Farewell to Falstaff: Henry IV, Part Two

In my instalment on Henry IV, Part One, I claimed that it “is Shakespeare’s most perfectly constructed play.” What to make, then, of this sequel, where we see three of the four major characters run it back and we get further exploration of issues we’d already seen in the first play? One issue that this play faces that makes it inherently less perfectly constructed is precisely that absence of Hotspur, whose larger than life personality got cut down in the Battle of Shrewsbury when Hal faced up to his doppelgänger and destroyed him, showing that he wasn’t the disappointment his father thought he was.

Except, now he’s that disappointment all over again. Part Two of the story sees that same tug of war between Falstaff and King Henry to claim Hal for their respective purposes (fun vs responsibility) that we saw in Part One, but this time there’s a Hotspur-shaped hole that we are informed of from the outset when we get a recap of the battle and Hotspur’s father, the Earl of Northumberland is informed that “Harry Percy’s spur was cold” now.

Interestingly, Shakespeare makes this opening scene one of confusion, with Northumberland being first told that it was his son that had slain Prince Harry and that the rebellion had been successful, before conflicting reports, including from an eye-witness, confirm that the opposite is in fact true. It shows the dangers of being in a filter bubble where yes men just tell you want you want to hear instead of revealing the true story.

Northumberland doesn’t want to hear that his son is dead, but neither does he want to live in a fantasy:

Yet, for all this, say not that Percy’s dead.
I see a strange confession in thine eye;
Thou shak’st thy head, and hold’st it fear or sin
To speak a truth. If he be slain, say so:
The tongue offends not that reports his death;
And he doth sin that doth belie the dead,
Not he which says the dead is not alive.
Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news
Hath but a losing office, and his tongue
Sounds ever after as a sullen bell,
Rememb’red tolling a departing friend.

The sickness…

If the main focus of Part One was honour (with Falstaff showing a deficit of honour — cowardice — and Hotspur showing an excess of honour — foolhardiness — and Hal ultimately discovering the golden mean), Part Two is concerned primarily with sickness, aging and death. King Henry is sick, but so too is the country which he rules, riven with rebellion that threatens the health of the state.

Susan Sontag says of illness as a metaphor:

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer), the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease — because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

In Henry IV Parts One and Two, as elsewhere in Shakespeare, the sickness experienced by a character is very much tied to their own failings: King Henry’s flawed character has influenced the flaws in his own body and in the body of state.

A search of the play text reveals innumerable instances of the words ‘sick’, ‘ill’, ‘disease’, ‘old’ and ‘death’, suffusing the play with with this melancholy sensibility. The first to explore the idea of sickness is Northumberland, who had missed the Battle of Shrewsbury and the death of Hotspur because he was at home sick. He claims that the news of his son’s death, rather than weakening him, has perversely brought him to health in some kind of reversal:

In poison there is physic, and these news,
Having been well, that would have made me sick,
Being sick, have in some measure made me well.
And as the wretch whose fever-weakened joints,
Like strengthless hinges, buckle under life,
Impatient of his fit, breaks like a fire
Out of his keeper’s arms, even so my limbs,
Weakened with grief, being now enraged with grief,
Are thrice themselves. Hence therefore, thou nice crutch.
⌜He throws down his crutch.⌝

Falstaff’s entrance to the play, in Act 1, Scene 2, comes with a continuing focus on sickness, with an examination of his urine:

FALSTAFF Sirrah, you giant, what says the doctor to my
water?
PAGE He said, sir, the water itself was a good healthy
water, but, for the party that owed it, he might have
more diseases than he knew for.

Falstaff is the poster boy for the hedonistic lifestyle, so when it comes to sickness and Falstaff it is inevitably going to be self-inflicted. And Falstaff being Falstaff, he’s also going to play sickness for laughs, as when he mocks the Chief Justice and makes reference to the King’s sickness:

This apoplexy, as I take it, is a kind of
lethargy, an ’t please your Lordship, a kind of
sleeping in the blood, a whoreson tingling.

Falstaff goes on to say that “it is the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking” that he himself suffers from, as he persistently tries to change the subject. He finishes the scene by declaring to himself (and the audience) that, “A good wit will make use of anything. I will turn diseases to
commodity.” As usual, he is looking to profit himself and he will turn anything to his use, even disease.

