Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

The final dramatic resolution of the conflict within Hal, and the emblematic unification of the two poles between which he has been moving, occurs in the splendid double epitaph in the play's final scene at Shrewsbury.

Hotspur is dying, slain by Hal—a Harry killed by a Harry—and Hotspur's language here, as so frequently, is lofty, mythic, reaching beyond the common world.

What, old acquaintance! Could not all this flesh Keep in a little life? Poor Jack,

farewell. I could have better spared a better man. 5.4.101–103

More than anything else, this play finally challenges the audience to deal with its complicated response to Prince Hal. Is the Hal of Henry IV Part 1 “good” or “bad,” agreeable or disagreeable, fun-loving or calculating?

The condition of Renaissance—or early modern—kingship is a condition of limitation and loss, as well as of power and possibility.

Henry IV Part 2

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Sir John Falstaff, an “irregular humorist”

ECAUSE THE TITLE of this play so clearly indicates that it is a sequel, and, moreover, a sequel to a play that had by the mid-twentieth century become extremely popular, The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, as it was called in both the 1600 Quarto and the First Folio of 1623, has frequently been underestimated by critics, readers, and theater directors.

the appeal of Falstaff was so considerable that the two Henry IV plays have often been combined as a kind of “Falstaffiad”: the best example of this is Orson Welles's 1965 film Chimes at Midnight. But the play has much more to offer than a continuation of the Falstaff story.

It is brilliantly constructed; it deploys characters and types with remarkable deftness; and its ear for language is unerring, from the “high” (Henry IV's lament on kingship; King Henry V's accession speech), to the “low.”

“Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?” (2.4.234–235).

This wry comment might well serve as a useful epigraph for this entire play, for in a sense every person, every value, every energy, and every desire, with the sole exception of those belonging to Prince Hal himself, seems in Part 2 to have outlived its performance.

virtually everyone in this play is sick. “[W]e are all diseased,” says the Archbishop of York, “of which

disease / Our late King Richard, being infected, died” (4.1.54–58). The disease that afflicts them is the lingering curse of anarchy and usurpation, of having offended God.

Falstaff's first words in this play confirm the diagnosis of rampant and persistent illness, as he inquires about a doctor's report on his urine and then begins to descant on deafness, consumption, old age, and the probability of venereal disease. The whole world of the play is, in effect, sick of a social disease, of which Falstaff becomes, increasingly, the sign and the emblem of disintegration.

the man is shrunk, or rather swollen, into a mere metaphor of himself.

Sack, a white wine imported from Spain and the Canary Islands

generally designates a sweet wine of the sherry class, despite the fact that “sack” probably derives from sec, “dry.”

As Falstaff enlarges, in a kind of moral dropsy, other characters and values are dwindling to shadows of their former selves.

One way of mapping the decline is to notice how much of this play is written in prose.

The prose world is swallowing up the world of poetry,

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. 3.1.4–6, 26–31

Hal cannot show sorrow at his father's sickness, although he feels it, because every man would think him, as Poins does, a “most princely hypocrite” (2.2.42).

The last Englishman named in these plays who had died a heroic death in the Holy Land was Thomas Mowbray, Henry's first opponent at the beginning of Richard II. His last opponent, here in Henry IV Part 2, is Falstaff the living embodiment of anarchy, misrule, and dissent within England—Falstaff, who had once been Mowbray's page.

The prophecy that told him he would “die in Jerusalem” is fulfilled, but, as always, with a bitter twist. Prophecies in these plays, once made, will always come true—but the meaning of the truth is a kind of riddle,

Where it shall mingle with the state of floods, And flow henceforth in formal majesty. 5.2.122–132

This speech is, structurally and emblematically, the pendant or reply to his “I know you all” soliloquy in Part 1. It is not, of course, itself a soliloquy, but rather a formal address to the nation.

The audience cannot be entirely surprised—although the irrepressible Falstaff is—that in the next scene this King will reject Misrule.

Falstaff does not grow and change as his world changes, and as Prince Hal changes, and so the play, however regretfully, leaves him behind.

The moment that follows, although it is inevitable, is nonetheless one of the most devastating in any of Shakespeare's plays, as the young King, with ice in his

voice, instructs, “My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.”

“Presume not that I am the thing I was” is the final echo of “I know you all,” and indeed of the clipped and chilling “I do; I will” with which a younger Hal responded to Falstaff 's “banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.”

The banishment of Falstaff, the end of this kind of holiday, is part of the essential hardship of being a king. The king's role, as will become even clearer in Henry V, is

a quintessentially lonely one, and the lack of forgiveness shown to Falstaff is part of the cost of being King.

The Merry Wives of Windsor

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MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR is a lively “citizen comedy” that anticipates, in its spirit, both Restoration drama and the screwball comedy of early-twentieth-century film, combining as it does elements of farce, comic violence, and

sophisticated and witty dialogue.

Combined as these elements are with a rich sense of place and time—the text

of the play is dense with local color, references to food, flora and fauna, law and medical practice in the period, exploration and discovery, and more—they generate a compelling dramatic energy as well as a lively portrait of late-sixteenth-century England.

Falstaff is transported in time for this play.

The most familiar story told about The Merry Wives of Windsor is that Queen Elizabeth, delighted with the figure of Falstaff in Shakespeare's Henry TV, asked the dramatist to write another play, showing “Falstaff in love.”

The story is first told in print by John Dennis in 1702— “This Comedy was written at her Command, and by her direction, an she was so eager to see it

Acted, that she commanded it to be finished in fourteen days”—but the version most usually cited is that of Nicholas Rowe,

She was so well pleas'd with that admirable Character of Falstaff, in the two Parts of Henry the Fourth, that she commanded him to continue it for one Play more, and to shew him in Love. This is said to be the Occasion of his Writing The Merry Wives of Wind...

In recent years the victory of the “merry wives” over their husbands and suitors, and the relative plenitude of female roles, has made the play especially attractive to theater audiences in England and the United States, and around the world.

Although Merry Wives differs greatly in tone from a play like Twelfth Night, one of Shakespeare's most “aristocratic” comedies, it has a number of significant similarities.

the middle-class setting delightfully undercuts emotions and pretensions that run high and wild in other contexts.

unstable and comical nature of sexual love.

From buck-basket to buck to cuckold to deer to ass, Falstaff's trajectory is a lively devolution.

We might say that “translation” in the widest sense is at the heart of this play,