Monday, July 16, 2012

Monday July 16 2012

This has been a week of some ado about a few things. The most important is a kind of a birthday. A year ago at this time I was in the process of setting up the blog and a year ago yesterday, the blog's first follower, Hal, signed on. The blog hadn't really been made public yet though so the first birthday celebration will be held in the near future.
The next two Mondays there will be no ado about anything on the blog since Hal and I will be off on an excursion to Macbeth territory (I hope he and Lady M aren't home...). So this will be the last Monday report for July. Here it is:

From Gregory Doran's Shakespeare Almanac:
  • On July 9 and 10, 1575, Queen Elizabeth visited Kenilworth Castle, near Stratford. Shakespeare was eleven years old. Did he witness the festivities?
  • On July 11, 1564, the plague struck Stratford. Baby William was not yet three months old. His parents had lost two daughters to previous plague outbreaks. This one killed 200 hundred Stratfordians out of 1500. The world is so lucky that tiny Shakespeare survived!
Shakespeare sightings:
  • In the novel The Beekeeper's Apprentice, by Laurie R. King, Sherlock Holmes's young apprentice Mary Russell learns her Shakespeare at Oxford and refers to him throughout the book.
  • The online film and music company Discshop had a full-page ad in Dagens Nyheter for the newly released DVD of “Anonym”, the film about Shakespeare supposedly not being written by Shakespeare. Having concluded that of course Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, I can report some glee over the fact that the film clearly hasn't been a box office smash having so quickly been released as a DVD, but I'm sad to report that not only Derek Jacobi but two more of my favorites actors David Thewliss and Vanessa Redgrave are in it. Are they too misled?
  • With the London Olympics looming large it's not surprising that Shakespeare is mentioned now and then. Yesterday the Curtain Theater, where Romeo and Juliet was probably first staged, was mentioned in Dagens Nyheter as something to see in East London.
Further, this week:
  • Finished reading with Hal: Much Ado about Nothing
  • Read with Hal: several analyses of same.
  • Started writing: text on same. I actually just finished the rough draft but it won't be polished and posted until next time.





Monday, July 9, 2012

Monday July 9 2012


Shorter lists this week, of course. And nothing from the Almanac. But still, a decent Shakespeare week.

Shakespeare sightings:
  • In Dagens Nyheter, missed last week actually collected sometime in June, a not so positive review of a production here in Stockholm of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
  • In Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility Mrs. Dashwood exclaims that they had never finished reading Hamlet before Willoughby took off.
  • In the TV series “Desperate Romantics” (not watched, only glimpsed) that famous painting of Ophelia (the name of the artist escapes me) flashed by in the background.
  • In an interview with those involved with the making of the movie “Frost/Nixon”, Oliver Platt, speaking of his role as Bob Zelnick and his colleague James Reston (played by Sam Rockwell), compared the two to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.
  • Emma Thompson makes clever use of Shakespeare in her excellent screenplay to “Sense and Sensibility” on several occasions.


Further, this week:
  • Started reading with Hal: Much Ado about Nothing
  • Finished and posted: my text on Henry the Fourth, Part Two.





Henry IV Part Two Hal and His Pal


  Hal and His Pal
The Convoluted Relationship between Prince Harry and Falstaff in
Henry IV Part Two

This is another one of those plays that inspire several ideas for further exploration – in this case lying, aging, fathers, and more – but in which one glaring aspect has to be dealt with before going on to others: the relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff. It was plenty complex in Part One. In Part Two it becomes positively torturous. Poor Hal. Poor Falstaff. Who's the good guy? Who's the bad guy?Haven't we asked this question before? Doesn't Shakespeare always do this to us? Well, yes. So we know the answer before we even start. Both are both. But that only makes it more interesting to look at.

We've already observed the boisterous relationship between Hal and Falstaff in the altogether more comical Part One. Although they were already at loggerheads with each other the tone was generally that of good, wild, prankish fun. At least sometimes. Hal, in spite of his early monolog in which he told us that he was just playing around with his plebeian gang and that he would grow up and return to his proper place, we could easily forget that in the rest of his romps with Falstaff et. al. Hal was sharp-witted, energetic, one of the boys. Falstaff was rambunctious, funny and, in his “honour” monolog, heroic.

Part Two is something else. The play is filled with ”many images of sickness, disease and old age, [and] permeated with intimations of mortality...” (Howard, p. 1323). Rarely funny, this play is “melancholy” and “somber” (ibid). Falstaff is no longer the mischievous and wise anarchist, he is a fat, old, pathetic and often cruel drunkard. And Hal is realizing that not only does he love his father from whom he has chosen to be estranged, but that old dad is dying and he will soon find himself – abruptly and shockingly – king.
Friendship can get messed up for less.

