'You can take away cricket.
'You can skip the Last Night of the Proms.
'You can even lose an empire.
'But if you lose Shakespeare, as far as I'm concerned,
'there's no England any more.
'It was here, between the pit and the galleries,
'that an IDEA of England was born.'
"Here, said they, is the terror of the French."
'One that's lasted through wars and revolutions,
'migrations and immigrations, one that is still with us.'
"This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle.
"This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars.
"This other Eden, demi-paradise.
"This blessed plot,
"this earth, this realm,
"this England."
'But what Shakespeare gives us is never just Fantasy Island,
'a dream of Albion.'
Oh, he can turn on the sceptred isle mood music all right,
no-one better, but that's not why Shakespeare sings to me.
It's because, in his histories,
especially in the great masterpieces of Henry IV, Part One and Two,
he gives us England unedited, the complete thing,
the cream and the scum.
The fleabag hostelries on the London Road, the chilly cathedrals
where sour bishops crack their knuckles and plot.
He gives us the clapped out actors and the greedy squires.
He gives us the real thing and that's what we want, don't we?
The dirt and the devilry.
Why, then, let grievous, ghastly, gaping wounds
Untwine the Sisters Three!
'Above all, Shakespeare gives us the voices of England,
'cascades of tumbling prattle, ripe curses, symphonies of gossip.'
By this wine, I'll thrust my knife in your mouldy chaps
an' you play the saucy cuttle with me.
And this valour comes of sherris.
'The miracle is that audiences could see England on the stage
'almost before it existed in reality.
'Over and over again, the Word itself came booming over the boards.
'Nought shall make us rue
'if England to itself do rest but true.'
'It was Shakespeare who gave us a sense of who we really are.
'How did he do it?'
'Shakespeare's theatre could only be born
'once an older, Catholic theatre had been killed off.
'For hundreds of years, the English had gathered
'to watch scripture performed in front of them.
'The Miracle plays, which dramatised
'the supernatural interventions of the Christian saints...
'..and the Mystery plays, the most dramatic bits of the Bible,
'each story acted out by a different guild.
'Noah and his wife by the fishmongers,
'the Last Supper by the bakers,
'the Three Kings by the goldsmiths.'
To modern ears and eyes,
the Miracle and Mystery Plays do seem just a bit primitive.
The simplest of dialogue, one dimensional characters,
not very much in the way of poetic or psychological insight
and all performed by amateurs.
But, in their day, they were extraordinarily popular.
People flocked from miles around
just to see the Bible brought to life,
with gorgeous costumes, fantastic spectacle,
outsized heads breathing flame,
a lot of screaming and shouting just at the right time.
'The Mystery and Miracle plays were crude, but they served a purpose.
'They brought the English together and helped connect them
'to the rest of Christendom.
'Until, in the 1530s, that great Catholic communion was torn apart.'
'William Shakespeare was born
'some 30 years after the Protestant Reformation began.
'This religious revolution divided England
'and Shakespeare's own family.
'His mother, Mary Arden, came from an obstinately Catholic clan.
'One of her relatives was executed
'for conspiracy to murder Elizabeth, the Protestant queen.
'His father, John, began as a tradesman
'but became Mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon.
'He didn't let religion stand in the way of success.
'If an appearance of Protestant enthusiasm
'was the price of going places, so be it.
'A few months before Shakespeare was born,
'the religious schism which touched his own family
'was played out in the Guild Chapel, his local church.
'The spectacular religious paintings covering the walls,
'which were so familiar to the congregation, were whitewashed.
'John Shakespeare was among those who ordered this obliteration.'
The old culture was full of pictures, of images,
and now it was literally wiped out,
but onto that whiteness came the Word,
for as Protestant preachers constantly reminded their flocks,
"In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God."
But that was a stern and flinty message.
There were other kinds of words
that would seize the attention of the English.
Poetic words, dramatic words and most bewitching of all,
words that could paint pictures.
And the greatest word-picturer of them all
was the son of the whitewasher, William Shakespeare.
Catholicism gives you everything in front of you
in glorious Technicolor.
