Henry IV Part 1

23:17unknown guest:But the play is interested, I think, in where England sits in relation to the other parts of the islands. In Richard II, the earlier part of the narrative, you know, we've seen something of the English activities in Ireland in that period as well. But one of the most fascinating things, I think, in Henry IV Part I is the way in which the map is brought onto the stage. And it's going to be divided up between Mortimer and Glyndour and Hotspur, you know, between Wales, between the north of England and the south of England.

23:46Misha Glenny:Lawrence, you wanted to come in there. There's quite an interesting parallel to draw with King Lear, which also has a moment where a map is brought out and a kingdom is divided into three. And in King Lear, there's a very unspecific sense of exactly what is contained within those three parts of the kingdom. There are plenteous rivers and so on, but there isn't really a clear and precise sense of location. Henry IV is very different. You have a very clear sense that the kingdom will be divided up with Glendure getting the bit to the west of the Severn, and Mortimer getting the bit to the south of the Trent, and Harry Percy getting the bit, Hotspur getting the bit to the north of the Trent.

24:22Misha Glenny:So there's a much more distinctive sense of a kingdom. There's even an argument over the course of the Trent that Hotspur seems annoyed that it cuts him out of a bit of land because of where it bends around. And so he talks about recoursing it in order to get a bit more land. And I think more generally, Henry IV compared to some other plays just has a very distinctive sense of the kingdom. There are lots of place names, Holmden, Ravenspur, Shrewsbury, Bristol, Burton, Bridge North, Gloucestershire, St Albans. There are others. It has a very precise sense of geography. Lucy?

24:53unknown guest:But also in these scenes, we have the speaking of Welsh on stage. So Glendua and Mortimer's wife, who's Glendua's daughter, speak to each other in Welsh. But there's no dialogue specified in the printed texts that have come down to us.

25:06Misha Glenny:So you mean the director could say, right, I want you to say, actually, we're going to betray Henry IV here or we're going to betray Hal?

25:15unknown guest:Well, so there's quite a sizable Welsh community in London at the time. but there's nothing in the text that the play has come down to us that specifies what the actors say. There are just stage directions saying that Glyndour and Lady Mortimer speak in Welsh, you know, the lady speaks in Welsh and so productions have had to devise dialogue for those moments. We think there were probably a couple of Welsh speakers or people who could at least pronounce the words in Shakespeare's company at the time for that dialogue. So if you had Welsh spectators at the theatre in the 1590s they could have presumably got something slightly different from the play than the monoglot English-speaking audience would have got from it.

25:57Misha Glenny:Lawrence Publicova, what does the play tell us about the nature of power? I think one of the things it tells us is that it's incredibly important to some people and less important to others. You know, you've got Falstaff as perhaps the spokesperson of those. I mean, it's not that he doesn't want things, Falstaff, you know, preferment coming his way, But I think he's less sort of invested in the rise to power or the maintenance of power than some of the other characters around him. But I think the play also thinks about how power operates. I think one of the great scenes is where Hal and Falstaff act out Hal going to his father to answer for himself.

26:36Misha Glenny:And there is a moment where Falstaff sort of says, well, OK, take this joint stool as my throne and this pillow will be my cushion and so on. And it makes you think about, OK, well, how does one exert power? Is power partly about performance and imposing that performance on others? Is it something that you perform, that you inhabit identities rather than always having them? As Emma started off by saying, you know, this is a play where Henry IV comes to the throne and his power is very insecure. And so much of the play is about the maintenance of power, but also about its legitimacy. So when you talk about it being performative, are you saying that it's important for these characters to assert their narrative?

27:20Misha Glenny:I think that's certainly the case for Hal. You know, what gives him legitimacy? I mean, the play starts off with Henry IV, his father, doubting Hal's capacity for coming to power and properly ruling the kingdom. He even wishes that he had Hotspur as a son rather than Hal. So one of the things Hal learns how to do in this play is to adopt the right language and the right behaviour to appear a legitimate ruler. And a lot of that has to do with stealing the honour off Hotspur, particularly on the battlefield. I mean, it's significant that there's a single combat which Hal wins. I mean, as we know from other parts of the dialogue, really the reason the king wins at Shrewsbury is that the army of the rebels isn't as large as they would have liked it to be.

