Shakespeare for All Time

The very excellent Amanda Mabillard of Shakespeare Online has developed several essay questions for each of Shakespeare’s plays. Today, I am going to take a shot at answering this two parter on the character of Prince Hal in Henry IV:

Many critics of the play argue that, in the final analysis, Shakespeare has failed to make Prince Hal a convincing character. We are to conclude that Hal has every virtue that makes both a great ruler and a great man — honesty, bravery, loyalty, generosity, intelligence, compassion, etc — in addition to accepting that he has no flaws with which to counter those virtues; flaws that would make him a realistic character. Do you agree that Hal is “too good to be true”? Is it really true that Shakespeare makes Hal flawless? Make reference to Hal’s relationships with his father and Falstaff in your answer.

Discussion and Analysis

In Shakespeare’s time Henry V (Prince Hal) was considered to be the model of the ideal English king. And for more than three centuries after that Shakespearean scholars who had carefully studied the Henriad (Richard II, Henry IV, 1 & 2 and Henry V) had, almost to a man, concluded that Shakespeare himself was a Henryoloter. That was the conventional wisdom until 1951 when a brilliant scholar named Harold Goddard came along. Goddard posited that Henry V was only apparently a patriotic tribute to an ideal king; that beneath its surface was a Shakespearean mockery of the notion that a warrior king, especially this warrior king, could ever be the ideal.

In her essay question, Mabillard asks this: “Do you agree that Prince Hal is too good to be true?” Not only do I not agree that Prince Hal as portrayed by Shakespeare is too good to be true, I don’t agree that any serious scholar has suggested that he is too good to be true. It is not Prince Hal, but Henry V, that scholars have suggested is too good to be true.

We need look no further for proof that Shakespeare did not intend to portray Hal as a flawless man than to the first 4 and 1/2 acts of Henry IV, Part 1, during which Prince Hal is not only not too good to be true, but not good at all. He is, at worst, a rogue, a prankster and a thief and, at best, a hypocrite.

Let’s examine, as Mabillard asks us to do, Hal’s relationship with the two father figures in his life: His real father, the embattled and insecure King Henry IV, and his surrogate father, the swaggering boon companion, Sir John Falstaff,

First, let’s deal with Hal’s real daddy.

Shakespeare, as he frequently does with his primary characters, builds Hal’s character by showing us how he is viewed by others. The pattern holds true here and the portrait we get of Hal is not a flattering one. The King not only finds his son to be flawed, he finds him to be irrevocably flawed. He is so disappointed in Hal that he openly wishes that Hotspur and he had been switched at birth and that his true son were the honorable Harry Percy rather than the riotous Henry Monmouth:

Yea, there thou makest me sad and makest me sin
In envy that my Lord Northumberland
Should be the father to so blest a son,
A son who is the theme of honour’s tongue;
Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant;
Who is sweet Fortune’s minion and her pride:
Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,
See riot and dishonour stain the brow
Of my young Harry. O that it could be proved
That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call’d mine Percy, his Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.

It’s hard to imagine anything more damning than a father wishing that his son were not his son. Clearly there is something in Hal that has provoked this reaction from his father and it isn’t good. Fortunately, we don’t have to look far to see what it is. Hal himself tells us that he’s irresponsible, lazy, roguish and keeps company with theives, swaggers and drunks. He pronounces, in his most famous sololiquy (“I know you all, and will a while uphold… .”), that he will intentionally play the rogue to lower everyone’s expectations so that when he becomes king everyone will be pleasantly surprised that he is precisely the opposite. His prior dishonor, he says, will make his future honor stand out in high relief.

And let’s not forget Prince Hal’s premature self-coronation after the gravely ill Henry IV falls asleep on his death bed. Hal assumes his father is dead, grabs the crown and places it on his head. Goddard is spot on here when he says that Shakespeare wanted to portray Hal as overly-ambitious, drunk with the idea of power. Goddard provides the textual proof. The words Hal uses when he takes the crown are full of expectation and excitement at the prospect of power, but are quite different later when others, including his father, discover that he plucked the crown while the king still lives.

Hal’s relationship with his father is flawed from the crown to the toe. Hal doesn’t respect the King (if he did he wouldn’t be galavanting about town with the disreputable Falstaff and his pals) and the King wishes he had any other son but him.

Now let’s now Hal’s relationship with his other father, Falstaff.