We naturally, I think, view destruction of all that beauty
as a terrible act of vandalism
and a sort of ghastly thing to have occurred,
but actually it seems to me that if you don't have that moment,
you don't get the rest of the second millennium.
I mean, genuinely, because what is the Word?
The Book and the Word is requiring you to imagine
and that's where it connects, I think, with Shakespeare
and I don't think human progress could have happened in the same way
without that occurring.
'It's one of those miraculous historical coincidences
'that a child with a genius for storytelling should be born
'at a time when the Word became supreme.
'The place where the young Shakespeare lost himself
in a web of words was here, his school room.'
Amo, amas, amat. You can just hear it, can't you?
Latin verbs, boys. Conjugate, conjugate.
Beetling brow, scary schoolmaster and that huge desk
and little William Shakespeare conjugating with the best of them.
You think about Shakespeare, you think,
"There is a magpie-like mind, omnivorous.
"There's nothing he doesn't want to learn about everything,"
but what he must learn is discipline.
These desks lined up, you know,
the discipline that assembles itself in his amazing brain.
The discipline that makes words fall on the page
so exactly as he wants them.
Mind like a steel trap, then, too.
And it's here in this room, you don't just get Latin verbs,
you get with Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus.
You get history, one of Shakespeare's great obsessions.
You can almost feel the Roman emperors,
and maybe the English kings and queens too,
marching out of the timbers.
'Those kings and queens weren't just ruling England.
'They were creating it.
'The Reformation Henry VIII began in the 1530s
'had divorced not just king from queen,
'but England from Catholic Europe.'
"England is an empire entire unto itself,"
'his statute of separation declared.
'England was on its own now.
'The English needed to know who they were and what made them unique,
'what their story was.
'To do this, they turned to history.
'In the 16th century, chronicles rattled off the presses.
'Perhaps the greatest of these
'was the text Shakespeare would plunder for stories.
'Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles.
'Everything was in Holinshed,
'not just the deeds and misdeeds of kings and queens,
'but a complete anatomy of the English.'
"Those that are bred in this island are men, for the most part,
"of a good complexion, tall of stature..."
"..strong in body, white of colour and thereto of great boldness..."
"..and courage in ye wars."
"The situation of our region, lying near unto the north,
"doth cause the heat of our stomachs to be somewhat greater force..."
"..therefore our bodies do crave a little more ample nourishment
"than the inhabitants of the hotter regions."
"Ours is a mean language,
"neither too rough nor too smooth in utterance."
'The Protestant English needed to know what they had in common
'so they could unite against Catholic rebels at home and abroad.
'But few could read.
'The only way to reach ordinary people
'was through a new kind of spectacle.'
'Down with the cult of the Virgin Mary.
'Up with the cult of the Virgin Queen.
'In all our history, no monarch understood
'the power of royal performance better than Elizabeth I.
'The royal roadshow was regularly on tour.
'In 1572, she arrived in Warwick,
'a few miles from Shakespeare's home town.
'William, who was eight years old, may have seen her.
'A mock battle was laid on to entertain the crowds.
'Top of the bill was a dragon, spitting out balls of flame.
'But the pyrotechnics got out of hand
'and fire destroyed the house
'of a pensioner couple living nearby.'
In the morning, the Black Book, the archive of Warwick, tells us,
"It pleased her gracious Majesty to have the poor old man and woman
"whose house had been burnt, brought before her
"and being so brought, her words much re-comforted them."
It probably helped that she also gave the man and woman
£25 to restore their damaged property.
It was all a big public performance
designed to celebrate the union of Queen and people,
but you have to say, "What a trooper."
'Elizabeth couldn't be on stage all the time,
'so the patriotic Protestant England message
'was spread by licensed acting companies
'who travelled up and down the country playing in tavern yards.
'Elizabeth's most trusted courtiers were their patrons and protectors.
'You can never really pin down why cultural sea changes happen,
'but at some point in the late 1560s,
'someone had a simple but very brilliant idea.
'Instead of taking drama to the punters,
'why not have the punters come to the drama?'
'And where better than in London,
'where thousands had settled in the filthy slums
'that teemed on the edge of the city?'