28:02Misha Glenny:but there's something about Howe's performance of chivalry in that moment that grants him a legitimacy that he wouldn't otherwise have. Emma, a lot of male characters in this play, not so many women. Why not? It's a really interesting question because actually in previous history plays Shakespeare has amplified women's roles. In Richard III famously, for example, he keeps Queen Margaret alive when historically she was out of the picture and that's because the voice offers something. So it is really interesting to think why not here. In some ways it's too simple, but I'll say it anyway. I mean, this is really a play about daddy issues.

28:38Misha Glenny:It's Hal and the King or Hal and Falstaff. It's Hotspur and Northumberland. These are men understanding themselves in relation to fathers or sons who overshadow them or undermine their authority or something. There isn't much room for women in that very patrilinear narrative. Lawrence mentioned that we do get the wife of Hotspur, Kate. Shakespeare likes Kates and often makes them quite feisty women but her feistiness is really only employed to say why have you sort of shut me out of everything. So it's a little cameo which almost reinforces the absence of women elsewhere. So I think this is really a play about male relationships.

29:26Misha Glenny:And it's interesting maybe to think when Shakespeare comes closest back to this kind of narrative, which I think he does in Hamlet, another coming of age story. He does actually want to triangulate that much more with a powerful female character in Gertrude. Lucy, what were the challenges for the first actors performing this play and what opportunities does it offer to the performer?

29:51unknown guest:I think one of the most important things about this play is the extent to which it's an ensemble piece. So there's a relatively even split between the leading roles in terms of numbers of lines and things. So Falstaff has about 20 % of the lines, Hal and Hotspur both about 18%, The King around 11%. And it demands really strong casting, I think, top to bottom. You can't get away with having one very charismatic lead actor who's carrying the rest of the cast. It's a play that poses challenges maybe in terms of its shifts tonally. Lawrence talked earlier about the way that you have this mixture of prose and verse.

30:29unknown guest:There are possibly sort of technical challenges for actors in those. But it's interesting that one of the scenes that has often been most popular in 20th, 21st century productions which is the play Extempore sequence where Hal and Falstaff take turns at playing Hal and the king, and the king lecturing Hal on his bad behaviour, which is an incredibly powerful, really funny scene in performance. It actually didn't figure on the stage for a while in the 18th and 19th centuries. And there's an anecdote that Abraham Lincoln actually had an actor who'd been in a production of the play to the White House.

31:05unknown guest:And one of the questions he asked him was, you know, well, this wonderful scene, one of the best scenes in the play, why is it not staged? And the reply of the actor is very interesting, because he said, there's never anything distinctive enough about the actor playing Prince Hal to make the impression interesting, to make the impersonation interesting. So presumably at that point, Hal wasn't really being viewed particularly as a leading role. It was being undercast a bit. Whereas if we move on into the 20th and 21st century, Hal has often been seen as a really important dramatic centre of the play, has often been very strongly cast by an up and coming actor.

31:48Misha Glenny:Emma, how much is that extemporary scene, the scene where Hal and Falstaff exchange roles? You know, at one point Falstaff is playing Henry IV, at one point Hal is playing Hal and then they swap roles. How important is that for the play, that one scene? I think it's fabulously important. It shows, as Lawrence has said, that kingship seems to be a matter of convincing props. So the actual king in the play may not look all that different from the pretend king because he too is pretend in the wider context of the theatre. I think it's very important. It's a way that Hal and Falstaff articulate anxieties about their relationship through the guise of these other characters, because it's in that guise that Hal is able to acknowledge what Falstaff most fears, that in fact he will have to reject him, as we've already discussed.