What we have here isn't merely the parting of ways of an old man in decline from a young man in ascension. It is the separation of the world of the tavern in which the working class characters know “that staying indoors by a warm fire with good company, food and drink was infinitely more sensible than braving the dangers of traveling at night or fighting a battle” (Egan, p. 18), from the world of courtly power, pomp and circumstance and, as we are told (and already know if we've seen or read Henry V) war with France.
But even this is not simple. The cozy world of the tavern of Part One was really a rather sinister place of petty theft and quarrels and in Part Two the “warm , roistering noise overheard in the tavern – noise that seemed to signal a subversive alternative to rebellion – turns out to be the sound of a whore and a bully beating a customer to death. And Falstaff, whose earlier larcenies were gilded by fantasies of innate grace...” (Greenblatt, pp. 47-48), now romps about with Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet but we don't find him loveable any more. Instead he is revealed as a two-timer and a long-term sponge who has borrowed money from Mistress Quickly while promising to marry her then calling her a madwoman (one wonders why she would want to marry him, she seems to be doing pretty well on her own). Still, he is caught between the tavern and the battlefield and in his blustering braggart way, already sensing perhaps that he's living in a fantasy, he boasts that though old and fat he is a man “of merit...sought after” (Act 2.4) as he heads off on his recruiting mission.

This is not Falstaff's best moment of shining nobility. He mocks the poor sods he's sending off to a more or less certain death and happily lets himself be bought off by those who can afford it. This “recruiting scene [is] one of the most brilliant passages Shakespeare ever created [but] we don't know whether to laugh or cry. Of course the five potential recruits are ludicrous. Falstaff' jeers at them, rather leadenly...Yet is is hard for us not to smile too. Does this not make us partly complicit in Falstaff's chicanery?” (Poole p. xliv). Yes, it does. We laugh, and cringe, at this cruel Sir John.

Just one more example of “Falstaff in decline” (Poole, p. liv): his long-winded monolog about the splendid qualities of sack in which he claims that “...valour comes from sherry...Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant...If I had a thousand sons, the first human principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations, and to addict themselves to sack” (Act 4.2). As Poole writes, “Does he know what nonsense he's talking?” (p. liii)

While Falstaff is embarrassing himself, and us who quite liked him (oh! where is the Falstaff of the honour soliloquy?), Prince Hal – how banal and yet how grand – is growing up. And sobering up in more ways than one.

In the first of only two scenes in which Hal and Falstaff are on stage together we see that, as previously arranged, Hal and Poins are disguised in order to spy on Falstaff. In an earlier scene, in which Falstaff's page, provided by Prince Harry not so much to help the old man as to spy on him, we see that if Hal has ever trusted Falstaff (probably not), he doesn't now. He says to Poins: “How might we see Falstaff bestow himself tonight in his true colours, and not ourselves be seen?” (Act 2.2)

And so they spy. And Falstaff insults him. The Prince, he tells Doll Tearsheet, is, “A good shallow young fellow. A would have made a good pantler” (the Norton edition explains: pantry worker). Falstaff goes on to compare Hal to Poins as both having “a weak mind and an able body” (Act 2.4).

When Hal reveals himself Falstaff's first greeting is “Ha, a bastard son of the king's!” Their bantering exchange of insults continues and a deeper analysis of all the insults exchanged by the two in both plays would surely yield a book. Suffice it to say here that Falstaff is in fact disconcerted this time: “No no no, not so. I did not think thou wast within hearing” and, quickly running out of the sharp retorts he produced effortlessly in Part One Falstaff pleads, “No abuse, Hal”. Six times. He tries ungallantly to turn the Prince's abuse onto Mistress Quickly but Hal is having none of that. Shakespeare wisely ends the exchange by the arrival of Peto announcing the threat of war. The switch in Hal is immediate:

By heavens, Poins, I feel me much to blame
So idly to profane the precious time (all quotes Act 2.4).

As Poole puts it, “The Prince turns from prose to verse and exits from comedy into history, never to return...” (Poole, p. lv).

And indeed the next time they meet, Hal has become King Henry the Fifth. And Falstaff?
“I know thee not, old man.” Perhaps the most heartbreaking, but most inevitable, of all lines in Shakespeare.
Falstaff has been sure from the very beginning that once Hal has become king, he, Falstaff will have it made. Life will be a bed of roses, or more likely an endless fountain of sack. He has not seen the signs of Hal's distancing himself from him and right up to the very moment of King Henry the Fifth's entrance Falstaff - foolishly, with us crying, “No, don't!” - rejoices:

God save thy grace, King Hal, my royal Hal!
...God save thee, my sweet boy,
...My King, my Jove, I speak to thee, my heart! (Act 5.5)