This no-man's land was called The Liberties,
the place outside city law, and there anything goes.
On one side are city walls, the other, open fields and hedgerows.
Roads that went somewhere and roads that went nowhere.
The footpads' delight.
Bear baiting pits, slop pail taverns, brothels and fencing yards
where you could make or lose a fortune.
And it was there, amidst the nasty, exciting stuff,
that a cultural revolution was happening.
'In the 1550s, the great crowd pleasers
'had been bear baiting and cock fighting.
'But by the 1590s, between 15 and 20,000 Londoners
'saw a play every week.
'In a few decades, modern theatre was born.
'On the outskirts of the city,
'the first purpose-built playhouses since Roman times sprang up.
'The Reformation signalled the death knell for the Mystery
'and Miracle plays, but now there were new shows,
'new congregations and a new homespun creed.'
The theatre was now a place for a new kind of communion,
the communion of Englishness.
What you feel at Wembley, they all felt in the rows,
the curtain and the glow.
Oh, the hoi polloi and the gents still sat separately,
four pence of the gents, a penny for the rest of us,
but they all went through the same storm of emotion, blood and tears.
There was only one thing they could do here
that they couldn't do in the cathedrals...
laugh out loud, and that they did a lot.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
'And with the theatre, inevitably, celebrities and stars.
'Most of them Londoners,
'many of them Oxbridge boys, men living on the edge.
'Kit Marlowe, double agent, atheist,
'author of Tamburlaine the Great, Doctor Faustus, the Jew of Malta.
'Thomas Kyd, master of blood and guts revenge drama.
'Robert Greene, dissolute and drunken,
'the specialist in Elizabethan rom-com.
'But then, up pops someone who definitely didn't fit in.
'For most of the 1580s, Shakespeare had been in Stratford,
'married with three children, Susanna, Judith and his boy Hamnet.
'But at some point, he left his family behind.
'The first we hear of Shakespeare in London is in 1592.
'By now, he was an actor and a budding writer.
'His theatrical ambitions
'were putting Robert Greene's nose out of joint.'
"There is an upstart crow," Greene said, "beautified with our feathers
"that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide,
"supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse
"as the best of you, and is in his own conceit,
"the only Shake-scene in a country."
'Shakespeare's first history play, Henry VI, isn't a classic.
'It has too many battles
'and not enough of the profound poetry of his later work,
'but as the record of a genius in the making, it's priceless.'
History was the obsession of the age
and Shakespeare services the craving by dishing up tales
of the Plantagenets, Lancastrians and Yorkists.
Feuds, wars, butcheries.
The powers that be liked this,
because the message of Henry VI is, "No more civil wars"
at a time when, without an heir to Elizabeth,
this seemed more and more on the cards.
And the people, they ate it up, because what Shakespeare gave them
was Kill Bill in tights,
or rather Kill Humphrey, Henry and Dick.
CROWD SHOUTS
'Henry VI, Part One.
'The setting, France during the Hundred Years' War.
'Style, all action stuff. Battle every five minutes,
'can't move for dead bodies. Buckets of the red stuff.
'The characters.
Weedy "Oh, dearie me. I should have been a monk"
'King Henry VI, disastrously indecisive.'
'But in compensation, a true English hero,
'the doughty warrior Talbot, built like a cliff face, craggy all over.
'Talbot scares the Bejesus out of the Nancy French,
'even when they've taken him prisoner.'
"Here," said they, "is the terror of the French."
"The scarecrow that affrights our children so."
Then broke I from the officers that led me,
and with my nails digg'd stones out of the ground
to hurl at the beholders of my shame.
My grisly countenance made others fly.
None durst come near for fear of sudden death.
In walls of iron they deemed me not secure.
So great fear my name amongst them was spread
that they supposed I could rend bars of steel...
..and spurn in pieces posts of adamant.
'But aren't the English winning the Hundred Years War?' you're asking?
'Well, no.
'The problem is they're as busy fighting each other as the French.
'With King Henry VI unable to make a decision about anything,
'civil war has broken out between the houses of Lancaster and York.
