King Henry IV Part 2, page 15
If indeed the actor playing Falstaff performed this Epilogue at the Curtain, the final section would have acquired special potency, for its subject is the identity of Falstaff himself and the offence given by that character when he was named Oldcastle, an association which Shakespeare’s company was forced to disavow. Kemp himself is assigned the task of reassuring playgoers that ‘Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man’ (32). In Fehrenbach’s view, this disavowal must have been dictated by ‘Tilney’s campaign to launder the plays of any lingering offence to the Brooke family. The famous Oldcastle line in that final speech, so unsubtle, so unfunny, so overtly pointed, and so unrelated to the rest of the play, comes off more like an official announcement made by a stern Master of the Revels than a witty quip … written by a clever playwright’ (97).
As if for proof that the name Oldcastle is not at issue here, the speaker tells the audience that Shakespeare is contemplating another Falstaff play in which the fat knight will follow the King to France where he ‘shall die of a sweat’ (Epil.30), a term often used for a cure for syphilis.112 But this in itself is problematic, because it recalls numerous sweating references which directly link Falstaff to the historical Oldcastle who, refusing to recant, was burned at the stake – references which intimate that this indeed was ‘the man’.113 In Part One, for example, the Prince says, ‘Away, good Ned. Falstaff sweats to death’ (2.2.105); and in Part Two, Falstaff lards his own speech with references to sweating. ‘I mean not to sweat extraordinarily’ in the wars, he tells the Lord Chief Justice (1.2.208–9). ‘Do ye yield, sir, or shall I sweat for you?’ he asked Collevile; for ‘If I do sweat, they are the drops of thy lovers and they weep for thy death’ (4.2.11–14). And he reassures Shallow that the new King will be moved to see them ‘stained with travel and sweating with desire to see him’ (5.5.24 –5). In a play where references to Falstaff’s sweating are so insistent, the memory of Oldcastle’s death by fire hovers just beneath the surface. Despite its denial of Falstaff’s identity as the historical Oldcastle, then, the Epilogue forges a strong link between them. Furthermore, it is the only epilogue in which Shakespeare reveals his plans for a future play. It is ironic that in the play he eventually wrote, Falstaff indeed is martyred, not by the audience’s ‘hard opinions’ (Epil.31), but by the King’s. Obviously, then, although Shakespeare was contemplating Henry V at this time, he had not yet decided to exclude Falstaff from it.
EDITORIAL CHOICES
There are two, arguably three, different versions of Henry IV, Part Two, but for various reasons none of them provides a fully authoritative basis for an edition. For reasons explained in Appendix 1, I deem it prudent to use the text with the least apparent intervention, the first issue of the Quarto in 1600 (Qa), and to add to it those passages from the other texts which seem authoritative: 3.1 from the second issue of the Quarto (Qb, 1600) and eight passages which appear for the first time in the 1623 Folio (F) – but otherwise to alter only what, in Qa, is obviously in error by seeking alternative readings in F. In cases where a reading in Qa is defensible, even though another reading may seem preferable, I typically choose it, explaining the merits of each reading in the commentary.
All passages found in F but not in Q, and all alternative readings of single words or phrases adopted from F, are enclosed by superscript Fs. Speech prefixes have been silently regularized, with names and titles spelled out in full, not abbreviated. As is customary in Arden editions, I have modernized spelling and punctuation; I have, however, retained archaic spellings if they indicate idiomatic pronunciations or regionalisms that are important in defining a character’s social class or geographic origin. Where there are differences in punctuation between Q and F that could lead to discrepant readings of a speech or passage, I follow the lead of Q, though I do so fully aware that a scribe’s or compositor’s habits of punctuation have inevitably contaminated the punctuation they found in their copy-text. In cases where F has printed as verse what in Q is prose, I elect to follow Q for reasons explained in my account of how F compositors encountered problems in casting-off. When differences between Q and F spelling or punctuation are significant enough to affect meaning, those differences are discussed in the commentary notes.
