O, for a Muse of Fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of podcasting!  Welcome to the Clubhouse, everyone, and I hope you enjoy today’s episode of the Classic English Literature Podcast.  We’re back in Shakespeare’s theater for his plays about Prince Hal – the Henry 4ths and Henry 5th – so order up some fizzy ale, a bit of fruit, nuts, cheese, and oysters: the Chorus is mounting the stage, and he will tell all.

But while he's clearing his throat, I want to send out a special thank you to a listener.  Davis, I really appreciate your generous donation to the show.  Davis was a student of mine years ago and is now a wonderful teacher himself.  Hey, Davis, if you’re still in touch with any of the old gang from room 309 in the Hawk’s Nest, let them know I was asking for them!

Ooh! The play’s beginning!

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If you think about it, so many of Billy the Bard’s works dwell upon two main subjects: the problem of kingship and the struggles of parent-child relationships.  Fully one-third of his plays draw from English history and investigate the actions, values, and characteristics of a monarch.  Beyond the history plays, tragedies like Macbeth or King Lear or Hamlet consider the issue.  The Roman plays, too, like Julius Caesar and Coriolanus.  The relations between children and parents – and especially between fathers and sons – similarly dominate.  The three aforementioned tragedies, certainly, as well as Othello, but also problematic comedies like Taming of the Shrew or the Merchant of Venice.  The sonnets to the Fair Youth, too, one might argue, have a parental slant.

The plays we’ll look at today tackle both themes.  As a group, the plays now titled Henry IV parts 1 and 2 and Henry V (with the preceding Richard II) are sometimes called the second tetralogy (the first being the Henry VI plays with Richard III). You may have heard the term Henriad – like Homer's Iliad – because these are Shakespeare’s epic.  The term is not really settled – sometimes it refers to all eights plays, sometimes just the second tetralogy, sometimes just the Henry 4 and 5 plays, which is how I’ll be using it in this episode.  

Some find it  easy to see the three plays of the Henriad as something of a coming-of-age story for young Henry Plantagenet, usually called Hal before ascending the throne.  Henry IV, part 1 opens with King Henry IV, lately Bolingbroke, who deposed Richard II to become the first Lancastrian king, dealing with, in essence, two rebellions.  Firstly, Owen Glendower, a Welsh rebel, holds Edmund Mortimer, the king’s cousin hostage while in the north, Harry Hotspur has sparred with the Earl of Douglas.  But while the King struggles to cement his authority, his son and heir, Prince Hal, slums it down in the taverns and brothels of Eastcheap with a rabble of thieves and ne’er-do-wells led by the irrepressible Sir John Falstaff, a fat, lazy, gluttonous, drunken knight who acts as a sort of foster-father to the young prince.

Political tensions in the north rise, despite the fact that Henry IV admires Hotspur, even to the point of wishing 

that it could be proved

 That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged

 In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,

 And called mine “Percy,” his “Plantagenet”!

 Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.

Listen to Hotspur’s speech while arguing with Worcester about why he has a right to keep prisoners Henry demands.  Hotspur says:

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap

 To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon,

 Or dive into the bottom of the deep,

 Where fathom line could never touch the ground,

 And pluck up drownèd honor by the locks,

 So he that doth redeem her thence might wear

 Without corrival all her dignities.

It is this obsession with honor and martial glory that Henry finds wanting in his own son and, maybe (if he’s honest) in himself. While Henry laments the great unquietness of his realm, and promises - seriously - to go on Crusade, yet he acknowledges his responsibity for the turmoil: 

My blood hath been too cold and temperate,

 Unapt to stir at these indignities,

 And you have found me, for accordingly

 You tread upon my patience. But be sure

 I will from henceforth rather be myself,

 Mighty and to be feared, than my condition,

 Which hath been smooth as oil, soft as young down,

 And therefore lost that title of respect

 Which the proud soul ne’er pays but to the proud.

He has been too soft, too lenient, too merciful, and his underlings and rivals see this as weakness.  No more Mr. Nice Guy!  

