northern youth exchange His glorious deeds for my indignities. Percy is but my factor, good my lord, To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf… (3.ii. 144) In defeating such an enemy Hal subsumes the reputation of Hotspur. And Hal’s valediction over his body is dignified, generous, even loving. There was something in Hotspur that was valuable, but Hotspur could never have glimpsed the generosity of mind that could comprehend an enemy and treat him as a person. The repulsive behaviour of Falstaff, his appalling treatment of the body, that immediately follows is more than ‘comic relief’—about which I am always sceptical— after this tense moment. Falstaff hopes to profit by it, to con people into believing the unbelievable. This surely underlines that honour that is mere reputation—‘air’—as Hotspur’s was can easily degenerate into Falstaff’s amorality, where what matters is the front put up to the world. What, by contrast, we have seen in Hal is an honour that is moral and internal, not dependent on public repute (for Hal is generously prepared to let Falstaff take his chance with his lie) but is part of a man’s sense of his own integrity and his own self-hood. It is precisely this honour that Shakespeare shows in Hal, carefully distinguishing it from the jingoistic military glory the future Henry V could easily seem to represent, and which he did embody in The Famous Victories of Henry V, which Shakespeare used. For the world admired Hotspur for sufficient  And the king agreed, knowing it was politically dangerous—a contrast to Worcester.

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reason: he was a good soldier, a good leader, a man of great courage and skill. It is in exactly these qualities that he is compared with Henry V, for Shakespeare is putting down a marker, in more ways than one, for the French campaigns of Henry V. Hal has shown he possesses these, and more. 6.2 Educating Hal: Policy and John ‘Policy’ and honour: the two seem to be contradictory. And with good presentation policy can look like honour. How can we tell? This is a real issue in this play and Henry V: the glamour of Henry’s reputation as chivalric warrior and successful monarch is carefully counterpointed. It is very noteworthy, for example, that this new king, who has so surprised everyone with his supposed ‘reformation’ (they did not hear his soliloquy in Part 1!) has a way of making other people take responsibility for what he does:  the Archbishop (whose motives are certainly mixed) has to take responsibility for his unleashing the graphically-imagined horrors of war on France;  the conspirators (whose support of Richard of Cambridge might be better justified than it seems) are trapped into advising on how they themselves should be treated;  the governor of Harfleur is left in no doubt that if he decides to resist, on him lies the responsibility for the sack of his town;  Williams and Bates have to accept that they cannot blame the king for the state in which they die. Very successful and shrewd ‘policy’ indeed. One must ask about that glamorous and graceful offer of single combat he made: was it made knowing it would be declined, a propaganda ploy? A lot depends on how the character is played, and we ought to recognise that single knightly combat was part of the code of military honour which Elizabethans admired, and which some (like the imprudent Essex: see Appendix) actually would, if allowed, have put into practice. A ruler cannot rule simply on glamour or honour: he has to be prudent, circumspect. Prince John has a smaller, less glamorous, role in Part 2 than Hotspur’s in Part 1, but like Hotspur, he points up the royal qualities of Hal, and is also set up  Richard actually had, by descent, a better claim to the throne than Henry. Elizabethans would have known that. We usually do not. That makes the whole conspiracy look much more ambiguous.

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as a contrast to Hotspur. A dutiful son, already skilled in war and peace, he is fully worthy of trust. In Part 1 3.ii 32-3 the king chides Hal that John has taken his place in the Council (another example, like longing for a son like Hotspur, of Henry’s misjudgement), and in Part 2 4.i. he is Henry’s general, with ‘a full commission,/In very ample virtue of his father/ To hear and absolutely to determine’ the settlement of the rebellion. The cool intelligence and calmness that Hotspur lacked is his main trait, and he is circumspect and calculating to a fault. He is given a powerful speech reproaching the Archbishop in 4.ii, in which the very tones and cadences of his father are heard. Whereas, in this situation, a Hotspur would have rushed without thought to the arbitrament of arms, this prince calmly accepts those parts of his enemies’ case that seem just, promises redress of grievances—and then by a deliberate disingenuousness in exploiting their overconfidence traps them. This is not exactly glamorous conduct, and he is reproached for it by the rebels; but the fact of the matter is that he has saved many lives of English and put down the rebellion finally. His conduct here precisely anticipates that of Henry V, when he traps Cambridge, Scrope and Masham in an exactly similar way. Neither breaks word or promise or honour. Both princes are being made to show the ‘policy’ Elizabethans thought necessary in a true prince. There is little dash or verve in Prince John, and one cannot imagine him leading men into the storming of Harfleur or the desperate action of Agincourt. But he is not unattractive: he has more than adequate courage, as we see in Part 1 5.iv and 5.v 128 when, having not only fought well but actually taken on Hotspur himself, he wins his father’s and Hal’s sincere praise. He is pleased to be sent by Hal to relay to Douglas Hal’s generous freeing of him without ransom. Indeed, he shares more than a few of his brother’s qualities, and it is interesting how both react to Falstaff’s conduct in battle. In Part 1, 5.iii Falstaff’s idleness and fooling irritate Hal in the extreme; similarly, in Part 2, 4.iii John chides Falstaff for his late arrival on the field. After Hal has killed Hotspur, he allows Falstaff to perpetrate his lie, and even generously promises to ‘gild it with the happiest terms I have’ (5.iv.153). In Part 2, 4.iii, John shows a comparable indulgence: Falstaff’s ludicrous self-advertisement over having ‘captured’ Sir John Colville does not take John in—‘it was more of his courtesy than your deserving’—but he promises he will ‘better speak of you than you deserve’. We are never allowed to forget the parallel between the two brothers, and the course of the plays shows a gradual convergence between the public estimate of Hal and the reputation his brother already enjoys. Their linking is emphasised by, of all  Douglas, note, as a Scot is not a rebel. Nevertheless, this magnanimity—a mark of true kingliness—reveals quite a lot about Hal.

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people, Falstaff. His speech in praise of sack (4 iii.79ff.) opens with a sneer at the ‘young, sober-blooded boy’ who has just that moment been signally kind to him, whom he clearly does not like—and whom he completely underestimates, for John is anything but a fool and coward. At the end of the speech he ludicrously attributes Hal’s valour to sack. That it is Falstaff who, in such a context, sees such a contrast between them makes us see, in fact the similarity; and see, moreover, that Falstaff is quite upstaged by an irony that began with Hal’s ‘I know you all’ speech. He is confident he knows where he stands with Hal, but in fact Hal is playing just the sort of circumspect, serious, game with Falstaff and with public opinion that John played with the rebels. Falstaff also contrasts Hal with Henry IV, and again the effect is to make us see the common ground. Hal has all of Henry’s political qualities, and what seems like praise of his wild youth turns into a reminder of his soberness of judgement. It is in terms of the agricultural images I discussed above, and Falstaff is thus, without his realising it, confirming while apparently rejecting the values and symbols of real kingship the plays have set up: Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit from his father, he hath, like lean, sterile, and bare land, manured, husbanded and till’d, with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. John, always the ‘good son’, is a figure of order and settled life. On his father’s death it is he who sympathises with the apparently dreadful prospect before the Lord Chief Justice, and ‘would ’twere otherwise’ (5.ii.32). He has not understood Hal’s nature or his tactics any more than Hotspur did, and both underestimate him. Just as Hotspur’s good qualities were ‘cropped’ and taken over by Hal, so too are John’s. He trumps his courage and his policy, and at the end of Part 2 he embraces the Lord Chief Justice— the ‘Justice’ itself John thought he would reject. John and Hotspur show Hal to be a bigger and more august figure than either of them, who possesses the king-becoming graces, that each of them glimpse, in fuller measure and completeness. Hotspur puts down one marker for the victor of Agincourt; John puts down another for the ‘Just King’ and the architect of the peace. And both point to that magnanimity and strength that is explored, with all its shadows, in Henry V. 6.3 Educating Hal 3: Falstaff and Folly Falstaff is by far the most memorable figure in the play. It is the more important,

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therefore, that we do not slip into sentimentalising him. He is the Clown in this particular theatrical pattern, and like Shylock was always so played until the 1800s. The fact that he (again like Shylock) is rather interesting does not mean we should be bamboozled by him. But many have been, ignoring what it might be like to live in a polity ruled by Falstaff and his values. He is, in fact, the figure of Folly and Vice in this play, the subversive, anarchic, which must be controlled by yet validates rule and order. Had Henry V, as promised, had a part for him, that is exactly the role he would have fulfilled even more appropriately there. (That role is taken, much less powerfully, by Pistol, Nym and Bardolph.) Even so, the heart of Shakespeare’s discussion of the education of the prince and of true kingliness must ultimately centre on him. His presence in both Parts, often in deliberately parallel situations—the two battles, for example—constantly keep these issues alive, for he is a ‘misleader of youth’, a ‘white bearded Satan’, a Vice, at loose in the world of the play. Falstaff’s physical grossness visibly figures that distemper in the realm only true kingship can cure. But before we can look at him properly, his curious history must be outlined. Falstaff/ Oldcastle Shakespeare’s sources for these plays are not only the chronicles, but also earlier plays about these events and the popular traditions of them. In popular tradition the wastrel prince who suddenly reformed and became a model ruler had remarkable tenacity—perhaps because it has a considerable similarity to a motif in folk-tale and romance. The real Prince Henry had been an associate of the Lollard knight Sir John Oldcastle, who was burnt for heresy in the reign of his Prince. Oldcastle becomes a rogue, and appears as such in the Famous Victories which Shakespeare certainly drew on (it also gave him, probably, suggestions for the treatment of the incident of the Dauphin’s tennis balls in Henry V). One or two references still remaining indicate that when Shakespeare wrote Henry IV he called his rogue Oldcastle. It is now clear that those references hide an earlier, performed, version of the play where ‘Falstaff’ was called ‘Oldcastle’ throughout, and we need to examine the implications of this. Oldcastle was one focus for sixteenth century argument about concerns in religion and politics, and the substitution of name is highly relevant to what I said above about the explosive topicality of many Elizabethan plays. The first version of the play may  ‘My old lad of the castle’ (Part 1 ,1.ii.41); ‘Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man’ (Part 2, Epilogue)

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well have been a succès de scandale, and the publication of the first Quarto in 1598 may have been hurried through to publicise a change of names demanded by the censor (see Appendix). The original Sir John Oldcastle (c.1378–1417) was High Sheriff of Herefordshire and became Lord Cobham in right of his wife in 1409 (he was thus connected with the Lord Cobham of Shakespeare’s day, a man of considerable influence). The chronicler Holinshed says he was a valiant captain and a ‘hardie gentleman’ in the French wars, high in Henry V’s favour. But he became a supporter of the Wycliffite or Lollard heresy. Henry V personally tried, in vain, to win him back to the orthodox faith; he was hanged and burnt. Controversy over Oldcastle continued for some two centuries. Was he to be seen as a martyr to a sort of proto-Protestantism, or was he a traitor to the king who befriended him? In the mainstream historical tradition, represented by chroniclers like Fabian, Hall, Grafton, and Stow, he is a robber, a traitor and a heretic. Worse, he was a hypocrite, hiding foul designs under the cloak of righteousness. His confession at his trial of his youthful misdeeds is quoted: ‘in my frayle youthe I offended thee (Lorde) moste greeuously, in Pride, Wrathe, and Glottony, in Couetousness and in Lechery’—a good number of the Seven Deadly Sins. He intended to destroy his king, God’s law, and ‘all manner of policie, and finally the lawes of the land’. But this view was not accepted by Puritan writers, who were ready to look back into the ‘dark Romish past’ and see men who hinted at the glory of the clear wisdom and rightness that had been revealed in themselves. Foxe, whose Actes and Monuments (commonly called the ‘Book of Martyrs’) was in every parish church in the reign of Elizabeth, spends twenty pages defending Oldcastle, and rebutting the case against him. It can be seen, therefore, that an attitude taken to Oldcastle was a pretty sure symptom of one’s religious stance, and therefore of one’s political views—even, given the international situation at the end of the century, of one’s views on what England’s foreign policy ought to be. We can begin to guess why the censor was worried. Shakespeare’s treatment of his character shows few Puritan sympathies. In Falstaff it is only puritans who are satirised. The religious allusions, of which there are many, are entirely appropriate to his original identity, and they are all hypocritical. Oldcastle’s very presence emphasises the play’s religious motifs, like, particularly, Henry’s oftmentioned desire to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem—an ironic metaphor for the life  The original version of Henry V almost certainly did fulfil the promise of the epilogue to 2 Henry IV and have a part for Falstaff in France; some of Pistol’s and the Boy’s lines are best explained on this hypothesis.

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of man on earth in which all the characters are tested. The victims of the robbery in Part 1, 1.ii are designed to be ‘pilgrims going to Canterbury’, to St Thomas’ shrine (21–2)—innocent travellers seeking their salvation through penance; yet the Puritans considered Oldcastle to be a man more saintly than St Thomas à Becket. Several references to the historical Oldcastle underline that Shakespeare (or his company) took an anti-Puritan line and also that he was seeing in the historical figure an archetype of moral chaos who can fitly be associated with the popular tradition of the wild youth of Prince Henry. For example, Part 1, 1.ii.134, ‘By the lord, I’ll be a traitor then, when thou art king’, surely alludes to fact: Oldcastle did become a traitor when Henry V became king, and he did turn upon the true prince (c.f. Part 1, 2.iv.264). Henry V did try to reconvert Oldcastle, and this seems to be the point of the allusion in Part I, 1 ii 89 (‘I’ll be damned for never a king’s son in Christendom’) and 111: ‘Then art thou damned for keeping thy word with the devil’. The historical Oldcastle was burned; Falstaff is compared at Part 1, 2.iv. 420 to a ‘roasted Manningtree ox’: the bad taste would not have worried an audience. The historian John Stow records the story that Oldcastle at his execution said he would rise again in three days; Falstaff ‘rises from the dead’ at Shrewsbury. In the charade of Part I, 2.iv, two portraits of Falstaff are given, the one a virtuous man, the other a corrupter of youth, a ‘reverend Vice’; this looks like a clear allusion to the opposing views of Oldcastle, and we are in no doubt which one we are to take. At 5.iv 162, Falstaff promises—conditionally!—a conversion, a conversion the historical Oldcastle described at his trial. All these allusions make it clear that Shakespeare has not only portrayed a Protestant martyr as a hypocrite, but has gone into the controversy with relish and a streak of cruelty. ♣ Once we grasp the significance of Falstaff/Oldcastle, it becomes clear that his association with Hal, particularly in Part 1, is to suggest the True Prince should embrace true religion and reject false—and that the false religion to be rejected was that of the extreme Puritans. Let’s consider how Shakespeare used this issue in the discussion of the kingly qualities and their development.  The topicality of all this is clear. Philip Henslowe, of the competing company, in 1599 put on a cooperatively-written potboiler called The first part of the true and honourable historie, of the life of Sir IOHN OLD-CASTLE, the good Lord Cobham, written specifically in reply to 1 Henry IV to clear Oldcastle’s Protestant good name. There are lots of similar references in the two plays. Later, in 1639, the first version of Part 1, called Oldcastle, was performed at Court, where the Queen was a fervent Catholic, at the Cockpit in Whitehall, on 29 May—the Prince of Wales’ Birthday. Appropriate!