Finally, I have kept stage directions to a minimum, reprinting those in Q and only occasionally adding to them directions from F (within superscript Fs) or fleshing them out with information (in brackets) such as entrances and exits that may be necessary to a basic understanding of the action. Although it is tempting for modern editors to provide fuller stage directions to help readers visualize what may be occurring on stage, such directions violate the spirit of original Elizabethan theatrical practice, in which actors figured out what to do from cues given in their individual ‘part’ copies without explicit direction. They also limit the imaginative interplay between text and reader, wherein one combs the text for clues to piece together a picture of what may be transpiring, then imagines alternatives to that picture in which the most obvious clues are rejected, and new possibilities for staging replace them. For the most part, required stage business is implicit in the text. An editor need not make it explicit.
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1 I call the Prince ‘Harry’ rather than the more commonly used ‘Hal’ because he is referred to as Harry 21 times in the play but only four times as Hal. When discussing the Prince in Part One, I revert to calling him Hal because that is the familiar name by which Falstaff refers to him 35 times: with the exception of Poins’s use of ‘Hal’ twice, the name occurs ‘only on Falstaff’s lips’ (A. Barton, 110). Falstaff calls the Prince by the more formal ‘Harry’ only when impersonating the King at the tavern (1H4 2.4.388– 404). In Part One, ‘Harry’ is a name shared by the Prince and his rival Hotspur; in Part Two, it is used for the King and for Hotspur, but only three times each. The name, in effect, belongs to the Prince alone in Part Two.
2 Stephen Booth’s indictment of the play as a ‘still-born [and] exhausted point-for-point echo of Part 1’ is especially searing. The play’s preoccupation with frustrated expectations, he argues, becomes the governing principle of the play’s aesthetic as well; but Shakespeare’s ‘perverse rhetorical purpose … whereby one treats of ennui by engendering it in one’s audience’ is ‘misconceived’ and has never succeeded ‘in making his audience like it’; for ‘one cannot reasonably ask artists and audiences to submit to a disappointing play on the grounds that it succeeds in being disappointing’. Booth thus favours ‘abandoning 2 Henry IV to print and bardolatrous festivals’ (270).
3 C.F. Tucker Brooke speculates that the play may have been ‘an unpremeditated addition caused by the enormous effectiveness of the byfigure of Falstaff’ (333); and Shaaber borrows Brooke’s term to interpret the play as ‘an unpremeditated sequel’ (‘Unity’, 223).
4 Shaaber painstakingly diagrams the number of scenes in the two plays, finding in the disposition of those involving chronicle history and those involving Falstaff evidence that Shakespeare simply copied the successful formula of the first play in the second (‘Unity’, 221). To a degree, however, Shaaber ignores differences in the structures of the two plays to make his point.
5 Sherman H. Hawkins elaborates on Hunter’s argument in ‘The structural problem revisited’.
6 On the convergence of service and friendship as a form of paternalistic protection, ‘a legacy of feudal obligations’ which helps to explain Bardoph’s role in the play, see Weil, 81– 4.
7 Wilson, First Part, x–xii. He had introduced this idea three years earlier in Fortunes, 64; E.M.W. Tillyard expanded it in his study of how Morality traditions influenced the development of the Prince (264 –304); and Humphreys (1H4, xxviii), embraced the idea that ‘the moral events’ of the two plays, ‘Hal’s redemption in chivalry and justice’, run thematically ‘in parallel’. Irving Ribner viewed the Prince’s twin reformations similarly as ‘a ritual process to be taken more symbolically than literally’, each one ‘necessary to the creation of the perfect king’ (171). Wilson’s ‘symbolic arrangement’ persisted even as late as 1982, when Hawkins explored how the two Henry IV plays portray the ‘moral testing’ of the Prince in ‘valor’ and ‘justice’ (296 –8).