'Bringing up religion in Elizabethan England
'could land you in jail or even worse,
'so Shakespeare uses the Wars of the Roses as cover
'to explore the religions schism of his age.'
One of the reasons for the popularity of history plays
was it's an opportunity to safely talk about the present
through the prism of the past.
It is an England struggling with self-definition
and it's an England where...
you have to talk carefully as you try to define it.
You have to talk in metaphor,
you have to talk in euphemism or in equivocation.
You have an old world of shared values
that reeks of a Catholic England
that is also beset with corruption
and a crumbling of its genuine authority
against a new broom...
..that is, at its best, reformist
and critical of the old corrupt...complacent world,
and at its worst, turns into a kind of Machiavellian
'I am myself alone.'
I have no brother.
I am like no brother.
And this word, love,
which greybeards call divine,
be resident in men like one another and not in me.
I am myself alone.
'If Henry VI and his crumbling court embody old Catholic England,
'then in Richard, Duke of Gloucester, we see a new world,
'where only power and money count.
'If the character seems familiar,
'it's because he's the first draft of Richard III,
'the crook-backed king.'
I have often heard my mother say
I came into the world with my legs forward.
A midwife wondered and the women cried,
"Oh Jesus, bless us.
"He is born with teeth!"
And so I was.
Which plainly signified that I should snarl and bite and play the dog.
Then, since the heavens have shaped my body so,
let hell make crook'd my mind to answer it.
'Even in his first history play,
'Shakespeare is writing brilliant characters.
'But there's something else about Henry VI
'that is trademark Shakespeare, breathtaking in its boldness.
'At the end of Part Two, he puts the people themselves centre stage.
'What's more, they come on as rebels. Filthy, cursing, ferocious,
'the very stuff of the galleries' worst nightmares.'
A-a-a-agh!
'They are led by a charismatic rabble-rouser, Jack Cade.'
Away! Burn all the records of the realm.
My mouth shall be the parliament of England!
And you that love the commons, follow me.
Now show yourselves men, tis for liberty.
We will not leave one lord, one gentleman. Spare none!
"My mouth shall be the parliament of England."
'A brilliant Shakespearean one-liner.
'Cade loathes politicians and bureaucrats.
'He wants primitive justice,
'his mouth the only law-giving Chamber in the land.'
'There'd been crowd scenes before, though not many. This was different.
'Shakespeare put the onion breath into his Dicks and Georges
'and let the middling sort smell it.
'He was the first poet of class war.'
So, sirs, now go some and pull down the Savoy,
others to the inns of court. Down with them all.
As for these silken coated slaves I pass not.
It is to you good people that I speak, over whom in time to come
I hope to reign, for I am rightful heir unto the crown.
Jack Cade gives you this vision of the city of London
razed to the ground with horses grazing on grass
where there used to be buildings.
It's sort of...year zero is what he wants to return to.
I think there's a part of the Cade rebellion
that is a scene in front of the hell mouth
offering sweeties to the people.
"Come on, let's misrule, let's chuck it all out".
'In an age when apprentices rioted each Shrovetide
'and when martial law was regularly imposed on London,
'Shakespeare was dramatising revolution.
'But he was no fool.
'and to avoid any suspicion that he was endorsing rebellion,
'Shakespeare turned Cade into a character of gormless megalomania.'
I thank you, good people.
There shall be no money.
All shall eat and drink on my score
and I will apparel them all in one livery,
that they may agree, like brothers,
and worship me, their lord.
'Jack Cade's rebellion is put down and he is executed.
'Cade's ferocity, Talbot's heroism
'and Richard Duke of Gloucester's villainy transfixed the audience.
'Over 10,000 people flocked to see Henry VI, one in 20 Londoners.'
Henry VI seems like the work of a playwright in progress,
especially compared to the high voltage masterpieces
which are to come.
But if you think about it as a crowd pleaser, it is all there.
The groundlings get to laugh at lines of Jack Cade's like,
"First kill all the lawyers,"
and the toffs and the merchants get to chuckle at the idiot rebels.
As commercial shows go, it is utterly brilliant.