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The alternating locales reminds us that, as no other character does, Hal straddles two worlds, of the court and its values, and of Eastcheap. The course of Parts 1 and 2 shows each demonstrating its true nature and values, and Hal taking from each what is valuable and necessary to him as the ‘Hero King’ who unites England. Inevitably, he must reject Eastcheap; but not before he has observed it fully and recognised that he is king as well (as John never could be) of the disordered and frivolous and corrupt, and must take responsibility for it. After all, at the end of Part 2 generous and merciful provision is made for Falstaff: he is sent to honourable custody in the Fleet pending examination, and he and his companions will be ‘very well provided for’ (5.v.96), the only condition being that they must not come near the royal presence until they have reformed. As we have seen, Hal’s choice recalls the favourite Renaissance theme of the Choice of Hercules. Like Hercules, Hal could choose Vice: that this is a real possibility for those without the audience’s hindsight is indicated by the ease with which those of Eastcheap think he is already theirs and those of the court are quite sure of it. In keeping with many treatments of the Hercules legend, the ‘True Hero’ is master of pleasure and a follower of Virtue. There is no doubt at all that Hal enjoys a lot of the fun in Eastcheap, but note that he never actually touches the pitch of the proverb that Shakespeare ironically makes Falstaff euphuistically quote in Part 1, 2.iv. 405ff (self-valuation indeed!), and much of Hal’s humour in these scenes is directed against Falstaff at the expense of his false values. His very first speech to him in Part 1, however it be spoken, is an attack on his vices and sins. The temptation, even if we know the outcome, is real enough, and it is often forgotten, even by readers of Paradise Lost, that tempters are not tempters if they are not deeply attractive. Falstaff is just such a ‘tempter of youth’, and I have already discussed his dependence on the Vice of the Morality plays who solicits the allegiance of young men through his wit, humour, good company and offering of food, drink and sex. But the Vice is the devil in another guise, and Falstaff is, after all, called a ‘white-bearded Satan, a corrupter of youth’. Where Shakespeare is extremely daring—and provocative—is in conflating this figure with Oldcastle. If Falstaff, this aged whoremaster and drunkard, this gluttonous coward, thief, extortioner and murderer, is aimed at the extreme Puritans, there is a good deal more than humour involved: there is a direct challenge to their ideas of the state and of the little world of man—and to their good faith. In popular opinion in the Henry plays, Hal has cut himself loose from his real father and what he represents, and we see him in the process of choosing a moral  What other word fits his treatment of his ‘food for powder’? - Part 1, 4.ii.65ff; 5.ii.36ff.

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father. The relationship with Henry is coloured by misunderstanding, for Henry is all too ready to judge by appearances and report; his misunderstanding of Hal’s taking of the crown is a case in point, for after Hal saved his life at Shrewsbury he ought to have judged his son better. On this count alone, Hal is symbolically set apart from his father, for he is never taken in by mere appearance. That fault dogged both Richard and the Henry Bolingbroke who trusted Northumberland. The important opposition, however, is between a Falstaff who treats Hal with the familiarity of a son, and the Lord Chief Justice whom Falstaff insults, who fears Hal’s accession—and whom Hal tells ‘You shall be as father to my youth’ (5.v.118). The young are always attracted to riot and intemperance, and the Lord Chief Justices of this world, and others, have the job of containing their excesses while they grow up. Hal was no different: in Part 2, 5.ii.67 ff. and 76ff. Hal and the Lord Chief Justice refer to the occasion (dear to the popular tradition of the wild prince, but which has no foundation in history) when Hal struck him ‘in [his] very seat of judgment’ and was, quite properly, imprisoned for it. But in Part 2 Hal is away from Falstaff for most of the five acts, and his reconciliation with Justice is public. Hal is shown beginning to take his part as a responsible and indispensable part of the machinery of state, whose place is on the field or at the Palace. The confrontation is clearly between the attractions of the old Vice, Falstaff, and the sternness—but not inhumanity, for Shakespeare portrays him as a compassionate and feeling man—of the Lord Chief Justice. Falstaff and the Lord Chief Justice both have speeches that turn on their expectations of what will happen when Hal comes to the throne; right at the beginning, Falstaff asks ‘shall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king, and resolution thus fubb’d as it is with the rusty curb of old father antic the law? Do not thou, when thou art king, hang a thief’ (Part 1, 1 ii.50ff). He does not take Hal’s reply seriously. (When King, Hal does indeed hang thieves— Bardolph.) In Part 2 Falstaff promises Shallow, ‘choose what office thou wilt in the land, ’tis thine’ (5.iii.116ff) on hearing of Hal’s accession. The Lord Chief Justice expects the worst, and so do those who support him (5.ii.25ff). Part of the dramatic pleasure is that we know they are both wrong. The irony allows Shakespeare to give the Lord Chief Justice a powerful apologia for impartial justice and political stability that follows where the royal house itself is under the law. The only ‘justice’ Falstaff  Notice that Shakespeare makes Hal quote Henry IV’s approval of this action (5.ii.108ff.) - a small but important indication of Henry’s honesty and seriousness as a king

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could offer is typified by the ridiculous Justice Shallow—partial, bribable, self-seeking, a old man who wishes for the powers of youth—but only to commit more folly and lechery. Given the parameters of the discussion in the plays, then, in Falstaff we know what type of figure to expect. The details, however, are unusual. I discussed above the paradoxical links he has with the notion of a tragic figure; the complexity in him makes him dramatically interesting. His energy and wit interest both us and Hal by, as Dr Johnson said, the ‘most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety, by an unfailing power of exciting laughter, which is the more freely indulged, as his wit is not of the splendid or ambitious kind, but consists in easy escapes and sallies of levity, which make sport but raise no envy’. There are hints of complexity: the jokes about his conscience, Oldcastle or no Oldcastle, in the dramatic context round him out; a coward and cynic, when he has to fight or be killed he fights—and then shams dead. But the main thing Shakespeare gives him is a capacity for development. In Part 1 we see a gradual revelation of a complex but to all intents and purposes static character. But after Shrewsbury a much less likeable Falstaff begins to appear as he thinks his power growing. Immediately after the outrageous lie about Hotspur’s death, a new pride (a deadly sin) and arrogance is seen in his dealings with both superiors and inferiors. He even assumes his interest with Hal will be of use to Prince John. He is impossibly rude to the Lord Chief Justice (2.i.108ff., 148ff.), and in the earlier confrontation (1.ii) between them—where he takes some very hard knocks—his humour seems for the first time to be merely silly: and is (146ff.). He spends his time with the common whore, Doll, and treats both her and Mistress Quickly with cynicism and cruelty. Hal absent, he now sees him without the apparent affection of Part 1, merely as a source of good fortune, and we actually watch him thinking how he can use Shallow not only for his own advantage (3.ii. 325, and 4.iii.126ff.) but as ‘copy’ for jokes to amuse Hal (5.i.72ff). His conception of honour, funny enough in Part 1, is seen in action in Part 2: he sends his men into the hottest part of the fight to their deaths so that he can claim the pay of those killed. And finally, if this development were not enough to make even the stupidest audience see what was going on—and Shakespeare knows enough about audiences to  In Shallow but more obviously—crucially—in Falstaff, Shakespeare as used the idea, part of the comic stock throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance, of the senex amans—the old man in whom sexual desire has outlived the performance. Seeing him with Doll on his knee reminds us forcefully of this.

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make his plays dolt-proof—he is careful to point up what Falstaff is and embodies by clear visual signals, just as he defines what is happening to Richard. In Part 1, 2.iv.354ff, in the charade in the Boar’s Head, Falstaff acts the part of a king: .

This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre, this cushion my crown. There is a clear cue here for the visual staging, and once we formulate it properly against the emblems and symbols of the time interesting things happen. The chair becomes a throne (one meaning of ‘state’), yet it is a mere ‘join’d stool’—a fake; the sceptre of justice becomes a dagger of violence and rapine; and the cushion on his head, his ‘crown’, is emblematic of the Deadly Sin of Sloth. That focusses it all, for Falstaff ‘is’ Sloth—the rejection of spiritual good and the ignoring of all higher calls but those of the body. This is Falstaff’s real nature, and this is what a kingdom ruled by his values would be. Again, consider Part 1, 2.iv 209ff. Here Falstaff makes Doll sit upon his knee. The comments of Hal and Poins, observing, make us see this almost allegorically— ‘Saturn and Venus this year in conjunction’; old age sits ill with lust. Falstaff and Doll’s own words turn on the idea of the death they must both die—and there is no sexual pun here. What is visually communicated to us is Falstaff as Lust, another Deadly Sin, reduced to the ludicrous ugliness of its real self in this presentation. Shakespeare is using here almost unchanged the allegorical tools of the Moralities; and not for the last time, as Macbeth or King Lear show. It is his language, as Johnson saw, that gives Falstaff the surface attractiveness that makes him compelling. But despite its brilliance, his language itself is a moral symptom. In his speech words run mad into pun and double-entendre; his language inverts a perception of reality as his conduct wishes to invert the real thing. He is even, with the Lord Chief Justice, momentarily reduced to meaningless repetition—‘gravy, gravy, gravy’—but the torrent soon gathers fresh strength. Only at the end, rejected by Hal, does reality momentarily break in: ‘Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound’. (He has other debts—he ‘owes God a death’). He tries to take off again into the illusion of language, but fools no-one, for Shallow returns his own earlier pun: ‘A colour that I fear you will die in, Sir John’. His last words are an appeal—which will be heard—to the Lord Chief Justice whose sense he rejected. But even this point about the distance between Falstaff’s language and reality is cued visually: he is set  The parallel structure of Parts 1 and 2 is beautifully exemplified here. Both of these crucially defining Boar’s Head scenes occur at the same point in their respective plays.  Gluttony, surely suggested here, and exemplified visually in his sleep behind the arras in Part 1, 2.iv.521ff, is another Deadly Sin.

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in contrast to the near-silent Silence in 3.ii and 5.iii, another old man whose remarks centre on death, a lost past, and, after dining liberally with Falstaff, drunken fragments of half forgotten songs. This is the inner Falstaff, the withered applejohn. And finally, Shakespeare’s underhand irony: in Henry V, in the Folio version we now have (which may not represent fully the first draft), Falstaff is killed off. Mrs Quicklie describes his death with her customary delicacy and aplomb. But behind our guffaws and sniggers (and the real pathos), the echo is unmistakable: the cold spreading from his feet upwards is exactly how the death of the greatest of teachers, and wisest of all the Greeks, Socrates, is described by Plato. And on the battlefield at Shrewsbury Falstaff’s ‘catechism’ was cast in the unmistakable question-and-answer format of—a Socratic dialogue. Why did the Athenians, in their wisdom, condemn Socrates to death? For corrupting, misleading, youth. The complexity of Falstaff, then, is central to our understanding of the progress of Hal, and audience, to the understanding of what kingship entails. Before the play opened this prince was educated to distinguish vice from virtue, responsibility from irresponsibility, but his kingdom and the audience have to go through a process of thought and learning. The plays are generally relevant: they are also a signal warning, in what everybody knew to be the Queen’s declining years, to those jockeying for positions of advantage in the succession. ♣ There is no sweet fruition in an earthly crown, as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great thought. In Part 2, 4.v that golden rigol which Richard had held out to Bolingbroke as a symbol of Fortune and of care lies on Henry IV’s pillow as Hal watches. Here is where Shakespeare makes the man who is to be the Henry of Henry V explore the pain and responsibility of kingship. Like his father, he envies his poorest subjects. But, seeing no sign of life in Henry, he takes it with dignity and sorrow, and a consecration of himself as ruler to God’s protection. And as he has no audience on stage to impress, we have to take that as genuine commitment. Against that commitment we have to see the ambiguities of Henry V, and it may modify our reading of them. But Henry is not dead. Hal’s explanation of his act powerfully illuminates his action in taking the crown. He took it ‘To try with it—as with an enemy/ That had before my face murder’d my father’. He sees what it has done to his father, what the crown has cost in terms of humanity and love, ‘eat[ing] the bearer up’. Shakespeare makes him point that great issue: the cost of kingship to the king. Our pity for Henry is increased by his confession to his son of the ‘by-paths and indirect crook’d ways’ by which he

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came to it; he cannot undo what his own action led him on to do, he cannot undo the unhappiness of his whole reign, and must carry responsibility for it to his grave. Yet Hal may, perhaps, inherit it with ‘true peace’. Neither Richard nor Henry knew that. This scene, 4.v, is an important qualifier of our reaction to Hal when he appears after Henry has died. He has succeeded to the crown with pain and fear. We can see his promise that he sees it as a ‘joint burden laid upon us all’, that he will ‘bear your cares’ (5.ii.55ff.), as quite without hypocrisy; and his first act as king is to embrace Justice. With this, the body politic torn apart by Richard is restored, and ‘limbs of noble counsel’ (135) called to ensure that, just as his own body is now properly governed (his ‘affection’, 124, having been buried with his father) England too will be ‘in equal rank with the best govern’d nation’. That hope is to be examined in Henry V, the final test of kingliness.