8 John Upton, Critical Observations on Shakespeare, 2nd edn, 1748, rpt. in Vickers, Shakespeare, 3.294 –5.
9 See Kastan, 1H4, 18. Kastan records an early reference to the play as ‘the firste part’ in the Stationers’ Register for 25 June 1603, but this reference, he suggests, was intended to distinguish the play from Part Two, which had also been published in quarto, and confirms that the two plays ‘were understood to be independent and self-sufficient’.
10 Johnson, 4.235; rpt. in Vickers, Shakespeare, 5.121.
11 Capell, Notes, vol. 1, cited in Humphreys, Ard2, xxii.
12 Wilson, Fortunes, 4. Just two years later, in 1945, Wilson altered his view to allow that Shakespeare may originally have planned a single play, then revised his plan when ‘Falstaff, grown “out of all compass”, needed a double drama to contain him’: ‘Origins’, 15.
13 The anticipation of Tillyard’s work by the German critics August Schlegel and Hermann Ulrici is discussed on pp. 32–33.
14 In his endnote to Part Two, Johnson allows that ‘As this play was not, to our knowledge, divided into acts by the authour, I could be content to conclude it with the death of Henry the Fourth… . These scenes which now make up the fifth act of Henry the Fourth might then be the first of Henry the Fifth; but the truth is that they do unite very commodiously to either play’ (4.255; rpt. in Vickers, Shakespeare, 5.123).
15 Wilson, ‘Origins’, 2–16, conjectures that the text of Famous Victories represents ‘a much abridged and debased version of two plays belonging to the Queen’s company’, which performed them in the 1580s as a vehicle for Richard Tarlton.
16 My view is anticipated by, and indebted to, Shaaber (‘Unity’, 221) and Kastan (1H4, 21).
17 Corroborative evidence that this Falstaffe play refers to Part Two has been found on a fragment of paper in records of the King’s Office of the Revels, inserted in a MS of the History of Richard III, which lists plays being considered for court performances in 1619/20 and on which is written ‘nd [presumably ‘2nd’] part of Falstaff not plaid theis 7. yeres’ – that is, since 1612/13. This is the last record of a performance of Part Two before the closing of the theatres by Parliament in 1642. See Marcham, 33, and Melchiori, 37.
18 Charles Beecher Hogan (1.144 –94 and 2.238–77) records all performances, by theatre, of Part One and Part Two during the eighteenth century in London. Though Part One was frequently performed on its own and was clearly more popular than Part Two, theatres would regularly stage the two plays during the same season; but performances of them were often separated by weeks or months, so that audiences could see the two in proximity only occasionally. The same trend continued throughout the nineteenth century: see Norwood, 348– 415.
19 End-note to Part Two in Plays, 4.235; rpt. in Vickers, Shakespeare, 5.124.
20 See Odell, 1.41–2, 54.
21 The text for this production, which starred Macready as the King, Charles Kemble as the Prince and John Fawcett as Falstaff, was basically the same as that used by J.P. Kemble for his 1804 production, published by Mrs Inchbald in 1808. It has been published in facsimile as Henry IV, Part 2: Coronation Production 1821. Opening at Covent Garden on 25 June and running for twenty-seven consecutive performances, this was the most successful production of the play in the nineteenth century (Norwood, 362). See also Odell’s description of the staging, 1.166 –9.
22 Of Cibber’s performance in 1738–9, Thomas Davies wrote, ‘His manner was so perfectly simple, his looks so vacant … that it will be impossible for any surviving spectator not to smile at the remembrance of it… . Cibber’s transition from asking the price of bullocks, to trite, but grave, reflections on mortality, was so natural, and attended with such an unmeaning roll of his small pig’s-eyes … that I question if any actor was ever superior in the conception or expression of such solemn insignificancy’ (1.306 –7, rpt. in Wells, 19 –20).