'Almost alone among his contemporaries,
'Shakespeare wrote plays
'which delighted both the pit and the gallery.
'How did he do it?'
'Well, he was from the heart of England
'and he seemed to know the rest of it too, Catholic and Protestant,
'town and country,
'the humble and the high born.
All these identities served him well
when he became a playwright in earnest,
because he ended up as a kind of everyman,
someone who knew how to talk not just to the gents,
but to the groundlings. He knew what made them laugh,
what would bring tears to their eyes and what got their goats,
how to make them clap their hands in applause and stamp their feet.
'Just as Shakespeare was making his name, disaster struck.
Plague.
The theatres closed their doors.
Shakespeare's acting company shut down.
For the best part of a year, he was exiled from the theatre.
Then, in 1594, he joined a prestigious new acting troupe,
the Lord Chamberlain's Men,
and not just as a part-time actor and script doctor,
but as lead writer and partner in the company.
One of his new smash hits was a masterpiece...
Henry IV.
Henry has deposed Richard II. Guilt weighs heavily on his conscience.
But what makes the play groundbreaking is the fact that it's not really about kings at all.
Ordinary English men and women don't just appear in crowd scenes
or in brilliant cameos.
In Henry IV, they're the rowdy, mouthy, magnificent stars.
Maybe it was because Shakespeare was now in-house writer for the Lord Chamberlain's Men
that he felt the surge of confidence that allowed him to do things
in Henry IV that he would never have done in Henry VI.
Sure, there is still loads of swordplay,
but the real action is now in the language itself.
Explosive, dynamic, lacerating with irony.
And it came out of the mouth of someone who was brutal
only in his honesty, whose blade was wit,
who used that blade to cut through all the hypocritical cant
to what actually counted in the late Elizabethan world - money and power.
Sir John Falstaff.
"What is honour?
"A word.
"What is in that word, honour? What is that?
"Honour.
"Air.
"A trim reckoning.
"Who hath it?
"He that died o' Wednesday. "Doth he feel it?
"No. Doth he hear it? No. Is it insensible, then?
"Yea, to the dead.
"But...
"Doth it not live on with the living?
"No. Why?
"Detraction will not suffer it.
"Therefore I'll none of it.
"Honour is a mere scutcheon.
"And so ends my catechism."
In Henry IV, Shakespeare creates an entirety of an English world,
the courts and the country, lords and lowlifes.
And it's an authentic portrait of England, warts and all.
And nowhere is this more true than in the character of Falstaff.
He's a bundle of contradictions - cowardly, cynical and calculating,
but also fiercely intelligent, warm-hearted, brimful of bonhomie.
"The second property of your...
"excellent sherris is the warming of the blood,
"which before, cold and settled, left the liver white and pale,
"which is the badge of...pusillanimity...
"..and cowardice, but the sherris warms it,
"makes it course from the inwards to the parts' extremes.
"It illumineth the face,
"which as beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom,
"man, to arm. And then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits
"muster me all to their captain, the heart,
"who, great and puffed up with this retinue,
"doth any deed of any courage.
"And this valour comes of sherris."
In Falstaff, we find all those characteristics we associate with the English,
wit, irony, irreverence.
The great question since the Reformation had been, "What is England?"
In Henry IV, Shakespeare answers that question in a single word.
Falstaff has to be big,
because almost all of England and its pulsing, meaty, rowdy,
uncontainable life flows directly through him.
He's the living embodiment of a small country,
which suddenly has an outsized sense of itself.
He's very much part of that English strain who doesn't really give a toss, actually, you know.
You want the world? Have it.
You want all that Tudor power or Plantagenet power
or whatever it is, you know, have it, because life...
life itself is about something other than that.
About what? Come on.
Well, about appetite and... Yes.
Having fun and...
And love in the Doll Tearsheet scene...
And love and sex and, you know. Companionship.
Falstaff was instantly and extraordinarily popular.
Whenever he appeared, the playhouses were full.
Understandable, really. Elizabethans needed something to smile about.
By the mid-1590s, there was roaring inflation,
made worse by a succession of bad harvests.