7. A Trim Reckoning: Language and Rhetoric The importance to his contemporaries of the issues Shakespeare raises in these four plays is obvious. They may be summed up as, indeed, an examination of the predicament of fallen men caught in a world where as moral beings they have to make decisions and choices without knowing all the limits on them or the consequences of their choice. Moreover, we are explicitly not watching the historical reality, but a representation of it created in the theatre by the words the playwright (himself a man in history caught in the same web) gives his characters to speak. The medium of the plays, language itself, must be part of their subject. It, and contemporary attitudes to it, therefore demand our attention. For along with the discussion of the idea of England and her polity, Shakespeare explores the very speech itself that identifies men as English, its resources, its relation to truth and reality, the way the individual creates in it the world he inhabits—and the ironies of the clash of those individual worlds. He is not unusual in this, for in the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth English the analysis of words and the way they communicated and signify attracted much attention, in one way or another. This interest may take the form of serious analytical discussion of language theory—as in Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605) or Jonson’s English Grammar (1640); on the other hand, it may manifest itself in the dictionaries of thieves’ cant or slang which were often included from the end of the sixteenth century in popular, catch-penny, sensational ‘rogue pamphlets’ describing the criminal world which has always been both feared and envied by respectable citizens. How could language and words not be a conscious concern, in the front of all thinking people’s minds, in an age when the crux of the Reformation theological debate lay precisely in the meaning of words in the Gospels and Epistles? Did the language of the Bible relate to real things existing independently of their description, or was language (please do look up the Appendix when you have time) merely a convention among humans that, ultimately, could only discuss itself? Armies marched and men burnt over whether the Greek word Δικαόω meant ‘make righteous’ (the sense of the Latin justificare) or ‘pronounce righteous’. The number of books on language, its theories, forms and uses published between 1500 and 1700 is huge, and anyone of even minimal education

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must have stubbed their toes on the issue. At the heart of the way men thought about these things are the notions of the Creating Word of God (Genesis I), uttering all that is into being, the language of Adam, and the myth of the Tower of Babel (Genesis XI) and the Confusion of Tongues. Only when we grasp this is the significance of the large number of mediaeval and Renaissance engravings and paintings—for example the one by Brueghel—of the Tower of Babel clear. 7.1 Rhetoric An age like ours that uses the word ‘rhetoric’ (see appendix) in an almost exclusively pejorative sense—the sort of verbal obfuscation employed by politicians with whom we don’t agree—finds it difficult to grasp the great importance of this art in Antiquity and the Renaissance. Rhetoric was that skill of writing and speaking to best advantage, of choosing the style—‘grand’, middle or genus humile—appropriate to your person, situation, audience and purpose. In its discussion of rules and techniques it was a practical discipline indispensable to life in a community where persuasion, oral or later written, had a major political, religious or moral place. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance no-one of even minimal education would be ignorant of it, and not recognise the skill (or not) with which a writer or speaker was presenting a case. Indeed, so fundamental is the idea of rhetoric to communication in general that even what we would call body-language is classed within it: Cornelius Agrippa, the sixteenth century scientist, talks of dancing as a branch of rhetoric, and the handbooks for actors and speakers by John Bulwer, Chironomia and Chirologia (1624) (I reproduce some of their plates in my Very Brief Introduction) clearly imply this sort of understanding. The nuts and bolts of rhetoric are the two hundred or so ‘figures’ or ‘colours’, the linguistic or articulative patterns into which words could be put to achieve effectiveness. Many of these are exemplified in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a first century work attributed to Cicero, very often and very cheaply printed in the Renaissance. But the art is more than mere decoration; Cicero in the De Inventione recognised five rhetorical operations—‘invention’ of the subject, its arrangement, its style, the techniques for memorising it, and its delivery. It is a unified and coherent discipline, a practical social, political and psychological tool, which can train the mind, win over friends, persuade or ridicule enemies. Hardheaded Bacon says ‘It is eloquence that prevaileth in an active life’ (Advancement of Learning, 1605). It was valued as a supreme art because it mobilised the will, moved affections, affected judgements,

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made men feel intensely, to will, to act, to understand and to believe. Logical argument appealed solely to the reason in a plain and unadorned style—Bacon saw it as appropriate only for a learned audience; but to orate and to persuade demanded a ‘coloured’ style that—Bacon again—‘can bring the imagination to second reason, and not to oppress it’. Cicero’s old definition of rhetoric’s aims—to teach, to please, to persuade—is still current, and in the Renaissance, that polemical age, there is increasing stress on persuasion. The very large number of books published on rhetoric in the sixteenth Century compels us to recognise how wide was knowledge of the art. My own copy of the Rhetorica ad Herennium, printed by Cesano in Venice in 1550, seems to have been in the possession of the Landi family for at least l00 years; there are notes in a neat cancelleresca cursiva hand, more in a ‘secretary’ hand, and what looks like a child’s notes in a seventeenth century hand; and one of these readers—probably the last— found time to give the picture of Cicero a moustache. Even conservative guesses of the size of editions (where it is not certainly known), plus the fact that few copies would have merely single readers, indicate that we are talking about several million people, reaching well down the social scale, knowing what is what in rhetoric. In the seventeenth century it was a subject in nearly all schools. Several conclusions follow. No-one using words, be he pamphleteer, preacher or poet, is going to be ignorant of the art. Shakespeare’s work is full of the formal rhetorical figures of the ‘grand’ style. Second, the audience of a work is going to notice the art with which the words are disposed, and may even be detached enough to watch how those patterns affect their own minds. Third, the discussion of language and its relation to truth means that a natural correspondence of words to things cannot be taken for granted, and therefore the danger will be apparent that effective persuasion may be, after all, misleading. (Shakespeare underlines this in the two contrasting styles of formal rhetoric he gives to Brutus and Antony after Caesar’s murder in Julius Caesar, 3.ii.) And in drama, we have the complex situation of two audiences: one watching the play in the manner I have just described, distanced from the action, while moved by it, by their assumptions about language and rhetoric, and another in the play, representing (as they must) in the real world, who are also being manipulated by, and manipulating, language. So the language that marks men as English is not something to be simply dismissed as ‘a newly vigorous mode of expression’ which ‘delights in its own resources’. There are big philosophical and epistemological issues just under the surface, and I am sure Shakespeare was aware of them: indeed, he would have had to have been of

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a stupidity and an ignorance unparalleled not to have been. Dogberry in Much Ado, Armado in Love’s Labours Lost, a Pistol or a Falstaff are premised on a consciousness of and nervousness about the slipperiness of language and on the nature of theatre as acted language. The very being of Shakespeare’s major characters is defined by their language, and as their language changes so do they and their predicaments. Dante believed that a poetic language that would genuinely match the issues of his countrymen and time could be found only in that used where men daily confront who and what they are—that is, in work, in communication with others, and in the face of their own passion or suffering. The ‘Henriad’ seems to be dealing with the finding of just such a high language, a mode of perception and communication ‘true’ for England—or, at least, a vision of England. That language sets the parameters for the political and moral debate. 7.2 A Confusion of Tongues: language, speech and metaphor in Henry IV A play with the figure of Rumour ‘painted full of tongues’ looking backwards and forwards in time at its centre must in some sense be ‘about’ those tongues. Rumour is honourably descended from Vergil Aeneid IV. 173-197 and Chaucer’s Hous of Fame; but those personifications do not equal the dramatic force of this figure. For one thing, it opens Part 2; the braying command, ‘open your ears’ precedes the emphatic main point that rumour is a liar, ‘stuffing the ears of men with false reports’ before moving on to the exposition we expect. For another, visually he taps, as a sort of ne plus ultra in the emblematic mode, the audience’s conceptualisation of the idea of hypocrisy, commonly depicted in emblem books as a detached tongue with wings. But Rumour’s point goes deeper: implicit in the speech is the problem of how can we or anyone tell truth from falsehood when there is no independent proof one way or the other. If our ears are ‘stuffed’—the imagined passivity of the ears suggests false reports cannot be avoided—we cannot hear truth. Is what our eyes have seen represented in the last play at Shrewsbury, or read in the history books, ‘true’? In what sense? This problem is peculiarly evident in 2 Henry IV. It is not only that the political scenes are dominated by men, hypocritical or politic—and what is the difference?—using words to say what they don’t mean: Northumberland’s ‘crafty sickness’ is coloured by verbal messages, evasions, rationalisations; Prince John wins a  It is tempting to suggest Shakespeare is playing with the Cretan paradox...’I met a man from Crete who told me all Cretans are liars’. The play is, after all, not reality but a recreation of it through historical narrative.

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bloodless victory by deliberately misleading his adversaries by false appearances and language set up to be misconstrued. The passion of the Archbishop’s case, convincing as it indubitably sounds, is ironically framed by the realisation of its fundamental clash with his office—pointed, indeed, by Westmorland—and the fact that he has been pretty slow in arriving at this reaction if it was so self-evident. The ‘comic’ scenes, too, exploit the gap between statement and reality: Justice Shallow, prompted by Falstaff, is creating in language an illusion about the youth he has lost and only the past tense keeps him in any sort of touch with the reality Falstaff—‘Old, Master Shallow’—sees. The selectivity of memory, moreover, means that the illusion bears little relation to the Shallow Falstaff (how accurately?) remembered. Falstaff himself throughout the play works on the assumption which we know to be false that the mad England whose symbol he is will triumph. And when the reality breaks in not only of the political state of affairs but also of what he is (no longer ‘they hate us youth’ but ‘How ill white hairs become a fool and jester’), he tries to escape the realisation through weaving a final fiction that not even he, let alone Shallow (whose £1000 is real enough), believes. As Rumour’s last line has it, ‘smooth comforts false [are] worse than true wrongs’. There is more than a glance at the perennial political nuisance of flattery, of using words to tell people a version of reality they want to hear. And yet behind all this confusion of language, where people speak but not to communicate, where the family is broken and members of the body politic cannot unite in common action, there is an England that is real and vital, where headlands have to be sown with red wheat, and where men actually live and grow old and die. For a moment Shakespeare seems to be offering us the notion that there is a world where men are what they seem, where men’s names do reflect their inner nature—Wart, Mouldy and Bullcalf, Shallow and Silence and Pistol (with the bawdy pun on ‘pizzle’). But this is only to take it back from us, for as the quarrels and disputes among the rebels makes quite clear, where no two of them can even agree on the nature of their own situation, let alone the past, reality is more various than that. Moreover, since the fundamental convention of drama is that we accept it as providing a glimpse into a world of cause and effect like our own, it must, in the nature of things, be presumed that the physical appearance of Falstaff’s food for powder on stage is a mere incident in a continuum of their lives where their names do not express their totality; Doll Tearsheet was once and maybe still could be more than what her name indicates, just as in Part 1 Francis the drawer must, once we accept the play’s illusion, be a man who says more in his life than ‘anon, anon, Sir’. This problematical unreliability of language, intended through deceit or hypocrisy or not, seems a major area of the play’s interest.

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But Rumour does not just open 2 Henry IV; he is the hinge between that play and Part 1, and thus is in a central position in the whole balanced and mirroring structure. His symbolic figure invites our reconsideration of Part 1 and primes our watching of Part 2. He is the physical manifestation of that public opinion which plays so important a role as ground for action and inference in both Parts. The issues he presents of deceit and the gap between words, signification and reality, ‘smooth comfort’, reach into the dark backward and abysm of time, back even to the fickleness of opinion glimpsed in Richard II. From the very first Boar’s Head scene (1.ii) in Part 1, words and what they can mean have been forced onto our attention. Hal’s soliloquy casts ironic light over everything he subsequently says to Falstaff, and over Falstaff’s reception of it, and the reactions of other characters; yet there is no way Falstaff could ever realise the trap in which he is caught. Moreover, the striking feature of the dialogues between Falstaff and Hal is that they depend on two things: the creation and deliberate exploitation of a flight of fancy which is bodied forth into an illusory reality—as when Falstaff plays King Henry in 2.iv; and on the ambiguities of words exploited in pun, double-entendre, and the self-conscious lie. The nature of pun is to exploit our understanding of possible but conflicting meaning or reference carried by certain homophones. It draws attention to the gap between what is and what might be, and the humour depends on the mixing of incongruous frames of reference. Few puns in Shakespeare are not, at bottom, highly serious. The self-conscious lie, as when Falstaff is challenged about his behaviour during the robbery, on the other hand, amuses because we are aware of the real nature of the events, of the plausibility of Falstaff’s case if we did not know them, and are aware at the same time of Falstaff’s awareness of his implausibility. Part 1, therefore, alerts us (at the very least) to the problems of description, interpretation and inference. Its first two political scenes are centred on the interpretation of reports of conduct. But as I have shown above, it also alerts us to the way concepts of abstract qualities determine the conduct of men. Take, for example, Honour. Hotspur’s Marlovian lines, ...Methinks it were and easy leap To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon, Or dive into the bottom of the deep, Where fathom-line could never touch the ground, And pluck up drowned honour by the locks, So he that doth redeem her thence might wear

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Without corrival all her dignities! (Part I, 1.iii 199ff) do more than personify honour as a tangible (possessable?) feminine being. The moral and verbal idea is hypostatised into a fake reality, which takes over his perception of the world. The woman becomes more important than the concept. Moreover, the conceit allows him to create a story with himself as hero of the dramatic rescue: it is ultimately self-flattering, and any moral idea is completely, so to speak, submerged. I have already looked at the inadequacies Shakespeare demonstrates in Hotspur’s conception of honour; the point here is that he—like the Dauphin might be said to do in Henry V—sees the abstract moral quality not as qualifying his own being but as something extraneously ‘real’ and self-existent that can be proudly owned—ultimately a matter of public opinion and subject to Falstaff’s ‘detraction’. Hal, on the other hand, shows a more balanced understanding of the abstract nature of honour as a moral imperative which exists in so far as it modifies his own being and conduct as a man (see above). The ideal becomes real when predicated of a man’s moral action. But at Shrewsbury, Falstaff, the archetypal old sweat, puts the other extreme: honour is a mere word, ‘and what is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air’ (Part1, 5.ii.135) Falstaff’s ‘catechism’ reduces all abstract ideals, all the moral values for which men live and die, to mere sound, signifying nothing: the very parameters of moral life are mere illusion. And the public opinion that awards the useless label of honour in the first place will not value its own creation for long: ‘Detraction will not suffer it’. Yet note the irony: this is said by someone for whom the business of speech throughout the play is almost exclusively to lie. Himself aware specifically of the power of language to give new names to things, he uses it to obscure reality, to mislead, to twist facts: ‘A good wit will make use of anything; I will turn diseases to commodity’ (Part1, 2.iii.249). But against this smooth comfort, against the illusion of words that some of his characters create, Shakespeare sets hard fact: events were not like that, life is not like that. Hotspur’s or Falstaff’s reading of reality may be self-consistent, may be syntactically and lexically coherent, but it is a vision which is ultimately solipsistic. The vision defines not so much the world as its holder, and these two visions are mutually exclusive. It is in Hal, whose discourse (uniquely in these plays) straddles the two worlds of Eastcheap and England, that Shakespeare is exploring a comprehensive perception. ‘I know you all’ (Part 1, 2. ii.190ff.) we see  An interestingly ironic word for him to use, given its religious context of education for salvation!  Nevertheless he tries to have it both ways. Concepts that do not suit him are mere ‘air’, but he relies on ideas about Hal’s future conduct whose genesis is entirely in his own hopes. He who reduced all meaning to ‘air’ is hoist by his own petard.