32:41Misha Glenny:And it brings the whole seriousness of the history play genre into a brilliant Saturnalian kind of upturning. I love the moment when they swap and Falstaff says, depose me. And you think we've had one of the most serious tragedies, historical tragedies in Richard II all about this. And here it's just a throwaway kind of wonderful joke for the swapping of parts. So I think it's thematically serious and revelatory, but also great fun, great theatrical fun. So after that, we go to the crucial battle of Shrewsbury, Lawrence. We've got Falstaff there, Hal there, Hotspur. All of their ideas of honour, their varying ideas of honour, are put to the test.

33:29Misha Glenny:Which one wins out in the end? I think the ideas of honour, as they are expressed by the political figures of the play, are always being buffeted by other forces, comic forces or subversive forces. And you get this even before Shrewsbury. So in the tavern scene at the end of Act 3, where everyone has, as usual, been speaking prose and Hal comes in with the news of the battle to come and interrupts this prose world with verse. And it's an absolutely brilliant exchange he has with Falstaff. He says, the land is burning, Percy stands on high, and either we or they must lower lie. So he speaks a heroic couplet, which is meant to sort of gee everyone up and go off to fight.

34:08Misha Glenny:And Falstaff replies brilliantly with rare words, brave world, hostess, my breakfast, come. Oh, I could wish this tavern were my drum. that is the drum the place where he's going to recruit soldiers so he sort of mimics Howe's already left by this point he sort of mimics Howe's style in a way that completely undercuts it as well and that seems to be Falstaff's role in the play really to question to probe these ideas of chivalric heroism and honour and the value of power that are expressed by other characters and so just before the battle at Shrewsbury Falstaff has his wonderful catechism on honour where he wonders what it is.

34:46Misha Glenny:Does it have skill in surgery? No. What is it then? It's a word. It's air. Who has it? He that died a Wednesday. You know, the honour is actually detrimental to living and for Falstaff the important thing is life. Give me life. So you have all these different ideas about what honour is swirling around in the play and I think Falstaff usually, in this play at least, gets the last word as he does in that scene in the East Cheap Tavern. But do you think Falstaff has an inkling that at some point fairly soon he's going to be thrown over? Yeah, that's a fascinating question. I mean, I think it is set up, as we've said, both in Powell's soliloquy in Act 1, Scene 2, so we know.

35:27Misha Glenny:But Falstaff also knows because of that scene that Emma and Lucy have both discussed the play extempore in the tavern. And that wonderful, four such simple words that Lucy's already discussed were, I do, I will. I mean, I guess the question there is who is speaking those words? I mean, it's Hal impersonating his father. But it seems that in that transition between I do, I will, Hal goes back to being himself and seeing himself in the future. And that exchange can be played any number of ways. And I think it's been quite popular more recently for Hal really become quite serious at that moment so that Falstaff senses that something is afoot.

36:05Misha Glenny:Emma, you wanted to come in there. I was just going to say that Hal has the perfect excuse to do the deed with Falstaff, doesn't he, Shrewsbury? Falstaff, I mean, very sensibly, but distinctly unheroically lies down and pretends to be dead in the battle. There's a completely wonderful stage direction where Falstaff riseth up, which makes him feel like a principal of the springs, a person who can't be killed, you know, more than more than human or something. But Falstaff then, in a way which is not so cheerful, and let's have another cup of sack and bring me my breakfast, sees the body of Hotspur and stabs the body, the dead body, in order to claim the kill for himself.

36:48Misha Glenny:It's a despicable act, I think, in any value system. And Hal knows that this has happened. He knows that Falstaff has not, in fact, killed Hotspur. He has the moment when he could complete the reconciliation with his true father by rejecting his pretend father. But he doesn't. He keeps them in a kind of balance at the end. So it's all it's all teed up for him to do precisely that rejection, but not yet. Lucy.

37:20unknown guest:Is that partly, though, because Shakespeare is keeping things open for the sequel? Yeah, but he's already thinking, well, I like this character. I'm going to want to keep him around.