“Oh, Falstaff,” we want to say. “You don't talk to a king like that, especially not in public. He isn't your sweet boy Hal anymore. You foolish old drunk, how could you not see this coming?”
We could. From the moment Hal left the tavern he was no longer Hal. He disappears from the stage and doesn't reappear until Act 4.3 as the prince to be reunited with his dying father. As he contemplates the crown, does he give a single fleeting thought to his old pal Falstaff? No. There is only the crown and his apparently dead father to whom he says:

...Thy due from me
Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood,
Which nature, love, and filial tenderness
Shall, O dear father, pay the plenteously.
My due from thee is this imperial crown,
Which, as immediate from thy place and blood,
Derives itself to me.
[He puts the crown on his head.] (Act 4.3)

Henry IV has not died however but awakens to the pain of what he believes is the Prince's eagerness to ascend the throne. In his long and bitter monolog to his eldest son we can't help but see the hapless Harry as an ungrateful greedy pup, but then the soon-to-be king emerges when he answers his father:

God witness with me, when I here came in
And found no course of breath within your majesty,
How cold it struck my heart! ...
Coming to look on you, thinking you dead,
And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,
I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: 'The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father;
Therefore, thou best of gold art worst of gold:
Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,
Preserving life in medicine potable;
But thou, most fine, most honoured: most renowned,
Hast eat thy bearer up.' Thus, my most royal liege,
Accusing it, I put it on my head... (Act 4.3)


The king is overwhelmed with relief at hearing these words and hastens to give some last advice: cultivate our noble and true friends, confound the rebels by making war on France. He ends with:

How I came by the crown, O God forgive,
And grant it may with thee in true peace live! (Act 4.3)

The prince's reply:

My gracious liege,
You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me;
Then plain and right must my possession be,
Which I with more than with a common pain
'Gainst all the world will rightfully maintain. (Act 4.3)


Not a wisp of thought, memory, feeling for the world of the tavern. In the next act, in his confrontation with and acceptance of the authority of the Lord Chief Justice, Henry V makes only the vaguest reference to his wild youth, so recently ended:

...sadly I survive
To mock the expectation of the world,
To frustrate prophecies and to raze out
Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down
After my seeming. The tide of blood in me
Hath proudly flowed in vanity till now,
Now doth it turn, and ebb back to the sea,

Where it shall mingle with the state of floods,
And flow henceforth in formal majesty (Act 5.2).

Gone is the juvenile delinquent, who was only pretending all along. The new King has come forth in his rightful role.

Therefore, what else can King Henry the Fifth possibly say to the silly, joyous delusional old Falstaff's “My sweet boy Hal” but, “I know thee not, old man”?

The tragedy isn't in Hal's sudden meanness, the tragedy comes much earlier than the rejection. It is in the inevitability of the breaking of Falstaff's heart. Falstaff, the glorious anarchist who has spent his life poking fun and guffawing and conniving – to our immense amusement – at the powers-that-be, has metamorphosed into a lonely buffoon in a fantasy world in which he is not old, in which he is important, in which he and his great pal Hal will, stumbling and laughing, ascend the throne with a flask of sack in one hand and a young Doll Tearsheet by the other. Oh foolish Falstaff! Subversion doesn't work like that. Everything Hal has done has been part of the power structure of the Kingdom of England.

Yes, it is heartbreaking to see (or imagine) the look on Falstaff's face at the words “I know thee not, old man.” Yes, King Henry V regrets having to say them and banish his former fellow-carouser. But what choice did he have, really? He is bound up in the Great Mechanism that brought his father to the throne and will in time bring the pathetic Henry VI to the throne. In his repudiation of Falstaff, Henry V convinces us all “to magnificent and crushing effect” (Poole, p lx) that he is the king, and rightfully so. Falstaff may, as Jan Kott (of Great Mechanism fame) describes him, personify “the Renaissance lust for life and thunderous laughter at heaven and hell, at the crown and all other laws of the realm...[and possess] a plebeian wisdom and experience...” He may “not let history take him in.” He may “scoff at it” (Kott p. 99). But he is still, like the fierce Katherine and the enraged Shylock, crushed by the Great Mechanism. His time, like theirs, has not come. Hal's has.