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to imply, as the plays progress, an understanding of inner nature that a Gardener of England must have. The issue of the relation of understanding and speech to the world as it is is never far from these four plays. Richard, for example, mistakes words, metaphor and speech for reality and action. But not only Richard is affected. As a simple practical problem for the man writing a play, the utterance Shakespeare gives his people is the only way their selfhood can be established and they can be related to each other and to us; they live in their reality unaware of us, but we are doubly aware—through our historical knowledge, and our consciousness of watching a play—of what they cannot know. The Choruses of Henry V push this issue towards us: they all remind us of the reality of history, the distortion of it through report (or Rumour), and the inadequacy of the words and action that represent it on the stage. They demand that we contribute from our own individual sensibilities and experience to validate the illusion of the play in a non- or supra-verbal way. Only then will the ‘text’ of the play acquire any shadow of what it represents. And even with the audience’s imagination working full stretch, the reality of events is as far away as ever: it is still a play, it is still ‘conjecture of a time’, as Henry V’s Chorus puts it, which the dramatist and the audience are cooperatively creating. Yet the case is not hopeless. Something of value is being communicated, even if it is fuzzy round the edges; Shakespeare would not have written such topical and serious plays had he not believed he could affect the men who watched them to the better actual achievement of a just polity. The problem he is addressing is utterly basic. Language—the language Shakespeare and his audience shared—is the speech of fallen Man, and therefore fundamentally flawed but not totally removed from truth. Something can be communicated, but its reception is problematical. Pistol is the central symbol of this. His noisy and furious verse, signifying little, is an image of the faulty reception and memory of the verbal discourse of other illusions in the theatre (for most of his tags are theatrical in origin)—a neat self-reference. It is also received with some awe by those who only hear noise and do not distinguish words, where the rhetoric of tone and gesture conveys more than the semantics. For those like M. le Fer, whose separation through speaking another of the post-Babel languages allows him to do only this, a Pistol unknown from other contexts is indeed formidable. But those with glimmering of sense and honesty begin to perceive the sham. The one who never does is Pistol himself, whose attitudinising discourse gets him into situations he cannot handle—for example when he is soundly beaten by Fluellen. (Fluellen, incidentally, is a man whose bookish discourse, clearly comic in some measure, is focussed entirely on right action in real

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conduct.) The logic of Pistol’s rhetorical level takes him willy-nilly to situations out of his control, and his language prevents him knowing what even he is. And Pistol lives on, a continuing life of deceit, in Henry V’s England. Moreover, the central metaphor of the Fallen Garden in these four plays naturally leads us on to seeing the different personal languages—even the different perceptions of reality that lie behind language—that Shakespeare’s characters speak as the consequence of a second Babel, when the family of man is broken and they are no longer of one language. Mowbray (Richard II 1.iii.154ff.) sees the hardest part of his banishment as his not being able to communicate in his native English—his sentence is ‘speechless death’. But as we have seen, even Englishmen do not (intentionally or not) always speak the same language. In these plays (unusually for Shakespeare) some characters, of course, really do speak an actually different language, and the scenes where this happens must be taken very seriously. It is easy to contrast Mortimer and Glendower’s daughter not understanding each other—Babel come again for him who would be king—with Henry V’s charming penetration of the barrier of language with Katherine—the just king apparently winning his legitimate second realm. In these two moments, indeed, we do see something important about the idea of kingship and the need for unity in a realm; we also see how meaning can transcend verbal discourse. But French is also used as early in the sequence as that terrible scene where a father calls for his son’s execution (Richard II 5.iii). York exploits the opposite meanings of the English ‘pardon’ and French ‘pardonne moy’—the tongues are willingly confused as the family is destroyed. Together with this symbol of disorder striking at the root of society is the notion of language being used to mean the opposite from what is expected. A much more light-hearted—but not less important—instance is the scene in Henry V 3.iv between Katherine and Alice. (Shakespeare may well be glancing at contemporary controversies about the teaching of language—the natural sequence was often argued to be letters, syllables, words, sentences.) Katherine, long before a peace treaty, is learning the language of her ‘natural’ lord; what we have is a sort of ‘naming of parts’, giving her body its names in the language of her king. Her innocence in this naming must remind us of that other innocence in Eden. But in the language itself lies a serpent. The English/French puns that run through this scene are almost without exception bawdy—not at all the sort of thing well-brought-up young princesses in romance are supposed to talk about to their ladies. Katherine professes shock—but repeats her lesson. She is accepting that the language she will speak in her most intimate relationship is provisional in its meaning on the associations of its hearer. Later, when Henry woos her in person (5.ii.100ff) she elevates her perception

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into a general statement. First Henry deliberately misapplies her ‘like me’ to offer the nearest he can ever get to ‘love-talking’: ‘An angel is like you, Kate, and you are like an angel’. The chiasmic structure of the line draws attention both to the vapidity of the simile and its inherent improbability; and the fact it is a simile necessarily implies that Kate is not an angel. Kate’s response could serve for an epigraph to the whole of Shakespeare’s discussion of this issue: ‘O bon Dieu! Les langues des hommes sont pleines de tromperies’. The deceits of men’s languages are indeed a good part of Shakespeare’s subject. We discussed above the valuing perspective provided by the ‘Georgic’ imagery that runs through the cycle, and we need a brief return to that discussion. The ideas of gardens and growth (and husbandry) run through all the plays. In Richard II the repeated use of the verbs ‘plant’, ‘pluck’, ‘crop’, ‘fall’, ‘wither’, applied to kings, princes, and members of the commonwealth show how central is the idea of the natural world and its management—the task entrusted to Adam. But the other task entrusted to the first Gardener was to know the nature of his subjects; to name them. Language is power. 7.3 A rhetoric of rule ‘The king is but a man...’ (Henry V, 4.i.101) In contrast to Richard, isolated in his own mind even when in company, locked into a world of metaphor, Hal in Henry V and in Henry IV is constantly in some sort of speech-based relationship with other characters, fully aware of their otherness. And language is power: Adam ruled through the word, and rhetoric is the ground of human polity. The first scene of Henry V stresses summarises how the king has abandoned the ‘courses of his youth’ we saw misconstrued in Henry IV, and how he has learned to be master of all the arts of language. The play systematically demonstrates him using the full range of rhetorical modes and registers. He can handle logic and argument convincingly, and even those he condemns admit his justice; he is so much master of the stirring oration that those made before Harfleur and Agincourt have become standard warhorses of Anthologies Of English Poetry since the year dot; he is master too of the regal address in the full panoply of power, whether it be in council, or addressing the besieged of Harfleur, or concluding treaties. We hear him in prayer—a special sort of rhetoric and language—and we see him playing the ‘rough soldier’s wooing’ to perfection—which he could not do if he were not aware of the mode he was using. Hal is one of the most circumspectly self-aware heroes in all Shakespeare, matched only by Hamlet. He never retreats into,

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or even uses, the intense image-guided self-absorption of Richard, whose world is self-defined, and his linguistic and rhetorical range is far more comprehensive than Richard’s. Seeing him in both Henry IV and Henry V, he is shown to command all the modes of discourse in the plays—including fooling around with the verbal ambiguities that in Mistress Quickly or Pistol are unintentional. The three English kings of these plays are all caught and evaluated in this web of language and utterance, and in a sense one could say that all the plays have a single generic hero. ‘the king England needs’, and examine what content we can put into that word ‘king’. The man who is king is the mortal representative of an immortal office in the vast hierarchy of creation: the old idea of the Prince’s Two Bodies. In state he properly uses the royal plural to indicate that in his utterance the concerted will of the community expresses itself. The king’s will, the foundation of law and justice, can only be manifested through speech and rhetoric, just as the Creating Word embodied the Divine Will. The king is law embodied, and in his judgement the Law itself speaks. But as lex loquens the king must be master of the speech of his people, and the rhetoric he uses is the ground of the community he serves. Where Hal/Henry V differs from Richard and Henry IV crucially is that his public role fits him properly, and his utterance in it properly subordinates his undeniable humanity to the exigencies of kingship. With Henry IV’s public speeches—particularly the speech that opens Part 1—the rhetoric is all a little too clichéd, too easy, too well-rehearsed. The style suggests this man is consciously being a king, aware of his insecurity in the role. Richard, on the other hand, before his fall was never free from a vitiating inability to read the real nature and implications of the question before him (1.i) and an insensitivity to the fact that the law—of arms or of England—is more than a matter of the ruler’s whim. The overblown rhetoric Shakespeare gives him at that point is not attractive; he sounds, and is, a tyrant. Henry V, as the last Chorus reminds us, was not immortal even if his office is. The interim he has won, and England united, lasts only a few years before the balance is once more upset and bad counsellors and misgovernment destroy it. The tricksters and deceivers are not expunged from Henry’s commonwealth, and his restoration and ordering of the garden and speaking of the law are still subject to Time. There will be other rogues like Pistol, who reduce language to the noise of half-remembered tags from the illusions of plays, whom, for a time, no-one can distinguish from the true men—the trap Fluellen and Monsieur le Fer fell into; there will be other women like Mistress Quicklie for whom every sentence is an assault on language and sense, whose world is consequently chaos. There will be other conspirators speaking the English of

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Henry who glose with graceful speech like Scrope, Masham and Cambridge. There may be now.

8. (in)Conclusions Fashionable critical orthodoxies ebb and flow like the sea, to borrow a phrase of Shakespeare’s own, yet each can often offer us an insight into that Protean thing that is the way we read. Every temporary orthodoxy, from Freudian to Marxist to Structuralist to New Historicist to Postcolonialist to Cultural Materialist to Post Modernist, is itself as provisional and indeterminate as that which its devotees propose (often over-confidently) to explicate. All can show us something, none can show us everything. Further, with drama there is a special problem: for we are not dealing with a text, complete in itself, but with a multifaceted experience, mediated though actors and now directors, where every single performance will in the nature of things be differently nuanced—and there are crucial areas of the play we can never know about. We can never know, for example, the tone of voice, or speed, in which lines were spoken by the first actors. Tone can totally reverse meaning. So it is depressing how many critics, and students, still write as if the only way we could talk about plays is as if they were simply books like any others. Critical responses tell us quite as much about the critics as about the work criticised. ♣ In 1623, seven years after Shakespeare died, his colleagues Heminge and Condell brought out a ‘complete’ edition of ‘Mr. William SHAKESPEARES Comedies Histories & Tragedies, Published according to the True Originall Copies’. We are so familiar with this now that we forget just how ground-breaking it was to publish a writer’s collected plays, for plays were still regarded as a rather down-market form of writing. What is even more interesting is the idea of ‘true original copies’—the implication is that they are the final version as they left the author’s hand (which in  Even the great Frank Kermode in his edition of The Tempest at times does this – for example (p.143–4): ‘Shakespeare was not the first to portray fairies as of less than normal human stature… we have no difficulty in thinking of fairies as being of the size of Mustardseed, or of Ariel couching in the cowslip.’ Fine if we simply read: but Ariel and Mustardseed must have been played by full size actors. There is no doubt of that, and Mustardseed might have been, like Peaseblossom, played by one of the hulking clowns who played the mechanicals.

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turn makes us think about ideas of the author, changing rapidly at this very time). But this suggestion of an ‘ideal’ version ignores what we know to have been stage practice: constant adaptation, revision, addition, subtraction, by others as well as the original playwright, and it ignores the great differences there can be between any two performances of the same script. The Henriad was certainly so adapted, cut, sanitised, expanded—the textual history of the Quarto or Folio versions of its component plays amply show that. And that process continues to this day: every production is given a new spin, new ‘relevance’, and very few play all the words that can be attributed to Shakespeare. What the Folio did, then, was to create another ‘Shakespeare’: not the dramatist, but the writer whose works are read privately rather than watched communally. And that is a quite different sort of activity, for a reader can go at whatever speed is desired, can re-read, go back, compare, analyse, as no audience can. And there is no input from what actors can and cannot do on stage, or from which actors are on stage, to control speculative thought. Here the playtext begins to turn into something more like a romance, a proto-novel, and ‘Shakespeare’ begins to inhabit the physical mazes of library shelves and the mental hierarchy of ‘the Canon’ – the books that are ‘good for you’. But he did not write books… Ben Jonson, his not usually uncritical friend, gave unstinted praise in the magnificent eulogy in the preliminary pages of the First Folio. In that poem Shakespeare is first called the ‘Swan of Avon’. The phrase has become a cliché, but it was no cliché then. Jonson is alluding to Homer, the ‘Swan’ of Maeander, Vergil the ‘Swan’ of Mantua, and Pindar the ‘Swan’ of Dirce: a high compliment indeed, to compare him with the greatest poets of the ancient world, and Jonson suggests his fame will last as long: Triumph, my Britain! thou hast one to show To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe... He was not of an age, but for all time! But these poets were the National Poets of their respective cultures, and the touchstone of excellence in their language. Jonson’s comparison, which he would not have made lightly, similarly claims Shakespeare as the National Poet, the Sage, in whom the national language was brought to maturity. ♣ The original topicality of the Henriad—the old queen’s nervousness, the uneasiness

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about who should rule England, the qualities of the prince, the Essex business, Ireland (for Henry V is quite as much about Ireland as it seems to be about France)—naturally passed, quite quickly. That did not kill the play: one or both parts was staged (among 20 plays – an unprecedentedly lavish number) for the marriage of James’s daughter Elizabeth to the Elector Palatine in 1613, and it’s interesting to think how the theme of education for rule in this play would have linked to the same issue in The Tempest, which was also staged and would have been watched by the Court. The Dering MS records a conflation and adaptation of the two Parts for private performance in 1622–3, and Charles I admired the play. By the time of Charles II, it seems that Henry IV, familiarly known by Falstaff’s name, was valued chiefly for the Falstaff comedy scenes, with the political scenes regarded as rather dull—a view that found wide support over many years.

The named figures—note Falstaff and the hostess bottom left—are taken from various identifiable plays. This book of 1663 dates from after the reopening of the theatres after the gap during the Commonwealth.

Indeed, this may have been so even earlier, for ancient legend has it that Elizabeth was so taken by Falstaff that she demanded Shakespeare write another play with Falstaff in love, which request resulted in the agreeable farce of Merry Wives of Windsor. It’s often said with some truth that the Falstaffs of that play and of Henry  The Chamber Accounts mention a ‘Sir John Falstaffe’, and the in the same season ‘The Hotspur’; perhaps Parts 2 and 1.