37:30Misha Glenny:It's really interesting to think Falstaff lives to fight or not fight another day. Of course, I mean, that moment when Hal covers for Falstaff on the battlefield, that could easily have been the moment where he said, you old fool, I'm not going to stand up for you anymore. This could have been a moment of change. It seems completely straightforward in moral terms, doesn't it? This isn't looking him in the eye and saying, I don't want any more fun in East Cheap. This is the battlefield. This is a different place. And Hal flunks that, maybe. I don't know whether that's the way to see it. But you're absolutely right, Lucy.

38:09Misha Glenny:Shakespeare flunks it too because we want more box office, more false stuff. So at this moment, Hotspur's dead. Hal appears to be reformed or on the way to reform. do we start cheering for Hal as the potential national hero that he becomes later on in Henry V with Agincourt and all that? I think at the end of the play we almost don't have time. It sort of wraps itself up with a sense that Shrewsbury has been a victory for the king's forces but that there is more trouble to come. You know, this is a battle, not the war. So I don't think we have quite settled to where our place is.

38:50unknown guest:I always wonder with that ending as well, I think to some extent we are sort of on Hal's side at that point. He's the one who's had soliloquies. He's the one who we've been seeing in certain ways. But at the same time, Hotspur is incredibly attractive theatrically and is incredibly interesting. And so is there also that sense of, oh, but we were interested in him. We were interested in this actor's performance and Hal has kind of cheated us of that.

39:15Misha Glenny:It's rather peculiar, Lawrence, that Hal appears to be a minor character initially. Yes, I mean, Hotspur is certainly, he gets his name twice on the front page. And I think the previous play in the sequence, if we want to think of it that way, as Emma mentioned, is a tragedy, is a sort of perfect tragedy, really. And if there is a tragic figure in Henry IV Part I, it's Hotspur. I mean, he's the one who dies, he gets a very good death speech. And I think what's interesting about his outlook is that something is lost when he's gone, because when you get to part two, the chivalric language of Hotspur, which is always teetering into the comic but still fairly serious, becomes the language of pistol, which is a real pastiche of that chivalric heroism.

39:59Misha Glenny:And so there's something that's, you know, an energy or a principle of Henry IV part one which feels a bit more optimistic that by Henry IV part two in Hotspur's absence seems to have been lost and the world's been closed down a bit. Lucy, Henry IV Part I, still a very, very popular play. How popular was it in the 1590s when it first came out?

40:25unknown guest:As far as we can tell, it's hugely popular. It's printed very quickly. The first edition seems to have been pretty much read to death. There's only one fragment of one copy that survives. And there's another edition again in the same year in 1598. Then there are seven more editions before 1623 when the folio was published. And it's also one of the more popular Shakespeare plays in terms of the number of recorded performances. And our information about recorded performances is incredibly patchy, incredibly sporadic. There's the additional problem with the Henry IV plays that if a play is noted down as being Falstaff, you're not quite sure whether it's one of the two Henry IV plays or even Mary Wise of Windsor.

41:07unknown guest:But there are references to, say, a court performance of the first part of Falstaff. So that's probably the first part of Henry IV. It's also incredibly prevalent just in the discourse in the period. There are allusions to the play everywhere. Allusions to Hotspur's speech that Lawrence quoted earlier, which gets parodied and recycled in other plays. Lots and lots of references to Falstaff, particularly references to the sequence in which he exaggerates the number of people who attacked him during the robbery at Gad's Hill. But also the honour speech and so references to Falstaff on honour are really ubiquitous going right through into the 1640s, 1650s.

41:52Misha Glenny:Emma, we've heard how perceptions of this play change through the ages. Howl was unimportant to begin with but becomes more important later on. Do you think the 20th and 21st centuries interest in the relationship between father and son is a reflection of our times or was it always there? I think the way that we understand that father and son relationship is much more psychological, perhaps, rather than political or as well as political. So I think we can see this less as a play about a son who needs to prepare himself for the highest office in the land and more about a son living with and living up to and challenging his father's preconceptions about what he will do.