To be sure, Hal revels in Falstaff’s company. But most of that revelling comes at the bloat knight’s expense. Although Falstaff clearly thinks of Hal as his friend, Hal never thinks of Falstaff as anything but a source of amusement. Hal serves Falstaff merely to serve his turn upon him.

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
. . . .

I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Even if you hold with Goddard that Hal isn’t really a rogue but only playing one on T.V., you must still conclude that his manipulation of Falstaff and his boon companions for personal gain is devious and hypocritical. Hal, then, if not genuinely roguish, is a Machiavel.

Henry V’s rejection of Falstaff, although it should come as no surprise to even the casual reader, provides the final proof that Hal intended to abandon Falstaff all along. The public rejection of Falstaff was surely something the new King had to do to improve his reputation, but what does it say about him as a human being?

Conclusion

I find myself in a dilemma on the question of Prince Hal’s character.

On the one hand, Shakespeare was much too original a dramatist to accept at face value the simplistic conventions of his time. While he may have wanted to feed the groundlings their red meat by portraying Prince Hal/Henry V as the ideal king, it is awfully hard for me to believe that he would have intended to portray him as a flawless man. In fact, judging from the subjects Shakespeare chose for his other plays, it is likely that he was attracted to Prince Hal/Henry V as a subject not because he was England’s ideal king, but because he was England’s flawed ideal king.

But I think Goddard goes too far in concluding that Shakespeare had written a play beneath the play because the notion that a ruthless warrior like Henry could ever truly be ideal was anathema to him. Goddard’s analysis of Prince Hal/Henry V seems to be infused with a wentieth century anti-war bias. Goddard’s ideal king would never concoct a false premise for war and never slaughter defenseless prisoners, therefore, Goddard assumes Shakespeare’s king wouldn’t either. Goddard’s contention, being based as it is on assumptions that are not only unsupported by the text, but in direct contradiction of it, is similar in kind to those of the conspiratorialists Delia Bacon and Iganatious Donnelly who claimed that the plays are a grand and unified cipher that reveals that Shakespeare didn’t write them.

Goddard is right when he says Prince Hal/Henry V is a flawed man because the text proves that Shakespeare intended to portray him as a flawed man. Goddard, his pacifistic assumptions notwithstanding, is wrong, however, when he suggests that Shakespeare, in spite of his mostly tributory text, in his heart of hearts really believed that Prince Hal/Henry V was a despicable character. Goddard’s reading the Henry IV and Henry V plays turns textual analysis on its head by suggesting that what the words actually say is merely Shakespeare’s code for their opposite.

If we are to assume anything about Shakespeare’s personal feelings about Hal/Henry, we must assume that Shakespeare shared the biases of his time and admired Henry V and intended to show that admiration in dramatic form.

I saw Romeo and Juliet at the Orlando Shakespeare Center this weekend and have been searching for an appropriate topic to write about. I found it on a website called Shmoop (tag line “we speak student”) which lists a series of exam-type questions for students reading the play. This question stood out (emphasis is mine):

The fact that Romeo and Juliet have sex is what makes it impossible for Juliet to marry Paris and it is what leads to the play’s final tragedy. Why do the Friar and the Nurse decide to help Romeo and Juliet spend the night together, even after he has killed Tybalt? Could the play still have unfolded in a similar way without this night of lovemaking?

I am less concerned with the actual question in this question than I am with the question’s premise: Juliet’s loss of virginity precludes her marriage to the County Paris.

I have read Romeo and Juliet several times and have seen it performed twice on stage, once in a ballet and several times on film. I have not until now heard the argument that Juliet doesn’t agree to marry Paris, not because of her intense love for Romeo, but rather because she has lost her virginity to Romeo. This reading, at first blush, appears to make some sense because if Juliet were to marry Paris he would, on their wedding night, discover that she is not a virgin, immediately demand an annulment and thereby disgrace Juliet and the entire Capulet family.

But is this reading supported by the text?

In Act III, Scene V, shortly after Romeo has left Juliet’s bed chamber, Lady Capulet tells Juliet that she is to wed Paris “early next thursday morn.” Here’s the exchange (emphasis is mine):

LADY CAPULET: Well, well, thou hast a careful father, child;
One who, to put thee from thy heaviness,
Hath sorted out a sudden day of joy,
That thou expect’st not nor I look’d not for.

JULIET: Madam, in happy time, what day is that?

