A Year of Shakespeare

Henry IV Part I, Act I

I’m not exactly sure why it has taken me so long to wrap my head around this particular play.  Now that I have a reasonable handle on it and have begun to make inroads, there is nothing drastic going on besides a lengthy and convoluted backstory that takes Twister-like maneuvers to follow.  Especially when what most stands out about the first act is the less-than-stunning revelation how perilous it is to be king.

UPDATE: The depth of the play lies in its rich characters and dense plot.  Prince Hal and Falstaff transcend the confines of the story to achieve literary universality.  Not to mention the tragic built-in ironies confounding Henry. So yes, there is much to appreciate (and navigate) herein. It’s a chewy cookie (but so moist and flavorful).

When we left Richard II, he had been deposed by Henry and murdered by an overeager acolyte, casting a shadow of impending gloom over the dawning sequel.  It only takes the opening lines of Henry IV Part One to reveal that this has indeed happened.

KING: So shaken are we, so wan with care,
Find we a time for frighted peace to pant
And breathe short-winded accents of new broils
To be commenced in stronds afar remote.

Boom! Henry is besotted from the get-go with woes virtually identical to those that plagued Richard.  Sweet irony! For we are reminded again and again how obsessive (fussy, overbearing, insufferable?) the English can be about legitimate succession.  These sorts of issues are the mandatory blowback, apparently, of trying to preserve a monarchy while accommodating a burgeoning parliament filled with ambitious barons and expanding the tenuous rule of law.  A fussiness quotient gets added to an already incendiary mix, trying to balance partisan barons, a rowdy public, a dominant clergy and rival rulers.  Constant warfare created the need for what could become unbearable taxation.  Even without the modern trappings of 24/7 media and opinion polls every news cycle, the king battled incessantly with competing factions.

He may not have suffered from the same extensive overreach as Richard (failures at war, excessive taxation to fund failed campaigns, insistence upon liberties with court wives), but he wasn’t the first to be felled by the yawning gap between running an upstart campaign and the complications of having to actually rule a country.

Why in the world would anybody wish to be king under those circumstances? There were (and still are) many perks, of course.  The position paid handsomely and marriage posed no barrier to dalliances.  Like a mob boss or CEO of an international conglomerate, the living is good but the term may be short and the fall steep.

Henry is besieged both personally and politically. Personally in the form of his wayward son, Prince Hal, a kid more fond of hanging around miscreants like Falstaff than grooming himself for eventual succession.  He is contrasted with Hotspur (great name!), a feisty, enterprising, talented idealist who stands in opposition to Henry but embodies similar values and characteristics to the young Bolingbroke (the future Henry) we met back in Richard II.

Wheels within wheels…what goes around, comes around.  And now a plot is hatched to unseat Henry the same way that Henry deposed Richard.  Will the young Prince Hal mature in time to inherit the kingdom? Or will Hotspur’s crew avenge the “betrayal” they’ve suffered since supporting Henry’s rise to the top?

Getcha popcorn.  This is gonna be good!

In attempting to wrap my mind around Shakespeare’s titanic Henry IV, I have encountered a profound detour that I never expected. Turning to my dear Sir Isaac Asimov, my guide throughout this project, I discover over one hundred pages of a tome encompassing all the plays has been dedicated to Henry IV, Parts I & II alone.

Dissertations have been written on the character of Falstaff, so I will leave it to Mr. Orson Welles to provide our introduction:

I mentioned previously, rather tongue-in-cheekily, that the pattern of Shakespeare’s history plays had become all-too predictable.  Succession issues dominate, with the result that we come to understand that the crown sits precariously on the head of any man (or woman) who wears it.

Yet were these intended to be moral fables? Are we meant to draw lessons from them that can be applied to the present?  Shakespeare’s present? Ours?  In pouring through Shakespeare biographies, I have learned that the art of playwriting itself has had a moralistic evolution, being shaped by the pedagogical impulses of the Church.  That is, after the end of the classical period, of course, and the rise of the middle ages. It was expected, leading up to Shakespeare’s age, that staged fables would portray virtue and vice, sin and redemption, impart aspects of dogma to the large swaths of the population which could not read or write (and who may have avoided quasi-mandatory church service).

That was all radically changing, especially in cosmopolitan centers such as London.  But Shakespeare elevates his aim to a whole new level.  His plays don’t just summarize life or render it in homilies or pave it into pat clichés. No…somehow, rather, through his genius for the invention of characters, he holds a mirror to life and projects it onto the stage in three dimensions.  He presents us with complete beings such as Falstaff and Prince Hal, men (and women) who are burdened with mighty faults as well as gifted with soaring abilities, multi-layered, multivalent beings driven by complex motivations.  We cannot flatly state whether they are either good or bad, wearing a white hat or black.  They don’t represent a type.  In Shakespeare’s hands they become a type unto themselves.

Thus, we can drop the names Lear, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo, Falstaff and they mean something, stand for a unique person as well as idiosyncratic way of being.  There is no other writer in any language for whom it can be stated so unequivocally and triumphantly that he invented an entire spectrum of characters who have become as real to us through time as anybody who ever lived.