42:45Misha Glenny:and that becomes a much more everyman kind of experience. And that's what we've done with Shakespeare's histories. Mostly we've either said that they're all about government and regime change or they're about families who just happen to be kings and princes but really their interest is in the psychology of families which we can all share. And do you think anyone's got the balance right between that analysis of power and analysis of family relations? You'd think that we should have got that right, since it seems so contemporary to us that our own royal family has both its personal psychologies displayed to us, as well as the kind of political ones.

43:28Misha Glenny:But my sense is that it's been difficult for us to manage a fully cast production, which leans into all of those elements. We are, I think, in the age where we're in celebrity casting, aren't we? And celebrity casting tends to be around Falstaff, I think. My thanks to Lawrence Publicova, Emma Smith and Lucy Munro. Next week, it's 4 ,000-year-old laws from Babylon and their impact then and now. That's the Code of Hammurabi. Thank you for listening.

44:02unknown guest:And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

44:10Misha Glenny:What did we miss out, Emma? Do you know what I was thinking when we were talking was how we adopt the name Hal for the prince. I think in the text he's called Prince. Henry, his father calls him Harry and it's Volstaff who calls him Hal. So it's just so interesting to me that even in that way we name him we're sort of pally with him in the East Cheap sense rather than leaning into the other relationships he has. And I suppose it's a way many people understand having different identities with different people, isn't it? That different groups in their life have a different name or a different nickname for them and that that's one of the ways that you understand that you're a slightly different person in this world and in this other world.

45:02Misha Glenny:And that seems very pressing about him. Yes, I suppose, as Lawrence was indicating, about how he can switch his identity, what today we call code switching, is very interesting how effectively he does that, more so than other people, I would say, in the play. Hotspur is just one directional. And Hotspur is another Harry. And I think it's interesting that, you know, the king would rather call his son Harry, as though he's sort of wanting him to be more like Harry Hotspur. And I think it is interesting that we continue to refer to him as Hal across the three plays in which he features, despite the fact it's only really Henry IV Part I where he's mostly Hal, isn't he?

45:44Misha Glenny:He's much more Harry. Yes. I was also really interested about the play sequence, not just Henry IV Part I, II and V, but the whole thing from Richard II, in a way, to Richard III. If you look about it, there is a sort of season one, season two, season three element to it, wouldn't you say, Lucy?

46:06unknown guest:We don't think they would have been performed on consecutive afternoons, sort of one, two, three, four. They might have done parts one and two on consecutive afternoons. There's a little bit of evidence from things like Philip Henslow's account book or diary that sequels are occasionally kind of clustered together. But more often they would have been seen as single things. But there must have been some interesting things around who played who in what. Probably the same actor is obviously playing Hal Henry across the different plays. But what happens with an actor who has a major role in one play and then doesn't appear in the next?

46:42unknown guest:Contemporary productions have quite often cast the same actor who plays Hotspur in part one as Pistol in part two. So that Pistol really is functioning as a debased parody of Hotspur.

46:55Misha Glenny:And Lawrence, you mentioned Richard II. Correct me if I'm wrong, but if I recall it, Richard II basically gets his just desserts, or at least maybe not just desserts, but let's face it, he was a bad king. and Bolingbroke, who becomes Henry IV when he usurps the throne, is seen basically a good thing and yet in Henry IV Part I he's carrying this original sin, as it were. Yes. I mean, I think, you know, however successful a deposition is, it then leaves a question about legitimacy, doesn't it? I mean, you know, you can no longer really speak, though Henry does his best, about the divine right of kings.

47:40Misha Glenny:I mean, it's wonderful that the final scene of the play opens with him saying, thus ever did rebellion find rebuke. And you think, hmm, that wasn't so much the case when you rebelled, was it? But yes, I mean, and it's interesting how some people who are very critical of Richard during the play, Richard II, then see him as this rather saintly king afterwards when we get to Henry IV, part one, when they're not so happy with Bolingbroke. So, yes, I think Bolingbroke is a character who I suppose is haunted by the fact that he's sawn off the branch that he's sitting on by deposing a king. And Emma, we didn't quite get into the entertainment aspect of the Bull's head scenes.