As Shakespeare wrote Henry IV, London was gripped by riots,
sparked off by the skyrocketing cost of food.
Perhaps Falstaff's belly was a reminder of the good old days,
the days of plenty.
It's not just Falstaff's girth that's bursting at the seams.
It's also his language, which is abundant and baggy and brimful
to overflowing with intoxicating, exhilarating verbal juice.
Shakespeare's letting the lusciousness of the English language
roll around his and his audience's mouths,
so that they revel in the sounds of it, they wallow in the pictures.
You can almost taste the flavour and the savour of England in it.
"There's no more faith in thee than a stewed prune.
"His wit is as thick as Tewkesbury mustard.
"Hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-sucker."
What Shakespeare gives us in Henry IV
is the full performance of the English voice,
whether the pub crawlers of Eastcheap or the most high and mighty of aristocrats.
But whether he's giving us alehouse England or manor house England,
you know he's been listening,
because only an actor could have that ear
for the riotous carnival of English diction.
No-one else gets into the skin and the head of every kind of Briton.
In the late 1590s, Shakespeare lodged in Southwark,
on the south bank of the Thames.
Hundreds of brothels and alehouses packed together cheek by jowl.
The riot of English which Shakespeare heard on the streets
is captured in the scenes in the Boar's Head Tavern,
the pub in Eastcheap that's Falstaff's home.
There's the landlady, Mistress Quickly,
Falstaff's sidekick Pistol.
And, most compellingly of all, Doll Tearsheet,
the feisty neighbourhood whore.
In one scene, Pistol crudely propositions Doll.
Her response is a blistering broadside.
"What! You poor, base, rascally, cheating, lack-linen mate!
"Away, you mouldy rogue. Away!
"Away, you cut-purse rascal, you filthy bung!
"By this wine, I'll thrust my knife in your mouldy chaps
"and you play the saucy cuttle with me."
It feels as though Shakespeare was eavesdropping
and knew these people terribly well.
It feels as though he's writing about people. He's not far away...
Well, you know, he was an actor running round in the theatre
and the taverns, they were all kind of right next to one another and all mixing in the same world.
He's the one who contains the whole society,
you know, from the top to the bottom, and is truthful and different
in each category, particularly in the Henry IV plays,
where you've got all the strata of society kind of echoing a theme.
It's like a huge great choral symphonic picture of England.
In capturing the gabble and patter of English,
Shakespeare wasn't just recording the nation.
He may also have helped create it.
What's extraordinary about Shakespeare's language subsequently
is that it's become quite...
..unbeknownst to us, part of the way we think.
It's not just vocabulary and it's not phrases, famous phases.
It's to do with the rhythm. It's to do with the rhythm, the way Shakespeare uses language,
so that it's become... part of the way we speak,
even if we don't know that it has.
The self-conscious creation of our national personality
perhaps has something to do with it,
that Shakespeare just is part of the river of our language that most people would only half acknowledge.
In the second half of the 16th century, English was transformed.
Hundreds of new words and phrases appeared in print every year.
And many of these words appeared for the first time
in Shakespeare's plays.
Now, in all likelihood Shakespeare didn't invent
all these phrases, foul-mouth, puke, queasy, fob off, good riddance.
They were there already in the speech of the people,
in street slang, but what he did was to bring it onto the stage,
to wire together two totally different language worlds,
the world of the high-ups and the world of the lowlifes,
and by doing that, he expanded what literary English was,
and out of that expansion came image-rich ideas.
The green-eyed monster, pomp and circumstance,
a spotless reputation, the world is my oyster.
And after this language revolution,
we all think bigger, richer and in brighter colour.
CAR HORNS BLARE
In Henry IV, Part 1, Falstaff is the life force - cakes and ale,
laughter and comradeship, the innocence of sinning.
His comrade-in-sin is the Prince Of Wales, Hal.
Shakespeare was writing Henry IV in the shadow cast
by the death of his son, Hamnet,
probably taken off by the plague aged just 11.
We don't know how affected he was by Hamnet's death,
but perhaps it led him to brood mournfully on the relationship between fathers and sons,
for it is at the heart of the play.
Hal and his father are tangled up in terrible bitterness.
