King Henry IV Part 2, page 11
Politically, it is the play’s climactic scene. But dramatically, like so much else in Part Two, it is not the climax that the play seems to have prepared for.78 It undercuts the audience’s expectations and thus makes a fascinating contrast with the way in which the rebels are defeated at Shrewsbury. There, the focus was on battle; here, on negotiation. There, Prince Harry scaled chivalric heights to defeat the charismatic Hotspur in one-on-one combat; here, Prince John, a minor figure in the play, wins by double-crossing the rebels. The world of chivalry thus gives way to a world of policy: Prince John, even though his strategy might be defensible as a means of saving the kingdom from protracted civil wars, nevertheless appears cold and perfidious – a student of Machiavelli, as some in Shakespeare’s audience would have recognized – and his political subterfuge is rewarded.
Elizabethan audiences, however, may have condoned such subterfuge as necessary and even godly. On the one hand, as Jorgensen details in his analysis of sixteenth-century treatises on the morality of military conduct, perfidy was usually condemned in dealing with one’s enemies, with whom, as Thomas Elyot in The Boke Named the Gouernour urged, ‘consideration aught to be had of iustyce and honestie’ (3.5).79 Yet ‘the growing stress and wearisomeness of military campaigns’ in the 1590s, particularly against the Irish, were ‘reducing the English government to desperation and unscrupulousness’ (Humphreys, 238), and honour was rapidly being supplanted by expedience in the conduct of war. Apologists for the government were quick to enlist God on their side. One anonymous commentator in 1591 praised the English general Sir John Norris for his victory over rebels in Brittany, ‘[w]hereby we may see how God rebateth the edge of rebel harts, daunteth their courages and ranverseth their actions with his byblows or unlooked-for countrebluffs’. 80 The Church unsurprisingly spoke out powerfully against rebellion as a sacrilege. Archbishop Sandys, for example, exhorted hearers to obey those in office, for ‘God … hateth iniquity, and will not suffer conspiracy, rebellion, or treason against lawful magistrates either unrevealed or unrevenged.’81 While Elizabethan audiences may have balked at Prince John’s boast that ‘God, and not we, hath safely fought today’ (4.1.349) and been sceptical of his promise to redress the rebels’ grievances ‘with a most Christian care’ (343), they nevertheless may have understood his perfidy as a necessary expedient born of political desperation (Humphreys, 238). Indeed, they may have found greater fault with the Archbishop for sacrilegiously enlisting the authority of the Church to incite rebellion – ‘the Bishop / Turns insurrection to religion’ (1.1.200 –1) – and, according to Holinshed (3.529), for abusing his spiritual office by ‘promising forgiueness of sinnes to all them, whose hap it was to die in the quarrel’ (Humphreys, 238, 240).82
Ultimately, of course, one can only speculate how Elizabethan audiences would have responded to the Gaultree episode, for there is no hard evidence. That is not true for later audiences, however, whose distaste for the scene has been vividly documented. Dr Johnson spoke eloquently for generations of readers and playgoers who, on hearing Prince John sentence ‘these traitors to the block of death’ (4.1.350), have felt ‘indignation to find this horrible violation of faith passed over thus slightly by the poet, without any note of censure or detestation’ (Plays; rpt. in Vickers, Shakespeare, 5.122). Elizabeth Montagu, feeling a similar moral revulsion, concurred with Johnson four years later in wishing that Shakespeare ‘had employed his eloquence too in arraigning the baseness and treachery of John of Lancaster’s conduct in breaking his covenant with the rebels’ (ch. 4; rpt. in Vickers, Shakespeare, 5.334). Benjamin Heath addressed the ambiguities of the scene more circumspectly than either Johnson or Montagu, acknowledging that although the Gaultree double-cross ‘is founded in strict historical truth’ and Shakespeare ‘is undoubtedly justifiable in giving it us as he found it’, it nevertheless has ‘a very unhappy and disagreeable effect on the reader or spectator, as instead of acquiescence at least in the punishment of the rebels it cannot fail of exciting in him compassion toward them when so treacherously ensnared, as well as a very high degree of indignation against Prince John … for prostituting his character by so deliberate and odious a piece of perfidy’ (260 –1; rpt. in Vickers, Shakespeare, 4.557). Shakespeare was not the moralist some would have him be; nor was his goal to revise history as poetic justice.83
