Note for the Royal Shakespeare Company production, 2008
Among the Histories this is The tragedy. It is, not least in the cool tightness of its writing, right up there with Dane, Moor and Scot. At its pitiless end, no bodies litter the stage. Something much worse has happened: the annihilation of hope; the banishment not just of plump Jack Falstaff, but of delusion. What remains? The naked machinery of power in all its grinding metallic cruelty; the tinny blare of trumpets tuning up for the new king’s murderous cross-Channel excursion, courtesy of his father’s deathbed counsel. And Shakespeare appearing as himself at the very end offering a mordant shrug, ‘My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good night.’
Only those half-asleep in the stalls imagine that Henry IV, Part II is somehow an ‘add-on’ to Part I. It certainly is woodwind to I’s brass, but the plaintive minor key that plays throughout is the tip-off to II’s darker profundity. II needs I to set up the vanities – history, amity, loyalty, appetite, mirth, battle – because II’s job is to rip them all to shreds. The muscular heft of history gets collapsed into rumour, false comfort, ill tidings. Unlike I, not only is there no point to the plots and rebellions, but those who enact them know there is no point, except some sort of remorseless execution of a fatal cycle. So the protagonists on both sides – the dying king, the melancholy Archbishop of York – spend time wrestling with the unquiet ghost of Richard II, whose deposition and murder have condemned them all to stumble around forever sleepless like the grimly insomniac king.
Not a hoot, then, even with Falstaff at its heart? No, but something important remains amid the cold political ashes: memory. Part II is better called a memory play than a history; it is the most lyrical Shakespeare ever wrote. And it needs the most delicate touch in its direction and acting to draw out the autumnal pathos. The most heartbreakingly vivid scenes come from the mouths of the old as they spirit themselves back beyond the ache of their brittle bones to the lusty lads and lasses they still feel themselves to be. Whatever else ails them, their memories are as bright as gems: ‘Thou didst swear to me upon a parcel-gilt goblet sitting in my Dolphin-chamber at the round table, by a sea-coal fire, upon Wednesday in Wheeson week when the prince broke thy head for liking his father to a singing man of Windsor . . .’ prattles Mistress Quickly, never forgetting Falstaff’s promise of betrothal – and we see the moment in all its hopeless glory. ‘Then was Jack Falstaff, now Sir John, a boy and page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk,’ reminisces Shallow to Silence, and we suddenly see the juvenile, perhaps slender Jack. Time rustles in the lines like fallen leaves.
What makes all this bearable is a scene of intense sweetness, a love scene all the more tender for being ostensibly dressed in farce, and the purer for being set in Mistress Quickly’s brothel. After the raillery – and brutal it is, with much talk of diseases – between Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet, they become creakily amorous for old time’s sake: ‘Come I’ll be friends with thee Jack; thou art going to the wars and whether I shall ever see thee again or no there is nobody cares.’
Falstaff defends Doll against the rampaging Pistol, then verbally sets about the Prince and his friend Ned Poins, ‘a weak mind and an able body’, not knowing they are listening in disguise. The affronted then get their satisfaction by cackling at the ancient venery:
Poins: Let’s beat him before his whore.
Prince: Look, whether the withered elder hath not his poll clawed like a parrot.
Poins: Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?
To which Falstaff, oblivious, gives the retort that redeems the entire play from the cynicism that sometimes seems to chill it, a single moment of instinctive, unembarrassed humanity: ‘Kiss me, Doll.’ And she does, for unlike princes and kings, the whore is true: ‘By my troth, I kiss thee with a most constant heart.’