Henry IV's crime of usurpation
has turned him into the opposite of Falstaff,
a life denier.
"Now perceive the body of the kingdom,
"how foul it is", says the gloomy King Henry IV.
"What rank diseases grow, how near to danger the heart of it is."
Unlike Falstaff who lives in a carnival merry England,
constant booze-ups, joke-slamming with the prince,
Henry IV, insomniac, guilt-ridden,
doomed never to enjoy the fruits of his usurped throne, is trapped,
like all of his courtiers, loyal or treacherous,
in a death star where everyone moans and plots
from inside the steel casing of their dark armour.
Henry IV wants his son, Hal, to be a paragon of virtue
to compensate for his own crimes.
Hal deals with the pressure by deliberately insulting
everything his father stands for.
Because his father is the big crook, Hal will be the little crook.
He'll get pissed and laid and lie and steal.
Because he can't love his real father, Hal turns to a fake father.
Falstaff takes Hal to his heart.
But there's a part of Hal which is always the calculating politician.
Even in the high noon of their friendship,
he's planning to kill the relationship off.
In one of the greatest scenes of the play,
Hal impersonates his father, the King, and Falstaff is Hal, the erring son.
As usual, there's an undercurrent of ferocity to the play-acting.
Hal lets loose with a barrage of insults,
and Shakespeare's writing gets wilder and higher
with each insult piled on the last.
"There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of a fat old man,
"a tun of a man is thy companion.
"Why dost thou converse with that trunk of humours,
"that bolting-hutch of beastliness,
"that swollen parcel of dropsies, that huge bombard of sack?"
It's one of the funniest scenes in the play,
but also one of the most savage. Hal on Falstaff,
"Wherein is he good, but to taste sack and drink it?
"Wherein cunning but in craft? Wherein crafty but in villainy?
"Wherein villainous but in all things? Wherein worthy but nothing?"
It's like a physical assault, merciless and unsparing,
that the mirth dies on our face.
It will do again.
The penny drops.
Falstaff realises that more is going on than comedy role-play.
So he puts in a plea for himself and what he represents - love and life.
"My lord, the man I know, but to say I know more harm in him
"than in myself, were to say more than I know.
"That he is old, the more's 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 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 plump Jack and banish all the world."
Then comes Hal's reply - a stab to the heart.
"I do. I will."
Falstaff is going off to war,
so he spends one last night with his girl, Doll.
In Henry IV, the lowlifes come across as cleverer and wittier
than the high-borns.
But in this scene, Shakespeare also shows them to be more tender-hearted.
"Thou whoreson little tidy Bartholomew boar-pig,
"when wilt thou leave fighting o' days and foining o' nights
"and begin to patch up thine old body for heaven?"
"Peace, good Doll.
"Do not speak like a death's-head, do not bid me remember mine end.
"Kiss me, Doll. Thou dost give me most flattering busses."
"By my troth, I kiss thee with a most constant heart."
"I am old. I am old."
"I love thee better than I love e'er a scurvy young boy of them all."
"Thou'lt forget me when I'm gone."
"By my troth.
"Thou'lt set me a-weeping and thou sayest so."
And everybody's howling with tears... Yeah. ..at that point, aren't they, really?
Well, you know, she's got, it is this sort of stupid...
I mean, she's just so forgiving. Yeah. And, um...
..and just understands, you know?
I know you're old, but I'd rather have you, you know,
because you're a person. Yes. You're a person that I love.
It's the fact that he gives that vulnerability to her
that makes him, you know, win her heart.
Shakespeare's daring to make something very touching
out of what could be just howlingly funny.
Falstaff is love and tenderness,
but he also understands the world of ruthless profit and ambition
and means to get his piece of it.
His whole life is a brutal scramble for cash,
barely a step ahead of the creditors.
He fleeces his landlady, he lies to the law,
he's an exploiter as well as a chum.
As a recruiting officer, he scours the countryside,
pocketing money to get fit men off the hook,
while packing the army with impoverished starvelings.
On one of these human scavenger hunts,
he descends on the Gloucestershire estate of an old friend,
Justice Shallow.