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IV are not the same, but it is ironically the Merry Wives’ Falstaff that has stimulated a large number of other works on Falstaff in centuries since. Some, major works in their own right, are:  Antonio Salieri’s opera Falstaff, (1799), libretto by Defranchesi;  Giuseppe Verdi’s last opera, Falstaff (1893), libretto by Boito;  Edward Elgar’s symphonic study Falstaff (1913), a sympathetic musical portrait;  Ralph Vaughan Williams’ opera Sir John in Love, 1924–1928, once again based on Merry Wives. There was too, in 1760, Kenrick’s very clever Falstaff’s Wedding, a sequel to Part 2, which picks up and extrapolates hints in the two Parts into a coherent comedy. Falstaff has also had his fair run of fictional treatment, of which Robert Nye’s novel Falstaff: Being the Acta Domini Johannis Fastolfe, or Life and Valiant Deeds of Sir John Faustoff, of the Hundred Days War, As told by Sir John Fastolfe, KG (2001) is a good example. In the eighteenth century, the ‘comic’ Boar’s Head scenes dominated more and more. Falstaff became a virtuoso role for actors: Betterton and Colley Cibber were successful in the role (Cibber also was very successful as Shallow), and highlighted it by suitable editing of the text. This trend continued into the nineteenth century and beyond, with Kemble, Phelps, and right down to notable twentieth century recreations of the role by Antony Quayle, Robert Stephens, and Orson Welles. Over the years a stage tradition of playing Falstaff grew up—gestures, intonation, business—which is a long way from what might have been done, or possible, on the Elizabethan stage. There is a curious footnote to the topicality issue. Around 1800, a time of revolutionary change across Europe, England’s press was not free, and political dissent, though not impossible, was often coded. The old King, George III, had periodic attacks of insanity caused by porphyria, and his son, the eventual George IV, had a rôle as Regent. He was no longer a young man: corpulent, hedonistic, something of a coward. He chose his company for his pleasures often from those on the Opposition side of politics, like Charles James Fox and the ‘Holland House Set’. Direct criticism was folly; but cartoonists like Gillray were able to mount sustained attacks on him by portraying him as a grotesque Hal to Fox’s Falstaff—Falstaff, the ‘misleader of  The great David Garrick, a small man, avoided the role after he was laughed at by the pit when he attempted to heave Hotspur onto his shoulders.

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youth’!—with speech bubbles quoting apposite exchanges from Henry IV. Sometimes Act and Scene references are given. It’s now of course the Falstaff scenes that are being milked for political reference. What is astonishing is that Gillray, whose sales were enormous, could count on every single purchaser being able to pick up the often quite obscure references and see the satiric parallels. Henry IV was so familiar that it was as much part of the culture as a television soap now. And a final ironic note to this is that at the Regent’s coronation as George IV in 1821, a spectacular Henry IV Part 2 was staged: one wonders whose was that choice. But the elderly monarch (who had a mere nine years to reign) had already lost his Falstaff, when Fox died in 1806. ♣ Falstaff has over the last three centuries for most become a sort of Hero, everybody’s favourite uncle, and the circumspect Hal who ‘rejects’ him becomes in the incautious mind a cold fish, a cynical and unattractive figure. It will be clear that I do not accept that view—I think it gets the original play almost diametrically the wrong way round—but one has to acknowledge that in the subtragic structure that Shakespeare deliberately built into it there is the potential for an ironically sympathetic reading of Falstaff provided we do not lose sight of the overall design. It is indeed possible to feel a great sense of loss when we lose Falstaff, but it is even more interesting to feel that sense of loss and to recognise that in it we have been trapped by Shakespeare’s play into letting our emotions rule our heads. For it is one of the marks of Shakespeare’s dramatic writing that he never lets us have things simple: there is always a ‘doubleness’, an awareness of the reciprocal, where two contradictory things can be true at the same time. Richard is a lousy king, a tyrant: but he is also a ‘sweet lovely rose’, ‘as full of valour as of royal blood’. Hal/Henry V is both a ‘mirror to all Christian princes’ and a Machiavellian thug. Bolingbroke/ Henry IV is both a manipulative usurper and a nearly tragic figure. The foregrounding of Falstaff was built mainly on the more attractive Falstaff of Part 1, for Part 2 has until recently been far less studied, read or performed. For about 350 years, Part 1 was played more often than Part 2, often on its own. In the eight There is a fine discussion of this in the important essay by Jonathan Bate, ‘Hal and the Regent’, Shakespeare Survey, 38  It’s interesting that ‘Falstaffian’ has for us became a common enough adjective, suggesting, approvingly, jolly bodily indulgence, good company, humour, fun…  Similarly Lear is ‘a very foolish fond old man’ and ‘every inch a king’, Malvolio a real nasty for whom we suddenly find sympathy, Andrew Aguecheek a mere fool—who suddenly says one of the most pathetic lines in Shakespeare: ‘I was adored once too’.

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eenth century, for example, Part 1 had 220 performances between 1704 and 1750 against 80 for Part 2 between 1720 and 1750. Even as recently as 1960 C. J. Sisson’s popular edition of the Complete Works (Odhams Press, London) could introduce Part 2 by saying There are undoubted longueurs in the play, and apart from Falstaff and his crew it is a dogged rather than inspired performance, competent as it is. Hotspur and Kate, and Glendower, could not be repeated, and some of the light has failed in the more official history. (p.512) The sheer size of the two-part play militates against an equal acquaintance with both, which alone allows the design to be clear, for Part 1 does not really make sense without Part 2. The emphasis given to Part 1 as comedy ensured that for generations of English-speaking schoolchildren it became a standard text, often set for exams. (The texts were often ‘cleansed’ of the bawdy elements in the dialogue.) But already at the very end of the nineteenth century in Germany Franz Dingelstadt had experimented with staging the plays as part of a group or cycle, and this was the precursor of the various conflations, adaptations and very clever sequences that have regularly appeared in the last century, most notably perhaps John Barton’s 1969-70 cycle When thou art King for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring Theatreground. We have become so used in this last couple of generations to seeing Part 2 played after Part 1 regularly that it’s hard to see them as separate. The change in perceptions of Falstaff, from ‘Vice’/Clown to ‘comic Hero’, is contemporary with moves towards much more sympathetic re-inventions of, for example, Shylock. Dr Johnson in his great edition of Shakespeare reflected the stress the actors put on the role by writing more than twice as much on him as on Hal and Hotspur together. The changes in attitudes and values, the fashion for ‘sentiment’, to which in the end we give the name Romanticism, quite often made the anti-hero, the outcast, the dissident, the hero: one thinks of Byron’s verse drama Cain. That may have affected attitudes to Falstaff. Another contributory factor might be the attitude to drama and fiction summed up in Coleridge’s phrase the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. The illusion of a secondary reality is now desirable, stated as condition of art, and instead of a character in a play’s design we start thinking of characters as ‘real people’ with childhoods and identity problems before the plays start. It’s easy to poke fun at Mary Cowden Clark’s The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines (London, 1880), and forget that with her brother Charles she brought out a hugely popular  Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (London, 1817) Ch. 14.

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edition of Shakespeare and that her book was based on very solid knowledge of the text and on shrewd inference about what might have been. Charles Knight’s equally popular complete Works, in the Imperial edition (London, 1873) introduces each play not only with historical background like the history of Verona for Romeo and Juliet but also with engraved scenes of the setting. It is easy to forget that in the plays one is not dealing with real people. In 1777 Maurice Morgann published ‘An Essay On The Dramatic Character Of Sir John Falstaff’ (London: T. Davies). This attempted to rehabilitate the ‘real’ Falstaff as no drunken coward, and was typical of critical trends of its time in the way it treated him as a real person. For Morgann and readers of his persuasion, Shakespeare re-created Nature rather than created art: an approach that did a lot for the close reading of ‘character’ but not much for the formal and theatrical qualities of the plays in which they were located. This approach was taken to an extreme conclusion by Charles Lamb: in effect, that the plays of Shakespeare were too good for the stage, and had to be read as poems or novels. Lamb’s schoolmate James White had produced in 1796 The Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff and his Friends, clever pastiches of the styles and idiolects of Falstaff and his associates. Lamb reviewed it, and the book may have stimulated his own thinking in his Essay on the Tragedies of Shakespeare. That essay’s main case is that ‘the plays of Shakespeare are less calculated for performance on a stage than those of almost any dramatist whatever’, and his criticism impressionistic: ‘I have confined my observations to the tragic parts of Shakespeare. It would be no very difficult task to extend the inquiry to his comedies; and to show why Falstaff, Shallow, Sir Hugh Evans, and the rest are equally incompatible with stage representation… ’ William Hazlitt’s essay, The Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays (London, 181718) had some shrewd things to say about Falstaff’s wit, but in effect took Morgann’s argument a good deal further: The secret of Falstaff’s wit is for the most part a masterly presence of mind, an absolute self-possession, which nothing can disturb. His repartees are involuntary suggestions of his self-love; instinctive evasions of everything that threatens to interrupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency. His very size floats him out of all his difficulties in a sea of rich conceits; and he turns round on the pivot of his convenience, with every occa There are some good things: Davy (Shallow’s servant) writes to his master of the death of Slender, who died from love of Ann Page (in Merry Wives): ‘Master Abram is dead; gone, your worship. A’ sang his soul and body quite away. A’ turned like the latter end of a lover’s lute.’

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sion and at a moment’s warning. His natural repugnance to every unpleasant thought or circumstance of itself makes light of objections, and provokes the most extravagant and licentious answers in his own justification. His indifference to truth puts no check upon his invention, and the more improbable and unexpected his contrivances are, the more happily does he seem to be delivered of them, the anticipation of their effect acting as a stimulus to the gaiety of his fancy. A. C. Bradley continued this tradition of sympathy for Falstaff in a very fine essay, ‘The rejection of Falstaff’ (Oxford Lectures on Poetry, London, 1909, pp.252-73). Bradley deplored the ‘rejection’ (it isn’t, quite) of Falstaff, and argued that by making him so ‘lovable’ Shakespeare had freighted the drama with more than it could bear. And this influential tradition foregrounding a sympathetic Falstaff retains its force, not only in introductions to student editions as late as 1986. The great Orson Welles’s brilliant film Chimes at Midnight (1966) condensed Henry IV into a tight storyline and added a few scenes from Richard II and Henry V. Welles himself was Falstaff, in a role that was an actor’s and director’s vehicle if ever there was one. The result is a film where Falstaff, and his memory, was the central, and very sympathetic, figure, whose love for Hal is unquestionable. Consider, too, films of the play, Henry V, where he famously does not (now) appear: Olivier’s 1946 film, like Branagh’s of 1989 (where Henry untextually weeps when Bardolph has to be hung), both drew additional material from Henry IV and dwelt lingeringly on Falstaff’s death, milking it for its pathos. John Dover Wilson’s fine study, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1943) is indispensable reading on this topic. Its publication coincided with the appearance of E. M. W. Tillyard’s Shakespeare’s History Plays (1944) and Lilly B. Campbell’s Shakespeare’s ‘Histories’: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, Calif., 1947): this trio of books altered radically the perception of the plays. While Campbell stressed the link to Elizabethan political issues, and Tillyard the interaction with Tudor ideologies, Dover Wilson’s reaction against Romantic ‘total characterisation’ readings stressed the importance of dramatic roles, mapping Hal as Everyman, Hotspur as Chivalry, Falstaff as Vice, and thus began a recovery of the moral design of the play. (William Empson rightly saw that taken too far Dover  W. H. Auden (The Dyer’s Hand, 1962, pp.195-8) offers an extreme view of Falstaff: a fat man, he says, looks like a cross between a very young child and a pregnant woman, and Falstaff’s ‘tragic’ ‘love’ for Hal is a ‘comic symbol for the supernatural order of Charity’. He also suggests he is a comic symbol for Jesus Christ.

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Wilson’s approach could be reductive, and recognised the ambiguity and contradictoriness of response that Shakespeare demands of his audiences.) After WWII, and perhaps as one consequence of these very books, interest in the political aspects of drama and literature grew, and the expansion of graduate studies in the Universities, with students seeking research topics, made available a lot of Tudor texts, simply ignored before, that affected our understanding of politics, ideologies, and how these were negotiated. This encouraged a growing recognition of the ambiguities, aporie and uncertainties in a lot of ‘political’/ dramatic writing of the early modern period, and a resultant increase in attention given to the figures of the kings, the nature of kingship and the treatment of the dilemmas of power. It is strange to think that the first book-length study of the Henriad—Derek Traversi’s Shakespeare: From ‘Richard II’ to ‘Henry V’—only appeared as late as 1957. His approach, relying on much detailed close reading, anticipates the interest more recent critics have shown in the linguistic structures and discourses of the plays, drawing on current interests in the politics of language. The Henriad is now recognised for what it is: a very fine achievement, dealing with issues near the core of Shakespeare’s thinking throughout his life, and with urgent Elizabethan concerns. Our modern interest in power—much less trusting and idealistic than once it perhaps was—and what it does has properly thrown attention back onto Henry and Hal: and on the growth of Hal into Henry V much could indeed be said. The near coincidence in date of Henry V and Hamlet is not without significance. And in those two heroes perhaps we may discern a real shift in Shakespeare’s portrayal—understanding even—of the self.

 See my Very Brief Introduction: ‘character’

9. Further reading Editions: The First Part of King Henry IV, ed. Herbert and Judith Weil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). An edition one wished longer. The very interesting introduction covers less wide ground than the Oxford editions, but deals well with the design of the play and its interpretations. A good bibliography. and The Second Part of King Henry IV, ed. G. Melchiori (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, repr. 2006). Melchiori argues for the play as an opportunist sequel to the Part 1, itself a reworking of an old play not by Shakespeare. It’s an interesting argument. The Introduction is comprehensive and there are excellent appendices, including several of the sources. Henry IV: Part One, ed. David Bevington (Oxford World’s Classics 1998) and Henry IV: Part Two, ed. Rene Weis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). The introductions deftly and economically place the Parts in their cultural, spatial and social context and have some illuminating remarks on the notion of politcal control of space. Bevington discusses performance and criticism of the play down to our own time, illustrating the range of interpretations the script/text can legitimately bear. Weis argues, radically, that Falstaff was called Oldcastle in Part 2 as well as in Part I. The play’s thematic ration to Part I is discussed. King Henry IV, Part 1 ed. David Scott Kastan (Arden Shakespeare: Third Series, 2002). Paperback. Kastan has a good discussion of the clever design of this play, and stresses the play’s analysis of political authority and King Henry IV, Part 2 ed. A. R. Humphreys (Arden Shakespeare: Second Series, 1967). Paperback. Still useful, but showing its age somewhat.