The hardness that Henry feels he must now put on is that which Hal, too, must assume in time to come.  The prince is not unaware of this.  In the tavern, Hal abandons the elevated blank verse of the royal court and easily speaks the prose of the proles. At the start of Act 4, Hal gives a lengthy discourse on his facility with working-class slang: “I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life.”   He’s, to use a modern term, code-switching – adapting his language to his environment.  That environment is dominated by Falstaff, perhaps the greatest comic character ever created (indeed, with only Hamlet as his rival, perhaps the greatest character ever created full stop), represents the anti-Henry.  He is a force of life, of gusto.  His oft-cited rotundity visually reminds us of his boundless appetites.  Many point to his origins as the Vice character in the old morality plays, or an allegorical representation of the cardinal sins of Sloth and Gluttony and Lust.  There is a rather famous scene in the tavern in which Falstaff and Hal role-play, first Hal playing himself and Falstaff the King.  Hal demands, tellingly: “Dost thou stand for my father and examine me upon the particulars of my life!”  

Dr. Freud, paging Dr. Freud!

Of course Falstaff “stands in” for Hal’s father.  In a parody of the later confrontation between the prince and the king, the two trade witticisms, ripostes, and insults, Falstaff talking up his own fabricated worth in the voice of the king.  Then, they switch roles, and Hal channels his father, heaping abuse on Falstaff/Hal: “that villainous abominable misleader of youth . . . that old white-bearded Satan!”

Falstaff replies with what I think is one of the most moving speeches in all of Shakespeare, a defense not only of himself, but of the joys of life, be they ever so crude and unchivalrous:

That he is old, the more the pity; his white hairs do

 witness it. But that he is, saving your reverence, a

 whoremaster, that I utterly deny. If sack and sugar

 be a fault, God help the wicked. If to be old and

 merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is

 damned. If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s

 ⌜lean⌝ kine are to be loved. No, my good lord,

 banish Peto, banish Bardolph, banish Poins, but for

 sweet Jack Falstaff, kind Jack Falstaff, true Jack

 Falstaff, valiant Jack Falstaff, and therefore more

 valiant being as he is old Jack Falstaff, banish not

 him thy Harry’s company, banish not him thy

 Harry’s company. Banish plump Jack, and banish

 all the world.

Banish all the world – all that for which we live.  Yes, he’s a rascal, a liar, a thief, and a drunkard.  But he is life, human life.

Hal’s response never fails to utterly chill me: “I do, I will.”  Devastating.

Hal will continue to squander his time in the Boar’s Head Tavern with Falstaff and company,but  he has already revealed to us his cunning plan.  It’s a bit of a long speech, but it’s crucial to an understanding of the play’s view of kingship and sonship:

I know you all, and will awhile uphold

 The unyoked humor 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 wondered at

 By breaking through the foul and ugly mists

 Of vapors 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 wished-for come,

 And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.

 So when this loose behavior I throw off

 And pay the debt I never promisèd,

 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 offense a skill,

 Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Hal performs a kind of public-relations ju-jitsu, using his father’s displeasure as a means of crafting an image of redemptive monarchy.  It’s crafty, but it’s also manipulative, and shows a coolness in Hal’s character.

At the end of the play, Hal indeed seems to have made good his promise.  At the battle of Shrewsbury, the Prince offers to stand in single combat against Hotspur (this is ahistorical, by the way.  They never met on the battlefield and Hotspur was significantly older than Hal, but it makes for great drama, no?).  He confesses his backsliding:

For my part, I may speak it to my shame,

 I have a truant been to chivalry,

 And so I hear he doth account me too.

 Yet this before my father’s majesty:

 I am content that he shall take the odds

 Of his great name and estimation,

 And will, to save the blood on either side,

 Try fortune with him in a single fight.  

The King consents, despite his reservations, because he’s just so proud of his big boy!  But note again Hal’s performance – I get the feeling that he’s playing his father here, and don’t believe for a second that he actually feels ashamed of his past frolics with Falstaff’s gang.  This is the moment of his glorification, when Falstaff becomes the sullen ground from which the Prince of Wales glitteringly ascends.  The fat knight gives his famous “catechism” at the battle, highlighting the contrast between his clear-eyed realism, Hotspur’s chivalric idealism, and Henry/Hal’s cool pragmatism:

What is honor? A word. What is in that word

 “honor”? What is that “honor”? 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. Honor is a mere scutcheon. 

