Background and dramaturgy material courtesy of dramaturg
Adam Versényi
Plot Summaries
The Making of A King draws its events
from a group of four related plays by Shakespeare:
Richard
II,
Henry IV, Part I,
Henry IV, Part II and
Henry V.
In
Richard II we see the
downfall of one king and the rise of another.
Richard II banishes Henry Bolingbroke and claims all of his lands and
possessions.
Henry returns to England
and, with his allies the Northumberland Percys, leads a rebellion. Richard is defeated, forced to abdicate the
throne, and Bolingbroke is crowned Henry IV.
The two parts of Henry IV I
show us the fractious nature of the new king’s reign. Threatened constantly by insurrection, much
of it led by his erstwhile allies the Percys; Henry IV is also greatly
distressed by the behavior of Prince Hal, his son and heir, and we track his
journey from youthful abandon in the taverns of Eastcheap to valor in his
father’s cause during the Battle of Shrewsbury.
By the end of the play Prince Hal distances himself from his old
drinking companions, especially the father-substitute he found there, Sir John
Falstaff, and is crowned Henry V.
In Henry V we see the new king as a man who
feels he has been called upon to cement the control of the Plantagenet line on
the English throne and to unite the kingdoms of France and England. Following his father’s advice to launch a
foreign war to quell civil unrest at home, the young king decisively invades
France. In the process he demonstrates his growing understanding of statecraft
as he dispatches both aristocratic traitors and common soldier thieves from his
old tavern days. By the play’s end Henry
V, against monumental odds, defeats the French at Agincourt, marries the French
King’s daughter Katherine, and is crowned King of England and France combined.
 |
| From Agincourt by Juliet Barker, October 2005 |
The Making of A King
 |
Henry IV, in Henry Holland,
Baziliologia, 1618 |
While the British Monarch is
largely a figurehead today, the subject of royal weddings, Helen Mirren films,
and tabloid scandals, the British Monarchy was for much of its existence a
powerful political and military force.
That is not the way it began, however, and Shakespeare’s plays deal in
many ways with the personal, dynastic and social forces that forged the
monarchic state.
Henry
IV shows us Prince Hal’s coming into his own during the uncertain times
that follow his father’s usurpation of Richard II’s throne.
Henry IV is bedeviled by numerous
forces:
civil unrest fomented by the
lords who helped him claim the throne and now feel abandoned by him; fear that
Richard II’s designated heir, Edmund Mortimer, will press his claim to the
throne; and the clear sense that, by killing Richard, he has both violated the
divine right of kings and made it impossible to assume that right for himself.
The beginning of the play focuses on the tension between a centralized monarchy
and the diverse geographical regions, languages, and cultures that comprised
the British monarchy. Henry IV is trying to break the grip of powerful
independent warlords, particularly from the North, who have challenged the
authority of the king.
In essence, what
Shakespeare dramatizes here is a painful transition from a feudal system to a
nation-state. The Northumberland Percys
and Worcester place feudal loyalties above fealty to a single monarch and
Hotspur is the strongest embodiment of feudal chivalry with its code of honor,
its admiration of heroism on the battlefield, and its elevation of loyalty to
self and family above any loyalty to the state.
Hotspur’s greatest danger to Henry is his assertion of feudal rights
against the law of the land.
Rather than
the traditional image of the monarch as the sun, Hotspur sees him as the moon,
a mere reflection of the king that Henry deposed.
Fiercely independent, embracing personal
honor and lineage over nationalism, valuing bravery and force of arms for its
own sake rather than what it can achieve, and zealously asserting his political
autonomy, Hotspur is a weapon skillfully wielded by those, such as
Northumberland and Westmoreland, who want to break Henry’s rule.
 |
| An artist's illustration of the town and part of Harfluer. |
Shakespeare
alters his sources to make Prince Hal and Hotspur the same age—the historical
Hotspur was closer in age to Henry—and makes the Hal of his play a bit older
than he was in reality.
The historical
Hal was only twelve years old during the Battle of Shrewsbury where, despite
being wounded by an arrow in his face, he fought valiantly.
Shakespeare makes these alterations to make
Hal and Hotspur’s final confrontation more dramatically compelling, and Hal
must defeat Hotspur to inherit a secure kingship from his father, but his
greater challenge will be to defeat the lure of the tavern world where first we
find him reveling.
Taverns were
alehouses where anyone could drink publicly. All layers of society from the
criminal to the courtly mixed freely outside the rigid class distinctions and
constraints of the court. During Henry Bolingbroke’s exile Hal was a ward of
Richard II and the experience of watching his father depose and execute his
mentor may also contribute to Hal’s motivation for fleeing the court to dally
in the tavern world.
Where Hotspur is a
rival for Hal, Falstaff is presented as surrogate father to him and, therefore,
a rival to Henry for paternal authority.
Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that Falstaff the thief is akin to
Henry the usurper, who stole the throne from Richard.
Both create positions of power they base upon
theft.
Hal, who will inherit the
kingship through legitimate succession, has the opportunity to establish the
crown as rightly his.
All of this
suggests, and the play extends the idea, that political power depends not upon
divine right, but upon performance.
He
who best plays the king is the king. This is a particularly apt concept for Elizabethan England where, as
Machiavelli observed in
The Prince, “political power is secured by theatrical
illusion—a populace can best be controlled by dissimulation, image-making, and
role-play.”
This is one
reason that Henry IV’s recurring illness became such an issue both historically
and in the play.