LADY CAPULET: Marry, my child, early next Thursday morn,
The gallant, young and noble gentleman,
The County Paris, at Saint Peter’s Church,
Shall happily make thee there a joyful bride.

JULIET: Now, by Saint Peter’s Church and Peter too,
He shall not make me there a joyful bride.
I wonder at this haste; that I must wed
Ere he, that should be husband, comes to woo.
I pray you, tell my lord and father, madam,
I will not marry yet; and, when I do, I swear,
It shall be Romeo, whom you know I hate,
Rather than Paris.

LADY CAPULET: Here comes your father; tell him so yourself,
And see how he will take it at your hands.

The only sentence above that might possibly be construed as alluding to Juliet’s lost virginity is her outburst,

Now, by Saint Peter’s Church and Peter too,
He shall not make me there a joyful bride.

The phrase “shall not make me there a joyful bride” certainly means that the bride shall not be joyful, but it might also mean that Paris won’t find his bride joyful (to himself) when he discovers that she has been enjoyed by someone before him. But I think that’s much too subtle a reference, even for Shakespeare.

I have searched the entire play and couldn’t find a single reference or allusion, other than the above sentence, that would indicate that the reason Juliet will not marry Paris is because she cannot marry him, having already lost her virginity to Romeo. Consequently, as we must always do when interpreting a Shakespearean text, we must assume that what is not there is not there for a reason. In other words, if Shakespeare wanted his audiences to believe that Juliet would have married Paris had she not consummated her marriage with Romeo, he would have made it clear at least somewhere in the text. That he didn’t include it in the text is additional evidence that Juliet would not have married Paris under any circumstances because she was utterly and thoroughly devoted to Romeo.

Here are two final points that make it easy for me to conclude that Juliet would not have married Paris even had she not already married Romeo and even if she had not consummated her marriage to him:

1.  Even were Juliet inclined to accede to her father’s wishes and marry Paris, since consummation was required in Renaissance Catholic Italy (and probably Elizabethan England, too) in order to create a binding marriage contract, it would be Juliet’s marriage (remember, it’s not a marriage until it’s consummated) and not just one component of that marriage (the consummation) that precludes her marriage to Paris. Shakespeare, in other words, would not have separated the marriage from the consummation because in the time of the play and his own time the two were coterminous.

2.  Shakespeare’s tragedy is premised on Romeo and Juliet’s extreme and reckless devotion to one another. If Juliet avoids marrying Paris only, or even partially, because she cannot marry him, that devotion is compromised and, along with it, the tragic crux of the play.

My wife and I attended the opening performance of Romeo & Juliet at the Orlando Shakespeare Center last night and, as we do all of the Shakespeare plays put on by the theater, thoroughly enjoyed it.

The highlight of the night, though, was when Jim Helsinger, the Artistic Director of Orlando Shakes, was pressed into emergency service as Lord Capulet after actor Johnny Lee Davenport got injured backstage.

The bespectacled Helsinger had to read his lines from a script. But he did so much more than that. He acted the hell out of the role and, at the end, received a standing ovation from the grateful audience for it.

Jim Helsinger

What made Helsinger’s performance even more heroic was that Davenport’s injury occurred right before the beginning of Act III, Scene 4, which meant that Helsinger had to speak and act 260 of the 381 lines (68%) Capulet speaks in the play. Most of these lines are packed with emotion. They include the highly charged scenes between Capulet and his daughter Juliet, who refuses to marry the County Paris, and the final scene where Capulet anguishes over his daughter’s death.

So, kudos to Jim Helsinger and the cast and crew for not only putting on another excellent performance of a Shakespeare play, but for allowing us to witness first hand what the phrase “the show must go on” truly means.

The star-crossed title characters were played admirably by Michael Raver and Stella Heath. It was clear from their performances – they pant, they sigh, they yearn – that the director, Thomas Ouelette, wanted them to behave like the infatuated teenaged lovers they are.¹ Raver and Heath do a yeoman’s job.

But for me – and the passel of 12 year old students sitting in the row behind me who laughed at every bawdy pelvic thrust in the play (and there are many of them in Ouelette’s version) – the real star of the play was Geoffrey Kent as Mercutio. Kent is, of course, funny, but he is so much more than that. Ouelette told us in his pre-play presentation that Mercutio has a dark side and he wanted to make this evident. Kent pulls it off with aplomb, especially at the end of his famous Queen Mab speech when he seems to be talking from his own experience of unrequited love:

This is that very Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:
This is she—

If you haven’t seen a Shakespeare play at The Orlando Shakespeare Center, you are missing something truly special. Go see Romeo & Juliet and bring your kids. It’s the perfect play to introduce children to Shakespeare. Be forewarned, though, that in addition to the bawdy gestures, the play has some violent moments and lots of fake blood. It’s probably not for children under the age of 12.