23 On the sparse stage history of Part Two in America up to the early twentieth century, with ‘at least five revivals’ of note, see Winter, 373– 6. The most notable of these was mounted in 1841 by James Hackett, a popular American Falstaff who, in a reversal of the usual flow of high culture, played the role in England as well.
24 Orford, 90 –1, discusses the Old Vic directors’ apparent ambivalence about staging the two parts of Henry IV as ‘offering one unified vision’ while disregarding continuity of casting. Other productions of the two parts together include Barry Jackson’s for the Birmingham Rep in 1921 and Robert Atkins’s for the Old Vic in 1923, both of which more successfully offered them as one unified play (Orford, 92– 4).
25 Witness, for example, the Sheffield Telegraph review of 25 April 1932 emphasizing Falstaff’s emergence as a fully-fleshed ‘conscious’ character, and the Evening News review of the same date describing the scene in which Falstaff is ‘cruelly spurned by the newly-crowned king’ as unforgettable.
26 The key to Olivier’s performance of Shallow as a ‘crapulous, paltering scarecrow of a man’, according to Kenneth Tynan’s memorable account, ‘is old-maidishness’: he ‘has quick, commiserating eyes and the kind of delight in dispensing food and drink that one associates with a favourite aunt’; indeed, one might mistake him for ‘a crone-like pantomime dame … were it not for the beady delectation that steals into his eyes at the mention of sex’ (48–53).
27 The title was changed to Chimes at Midnight for its US release. For the screenplay, Welles adapted conflations he had staged in the US (1938) and Ireland (1960).
28 Tillyard, 269. He interprets the Prince as ‘a man of large powers, Olympian loftiness, and high sophistication’ who throughout the two plays embodies ‘the abstract Renaissance conception of the perfect ruler’ defined by Castiglione, Lyly and Elyot (275 –80). Three years later, Lily Bess Campbell, in another groundbreaking book, viewed the plays somewhat differently, though still as a cycle, by reading them in the light of contemporary historical writing and Tudor political propaganda.
29 Robert K. Sarlos (117–31) discusses Dingelstedt as a pioneer in the staging of Shakespeare’s histories as a unified cycle and in cutting or revising significant portions of plays, especially the three parts of Henry VI, to ensure narrative coherence; Grene (31–5) explores Dingelstedt’s indebtedness to ‘the ever greater canonization of Shakespeare’ as the German national poet. Decades later, in Stratford-upon-Avon, Frank Benson was credited with originating the history cycle when he staged six history plays together in what was dubbed ‘The Week of Kings’ in 1901; but unlike Dingelstedt’s, his cycle was not a coherent dramatization of Plantagenet history. Rather, his selection of plays was opportunistic, drawing on productions he had mounted in previous years, each focused on an individual king. Henry IV, Part Two was chosen because of the accession of the Prince as Henry V, but Part One was not, Benson instead opting to revive King John. Grene (35 –8) and Orford (83–8) provide illuminating accounts of Benson’s cycle and its revival in 1905 and 1906. See also Sally Beauman on Benson’s resistance to Charles Flower’s suggestion that he present a cycle of history plays (32–3).
30 This and the following quotations from newspaper reviews of the 1951 productions are cited by Worsley in Worsley & Wilson, 48–76.
31 Tynan’s and the critical citations that follow are quoted in an account of the production in Leiter, 186 –7.
32 Underlying Hall and Barton’s concept of Shakespeare’s entire cycle of histories – they had staged the first tetralogy in 1963 – was Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, first published in Poland in 1961, which viewed the plays through the lens of Eastern European Marxism tinged with French Existentialism and even Absurdism, as if they had fused the politics of Brecht with the nihilism of Sartre or Beckett. Kott regarded the cycle as ‘a constant procession of kings’ in which history itself is the protagonist (9, 30). For his discussion of the ‘Grand Mechanism’ of history, see his chapter 1, ‘Kings’.