Somehow, even though Falstaff's up to no good,
he and we let ourselves drown in the dream world of rustic abundance.
This is deep England, the remembered world of Shakespeare's childhood.
He gives us the full sweetness of the English countryside,
the bucolic realm where there are always short-legged hens,
where the pippins are always juicy and the fields are always packed
with golden wheat.
So when Justice Shallow orders his steward Davy to sow the headland
with red wheat, when he orders up a joint of mutton,
when he insists that Falstaff join in, in an orchard
and eat last year's "pippins of my own grafting" did the groundlings,
stuck in their verminous rat holes, cellars and garrets,
hunger for the lost country home
that Shakespeare so bounteously had set before them?
It's on Shallow's estate that the thunderbolt strikes.
News arrives that Henry IV has died.
Falstaff saddles up, rides all night.
Once Hal is crowned, his hard-up years will be over.
But what he finds when he reaches London
is anything but the Promised Land.
Doll Tearsheet, pregnant, is dragged off to be whipped.
Doll is Hal's friend, but instead of sacking the Lord Chief Justice,
who has ordered her punishment, Hal, now King Henry V, embraces him.
It's already unbearable, but what happens next is merciless.
What we witness is not just a repudiation of Falstaff,
the father figure, the friend, the fellow reveller,
but a demolition, a living death,
and of a peculiarly English kind - the social cut,
as sharp and as lethal as a blade.
"My sweet boy, my heart!" cries Falstaff, reaching out.
"I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
"How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester!
"I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
"so surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane.
"But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
"Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace.
"Leave gormandizing, know the grave doth gape
"for thee thrice wider than for other men.
"Reply not to me with a fool-born jest.
"Presume not that I am the thing I was.
"For God doth know, so shall the world perceive.
"That I have turned away my former self.
"So will I those that kept me company."
With that, we can feel the air sucked out of Falstaff, a deflation.
Worst of all, the very essence of Falstaff's genius, his wit,
is snuffed out by royal command.
"Reply not to me with a fool-born jest", says King Henry V.
I cannot believe Shakespeare would've written the rejection of Falstaff like he did
if he did not want to make you feel two things.
One is really sorry for Falstaff.
And secondly a feeling that Hal has sacrificed
a really important part of himself.
He has got to cut Falstaff off from himself.
It's an act of surgery which wouldn't work for him
unless he did it in that cruel way.
Falstaff's bigness is no longer the measure of his life force.
It's simply the measure of his coffin.
In the epilogue, we're told that the fat knight will return.
Elizabeth I loved him so much that, according to tradition,
she even commissioned a new Falstaff play.
But what Shakespeare gave her was slapstick Falstaff
in The Merry Wives Of Windsor.
The real Falstaff would never come back,
except in his death scene, told by the grieving Mistress Quickly in Henry V.
"The King's rejection," she says, "hath killed his heart."
For all his faults,
Falstaff is the embodiment of England that we end up going with.
It's like the sort of battling out between that cold, repressed England,
and the warm, earthy, beer-drinking England,
and they're sort of still there out there.
It's always dangerous to say, "Here is Shakespeare's mind."
But if there's a place where he's happiest,
it is in the remembered old feast
that's circumscribed by Falstaff's stomach.
And if there's a place where he is, God forbid, judgmental,
it is on those people who rely overmuch on rational thought,
on cold, expedient rational thought.
Shakespeare had done his job of creating England on stage,
but it turned out there were two Englands.
In the first one, it was always midsummer, Friday night,
beery abundance, tender lust, lots of jokes.
But the second England was a much wintrier place,
run by hard men, concerned with power and money.
And right now the boot of the second England was on the neck of the first.
Though Falstaff is dead, the shock of his rejection lingers on,
a ghostly echo asking, "Was friendship always going to be sacrificed
"when the man became the monarch?
"Are kings capable of humanity or must they leave it behind
"when they ascend the throne?"
The awkward fit between humanity and royalty obsessed Shakespeare
into the new century and a new reign.
From that obsession came some of the greatest works
that he, or any dramatist of the tragedies of power, ever created.
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