Sickness is further used as a metaphor by the Archbishop of York, one of the leaders of the rebellion against the king, who in explaining his grievances to his foe, Westmoreland, leans on the imagery of disease:

Briefly, to this end: we are all diseased
⟨And with our surfeiting and wanton hours
Have brought ourselves into a burning fever,
And we must bleed for it; of which disease
Our late King Richard, being infected, died.
But, my most noble Lord of Westmoreland,
I take not on me here as a physician,
Nor do I as an enemy to peace
Troop in the throngs of military men,
But rather show awhile like fearful war
To diet rank minds sick of happiness
And purge th’ obstructions which begin to stop
Our very veins of life.

Rebellion is thus framed as a medical procedure which will restore the health of the nation from its current diseased state.

It is King Henry’s sickness that the play is most concerned with, however, and his illness partly manifests itself in his inability to find solace in sleep, leading to this soliloquy with its famous final line:

How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hushed with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfumed chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lulled with sound of sweetest melody?
….
Canst thou, O partial sleep, give ⟨thy⟩ repose
To the wet ⟨sea-boy⟩ in an hour so rude,
And, in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

His sickness is intrinsically tied to the burdens he feels as king and the crown itself becomes a potent metaphor for that burden that he must bear. His younger son, Thomas of Clarence, observes:

No, no, he cannot long hold out these pangs.
Th’ incessant care and labor of his mind
Hath wrought the mure that should confine it in
So thin that life looks through ⟨and will break out.⟩

It is the labours of his mind that have weakened him. In the key confrontation between father and son in this play, King Henry retires to his sick bed and places his crown on his pillow beside him. Hal says he will look over him and, thinking that he has died, puts on the crown and leaves the room. The King is not yet dead, though, and when he awakes thinks that Hal has taken the crown from shallow ambition and has wished him dead all along. Hal is forced to reassure him that he actually looks on the crown with distaste for what it has done to his father:

Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,
And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: “The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore thou best of gold art ⟨worst of⟩ gold.
Other, less fine in carat, ⟨is⟩ more precious,
Preserving life in med’cine potable;
But thou, most fine, most honored, most renowned,
Hast eat thy bearer up.”

This striking image of being consumed by the crown that he wears, his body wasting away is a potent example of illness as metaphor.

…unto death

Sickness can, of course, lead to death, and death is on a lot of people’s minds over the course of the play, ranging from Falstaff’s musings on his advancing age to the major event that is the death of a king. The play starts with the report of Hotspur’s death and ends with a death of a friendship as Hal completes his rebirth into King Henry V and rejects his former companion Falstaff in order to live up to his responsibilities.

King Henry’s son Thomas of Clarence looks to signs in nature that his father is about to die:

The river hath thrice flowed, no ebb between,
And the old folk, time’s doting chronicles,
Say it did so a little time before
That our great-grandsire, Edward, sicked and died.

Humphrey of Gloucester agrees that “This apoplexy will certain be his end.” Everyone is anticipating his end, not least the king himself, who still thinks the worst of his dissolute son, fearing what will happen when he takes over the throne:

Harry the Fifth is crowned. Up, vanity,
Down, royal state, all you sage councillors, hence,
And to the English court assemble now,
From every region, apes of idleness.

…

O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows!
When that my care could not withhold thy riots,
What wilt thou do when riot is thy care?
O, thou wilt be a wilderness again,
Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants.

An England that has lost all semblance of civilisation and has been returned to the wolves: a post-apocalyptic vision or England today under Brexit, with its parliament full of ‘apes of idleness’?

Upon being reassured by Hal that he will be a worthy recipient of the crown after all, King Henry reflects that he will have an easier time of it in some respects:

And now my death
Changes the mood, for what in me was purchased
Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort.
So thou the garland wear’st successively.

He counsels him, however, to start a war abroad, “to busy giddy minds/ With foreign quarrels” so that they can work together instead of fighting each other. As we’ll see in Henry V, Hal takes up this advice.

Not only did Hal have to reassure his father before his death about the kind of king he’d be, he has to reassure his brothers and courtiers afterward that he will rule responsibly and not carry out petty vendettas:

This new and gorgeous garment majesty
Sits not so easy on me as you think. —
Brothers, you ⟨mix⟩ your sadness with some fear.

…

Yet weep that Harry’s dead, and so will I,
But Harry lives that shall convert those tears
By number into hours of happiness.