July 2012

Works cited:
  • The Norton Shakespeare, based on the Oxford Edition. Ed. Greenblatt, Stephen et al. Second edition. 2008.
  • Egan, Gabriel. Shakespeare and Marx. Oxford University Press. 2004.
  • Greenblatt, Stephen. Shakespearean Negotiations, “Invisible Bullets”. Clarendon Press. 1988.
  • Howard, Jean E. in The Norton Shakespeare, see above.
  • Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. W.W. Norton and Company. 1964.
  • Poole, Andrew. “Introduction” to the Penguin edition, 2005. 
Films seen:
  • BBC, 1979. Director: David Giles. Cast: Prince Hal – David Gwillim; King Henry – Jon Finch; Falstaff – Anthony Quayle; Mistress Quickly – Brenda Bruce; Doll Tearsheet – Frances Cuka. As in Part One, Anthony Quayle is a masterly Falstaff, John Finch is perfect as Henry IV and David Gwillim can simply not compete with Kenneth Branagh who is forever and always Hal even though he never played him, at least not on film.
  • Chimes at Midnight”, 1965. Director: Orson Wells. Cast: Prince Hal – Keith Baxter; King Henry – John Gielgud; Falstaff – Orson Welles; Mistress Quickly – Margareth Rutherford; Doll Tearsheet – Jeanne Moreau. Combining both plays as well as Henry V, Orson Welles portrays a tragic Falstaff in this beautiful black and white somewhat low key labor of love.
  • My Own Private Idaho, 1991. Director: Gus van Sant. Cast: (Scott Favor) Prince Hal – Keanu Reeves; (Jack Favor) King Henry – Tom Troupe; (Bob Pigeon) Falstaff – William Richert; ) Mike Waters) Poins (or somebody) – River Phoenix. Truly a strange movie, this too makes use of both Part One and Part Two. Why Van Sant chose to incorporate a great deal of the plays, often literally word for word, into his story is a mystery to me but somehow it works. Sort of. 
Seen on stage: Yes! Seen at the Roundhouse in London on April 16, 2008, it was the first complete Shakespeare play we had ever seen in English. Had we but known, we could have seen more. The Roundhouse was presenting all of the History Plays, but this was at the beginning of our Shakespeare days, and we didn't have a clue. Still we saw this one! And that was a giant step in the whole process leading to this blog.

Monday, July 2, 2012

Monday Report July 2 2012

Finally! It's been a long month and even though I had many opportunities to talk about Shakespeare during the summer course (more often, undoubtedly, than my students really appreciated), I have missed blogging. It's nice to be back. Of course a month's supply of notations in the Almanac and of sightings have piled up. There are more than I can actually keep track of but I'll give it a shot:

From the Shakespeare Almanac:

  • On May 30, 1593, Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare's rival, colleague, maybe friend, was murdered under mysterious circumstances. 
  • On June 2, 1752, the first troop of professional Shakespearean actors arrived in America, in Yorktown, Virginia. 
  • On June 5, 1607, Shakespeare's daughter Susanna married Dr John Hall at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. On June 9, 1622, Shakespeare's old company visited Stratford and were paid not to perform. 
  • On June 29, 1613, The Globe burned to the ground. 
  • On June 30, 1614, the new Globe opened. 


Shakespeare sightings:

  • In the novel Still Alice by Lisa Genova, the main character, who is suffering from Alzheimer's, remembers loving King Lear. 
  • In the movie “The Artist” an actress hams up Juliet in a silent movie. 
  • In Percy Shelley's introduction to his wife Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, he compares the presentation of basic human nature in the novel to Shakespeare. Fair enough! 
  • On an essay test on The Bean Trees, one of my students used a paraphrase of “All the world's a stage”. Since she knows of course that I'm a Shakespeare freak, this might not count as a true random sighting but still...Unfortunately, she didn't pass the test. 
  • Steven Pinker, in his very fat and very strange book The Better Angels of Our Nature, mentions Shakespeare frequently. It doesn't make the book more believable however. While containing some interesting statistics I find Pinker's analysis disappointing. He is clearly not a historical materialist. 
  • In the movie “V for Vendetta” Natalie Portman's mother quotes Macbeth. 
  • In his book about the filming of Frankenstein, Kenneth Branagh of course refers to Shakespeare. 
  • And speaking of Kenneth Branagh, he's been knighted, in part because of his work with Shakespeare. So, Sir Ken, when are you going to quit messing about and get back to your true calling?! There are a few plays left to make movies of! 
  • In “The Big Bang Theory” when Leonard shows surprise at Sheldon's friendliness to Penny, Sheldon replies, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. 
  • In the grammar book I used in the summer course, The Oxford English Grammar Course, Shakespeare turns up now and then. 
  • In the novel The Passage by Justin Cronin, many of the sections of the book start with quotes from Shakespeare. 
  • Dagens Nyheter has had lots of notices in the past month: 
    • a glowing review of Othello on the island of Gotland 
    • mention of an English speaking acting group doing excerpts from various works in a park near the main library (didn't make it to that performance) 
    • an archeological dig has uncovered some of Shakespeare's old theater, the Curtain. “A fantastic discovery” says Chris Thomas. 
    • And of course on Midsummer, the biggest holiday in Sweden except for Christmas maybe, A Midsummer Night's Dream showed up in various places including the crosswords. 


Further, this month:

  • Finished reading aloud with Hal: Henry the Fourth, Part Two.
  • Read aloud with Hal: various analysis of same. 
  • Seen: Three movies about same. 
  • Started writing: Text about same.