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Primary Works: Some Histories available in the 1590s Baldwin, William, et al., A Mirror for Magistrates (London, 1559) and later editions. Daniel, Samuel, The First Fowre Bookes of the Ciuile Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke (London 1595); The Civile Wars betweene the Howses of Lancaster and Yorke (London, 1609). Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae. Grafton, Richard, The Chronicle of John Harding … with a Continuation in Prose to this Our Own Time (London, 1543). Grafton, Richard, A Chronicle at Large (London, 1568). Fabyan, Robert, New Chronicles of England and France (London, 1516). Foxe, John, Actes and Monuments, London (1563). Hall, Edward, The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Famelies of Lancastre & Yorke (London, 1548). Holinshed, Raphael, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577, 2nd edition 1587). A major source for Shakespeare. Close comparison show how intelligently and critically Shakespeare read More, Thomas, The History of Richard III (incorporated in Grafton). Stow, John, A Summary of English Chronicles (London, 1565). Vergil, Polydore, Angliae Historia Libri XXVI (Basle, 1534). Vergil, Polydore, An Abridgement of the Notable Work of Polydore Vergil, trans. T. Langley (London, 1546).

Shakespeare’s history Peter Saccio, Shakespeare’s English Kings: History, Chronicle, and Drama, Second Edition (Oxford University Press, 2000). Saccio illustrates how the Tudor chroniclers whom Shakespeare used medieval English history, how modern scholars look at that history, and at what Shakespeare chose to put in the action of the plays themselves. Highly recommended, and a very good read  There are several modern translations. Geoffrey’s completely bogus account of the foundation of Britain by the Trojans, descendants of Aeneas, was the view of history held by most people until after 1600.  Vergil demonstrated that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s (see note above) account of British history was quite wrong. Not many people were interested

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Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). How often do we think of Holinshed as a major writer in his own right?

Secondary works: studies and background books etc. Cultural and ideological background M. Axton, The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal Historical Society, 1977). Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold, 1969). Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). This important study argues that the drafting of the plays for the demands of the theatre did not exclude the company’s having at the same time the intention to publish them quite soon – usually, two years after first performance. The corollary is that Shakespeare’s design is detailed and thorough enough to stand a reader’s critical scrutiny. Coppelia Kahn, Man’s Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981) Louis B Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935). Chapter IX usefully discusses the histories available to Elizabethan middle class people.

The History Plays Lilly B. Campbell, Shakespeare’s Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino: Huntington, 1947). See remarks in text above. Graham Holderness, Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992). A penetrating if sometimes dense study by one of the foremost Cultural Materialist critics. Bloom, Harold, ed., Falstaff (New York: Chelsea House, 1992). Stimulating and inimitable. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare after Theory (London: Rouledge, 2000). It’s been fashionable for a long time to say in Shakespeare scholarship that he is ‘our contemporary’. Kastan argues that what value he has for us must begin, at least, with a recognition of his distance from us, and the nature of the world he knew.

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David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Dartmouth College, 1982. Henry A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare’s Histories (Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 1970). Alexander Leggatt, Shakespeare’s Political Drama: The History Plays and the Roman Plays (London: Routledge, 1988). Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1972). Robert R. Reed, Jr., Crime and God’s Judgement in Shakespeare (Lexington: Kentucky University Press, 1984). Irving Ribner, The History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957). E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943). Now regarded with some reserve as perhaps oversimplifying an untidy and contradictory mess, but of great and hugely interesting scholarship. Well worth a few hours. E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare’s History Plays (New York, 1946). See remarks in text above. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: From Richard II to Henry V (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1957). The first book length study of the plays, from a standpoint owing much to New Criticism and to the Scrutiny tradition. Matthew H. Wikander, The Play of Truth and State: Historical Drama from Shakespeare to Brecht (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1986) John Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946). See remarks in text above.

Appendices Appendix 1: Some Extant History Plays. This list is not exhaustive, and it is certain there were more than a few plays that never made it into print or were not recorded at all. (Shakespeare’s historical plays are not in this list.) Note how many plays on English historical material there were between 1588, the year of the first Armada and 1603, the year the Queen died. John Skelton, Magnyfycence (1519) Bale, John. Kynge Johan (1530-36) Albion Knight (1537-38) Respublica (1553), possibly by Nicholas Udall. Thomas Sackville, and Thomas Norton, Gorboduc (1565) Thomas Legge, Ricardus Tertius ( 1579) The True Chronicle History of King Leir (1594?) The Life and Death of Jack Straw, (1587-1590), possibly by George Peele. Thomas Hughes, The Misfortunes of Arthur (1588) The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (ca. 1588), possibly by Richard Tarleton. The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine, (1588-89), possibly by Robert Greene. 1 and 2 The Troublesome Reign of John, King of England (1588-89) Anthony Munday, John a Kent and John a Cumber (1589) George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar, (1589) Robert Greene, The Scottish History of James IV, (1589-92) Edmund Ironside or War Hath Made All Friends (ca. 1590),sometimes implausibly attributed to Shakespeare. George Peele, The Famous Chronicle of King Edward I. (1590-91) Christopher Marlowe, The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward II, (1591?).

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George a Greene, The Pinner of Wakefield (1591-92), possibly by Robert Greene Anthony Munday et al., Sir Thomas More (1592-5, but with later revisions). There is a substantial passage which seems to be in Shakespeare’s handwriting, The True Tragedy of Richard III (before 1594) Thomas Heywood, 1 and 2 Edward IV (1594-99) Robert Wilson, Fair Em, The Miller’s Daughter of Manchester. (1595-1600) The Famous History of the Life and Death of Captain Thomas Stukeley, (ca. 1596). Thomas Dekker, Old Fortunatus) (1596) William Rowley, et al., The Birth of Merlin (1597?) Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599) Anthony Munday, et al., The True and Honorable History of the Life of Sir John Oldcastle, (1599) The True Chronicle History of the Whole Life and Death of Thomas Lord Cromwell, (ca. 1600) Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon (1601) John Day and Henry Chettle, The Blind Beggar of Bednal Green, (ca. 1600) Alarum for London (1602) Richard Vennar, England’s Joy, (1602) Thomas Heywood, 1 and 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody (1603-05) Thomas Dekker and John Webster, The Famous History of Sir Thomas Wyatt, (1603-05) Nobody and Somebody, with the True Chronicle History of Elydure (1603-1606) William Rowley, When You See Me, You Know Me (1604-1605) The Fair Maid of Bristow (1605) Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon, (1605-06) Thomas Heywood and William Rowley, Fortune by Land and Sea (1609) John Fletcher, Bonduca (1609-14) Thomas Heywood, 1 and 2 The Fair Maid of the West (1612) The Valiant Welshman (ca. 1615) Thomas Middleton, Hengist, King of Kent, or The Mayor of Quinborough, (1616-20). Brewer, Anthony. The Lovesick King. (ca. 1617)

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John Day and Thomas Dekker, The Life and Death of Guy Earl of Warwick, (1620). Thomas Drue, The Life of The Duchess of Suffolk, (1623) Dick of Devonshire, 1625 Davenport, Robert. King John and Matilda. (1628-34) Jasper Fisher, Fuimus Troes, The True Trojans (1633) John Ford, The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck, (ca. 1633) Thomas Heywood, Royal King and Loyal Subject (1633) The Valiant Scot (1637?) The Welsh Ambassador (ca. 1623), possibly by Dekker.

NOTE: Of special interest to our discussion of Henry IV and its sequence are two plays which seem to be related in some way to it, and share several of its concerns: 1) The Reign of Edward III, (1589-92). This play was edited by Giorgio Melchiori and included in the New Shakespeare Series. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). It is virtually certain that Shakespeare had a substantial hand in its writing or revision. 2) Woodstock: Known through an incomplete, anonymous manuscript in the British Library, this play has an uncertain relationship with Richard II. The title on the manuscript is The First Part of the Reign of Richard II, with ‘Thomas of Woodstock’ a sub-title. Some modern critics have claimed it as part of ‘Richard II, Parts I and II’, but others consider it later than Richard II, and possibly by Rowley. Shakespeare’s authorship has been argued for strongly, but stylometric work on the text does tend to question this. It was edited by Wilhelmina P. Frijlinck, for the Malone Society Reprints in 1929, and, magisterially, by A. P. Rossiter in 1946. Peter Corbin & Douglas Sedge edited it for Manchester University Press (2002)

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Appendix 2: Censorship There was ‘Censorship’ at all levels: even apprentices could boo and jeer, and you took notice of what they did not approve, for money depended on it. But more seriously, magistrates could complain about plays to the Privy Council which could and did ban them. Some caution was necessary, even as the result of coming under the patronage of some great person. In December 1581 Edmund Tilney was made Master of the Revels – a Court office, which meant he could ban or authorise as he saw fit ‘all plays in the realm of England’. Although all scripts were supposed to be submitted to his office for approval, not all plays were, and not all were performed in the form he approved. Plays on religion and politics were officially banned, and the Bishops’ Order of 1599 banning history writing made history plays pretty sensitive. Moreover, printers had to submit plays they bought from the Companies to the Stationers’ Company and to the ecclesiastical censors for approval. So there was a lot of muddle and consistency, laxity and severity, mixed together, and censorship was erratic and arbitrary. (The manuscript of The Second Maid’s Tragedy (Anon) has survived with the censor’s annotations on it.) For example The Fawn, by Marston for a Children’s company, mocked James 1, yet was patronised by Queen Anne. With Sejanus, Jonson was accused of Popery and treason and the version printed was altered in consequence. Eastward Ho! in 1605 was a scandal – yet it was licensed and printed. Samuel Daniel’s Philotas (1605) got into trouble even though he was a licenser of the Children of the Revels. And, indeed, George Chapman wrote to Sir George Buck (Tilney’s successor) in a defiant tone, which seems to suggest the censor should be defending writers, not penalizing them. There are several places where one can glimpse censorship operating in Shakespeare’s plays, especially the histories:  the passage on O’Neill in Quarto of 2 Henry VI is toned down in Folio;  In Richard III, Buckingham’s appeal to Richard (III.6.115ff.) in Q is not in F;  In Henry IV, the character named Oldcastle originally is renamed Falstaff  The two versions of Henry V that we have, F and Q, are vastly different, and Q (a very different play indeed in every way) may have been rushed out to deflect the censor’s wrath;  the oily buttering up of James I in Macbeth may be to curry favour - as well as to deflect attention from the more disturbing and problematic issues in that play;

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 Augustine Phillips, a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was called in 11 days after Essex’s rebellion to explain why they put that performance of Richard II on. And Qq 1,2,3, of 1597 do not have the abdication scene, while Q4 has ‘new additions. See: Janet Clare, ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship, 2nd edn. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999)

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Appendix 3: Rhetoric The aims of Rhetorica were stated by ancient writers like Cicero and Horace to be to please, to move, to persuade—sometimes to please, to move, to teach. It is the second of the ‘Seven Liberal (= necessary to a free person) Arts’ which since Antiquity had been the basis of education. They divided into the trivium (hence our word ‘trivial’, because this is where you started): Grammar (i.e. literature), Rhetoric (the arts of using words to best advantage), and Dialectic (the science of argument) and when you had mastered that you went on to the more serious mathematical arts of the quadrivium— Arithmetic (= number theory), Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. Then and only then were you ready to tackle the Queen of the Sciences, Theology or Philosophy. The art of using words to best advantage recognises, first, three levels of style depending on one’s subject and audience: the high style for serious and high matters, the middle style for everyday, and the low style for comedy, jokes, and the workplace. Theoreticians since antiquity recognised that different patterns of words had different effects, and recognised over 200 distinct figures or colours of rhetoric, each with a purpose to achieve a psychological effect on an audience. Teaching this skill was an important part of renaissance education, for out of persuasion through words grows power. (It still does.) Many more people than we realise would have had a detailed technical knowledge of the art, and would recognise in a poem or a speech ‘a very fine epanalepsis’, as the commentator on Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, (1579), ‘E.K’, points out. Thus an audience would hear a play in ways quite different to ours: rather like an audience of pianists listening to someone play the piano. Some of the figures: (figures in brackets refer to Shakespeare’s sonnets) anadiplosis (Greek = doubling): last word of clause 1 opens clause 2 ‘hate me when thou wilt if ever, now Now, while the world…’ Anaphora (= taking back to): same word begins a sequence of clauses ‘Some glory in their birth, some in their skills Some in their wealth…’ antanaclasis (= referring against): same word, but with two different strict definition of pun ) ‘But thou art all my art…’

(90) (91) meanings (a (78)

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antimetabole ( = exchange) (sometimes called chiasmus): two words or phrases repeated in reversed order ‘music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly ?’ (8) asyndeton ( = unbound): Words heaped up without conjunction intervening ‘in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best of hand, of foot, of lip, or eye, or brow’ (106) auxesis ( = Increase): words arranged to form a climax ‘Since brass nor stone nor earth nor boundless sea but sad mortality...’ (65) epanalepsis ( = taking up again) same word begins clause 1 and ends clause 2 ‘Kind is my love today, tomorrow kind. .’ (105) epistrophe ( = a turning towards): same word ends a sequence of phrases ) ‘I am that I am…’ (121) cf St Paul ‘I spake as a child, I thought as a child...’ 1 Cor 13 epizeuxis: same word repeated, without pause ‘thou whose shadow shadows doth make bright…’ (45) gradatio (an extended form of anadiplosis through 3 or more phrases) cf St Paul: ‘whom he did predestinate them he also called; and whom he called them he also Justified; and when he Justified them he also glorified…’ (Romans, viii. 30) parison ( = according to equal): similar structure in sequence of clauses ‘and gilded Honour shamefully misplac’d and maiden Virtue rudely strumpeted... (66) Paronomasia (= naming alongside): same word, same sound but different sense ‘and captive Good attending captain ill.’ (66) Ploce ( = weaving): same word repeated inside repeated phrases ‘Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy’ (8) Polyptoton ( = many endings): word repeated, or different form, but from same root ‘love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’ (116) Syllepsis ( = taking together): one word written, but 2 senses suggested ‘But why thy odour matcheth not thy show the soil is this that thou dost common grow.’ (69) Zeugma ( = yoking): same verb used to serve 2 objects ‘Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.’ (128)

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Some Latin Rhetorical Terms: Adnominatio: repetition of a word root with different endings; when similar sounding words refer to different things (cf. pun) Amplificatio: elaborating an idea by saying it several times in different ways Anacoluthon: passing to a new grammatical construction before the first is complete Commutatio: reversal of the order of the first half of the sentence in the second: ‘eat to live, not live to eat’. Often used with contentio; cf. Chiasmus. Compar: rhythmical, syllabic and syntactical balance of halves of lines or of sentences against each other Complexio: a sequence of clauses or sentences where the same word or words begin them and similar words end them Conduplicatio: an emphatic repetition of a word or phrase under stress of emotion or to create feeling in the audience Contentio: strong, often patterned contrast Conversio: ending clauses with the same word Correctio: cancelling what has just been said in description and replacing it with something more suitable Descriptio: systematic enumeration of the appearance or qualities of a person or thing Diminutio: the modesty convention; winning the audience’s sympathy by disclaiming competence or excellence Diversio: a short turning aside from the main line of the narrative Effictio: the expression in words of someone’s bodily appearance Exclamatio: apostrophe; elaborate exclamatory address, or sudden stop­ping of discourse to address some person or thing, present or absent, personified or not Exemplum: a short story or reference used to illustrate a point Expolitio: repetition under a different guise; speaking of the same thing but not in the same way Frequentatio: drawing together for climactic purposes of all the different ideas in a passage Gradatio: anadiplosis; beginning the succeeding clause or line with the last word of the previous one Hypallage: transferred epithet Interpretatio: repeating an idea by using not the same word but a near ­synonym ‘‘parent’ to replace ‘father’, for example.