The image of the scutcheon, from heraldry, a coat of arms, is particularly apt.  It’s an appearance, a means of identification, only valued by those who subscribe to the ethic the symbol points to.  Like Tinkerbell and the fairies, it only exists if you believe it does.  And this is why Falstaff survives, Hal is victorious, and Hotspur dies. 

Of course, Hal defeats Hotspur, but gets separated in the battle.  Falstaff comes upon the corpse, stabs it with his own sword, and claims the kill.  Hal abides by the fraud, telling the old man: “if a lie may do thee grace, I’ll gild it with the happiest terms I have.” Later, the Prince tells Lancaster how he has learned to “cherish such high deeds.”  The juxtaposition here is telling: the politician plays to the crowd, just as an actor. Expediency is the watchword.

And so the Prodigal Son returns, except that in the Biblical parable, the errant child learns his lesson and throws himself upon the mercy of a loving father.  Here, the prodigality was calculated, calibrated for maximum political effect.  Hal does not learn a lesson over the course of the play – he always knew it, and he knew that, in the service of the monarchy (his father’s and soon enough his own) he must sacrifice Falstaff and the common people in order to lead them.  He can only be among them, never of them.  That becomes more evident on the fields before Agincourt.

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Henry IV Part 1 ends somewhat ambiguously, or at least without resolution.  Father and son ride off into the sunset to quell all rebellion in the land, as the violins swell and the brass blares a fanfare, for they will “not leave till all our own be won.”

The play was so successful, indeed, the most popular published play by Shakespeare in the 1590s, that by 1599 he had penned a sequel, one that he probably had not intended when the first play concluded.  Much of the popular demand centered on Falstaff – the punters wanted more of the fat knight – so the playwright largely repeated the structure in part 2 that had served part 1 so well.  Hal seems once again to have fallen into dissolute ways, distancing himself from his father’s court, but engineering his phoenix rising from the ashes act . . . uh, again.

Falstaff gratifies with witty speeches, the popularity of his sidekick Pistol was such that the ensign made it into the title page, clearly as a draw.  Internecine strife plays a less obvious role in part 2.

But despite providing a vehicle for Falstaff (as Shakespeare will again with The Merry Wives of Windsor, a comedy with a much diminished Falstaff, a caricature of the Henriad’s character) and bequeathing a couple of quite famous lines, such as “He hath eaten me out of house and home” and “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” the play is dwarfed by its predecessor and successor.  Hal becomes king by the end of this one, though, and offers a chilling line that neatly sums up his rise to the throne and eerily predicts the nature of his reign.  In his final casting off of Falstaff, the new King says, “I know thee not, old man,” finishing, “Presume not that I am the thing I was.”

The final play in the trilogy, The Life of King Henry the Fifth, is very much misnamed.  Really, the play focuses on the events surrounding the Battle of Agincourt in the autumn of 1415 and then Henry’s marriage to Princess Katherine.  Shakespeare’s primary source here, in addition to the reliable Holinshed, is an older anonymous play, from perhaps the late 1580s, called The Famous Victories of Henry V (actually, he poached events from this play for the entire Henriad).   

Here, we see the fully mature Hal as Henry V, the martial monarch.  In the prologue, the Chorus refers to him as “warlike Harry, like himself,” assuming the bearing of Mars, god of war.  That phrase is interesting, sort of a doubly redundant ambiguous simile or something. Harry is warlike: a warrior-king.  But the allusion to Mars makes warlike also comparative: like war itself, Harry personifies it.  Then the phrase “like himself” means something like, I don’t know, impersonating himself by being authentically himself by being like Mars.  At any rate, he is no longer playing the dissolute prince.

But he is rather touchy when other people bring it up. Early in the play, the bishops of Canterbury and Ely hope to maneuver the King into a renewed conflict with France over Henry’s claim to that country’s crown.  This, they hope, will distract the young king from an issue with Church revenues.  We are treated to long and fawning speeches, descriptions of Salic law, the air-tightness of Henry’s claim through Edward III, and appeals to his honor and image.  Lord Exeter helps out, saying, “Your brother kings and monarchs of the earth / Do all expect that you should rouse yourself / As did the former lions of your blood.”  It’s all so over the top, so exaggerated..  The crafty young monarch sees through them, almost, it seems to me, teasing them about his reservations, including the probably very serious threat of Scotland.  Nonetheless, Henry feels reticent, and has demanded that any military expedition be predicated upon unimpeachable evidence:

And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord,

That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading,

Or nicely charge your understanding soul

With opening titles miscreate, whose right

Suits not in native colours with the truth;

For God doth know how many now in health

Shall drop their blood in approbation

Of what your reverence shall incite us to.