For viewers today, the Gaultree episode is often regarded as an exposé of the cynical abuse of power on both sides. Among the rebels, Northumberland, who has saved his skin by fleeing to Scotland, sends a patently false excuse for failing to assist his brothers in arms (4.1.6 –16); the Archbishop uses his ecclesiastical authority to sanction a rebellion which may be motivated as much by private revenge as by common grievances, as he intimates when he yokes his ‘brother general’ (94) – that is, the ‘commonwealth’ – with his ‘brother born’ (95) – William Scroop, who was beheaded by Bolingbroke – as justification for his quarrel;84 and Mowbray, distrustful of the King, wants war at any price in payment for allegations of treason made by Bolingbroke against his father, which led to his banishment from England (R2 1.1.35 – 46, 87–108 ). Motives among the royal party are scarcely less self-serving. The capture of the rebel leaders succeeds in ridding the King of the most potent threat to his rule and paves the way for his son’s succession; and the plan for doing so was devised by Westmorland, who attached his star to Bolingbroke’s when seeking to redress wrongs done by King Richard, yet now arrogantly claims a King’s authority to determine whether wrongs alleged by others need to be redressed at all. No one’s hands are clean; no one’s motives honourable. Shakespeare seldom depicted politics more astutely.
Gaultree is the moral counter to Shrewsbury: it is about peace ignobly won, and it needs no Falstaff to add an ironic gloss on the proceedings. Without his capture of the rebel knight Collevile, however, the longest act in the play would be a relentless succession of political scenes unleavened by Falstaffian wit. Collevile’s capture, however, is but a thin counterpart to Falstaff’s bogus killing of Hotspur at the Battle of Shrewsbury (Part One 5.4.120 –8), and its humour depends on the audience’s recalling the reputation for valour he gained thereby: cf. 1.2.149 –52. Falstaff at Gaultree lacks the dramatic purpose he had at Shrewsbury. There, his self-serving behaviour and pragmatic commentary provided an ironic counterpoint to the chivalrous deeds and heroic hyperbole of the warring factions. Here, his capture of Collevile simply echoes the taking of the rebel leaders by a trick; and with no acts of valour in need of counterpointing, Falstaff’s role is superfluous. His appearance at Gaultree provides comic relief, but no ideological alternative to the main action.
The royal family saga
In a radical departure from Part One, Shakespeare displaces the royal narrative of Part Two by banishing the King and Prince to the outskirts of the play for much of its first four acts. Harry’s first scene, which does not occur until Act 2, affords him little to do other than languish in idleness and entertain himself by making a scabrous attack on Poins’s character, and his late arrival at the tavern in 2.4 to trick Falstaff is of little consequence. The King makes his first appearance only in Act 3, in a scene which does not so much advance the plot as establish that he, like the kingdom, suffers from unrest: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown’ (3.1.31). This scene, furthermore, was omitted for some unknown reason from the first issue of the Quarto: clearly it was written not to advance the plot but because without it, Henry would not appear until his deathbed scene in Act 4.
The opening scene of Act 3 thus introduces a much-needed royal presence to weigh against the Prelate’s Rebellion. It depicts the ailing King – now at his palace in Westminster (2.4.360) – and his nobles as political strategists who are trying to cope with the uncertainties of war and the ‘revolution of the times’ (3.1.46) which defeat even the best-laid plans. ‘How chances, mocks / And changes fill the cup of alteration / With divers liquors!’ laments the King (51–3), who lives in constant fear that his usurpation of Richard will be punished by the rebellion of those who once helped him to the throne. This scene reinforces the themes of sickness, betrayal, guilt and political necessity which, as embodied in Henry, lend the play a tragic resonance to balance the comedy of the Falstaff plot.