What he actually
suffered from is unclear, only that he suffered many bouts of a debilitating
illness starting in 1405.
Whatever the
specifics of the diagnosis, all his contemporaries agreed that his illness was
divine retribution for having usurped the throne.
Henry himself seems to have believed this as
well.
The first words of his will are,
“I, Henry, sinful wretch” and refer to “the life I have mispended”.
While
Henry IV begins
with the world of the court and the feudal lords, the play also
presents a richly observed catalogue of all of the other social classes that
comprise the new nation.
Hal boasts that he “can drink with any
tinker in his own language”, implying that being able to speak the common
tongue is essential to his future governance.
Throughout the play Shakespeare explores various alternatives to the
official speech of the court, moving those voices from the margins to the
center, with the loudest voice of all provided by Falstaff.
As the play proceeds Falstaff is increasingly
painted as a cynical, manipulative and degenerate character that Hal must
reject in order to rule.
But the brio
with which Falstaff speaks, the bravado with which he moves, and the keen eye
with which Shakespeare observes denizens of the world
beyond the court insures that while we understand the necessity of
Hal’s transformation into Henry V, the demands of the state also reject human
compassion and theatrical excitement.
Our sympathies remain with Falstaff.
 |
Henry V in a fifteenth century
portrait by an unknown artist. |
Shakespeare’s
Henry V dramatizes the new king’s
decisiveness as he moves to consolidate his power at home and brilliantly beats
the French at Agincourt.
Interestingly enough,
the animosity between the English and the French, many of the techniques of
warfare that they used, and the feudal system that Henry IV began to break and
that Henry V completely quashed, can all be traced back to the Norman invasion
of England in 1066.
By the time of Henry V’s rule the
feudal system had largely been superseded by a centralized state and by
invading France Henry resumed the Hundred Years War.
Its basic cause was a dynastic quarrel
between the kings of England, who held the duchy of Guienne, in France, and
resented paying homage to the kings of France. The conflict languished until
1415, when Henry V defeated France’s best knights at Agincourt.
He then allied himself with Burgundy and went
on to subdue Normandy.
In the Treaty of Troyes
(1420), Charles VI of France was forced to recognize Henry as regent and heir
to the throne of France, disinheriting his own son, the Dauphin.
By 1429 the English and their Burgundian
allies controlled practically all of France north of the Loire and had Orléans
under siege.
French fortunes were
reversed that year, however.
Joan of Arc
lifted the siege of Orléans and saw the dauphin crowned Charles VII at Rheims.
Her capture and execution did not end the
string of French victories.
In 1435
Charles obtained an alliance with Burgundy, and by 1450 France had reconquered
Normandy.
By 1451 all of Guienne except
Bordeaux was in French hands.
Bordeaux
fell in 1453, leaving the English only Calais (which they retained until
1558).
Domestic difficulties,
specifically the War of the Roses, kept England from making any further
attempts to conquer France.
The Hundred
Years War inflicted untold misery on the French people.
Famine, the Black Death, and roving bands of
marauders decimated the population.
An
entirely new France emerged.
The virtual
destruction of the feudal nobility allowed the monarchs to unite the country
more solidly under the royal authority and to ally themselves with the newly
rising middle class.
England ceased to
think of itself as a continental power and began to develop as a sea
power.
While this description of the
Hundred Years War goes beyond the scope of Henry V’s involvement, it
illustrates both the roots of the English-French conflict and how both
countries were moving from a feudal worldview to one based upon the concept of
the nation-state.
While we have combined these
history plays into two nights of performance, up until the twentieth century
Shakespeare’s histories were performed largely as stand alone pieces.
Furthermore, both in Shakespeare’s day and
throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the two parts of
Henry IV were seen as Hotspur and
Falstaff’s plays, leading to the probably apocryphal story from Shakespeare’s
first editor that Queen Elizabeth 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”, that being the
genesis of Shakespeare’s
The Merry Wives
of Windsor.
Contemporary
performances of these history plays have focused more upon Prince Hal than upon
Falstaff or Hotspur, but perhaps more importantly, they have also revealed the
broad canvas on which Shakespeare paints his world.
In
The
Making of A King we travel from high court to lowly tavern, from comedy to
tragedy, fact to fiction, private memories to public motives.
While one strand of the plays shows how
authoritative control and the making of a nation-state is achieved, another
strand of the plays vividly portrays how the diverse populations that live in
that new nation-state respond to its creation around them.
As audience members we glory in larger than
life characters like Falstaff and Hotspur, but Shakespeare pays no less
attention to minor characters like Justice Shallow or the soldier
Williams.
Perhaps that is what gives
Shakespeare’s history plays their continued appeal.
While the plays’ concern with unifying the
nation against the threat of civil war at home and invasion abroad must have
resonated with the playwright’s own audience worrying about what would happen
to their nation after Elizabeth’s death, our own time is no less
unsettled.
As we bring one war to an end
in Iraq our soldiers still face horrors in Afghanistan.
Our attempts to stave off economic depression
seem tenuous at best.
Natural disasters
like hurricanes and the probability of humanly created catastrophes like global
warming wreak havoc with our daily lives.
National politics, while not fought on the actual battlefields of war,
seem to have devolved into perennial legislative battles where politicians
squabble over their own increasingly polarized definitions of what constitutes
the nation.
In the meantime the
thousands upon thousands of ordinary citizens protesting in the streets occupy
our imaginations.
In such an environment
Shakespeare’s history plays that constitute
The
Making of A King still have much to tell us.