Therefore take heed how you impawn our person,

How you awake our sleeping sword of war:

We charge you, in the name of God, take heed.

So he is conscious that a claim exists and that he should, by right and tradition, exercise his claim, but only if it is honorable.  Then, ambassadors from France come with a message from the Dauphin, and a gift.  The Dauphin of France has sent King Henry of England tennis balls.  The King is enraged by this insulting allusion to his playful youth, especially made by one to thick to see its purposes:

we understand him well,

How he comes o'er us with our wilder days,

Not measuring what use we made of them.

He then commits to invading France:

I will rise there with so full a glory

That I will dazzle all the eyes of France,

Yea, strike the Dauphin blind to look on us.

And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his

Hath turn'd his balls to gun-stones; and his soul

Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance

That shall fly with them: for many a thousand widows

Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands;

Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;

And some are yet ungotten and unborn

That shall have cause to curse the Dauphin's scorn.

Sounds a bit like Hotspur here, doesn’t he?  He holds the Dauphin fully responsible for the terror the English army will unleash upon the French people and countryside, a wave of destruction that will torment those not yet born.  It is a hellish speech.

And it is not the only one.  On his campaign, before the gates of Harfleur, he demands the city’s immediate surrender or

I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur

 Till in her ashes she lie burièd.

 The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,

 And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart,

 In liberty of bloody hand, shall range

 With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass

 Your fresh fair virgins and your flow’ring infants.

Even on the battlefield, such language strikes us as shocking.  The graphic, almost indulgent, threat of physical, sexual, and moral violence against a civilian population is quite repulsive.  Now, is this more theater?  Would Henry actually make good on such threats in the case of Harfleur’s resistance?  Well, don’t know.  I wouldn’t bet on his forbearance.  At Agincourt, when he hears of the arrival of French reinforcements, he commits what then was a violation of chivalry, and today would be a war crime.  He orders the execution of all French prisoners:

But hark, what new alarum is this same?

 The French have reinforced their scattered men.

 Then every soldier kill his prisoners.

 Give the word through.

Even the enduringly famous “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,  Or close the wall up with our English dead!” is a pep talk urging his soldiers to close the line with their corpses.  The “Cry God for Harry, England, and St. George” is very stirring, though.  And, course, the St. Crispin’s Day speech – oh, my God!  Is there a better piece of martial oratory?  The answer is no.  There isn’t.  

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

 For he today that sheds his blood with me

 Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

 This day shall gentle his condition;

 And gentlemen in England now abed

 Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,

 And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

 That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

Harry is no doubt an effective war leader and rhetorician.  He plays a populist note here, that he is one of the “vile,” the peasant class, or that they are of him.  It is the “gentlemen” abed in England who lack nobility.  Today’s political rhetoric pitting the “elites” against the “real people”, usually by leaders with all the elite accoutrements, is a baser version of Harry’s rousing exhortation.

But perhaps I’ve gone far enough in pointing to Henry’s performative politics.  I admit I risk reducing Shakespeare’s rich characterization to a conniving opportunist, and he is certainly not that.  He is, as he will say, a man, and one with vulnerabilities and blindspots.  One of the more famous scenes occurs at the beginning of Act 4.  On the eve of battle, Harry is troubled in his conscience, dons a cloak, and anonymously moves about the camp, listening to his men speak about their fates.  Umm . . . ok, the secret cloak thing does still seem a bit performative, but bear with.