Rumour plays a significant role in exacerbating the King’s distress. In discussing the unhealthy state of the nation with his nobles in terms similar to those used by the Archbishop –
Then you perceive the body of our kingdom,
How foul it is, what rank diseases grow,
And with what danger, near the heart of it
(38– 40)
– he falls victim to unreliable reportage as readily as the rebels do. Calculating the number of enemy troops, he worries that ‘They say the Bishop and Northumberland / Are fifty thousand strong’ (95 – 6), a figure Warwick disputes by invoking the danger of listening to the false reports that Rumour warned against in the Induction: ‘It cannot be, my lord. / Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo, / The number of the feared’ (96 –8). Yet just a few lines later, in an attempt to bring comfort to the King, Warwick himself appears to have fallen victim to rumour by reporting that he has received ‘A certain instance that Glendower is dead’ (103), when in fact Glendower was still very much alive. No news, it seems, is to be trusted.
Furthermore, the King indulges in a revisionist history in which rumour and memory become faulty allies. In recounting Richard’s prophecy that civil war will be the wages of usurpation, a prophetic theory of history to which he here seems to subscribe, he looks to the Earl of Warwick for confirmation:
But which of you was by –
[to Warwick] You, cousin Neville, as I may remember –
When Richard, with his eye brimful of tears,
Then checked and rated by Northumberland,
Did speak these words, now proved a prophecy?
‘Northumberland, thou ladder by the which
My cousin Bolinbroke ascends my throne’ –
Though then, God knows, I had no such intent …
‘The time will come that foul sin, gathering head,
Shall break into corruption’ – so went on,
Foretelling this same time’s condition
And the division of our amity.
(65 –79)
Henry’s calling on Warwick as witness, however, is a fiction, for no Earl of Warwick appears in Richard II, and the family name of Warwick in Part Two was Beauchamp, not Neville. Yet Warwick apparently does not dare to contradict the King. On the other hand, Shakespeare himself may have been misremembering. Since the Earl of Westmorland was named Rafe Neuill in both Holinshed (3.529) and Stow (Annales, 529), it is conceivable that Shakespeare meant to include Westmorland in this scene, not Warwick.
Yet there is more to Henry’s sleight-of-memory. In Richard II, Richard is ‘checked and rated’ in the deposition scene (4.1.222–52) when Northumberland attempts to get him to confess his crimes against the state. The lines Henry quotes, however, are from 5.1.55 – 65, a confrontation scene from which he was absent. Furthermore, the lines themselves are misquoted: Richard’s reference to ‘The mounting Bolingbroke’ (5.1.56), with its accusation of predatory ambition, here becomes the familiar ‘My cousin Bolingbroke’; and Richard’s poetic ‘The time shall not be many hours of age / More than it is’ (57–8) becomes a more prosaic ‘The time shall come’. Various explanations for these misquotations are possible, from the exculpatory (Henry was not present and therefore is simply reporting hearsay) to the machiavellian (Henry calculatedly revises Richard’s words to play down his own role as usurper). In any case, the effect of these snatches of misremembered quotation is of thought-in-process, so that Henry’s speech, with its self-interruptions akin to those in Hamlet’s first soliloquy, has a veneer of authenticity.
This misrecollection of events in Richard II also contributes to the network of reports by which Part Two interrogates the nature of historical truth and invention. While one might assume that the King is knowingly revising events in order to exculpate himself, his refashioning of history is similar to that indulged in by the Hostess and Justice Shallow: anecdotal, self-serving and based on faulty memorial reconstruction. In the middle of the play, then, in 3.1 and 3.2, Shakespeare dramatizes the unreliability of historical narration in both the court and the country, and in this way he subjects the stories of those in power to public scrutiny. Beginning with Rumour’s false report of what happened at Shrewsbury and ending with the King’s reporting the prophecy that he would die in Jerusalem, a bit of lore which suggests that he is not committed to obliterating all vestiges of popular belief when it can serve his purpose, Part Two uses oral testimony to complicate chronicle history with the dramatic immediacy of history as personal reminiscence.