Footnotes:

¹   I saw an old film version of Romeo & Juliet where a fortyish Leslie Howard plays the part of Romeo. It borders on the absurd.

Do you think the Chinese are feeding their children double-condensed versions of the I Ching?

Katherin Schulten of the New York Times says there is now a condensed cartoon version of Shakespeare’s plays, er, I mean a condensed version of the CliffsNotes of Shakespeare’s plays:

If reading CliffsNotes’s “Hamlet” seems to be a pokey, 20th-century way to speed-comprehend Shakespeare, never fear. Now there’s a seven-minute cartoon version, complete with a talking Yorick’s skull. Think of it as CliffsNotes for CliffsNotes.

The goal, says Karen Cahn, general manager of branded experiences at AOL, a CliffsNotes partner, is to create “edutainment” that inspires young people to read the original. Students have used the familiar black-and-yellow CliffsNotes to supplement — or avoid — the reading of great literature since 1958. Though competitors like SparkNotes also have summaries and commentary online, CliffsNotes has animated the stories and translated Elizabethan English into contemporary slang. Romeo is “a total emo” and Julius Caesar dismisses warnings about the Ides of March with a “whatevs.”

Shakespeare coined words like sanctimonius, assassination and fashionable, Ms. Kahn has coined the word “edutainment.”

Oh, how I shake and quiver when I contemplate the future of my country.

Schulten continues. I grow more nauseous:

Does watching irreverent cartoons that “compress large amounts of knowledge into concise, tasty mind nuggets,” as the site describes it, help or hurt appreciation of Shakespeare? You be the judge.

“ROMEO AND JULIET” (Act 2, Scene 2)

Shakespeare says:

JULIET: If that thy bent of love be honourable,
Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow,
By one that I’ll procure to come to thee,
Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite;
And all my fortunes at thy foot I’ll lay
And follow thee my lord throughout the world.

CliffsNotes Films says:

JULIET: OMG, that was like so hot. Let’s totes (per urban dictionary “totes” means totally) get married.
ROMEO: I’ll get a priest.

“HAMLET” (Act 1, Scene 2) 

Shakespeare says:

QUEEN GERTRUDE: Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know’st ‘tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity. 

CliffsNotes Films says:

QUEEN GERTRUDE: So turn that frown upside down!

Shakespeare says:

HAMLET: …O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn’d longer — married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

CliffsNotes Films says:

HAMLET: He’s your brother-in-law! Gross.

This is pornography. Shakespeare is his words and to change them or paraphrase them is no different than penciling a moustache on Mona Lisa’s nether lip or beatboxing Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik.²

I am generally opposed to the death penalty, but for crimes like this I am willing to reconsider.

Footnotes:

¹  CliffsNotes Films has released videos of six often-taught Shakespeare plays, from “Macbeth” to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” co-produced by Mark Burnett (“Survivor,” “Celebrity Apprentice”).  A batch from another writer of classics, not yet announced, is in the works for summer.

²  The missile scientists that came up with this idea probably feigned outrage when Turner Classic Movies aired a colorized version of Citizen Kane.

David Haglund writing for Slate questions T.S. Eliot’s claim that Coriolanus and not Hamlet is Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy:

In 1919, T.S. Eliot published an essay that elevates literary contrarianism to heights that have rarely been equaled. The central argument of “Hamlet and His Problems,” which first appeared in the Athenaeum and was later collected in The Sacred Wood, is that Hamlet, considered a masterpiece for centuries, is a shambles. Eliot goes on to insist that the Bard’s greatest tragedy is actually a play few people paid much attention to then or now: Coriolanus, just adapted for the screen by Ralph Fiennes.