…

And, princes all, believe me, I beseech you:
My father is gone wild into his grave,
For in his tomb lie my affections,
And with his spirits sadly I survive
To mock the expectation of the world,
To frustrate prophecies, and to raze out
Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down
After my seeming. The tide of blood in me
Hath proudly flowed in vanity till now.
Now doth it turn and ebb back to the sea,
Where it shall mingle with the state of floods
And flow henceforth in formal majesty.

This is the promise he made back in Act One of Part One, that he would lower people’s expectations of them and then shine brighter than they thought possible when the time came. He had one moment already at the Battle of Shrewsbury and now that has father has died it is time to take on the mantle of responsibility full time. This means that he must return to another moment from Part One, when he told Falstaff while play-acting as the king that he would banish him. The literal death of his actual father necessitates the metaphorical death of his alternate father figure, the “ill angel” Falstaff.

When Falstaff, thinking that he will reap the benefits of his previous association with the new king, approaches him he receives this stunning and final rebuke:

I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester.
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane;
But being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing. Know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest.
Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know — so shall the world perceive —
That I have turned away my former self.
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots.
Till then I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.

Not only is Falstaff dead to him, but his previous self is also dead: he is not the thing he was. He has subsumed himself into his new role. He would not be who he is without that previous self but he feels he must move on from and turn his back on it, and on Falstaff.

Falstaff’s last word

These are not actually Falstaff’s last words in the play, which have him being escorted off forlornly by the Chief Justice, but I wanted to finish with his soliloquy from Act 4, where he delivers this rather magnificent ode to sack (wine), starting by dismissing the rather dour John of Lancaster, whom he compares unfavourably to his older brother Hal, because he’s not a drinker:

I would you had ⟨but⟩ the wit; ’twere better
than your dukedom. Good faith, this same young
sober-blooded boy doth not love me, nor a man
cannot make him laugh. But that’s no marvel; he
drinks no wine. There’s never none of these demure
boys come to any proof, for thin drink doth so
overcool their blood, and making many fish meals,
that they fall into a kind of male green-sickness, and
then, when they marry, they get wenches. They are
generally fools and cowards, which some of us
should be too, but for inflammation. A good sherris
sack hath a two-fold operation in it. It ascends me
into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and
dull and crudy vapors which environ it, makes it
apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery,
and delectable shapes, which, delivered o’er to the
voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes
excellent wit. The second property of your excellent
sherris is the warming of the blood, which,
before cold and settled, left the liver white and pale,
which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice.
But the sherris warms it and makes it course from
the inwards to the parts’ extremes. It illumineth the
face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest
of this little kingdom, man, to arm; and then the
vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me
all to their captain, the heart, who, great and puffed
up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage, and
this valor comes of sherris. So that skill in the
weapon is nothing without sack, for that sets it
a-work; and learning a mere hoard of gold kept
by a devil till sack commences it and sets it in
act and use. Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is
valiant, for the cold blood he did naturally inherit
of his father he hath, like lean, sterile, and bare
land, manured, husbanded, and tilled with excellent
endeavor of drinking good and good store
of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant.
If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle
I would teach them should be to forswear
thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.

It’s not exactly father of the year material, vowing to get your sons addicted to alcohol, but it’s okay, because Falstaff was never anyone’s actual father. He’s the id run rampant, the driver of fun in the play, that devil on the shoulder who’s always telling you to do the thing that you know you probably shouldn’t but would really like to do. Falstaff is life itself and that’s why he remains one of Shakespeare’s most enduring characters, even if he does get rejected in the end.

Henry IV, Part Two on film

The BBC Shakespeare Collection version of Henry IV, Part Two first aired in December 1979 as the second episode of Series 2, following straight on from Part One and employing the same cast members. There’s not much to say about it beyond my comments on Part One, except to say that it is also an effective production with strong acting from the leads. There’s some resonance between Jon Finch playing King Henry and his earlier role as Macbeth in Roman Polanski’s film, particularly in his soliloquy on sleep, which brings to mind Macbeth’s similar lament on his inability to sleep once he has murdered King Duncan.

Again, the real stand out adaptation of the play for me, leaving aside Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, is the Hollow Crown series, which also sees the same actors from Part One reprise their roles. Simon Russell Beale’s Falstaff continues to be a tour-de-force, even if this production omits his ode to sack that I included above. The production significantly amplifies the pathos in Falstaff’s character and we really feel for him when he gets rejected by the new king, the camera lingering on his reddened face in close up as he gets carted away.