He comes upon a sentry, named Michael Williams, who challenges him.  The king, pretending to be a common soldier, tries to put his own case for the justness of the coming battle, using ambiguous phrases such as “I think the King is but a man as I am,” at best tautological, and “I will speak my conscience  of the King. I think he would not wish himself anywhere but where he is.”  But Williams – and note that Shakespeare gives this interlocutor a name, an identity; he’s not just “Soldier 3” or “Crossbow Fodder 2.”  We have a man speaking here, questioning the honor of the king’s enterprise.  He says:

But if the cause be not good, the King

 himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all

 those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a

 battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry

 all “We died at such a place,” some swearing, some

 crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left

 poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe,

 some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard

 there are few die well that die in a battle, for how

 can they charitably dispose of anything when blood

 is their argument? Now, if these men do not die

 well, it will be a black matter for the king that led

 them to it, who to disobey were against all proportion

 of subjection.

Williams directly confronts the rhetoric Harry uses to intimidate his enemies and spur on his soldiers, points out the emptiness of such nationalistic bloviation, the callousness of such images of death when the human reality behind those images gets lost in the haze of patriotic or egotistical fervor.

When Williams and the other soldiers leave, Henry gives a soliloquy that shows how little he has absorbed in his time with the common men.  Rather, he pities himself for the burden of greatness, echoing his father’s “uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” and he longs for the simple, pleasant life of the mindless peasant, since those who rule cannot

sleep so soundly as the wretched slave

 Who, with a body filled and vacant mind,

 Gets him to rest, crammed with distressful bread;

 Never sees horrid night, the child of hell,

 But, like a lackey, from the rise to set

 Sweats in the eye of Phoebus, and all night

 Sleeps in Elysium.

Were you even listening, man?  Those men ARE NOT sleeping soundly.  They see the HORRID NIGHT.  

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Occasionally, when some tabloid or website needs a listicle to kill some some space, somebody will put out a poll asking for England’s most popular ruler in history.  Henry V usually occupies a slot close to the top, usually below good Queen Bess and Richard the Lionheart, but still respectable, though his reign is quite brief and the country plunges into civil war soon after his death.  I think what explains his continued popularity, or at least what contributes to an explanation for it, is the image created by Laurence Olivier in the 1944 film version of the play.  Olivier gives us a consummate hero-king in wartime – certainly a necessary bit of spirit-raising during the Second World War – and by excising some of the play's less flattering portrayals of Henry, we get a version of him to rouse the patriotic blood.  

But to mistake Shakespeare’s character for Olivier’s interpretation is a mistake.  Henry is an effective and successful king, but not an admirable man.  People often like to speak of his trajectory over the course of the three plays as a maturation, a coming of age, or as a redemption.  But I must reject the first proposition – Hal always was who he was.  He did not grow so much as was strategically revealed.  And the second proposition, if not dismissed by my first objection, I believe can only be seen as ironic.  Far from being a jingoistic pep-rally (though, yes, ok, Billy the Bard doesn’t often miss an opportunity to ridicule the French), The Henriad becomes by the end a satire of nationalism – the Chorus points that out.  A king cannot be both successful and good.  Note that Shakespeare never judges Hal.  While there may be less approbation than we are wont to recall, there is no condemnation.  Hal must do what he does because the stability of his realm requires it.  

We’ve mentioned Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli before, whose 1513 The Prince dismisses utopian fantasies as, well, utopian fantasies.  He introduces to the modern world the concept of Realpolitik, that is, a focus on practical strategies that will lead to desired results given the political realities of the time.  This, rather than focusing on moral or ideological considerations.  This amorality in the exercise of power led to the theatrical Machiavel, characters like Richard III or Lorenzo, whose ruthless ambition in the pursuit of power came to be associated with Macchiavelli himself.  

But this is an error.  Yes, Machiavelli urged expediency at the expense of morality if necessary, but not to gratify personal ambition.  Rather, the stability of the state was of the utmost concern.  To maintain power so that the state may thrive is the first duty of the prince and, in the service of this imperative, ethical considerations must give way.  So, looked at this way, Henry V is Machiavellian without being a Machiavel – indeed, perhaps has committed his entire life, from the taverns of Eastcheap to Westminster to the fields of France to the preservation of England.

Oh, wow, this has been a long one.  Sorry if I have taxed your patience.  Thank you very much for listening.  Please follow the social media stuff, drop an email, hit the “support the show” button, tell your friends, and so on.

Have a good time until next time!