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Occupatio: a refusal to describe or go into details, for whatever reason Parataxis: literally, ‘laying side by side’; the use of a series of coordinate clauses rather than the subordination of one to the other (which is hypotaxis) Ratiocinatio: elaborate way of structuring an argument in speech or soliloquy by arguing with oneself, posing objections and ideas, and meeting them Repetitio: beginning clauses or lines with the same word Sententia: a proverb or quotation or citation of another author to support an argument Significacio: the ‘deep’ or hidden meaning of a symbol, thing, or story Similiter cadens: balancing of words with similar endings at ends of phrases Traductio: repetition of key words in different places for emphasis Transitio: when one recapitulates briefly what one has said, and outlines what one is going on to next See: H. Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence 1577 (anthologised in W. R. Espy, the Garden of Eloquence, (New York, 1986) Aristotle Rhetoric III. 9 Cicero, ad Herennium IV G. Puttenham, Art of English Poesy, 1589 Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto, 1967) See also: various works by B. Vickers, of which especially Rhetoric Revalued, (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1982)

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Appendix 4: Language The Creation was an act of speech that immediately, without intermediary or hindrance, makes real what is in the Will of God. The Trinitarian understanding of the Deity identified the Son with the all-creating Word, and borrowed and modified from the Platonists the concept of the Logos (‘word’) as the creating activity of the Divine Mind. This is more than metaphor, for how does the Platonist or the Christian connect the concept of the eternal Deity of whom nothing can be predicated with a world of predicated things except by means of the will, the word, of the deity expressing itself eternally in that world? So it is the Word itself that gives life to all the ranks of creation. But this problem, though it fixes for us the crucial idea of speech as action and ‘realising’, is too high for human beings. We have problems enough. In Eden, when Adam was yet unfallen his unclouded eyes saw Truth in all her naked beauty and he walked with Him Who is Truth in the cool of the evening as a man with his friend. One of Adam’s first tasks was to give names to the Creation over which God had given him absolute rule, and those names expressed and conveyed the inner real nature of those things without the possibility of confusion—a language that was literally Knowledge. As A. Richardson put it long after Shakespeare’s death, ‘Adam, by seeing into the nature of every Creature, could see their names, though we cannot do it’ (The Logician’s School Master, London, 1657 p.13). Milton presents his Adam as doing just this: ‘My tongue obeyed and readily could name/What e’er I saw’ (Paradise Lost VIII.272/3); ‘I named them, as they passed, and understood/Their nature’ (VIII. 352/3). His language ignored or penetrated the surface of things, because the surface, multiform and capable of being seen from different angles as it is, is confusing. It moved directly to inner nature. Adam’s language was everywhere comprehensible, not ambiguous like modern speech or writing; and this complete knowing in language was both the means and the mark of Adam’s power over Nature. This desirable situation was spoilt first by the Fall. Adam’s Reason, the faculty he alone of the material creation shared with the angels, was clouded—not extinguished, but newly fallible. Yet for a time his descendants spoke his language, the inheritance of one family. But after the Flood, the first great punishment for sin and prefigurement of the Last Judgement, their pride led them to seek to build a great tower in the land of Shinar, which would reach up to Heaven itself. The commentators on the passage in Genesis X1 emphasise the ease with which they all, whatever their trades and nations, understood each other. They were capable, as man has never been since, of

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perfect cooperation. Just such perfect understanding is represented in the diligent and total cooperation of all trades in the building of the structure Breughel depicts, and Man’s power was unlimited. But God confounded their language, so that they did not understand each other’s speech. Language itself was now fallen, and ceased to bear a exact communicable correspondence to the nature of things. Dante is neither the first nor the last philosopher to see all the world’s languages as ultimately deriving from this mythic moment when, in a second Fall, men were divided by their labours and saw only a part of the whole of reality (Inferno, XXXI 76ff; De Volgari Eloquentia 1.4.4.). A quite serious aim in the minds of many, in the Renaissance and later, is the finding of a true language, isomorphic to reality, which will undo the damage of Babel and once more restore to Man the dominion over Nature Adam had. The linguistic researches of the seventeenth Century which embody this aim are intimately connected with what, with hindsight, we see as the growth of the empirical scientific approach. It is no accident that, among many others, Bacon saw his programme for reform in the arts and sciences as depending a good deal on clearing up the mess language had got itself into, nor that the philosophers of the Port Royal in France and those who came to form the Royal Society in England were so interested in the understanding of how language worked and in its reform. For words are power. By the late sixteenth Century, no-one of any intelligence whose business was writing—which includes playwrights—could have been unaware of the problem of the relationship between words, language and the perception or description of the world. From Antiquity and throughout the middle ages, there had been serious discussion of the human cognition, the part played by words in it, and the nature of speech both in itself and in relation to ‘reality’ and ‘the world’. Plato, for example, suggested that words were not mere labels attached to things for convenience’ sake, but actually related in an organic way to them, containing within themselves the seeds of their own meaning. Aristotle, on the other hand, took the view that nouns (for example) did not have meaning in this way, but by the habitual imposition of meaning on the mere sound. Ancient writers—Varro, Cicero, Quintilian for instance—had considered these matters deeply, and the Middle Ages inherited from late Antiquity a programme of study which continued and developed their ideas. The Seven Liberal Arts, the format of mediaeval and Renaissance learning, was deliberately divided into the trivium, which dealt with those arts that studied and exploited words, and the  The distinction is important. I am using ‘word’ and ‘language’ in the sense of de Saussure’s (Cours de Linguistique Générale, 1915) ‘parole’ and ‘langue’ to signify respectively the verbal units and the semiotic discourse into which they are put and which qualifies their individual signification.

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quadrivium which examined number and measure in arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. The arts of the trivium, grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, were related but separate. Grammar was the scientific study of language and of meaning in language. It could range from examination of syntactical relationships, the cement holding the bricks together, to what we would call linguistic philosophy and the detailed reading of texts. On a grasp of grammar depended one’s competence in the other verbal arts of rhetoric and dialectic. The distinction between these was old even when Plato, in the Gorgias, defined ‘rational’ i.e. logical speech as that which deals with what is, while rhetorical speech is that which does not convince by means of rational knowledge but persuades by the pleasing exploitation of metaphor and other means of verbal colouring. He saw the rational as a higher form, but rhetoric as necessary to persuade men to action. An analogy first used by Zeno and often repeated in the Renaissance (e.g. in England by Sir Thomas Wilson, Francis Bacon and John Donne) puts this in the form of an easily remembered visual image: logic, the rational ground of the art of dialectic, is the powerful closed fist, while rhetoric is the welcoming and receptive open and extended hand. Renaissance scholars, with the great benefits conferred by the recovery of so much of the writings of the ancient world, continued this analysis of speech and writing, and explored their social and political functions as well as their philosophical problems. There had been and was an understanding both of the inevitably provisional nature of post-Babel human utterance, and of its crucial ability to create meaning—a world, indeed—to impose order, and to interpret the world men inhabit.

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Appendix 5: Character Character in fiction, self-evidently, reflects ideas of the self held for real in everyday life. Fiction may modify those ideas in time—nature imitating art!—but it has to start with them. It is simple fact that Renaissance people could not think of the self as we do, and it is therefore highly improbable that when they wrote plays they suddenly used psychological and structural concepts that would not be invented for many years. Steven Greenblatt’s groundbreaking book drew attention some decades ago to early modern ideas of ‘Self-fashioning’: that is, a deliberate making of oneself into the appropriate social and (loosely) political roles, with the attendant values and behaviour. In briefest summary, men and women lived their lives much more publicly than we do, and were more or less consciously were acting a role —often several roles—all their lives. Those roles implied obligations, and responsibilities; they also entailed appropriate—decorous—behaviour, language, clothing. People defined themselves by their roles, and perceptions of self-hood were against the background of a moral gener­alization of what is or is not appropriate to individuals in a given position. A king has responsibilities, temptations, joys, that are not open to one of his subjects; a coal-heaver, as Aristotle apparently said, has some delights that are not decorous to a prince. In real life each would speak differently, and have differing perspectives on the world, and have different role-expectations; in drama, it is the simplest of all conventions that the low-life characters speak in prose, and even now we find it amusing when they attempt the artificiality of verse that on stage signals dignity and seriousness. If role-playing as a means of defining the real self is usual in real life, it follows that dramatic characterizations by author and actor not only are determined by these preconceptions but invested by them with an irony we might miss. Role and its values will be major determinants in how to write a character, how he dresses, is attended, and moves on stage, how an actor will play him, and how an audience will receive what he presents. But at the same time the audience is not allowed to forget that they are watching an actor who is not what he represents. It is just where the dividing line between illusion and reality lies that worries Bottom in rehearsing the play in Midsummer Night’s Dream; it is precisely this that bothers Hamlet when he meets the Player King. For an actor acting is also a man living, a real man suddenly acting another man who once was (or might have been)  Do look at the full discussion in my Very Brief Introduction: this is an important matter.  Renaissance Self fashioning from More to Shakespeare (New York, 1980)

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real. The illusion he creates gives rise to feelings that are real but may not be directed to a strictly real object. For Hamlet, here is the Player, on request, as a social grace, producing out of context a tragic speech. The implication of the request is that the Player’s art is to be enjoyed, and is not to be mistaken for reality. But he appears moved, so that the observer sees real tears, and all the signs of real feeling, and begins to sympathize with those feelings. But the actor is not moved; he is employing his art, and is pleased if it moves other. So the relationship between the appearance of sorrow, the result of art, and the real thing becomes central; Hamlet sees the difficulty of coping with, knowing, genuineness of feeling and acting (in both senses) on it, while the audience is brought up sharply against the paradox of illusion, their non-illusory response to it, and the effect it has on them in their own roles in life. For their lives do not stand still while watching a play.

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Appendix 6: Essex Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, (1566-1601) was the last of Queen Elizabeth’s favourites. His father died when he was 10 and Lord Burghley became his guardian, while his mother married the Earl of Leicester, whom some think Elizabeth at one point nearly married. He came to Court when Elizabeth was 53 (1586): she flirted with him, but also quarrelled a lot, and his hot temper and jealousy always allowed her to get the better. But she seems to have been genuinely fond of him, probably in a more maternal than amatory way: she was anxious when Essex went to the wars, which he often did (sometimes flouting her express command) and in which he always behaved himself with conspicuous daring if not with the prudence becoming a general. He was always advocating war with Spain; he was also perpetually quarrelling with rivals at Court or on campaign—with Raleigh, with Blount, with the Cecils; and his idea of a quarrel was to duel to the death if possible. (Which uses up a lot of courtiers…) In 1591, he commanded, with more valour than discretion, a small force sent to France to help Henri IV against the Catholic League. Whenever abroad, he was always complaining of the way his rivals, especially Burghley’s son Robert, were undermining his influence at home. All his enemies were delighted—not many others were—when he teased the Queen into giving him command of the great expedition to Ireland in 1599. He faced the worst rebellion yet, with the certainty that Spanish help was near. Once in Ireland, he made a pretty mess of things. Instead of driving at the Earl of Tyrone’s power base in Ulster, he made a useless progress through Munster; and, when at last he turned north, Tyrone trapped him into a parley in which he concluded a wholly unauthorized truce and undertook to present Tyrone’s demands to the English government. The Queen was furious and Essex made things worse by deserting his army and hurrying to England. Under semi-arrest for nine months, in June 1600 he was brought to trial. He got off lightly: dismissed from his offices and imprisoned in his own house, he was set free in August. However, he had lost the Queen’s favour for good, and he could not stomach this. He knew that Cecil and others were his enemies, and now entertained the absurd idea of using force. He intrigued with James of Scotland to support a rising, and begged Lord Mountjoy, who had succeeded to his Irish command, to land troops in Wales. But Essex was a bad head for any rebellion, and the London mob, with whom he really was popular, was not so foolish as to rise in his support. Essex was beheaded on 25th February 1601. Vain and rash, lacking any statesmanship, his birth gave him

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a position of authority for which he was wholly unfitted. But he did have qualities which endeared him even to those with whom he quarrelled: frankness, warm affection and generosity and, in war, the courage of a Romance hero. It’s just possible that in Hotspur Shakespeare is glancing at some of Essex’s qualities. Some thought—perhaps Essex thought—that he was an answer to England’s troubles, a Bolingbroke to Elizabeth’s Richard. His idea of nobility, the glamour of war and chivalry, was much more charismatic than the patient, detailed, managing and intriguing of really able men like Burghley and his dwarfish son Robert. The fundamental clash between the parties was between two ideologies, between what the French called noblesse de robe and noblesse d’epée: on the one hand, a myth of military glory and chivalry such as, Essexians and romantics argued, had made England great in the past—the ‘England of Henry V’; on the other, a modern emphasis on government, law, accounts, record keeping and money. The future lay there, and Essex did not, to his cost, realise it.