The climax of chronicle history in Part Two involves not the quashing of rebellion, as in Part One, but the question of succession – the fitness of Harry to rule after the King’s death. The royal plot comes into focus only in the final quarter of the play. Shakespeare carefully keeps the King and Prince Harry, who have remained in London following the Welsh campaign, out of the Gaultree episode. Although they may be tainted as the beneficiaries of Prince John’s policy, they are neither its instruments nor its authors: the King has appeared only once before news of Gaultree is brought to him, and the Prince has been kept in the wings, appearing briefly in two scenes of little political import, though he does admit to ‘bleed[ing] inwardly that [his] father is so sick’ and laments that his ‘keeping such vile company’ as Poins makes that admission sound hypocritical (2.2.46 –8). Now, the dying King asks for his son; but, told that he is dining in London ‘With Poins and other his continual followers’ (4.3.53), the King grieves to imagine the ‘rotten times’ England is destined to have when he is succeeded by his son, ‘when his headstrong riot hath no curb’ and ‘rage and hot blood are his counsellors’ (60 –3). When they meet, therefore, their interaction is politically and emotionally charged.
Attending on his sleeping father, Harry thinks him dead and takes the crown into the next chamber. The King, who wakes to find the crown missing, summons his son to scold him for his impatience. Where, during their confrontation in Part One, the Prince was able to redeem himself by appropriating the chivalric diction of Hotspur, here the stakes are higher: the King is on his deathbed, Harry has in his hands evidence of a parricidal wish, and this will be their final interview. The King’s accusations sting:
Harry the Fifth is crowned! Up, vanity!
Down, royal state! All you sage counsellors, hence,
And to the English court assemble now
From every region apes of idleness!
(249 –52)
Harry, who has been found ‘in the next room / Washing with kindly tears his gentle cheeks’ (212–13), responds to his father’s rebuke with seemingly unfeigned emotion and seeks to prove his loyalty and love; but as he does so, he recounts a speech which bears little resemblance to what he actually has spoken just moments earlier. Then, the words he spoke to his apparently dead father were sober and politically aware: ‘My due from thee is this imperial crown, / Which, as immediate from thy place and blood, / Derives itself to me’ (172– 4). Now, his remembered apostrophe to the crown is far more histrionic and self-justifying: ‘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 worse than gold” ’ (287–90). The Prince’s recollection of what he said, which continues for several more lines, amounts to a theatrical fiction intended to exonerate him from the disloyalty of which he stands accused – the sort of revisionism at which Harry repeatedly proves himself skilled. It is sufficient, however, to win his father’s trust:
God put in thy mind to take [the crown] hence,
That thou might’st win the more thy father’s love,
Pleading so wisely in excuse of it.
(307–9)
What the King seems to admire most, and what gives him hope for England’s future, is Harry’s speaking so eloquently in his own defence, a talent which reassures the King that his son has mastered the art of political rhetoric sufficiently to rule the land. In performance, though, their reconciliation can prove to be far more emotionally moving than I have here allowed. Often, in an uncharacteristic show of paternal affection, the King embraces the Prince, beginning his speech with a passionate ‘O my son!’ borrowed from the Folio;85 and a repentant Harry, drying his tears, sits on the bed – the King instructs him to sit ‘by my bed’ (310), but actors invariably elect to make the scene more intimate by having the father and son in closer proximity – while the King offers him ‘the very latest counsel / That ever [he] shall breathe’ (311–12).
In his dying speech, the King gives the Prince instruction in policy, rehearsing the devious methods by which he came to power – thereby calling into question his earlier protest that ‘God knows, I had no such intent’ (3.1.72) – and urging him, as a means of diverting rebellion after his accession, ‘to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels’ (4.3.342–3). The father and son are more honest with each other in this scene than in its counterpart in Part One (3.2), yet they share a sense of political calculation which allows the upshot of their conversation – Harry’s determination to keep the crown – to sidestep the question of legitimacy: ‘You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me; / Then plain and right must my possession be’ (349 –50). This couplet occludes the sins of usurpation and regicide by which Henry secured the throne and thus permits his son to substitute linear succession for divine right.86