48:18Misha Glenny:I mean, they're terribly funny, aren't they? They're really funny. And they are, I mean, just as Falstaff is so characterised by his expanse, you know, and all the images we use about him play into that, that he's larger than life or, you know, taking over the play or something. So, too, these scenes in the boss head are really amplificatory. If you can make one insult, you would make ten and that you pile them up and they become funnier and funnier through this litany of baiting and back and forth, kind of fat shaming, as we would now probably call it. But, you know, they often, if you don't play them as funny and if you see a more washed up, self-interested tavern scene, which is also possible, then they're very, very attenuated in performance.

49:04Misha Glenny:You know, for them to work, I think they do have to be life affirming and funny. And there are just great things. I mean, when Falstaff is sleeping and they find the bar bill, which is, you know, a penny for bread and all this money on sack. I mean, it's just, it really, it needs, doesn't need translating into the present in lots of really great ways. Lucy?

49:26unknown guest:They're also, I mean, they're the sort of closest that Shakespeare gets to representing contemporary London as well, aren't they? Even though they're set in an early historical period. And even things like the sack is, you know, the sack, drinking sack is a very Elizabethan thing to do. So it's that weird thing that the early modern history play does and Shakespeare also does of writing these plays that are about the historical past but are about the historical moment, not just in terms of politics, but in terms of a lived reality and a kind of material reality.

49:58Misha Glenny:Yeah, I mean, I was going to say something similar. I mean, because Shakespearean comedy is usually set in far flung places, we don't normally think of him as writing city comedy in the manner of, say, Ben Johnson. This feels about as close as we get to Shakespeare representing the world through which he moved. And that does involve that anachronism, you know, sack is Elizabethan, not something you would have been drinking in 1400. There's a reference to turkeys, which don't arrive in England until the 16th century. and there is that reality effect isn't there of all the superfluous detail just this stuffiness of those scenes which I really enjoy And I guess that's a way of Shakespeare signalling actually this is about now

50:33unknown guest:In some ways I think yeah and the other way in which those scenes particularly or rather actually the play in general is very much of its moment is linguistically so you know it's full of neologisms you know it's not a play that's written in a cod medieval speak even though Shakespeare and his collaborators do that sporadically elsewhere. So like the Gower choruses and Pericles, for example, are written in Cod Middle English. But what you get here is very contemporary ways of speaking, particularly around swearing. So Falstaff swears a lot, Hotspur swears a lot, and they use Elizabethan oaths.

51:08unknown guest:So it's, you know, splud, which is a contraction of by God's blood, slid by God's eyelids. So that's swearing on different parts of the body of the crucified Christ, which is hugely offensive in this period. So offensive that in 1606, playing companies are actually banned from using that kind of bad language on stage.

51:28Misha Glenny:So how does he get away with it? Well, there's some evidence

51:33unknown guest:that the folio version doesn't have a lot of those oaths. So there's some evidence that the company actually cut a lot of that bad language after this act is passed in 1606 so that they're not going to get into trouble. but it does seem to be sporadic and quite possibly the actors put them back in even when they've been taken out as well.

51:51Misha Glenny:And people are interested in how they swear as well because Lady Percy gets told off for not swearing properly by her husband.

51:57unknown guest:Yeah, Hotspur is like really potty-mouthed in this play by Elizabethan standards.

52:03Misha Glenny:I think it could be time for a cup of tea. You need to be off. I know Emma, you need to be off. Does anyone have tea or coffee? I'd love a cup of tea. A cup of coffee would be lovely, thank you. I'm fine actually, thanks.

52:13unknown guest:In Our Time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.

52:42unknown guest:Alderman, from Karl Marx to Marie Curie, from Emily Bronte to Leonardo da Vinci. How did those exceptional minds do their work? And are there ways of thinking we can emulate today? To find out, listen to Human Intelligence on BBC Sounds.