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Appendix 7: Miracle and Morality Morality Plays develop from Miracle Plays, and were popular in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A Morality play demonstrated a moral truth or lesson through the speech or action of personified abstractions—figures representing vices and virtues, qualities of the human mind, or abstract conceptions in general. Miracles Moralities were played throughout Europe. The aim of both was religious. In the miracle play the subject is derived from Bible narrative, Lives of Saints, the Apocryphal Gospels, and pious legends, a certain historical or traditional foundation underlies the plot, and the object was to reinforce truths of the Catholic faith. In the Morality the matter was allegorical rather than historical, and its object was ethical; the cultivation of Christian character, the application of Christian doctrine to conduct. In Everyman, the finest of Moralities, this is clear: a man is brought face to face with the imperative facts of Christian faith. Contemporaries seem to have enjoyed Moralities, to judge from the number of printed editions. Clearly, the substitution in the moralities of abstract ideas (Love, Friendship, etc.) for human personalities of the Bible or legendary narrative, would tend to produce a less real effect if acted carelessly, or if the audience did not thoroughly comprehend, or was out of sympathy with, the meaning of the play. But the allegorical abstract ideas appeared as human beings, and in many Moralities the characters were not all abstract qualities—there were angels and devils, priests, doctors, and, especially in English plays, the Fool, under various names, chiefly that of the Vice. They could be vigorous and vivid. Four plot types dominate the earlier Moralities, sometimes alone, sometimes combined: the Debate of the Heavenly Graces, the Coming of Death, the Conflict of Vices and Virtues, and the Debate of the Soul and the Body. In England the earliest extant complete Morality play is the Castell of Perseverance (early fifteenth century). This traces the spiritual history of Humanum Genus [= Mankind] from birth to his appearance at the Judgment Seat of God, personifying the foes who beset his pathway, the Guardian Angel who helps him resist them, and the sacrament of Confession and Penance which strengthen him. Around 1500 a new kind of Morality develops. As performances began to take place indoors, in the hall of a prince or noble, rather than outside as before, and as they came to be done by professional actors, compression became necessary both in time and in the number of characters. The aims also became more secular. The result was the Interlude, a sort of briefer Morality. They were plays in dialogue between

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two or more performers, often as a dramatic diversion in the pause or interlude in a feast or other entertainment. The Moral Interlude deals only with portions of a man’s life; and the ethical teaching is mainly limited to warnings against certain sins (especially those of youth) and in others to exhortations to learning and study. (Examples: Hickscorner; John Rastell’s The Interlude of the Four Elements) This type of play was often used for propaganda, especially Protestant against Catholic. Some major writers developed the form to great effect, and influenced later Elizabethan drama - for example John Skelton’s Magnyfycence; John Heywood’s The Four P’s, The Pardner and the Frere. In the 1560s Preston’s Cambyses, ‘a lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth’, intermingled historical characters like the King of Persia with personified abstractions from the moralities like Shame, Diligence, Cruelty and Murder. Preston also personified the members of the body politic: the Commons and the Council. Shakespeare knew the play: in 1 Henry IV, Falstaff threatens to portray Prince Hal’s father ‘in King Cambyses’ vein’ Shakespeare also knew that the crowd-pleaser in the piece was the Vice, Ambidexter, who is (as his name implies) a double dealer: not unlike Falstaff. Recent scholarship has, rightly, stressed that the roots of Elizabethan drama lie in the cycles of mystery/miracle plays, and the Morality plays, that featured prominently in town life in the later Middle Ages in northern Europe. On the Continent these remained a regular part of the yearly programme until long after our period, and the best painting (by van Alsloot) of a pageant cart, with a Nativity play being performed, comes from Brussels in 1615. (Please go and see, if you can, the panel called ‘The Triumph of Archduchess Isabella’ (1615) by Denijs van Alsloot in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. It can be seen on the Web at www.theatrales.uqam.ca/chronologie/Isabelle.html with a close up of the Nativity in monochrome at college.holycross.edu/interfaces/vol24_images/belingard/belingard.htm In England, because of their often emphatic Catholic ideology, the Privy Council, dominated by aggressive and doctrinaire Protestants in the last years of Henry VIII and in the Protestant reigns of Edward VI and later Elizabeth, attempted the total suppression of these plays. This was for a long time only partially successful.

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Convention All societies, all art forms, operate on conventions. They are essential to understanding. In terms of art, poetry, music and drama, convention may be defined as an area of agreement between audience and author where the terms of the discussion are taken for granted, and the focus of interest lies in what will be made with those terms. And they can be used negatively or positively, and are equally powerful in either direction.

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Centre In Renaissance art, structure is meaning. We have largely forgotten, in the aftermath of Romantic redefinitions at the end of the eighteenth century, of art and poetry as impulse, and the forms proper to them, the Renaissance and Classical fondness for balance and symmetry in art, music and poetry, and for the way form could convey emphasis and meaning. The ‘central place’, be it the focus of sight lines in a painting, the central entrance of a classically designed building, or the middle scene of a play or the middle lines of a poem is often important. So when looking at Renaissance drama, it can be helpful to ignore the Act divisions (which in a lot of cases are imposed when the play gets printed, and are mostly imperceptible in actual performance) and think of plays as a sequence of scenes chiastically structured round a scene that is crucial, and often visually very memorable. Those who wish to go into this deeply interesting matter further could start by looking at Alastair Fowler, Triumphal Forms: Structural Patterns in Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, 1970).

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soliloquy We take soliloquies for granted because of our experience of Elizabethan drama, and easily forget that they do a very specific conventional job. As in the Interludes, or Moralities, soliloquy can act like a chorus—as the confessions and self-descriptions of Moralities do—to make sure the audience follow the implications of the represented action. Their use is a function of the idea of character in drama I discuss fully in my Very Brief Introduction. Characters can be not only symbolic objectively, but point their own moral in a suspension of the time/space of the play. Even in plays like Hamlet where soliloquies are very important, these points stand; and, also, note that Shakespeare makes far less use of the soliloquy or aside than do his contemporaries. It is also true that the nature of soliloquy changes over the time of Shakespeare’s career, and the assumption that we easily make, that in soliloquy we are being allowed inside a man’s head, is the fruit of a reading of Shakespeare’s later practice and may not be true in plays before Henry V and Hamlet.

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Lollard The Dutch lollaerd, ‘mumbler’, was borrowed in late fourteenth century English to describe negatively John Wycliff’s followers, regarded by many as an heretical sect pretending to great virtue and piety. (The word is used pejoratively by Harry Bailly in Canterbury Tales, B.1177). John Wycliff taught in Oxford 1354-81, and made some major attacks on the abuses of and the authority of the Church. He advocated reform of the Church, and highlighted its corruption by wealth and power. He advocated holy poverty. He questioned the spiritual as well as temporal authority of Pope, stressed the need for a Bible in English so that all might read it, and denied that auricular confession to a priest was necessary. Eventually, he attacked the doctrine of Transubstantiation. His doctrines were finally condemned as heretical, and many of his followers were burnt under the Statute De Heretico Comburendo of 1401. Wyclif’s influence was considerable, not only in England. He certainly affected the thinking of John Huss in Bohemia, and perhaps indirectly Luther. See Richard Rex, The Lollards, (2002)

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Prince’s Two Bodies The concept of these two bodies originates in the development in the early mediaeval period, in the light of discussion stemming from St Augustine’s The City of God, of a theology of kingship. It began to operate in England seriously in 1272 with the succession of Edward I, when England moved from, effectively, an elective monarchy to a hereditary throne. It is accompanied by a development of a ritual surrounding kingship (especially at coronation) which overtly borrows from religious ceremonial, and the mediaeval coronation rite is very similar to the ordination of a priest. The mysticism inherent in the idea of this second, political, body was partly a way to win support for primogeniture (the succession of the first born) - the body politic exists due to its being imbued with divine right and any man who rules must be as a ruler above the simple concerns of the flesh, and rebellion against him is intolerable, as well as impossible. ‘The King can do no wrong’ is not a statement about the man, but about the man-in-the-office. Just so, the personal unworthiness of a priest does not invalidate the sacraments he dispenses. Edmund Plowden (1517-1584), a Catholic jurist who was ‘singularly well learned in the laws of England’, as William Camden characterised him), described this view of the crown: For the King has in him two bodies, viz, a body natural, and a body politic. His body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a body moral, subject to all infirmities that come by nature or accident, to the imbecility of infancy or old age, and to the like defects that happen to the bodies of other people. But his body politic is a body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of policy and government, and constituted for the direction of the people, and the management of the public weal, and this body is utterly void of infancy, and old age, and other natural defects and imbecilities, which the body natural is subject to, and for this cause, what the king does in his body politic cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any disability in his natural body. (Les Comentaries ou Reportes de Edmunde Plowden,1571) See: Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, repr. 1997) (to return to the main text please use the green button

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Method acting Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky (b.1863) greatly affected ideas of acting in the twentieth century. He argued that if the theatre was going to be meaningful it needed to move beyond the external representation that acting had so far stressed. He created an approach that stressed the psychological and emotional aspects of acting. The Stanislavsky System, or ‘the Method’, held that an actor’s main job was to be believed (rather than recognized or understood). Stanislavsky’s Method first employed ideas such as ‘emotional memory’. In getting ready for playing a role involving fear, the actor should recall something frightening, and attempt to act the part in the emotional space of that fear. In what was in effect a break from previous modes of acting that held that the actor’s job was to ‘become’ the character, Stanislavsky believed that an actor should make the character become him or herself, with an immediacy of direct emotional experience. Using ‘The System’, an actor is required deeply to analyse his or her character’s motives, and discover the character’s Objective in each scene, and Super Objective for the entire play. One way of doing this was using Stanislavsky’s ‘magic if’. Actors have to ask many questions of their characters and themselves: one of the first is, ‘What if I were in the same situation as my character?’

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Vice The Morality plays, which continued to be played until well into Elizabeth’s reign, thus forming the theatrical language of the generation of Shakespeare, often used allegorical characterisation—characters whose names indicated their representation of abstract ideas—like Nobility, Clergy, Widow England, Magnificence, etc – even the seven deadly sins. One of the most important is the blackly comic and intensely attractive figures of the Vice: this is the villain, an evil character at root, but immensely attractive, witty, amusing—and tempting. And if tempters are not attractive, they are not tempters. This Vice descends from the tempter, the Devil, in the Mystery plays, who is a bundle of laughs very often, but underneath sinister – and comic, in that he does not know (but we do) that he is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting. Add to this the popular image of Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine philosopher who wrote Il Principe in 1513. This book described the way politicians behaved —not as they ought to, but as they did: the first job of a ruler is to stay a ruler, and any means are acceptable to that end. Shock and horror was the official open reaction: but everyone who was anyone had a copy of the book and read it under the bedclothes…. Machiavelli’s name became a noun, the machiavel, and a type of dramatic figure regularly encountered in renaissance drama. Often young, witty, clever, learned, attractive, and utterly amoral—and often dressed in scholar’s black— they are the disturbers, the villains of the piece. They borrow a lot of the features, sometimes, from the clown/Vice.

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Pastoral Pastoral as a mode has its roots in Classical poetry, especially that of Vergil. Nobody ever took seriously the idea of a perpetual spring where shepherds sat around all day making love and poems, and the sheep looked after themselves. Partly because of its deliberate echoes of the Golden Age, demanding comparison with the mucky present, pastoral in poetry could be used as a lens through which to examine, obliquely, refracted, the issues of now. Thus Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics often address not only big and permanent human issues like life, death, love, fame, and what is art for, but also the issues raised by Augustus’ settlement after the century of the Roman civil wars. Thus pastoral can be an intensely political mode, precisely because it pretends not to be. The spread of the taste for pastoral in the sixteenth century owes a good deal to the popular anthologies of poetry, like Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), and England’s Helicon, (1600). These anthologies of courtly poetry, playing the sophisticated game, spread courtly taste beyond the court. It was popular especially because in a time often of tension it mediated class differences, mystified conflict, and offered comforting fictions that, as William Empson said, hold out a possibility of resolution. (And fantasies of community appealed to the privileged few.) Pastoral drama of the Renaissance can do many of these jobs. The setting of a scene, or a whole play, in the country rather than at court implies a dialogue between them, a testing of values: exactly as we see the issues of court relocated in As You Like It, or the sheepshearing scene in A Winter’s Tale allows the confrontation of issues of nature and nurture, and the way in which children are trapped by, but may be able to resolve, the actions of their parents.

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The authorship question The ‘authorship question’, ‘who wrote Shakespeare?’ need not detain us. The Baconian or Oxfordian positions depend on massive conspiracy theories that were wholly successful for all Shakespeare’s lifetime and long afterwards with no hint of the leakiness that we see as a matter of course in all conspiracies. We are asked to believe they were only penetrated in the mid-nineteenth century by the perspicuity of Miss Delia Bacon, an American lady with no academic training and no fulfilled pretensions to scholarship. Those who argue that Bacon wrote Shakespeare can never have read Bacon. As G. K. Chesterton said, there is only one sense in which bacon wrote Shakespeare, and that is alimentary… The Oxfordian case has attracted a multiplication of conspiracy theories from the gentle to the lunatic, all flying in the face of chronology and plausibility. Recent attempts to suggest that the authorship question is academically respectable are just plain wrong: it is not.

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Humanities Insights The following Insights are available or forthcoming at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/ General Titles An Inroduction to Feminist Theory An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms

Genre FictionSightlines Octavia E Butler: Xenogenesis / Lilith’s Brood Reginal Hill: On Beulah’s Height Ian McDonald: Chaga / Evolution’s Store Walter Mosley: Devil in a Blue Dress Tamora Pierce: The Immortals

History Insights The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism The Holocaust: Events, Motives, Legacy Lenin’s Revolution Methodism and Society Oliver Cromwell

Literature Insights Conrad: The Secret Agent Eliot, T S: ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time Gaskell, Mary Barton Hardy: Tess of the Durbervilles Ibsen: The Doll’s House Hopkins: Selected Poems Ted Hughes: New Selected Poems Lawrence: Sons and Lovers Lawrence: Women in Love Shakespeare: Hamlet Shakespeare: Henry IV Shakespeare: Richard II Shakespeare: Richard III Shakespeare: The Tempest

Shelley: Frankenstein Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads Fields of Agony: English Poetry and the First World War

Philosophy Insights American Pragmatism Contemporary Epistemology Critical Thinking Ethics Existentialism Formal Logic Meta-Ethics Contemporary Philosophy of Religion Philosophy of Sport Plato Wittgenstein History Literature and Philosophy titles also in preparation: India and the British 1757-1947 The Italian Risorgimento The New Deal Lord Palmerston World War II: the North Africa Campaign, 1940-43 Aesthetics Business Ethics Foucault Heidegger Islamic Philosophy Lacan Marxism Mental Causation Philosophy of History Philosophy of Language Philosophy of Mind Plato’s Republic Žižek Renaissance Philosophy Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism Wonder Austen: Pride and Prejudice Blake: Songs of Innocence & Experience and The Marriage of Heaven & Hell’ Chatwin: In Patagonia Eliot, George: Silas Marner