I could understand Eliot preferring, say, King Lear, Macbeth or Othello to Hamlet, but Coriolanus?¹

Eliot [then] delivers his contrarian coup de grace, bypassing all the other likely candidates for Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy… and declares that the title rightly belongs to Coriolanus, one of the Bard’s least-read plays:

One of the most psychologically disturbing speeches in the canon is the one Othello gives moments before he strangles Desdemona:

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul,–
Let me not name it to you, you chaste stars!–
It is the cause. Yet I’ll not shed her blood;
Nor scar that whiter skin of hers than snow,
And smooth as monumental alabaster.
Yet she must die, else she’ll betray more men.
Put out the light, and then put out the light:
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me: but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning’st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck’d the rose,
I cannot give it vital growth again.
It must needs wither: I’ll smell it on the tree.

It’s revealing to contrast this speech with Brutus’ famous speech where he decides that Caesar must die. Brutus, unlike Othello, opens his speech by announcing his conclusion – “it must be by his death” – and then proceeds to lamely rationalize that conclusion. Othello seems to be tilting the other way, against killing Desdemona. At the end of the speech he acknowledges that  once he plucks the rose he cannot give it life again. This statement provides a glimmer of hope that Othello might spare Desdemona after all. Instead, he simply says that he will smell the rose on the tree once more before he plucks it.

“I’ll smell it on the tree” is Othello’s bone-chilling affirmation that Desdemona, like Caesar, must die.

Brutus says it must be by Caesar’s death or else he will become a tyrant and Othello says it must be Desdemona’s death or else she’ll betray more men.

A reader of mine named Clay left the following comment on my post Ocular Proof and the Authorship Crazies:

Ocular proof that Bacon was Shakespeare: http://www.flickr.com/photos/68555176@N06/6723608697/

I clicked on the link and here’s what I found:

This is what is known by Baconists as the Northumberland Manuscript:

In 1867 in Northumberland House a manuscript folder was discovered which at one time had been in Francis Bacon’s possession. The folder contained a list with some of Bacon’s well-known works along with two of the Shakespeare plays.

It is the only Elizabethan document that has both the names Shakespeare and Francis Bacon written together. The Northumberland Manuscript is a valuable contemporary document which, although somewhat damaged by a fire in old Northumberland House, survives to prove that “Shakespeare’s” Manuscripts of Richard II and Richard III were once tied up in a portfolio with Francis Bacon’s Conference of Pleasure, some speeches, Nash’s Isle of Dogs and an old play that is lost.

The fact remains that on the old parchment cover is written the names of Bacon and Shakespeare in the list of contents and scattered sentences from the Shakespeare plays including the unusual word from Love’s Labour’s Lost, honorificabilitudini. On the back side of the cover are the words “put into type.”

If the Baconists are correct and this document proves that Bacon was the true author of all of the works attributable to William Shakespeare, the following document - known simply as The Manuscript – proves that I am the true author of the works of Philip Roth:

That Shakespeare often gives his wisest and most beautiful speeches to dishonorable characters and despicable villains is no secret. Caliban’s “the isle is full of noises” speech, Polonius’ “to thine ownself be true” speech and Edmund’s “excellent foppery of the world” speech are some of the most well-known examples. But he does this even in lesser plays, like Titus Andronicus.

Aaron the Moor is an over-the-top villain, so much so that many have considered him to be a parody of the type. Listen as he declares wasted those days in which he failed to commit some foul deed:

Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day–and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,–
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it.
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men’s cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends’ doors, [...]
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

Later he brags that he is going to have Tamora’s sons, Chiron and Demetrius, rape Titus’ daughter, Lavinia, and cut her tongue out.

But in spite of his unspeakable villainy (perhaps, because of it), Shakespeare makes him, above all characters in this blood-soaked play, a loving parent:

Stay, murderous villains! will you kill your brother?
Now, by the burning tapers of the sky,
That shone so brightly when this boy was got,
He dies upon my scimitar’s sharp point
That touches this my first-born son and heir! 

Aaron then cuts a deal with the Romans in order to save his child’s life, promising to confess and sacrifice himself if the Romans will allow his child to live.¹

Shakespeare must have calculated that wise words are more memorable when they come from the mouth of a villain rather than the mouth of a hero? Alternatively, or additionally, Shakespeare may have wanted to show that human beings are never all evil or all good, but rather, complex combinations of good and evil.

Footnotes:

¹   Of course, it very well could be the demon-child that he is hell-bent on saving, but that’s a topic for another day.

Phillip Corbett, the New York Times grammarian, warns against the misuse of Shakespeare by writers. In his article titled Mangled Shakespeare, Corbett discusses Hamlet’s oft-misunderstood phrase “it is a custom more honor’d in the breach than the observance