Henry IV, Part II (Richard Eyre, 2012)

"Presume not that I am the thing I was!"

It's been a while since I reviewed Part I, I know. The last few weeks have been somewhat unusual, though. The blog is now back to normal and you can expect Henry V fairly sharpish, probably next Saturday. I was actually going to review a film today but I really have to get these Hollow Crown adaptations watched and reviewed as I recorded them off the telly and they're taking up too much space. So, the current schedule is Shakespeare for two consecutive Saturdays, after which Saturday (or Sunday if I happen to be out Saturday) will be where I review new episodes of Doctor Who. I'll be doing a film on Bank Holiday morning. Only one other person (yes, you, Nick!) knows what it is. After the five weeks of Doctor Who then Saturdays will revert to films again, although I also plan to slot in a recording of Macbeth from BBC 4 at some point. The rest of the week will be all Buffy and Angel.

So, Part II. Again, the only one of these plays I've read or seen before is Richard II, so forgive me if I react to a play that is new to me. There's a real sense of foreboding right from the start. All these parallels of different pairs of fathers and sons are soooo last play. The old Earl of Northumberland, such a presence in the last play, gets only two scenes, in one of which he suffers the bereavement of his much-loved son, and another in which he buggers off out of the play. It's interesting that the scene in which he hears of his bereavement should take place amongst such bleakly beautiful Northumberland countryside.

But this play, unlike its predecessor, is concerned with just one father and one son. Even Falstaff, this time, is no longer a father figure; he and Hal are on strained terms from the beginning, and Simon Russell Beale gives Falstaff a palpable anxiety throughout, as if he knows, deep down, that the prince will disown him. There's much more emphasis on his physical age, even to the point of a sex scene which makes it clear that his performance is not what it was. Tom Hiddleston, too, gives us a more serious prince from the beginning, with the frailty and mortality of his father weighing upon his mind.

This play is much more serious than its prequel. It's not that there isn't comedy- there are some glorious insults in the scene where Falstaff is arrested, and Robert Shallow is a brilliant comic creation. But there's an ever-present sense of decline and doom which can only be redeemed by the accession of a king freed from the original sin of being a usurper. The old king visibly declines throughout the play, and becomes much more morose and philosophical, even getting a soliloquy on his insomnia, which even kings are subject to. Like Cnut, this king knows that nature marks a limit to his power. Perhaps there's also a suggestion that his inability to sleep, and the tumult that besets his realm, are a result of his illegitimacy as a king. It's significant that he even quotes Richard.

We're reminded that Falstaff, as a knight, has certain feudal obligations in time of war as we see him recruiting peasants to take with him.  One of them, Ralph Mouldy, points out that his wife and children will have no breadwinner while he's away fighting, a reminder that these aristocratic wars have cruel consequences for those further down the scale. Another peasant is fatalistic about his possible death, a motif that recurs throughout the latter stages of the play: as Shallow points out, "Death is certain". For everyone in this play, death is very near. Shallow is conscious of his many dead acquaintances; he sees his generation beginning to pass away. The king is dying. People die in wars, "traitors" are casually and summarily executed, and there are many, many mentions of old Falstaff's mortality, which culminate in his admonishment from the new King Henry V.

This scene is the fulcrum of both plays, of course: the new king's "I know thee not, old man." His new, royal persona is so very different from the playboy prince of the recent past but then, of course, as we knew from Hal's soliloquy at the start of the previous play, the playboy prince was no less of a mask than the kingly one. Hal has to clearly separate the man and the king, having learned from his father that kingship is a burden.