My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice

Henry IV, Part 1

If we’re talking pure structure, Henry IV Part 1 is one of Shakespeare’s best. Setting the structure up and keeping things moving, juggling all of the characters and locations and tones is a dazzling accomplishment. The play jumps from court to tavern and back. The characters are interesting, and there are a couple of “star” turns – Prince Hal, Falstaff, Hotspur. We’re never left alone with someone who’s a bore. Everyone speaks in a different voice. They all feel like real people and real personalities. The action moves from low to high and back, the class system breaking down – maybe Falstaff who is, after all, a knight – is the bridge – so that when finally low and high are together at the battle of Shrewsbury, there’s a sense of shock. They have been separate discrete worlds, and now, Falstaff stands there next to the King as though he’s an equal. Society – or at least the hierarchy – is destabilized. The destabilization has been necessary thing but it spells Falstaff’s doom. There won’t be room for his type of free-wheeling life-accepting mobility in the next play, Henry V.

Hamlet spends his entire play “acting” a variety of roles. He tries to go incognito, while he stalls. There isn’t just one Hamlet. There are many Hamlets. The same is true not just for Prince Hal (aka Harry, aka Henry V) but for Falstaff as well. Prince Hal is “acting” through most of Part 1, putting on a role, to stick it to dear old Dad. The big scene where he and Falstaff role play a confrontation between Hal and his father the King – to basically practice the inevitable confrontation – becomes even more interesting when they switch “roles”, and Falstaff plays Hal and Hal plays his own father. SUCH good writing, insightful psychology and character, while also serving a real purpose, laying out all the issues swirling beneath the surface.

Hal is “on vacation” from his life. His “low” companions are mentioned at the end of Richard II, basically setting the stage for the next play in the cycle, where he pals around with Falstaff, the thieves and the whores. However, the first time he is left alone on stage, in Act I, sc ii, he has a soliloquy starting with “I know you all” (the “you all” is ambiguous) where he lets us know HE knows he is pretending, HE knows he’s on a spree and of COURSE he will return to his role as heir-apparent. Hal knows he’s not going to STAY in the tavern. Everyone else might think he is “torn” between the two worlds but he’s not “torn” at all. Hamlet is the definition of “torn”. Shakespeare doesn’t allow ambiguity here: with the “I know you all” soliloquy, right up front, the second scene in the first act, Hal reveals his chilly detached interior: we are the privileged few allowed in. Hal might look like he is lost in the act, but he is not lost at all. Not perceiving this is Falstaff’s tragedy. Henry rejects Falstaff in Part 2, and the moment is shattering, particularly because Hal is so blunt and cold. Falstaff didn’t see it coming.

The whole play is about this dichotomy of pretense, self-knowledge, hypocrisy. There’s a lot of talk about “double men”. There are basically three Harrys/Henrys: Henry IV, Prince Harry, and Harry Percy (Hotspur). Much is made of this. King Henry IV wishes he had the OTHER Harry, the warrior Harry, as a son. Hal kills Hotspur: Harry kills Harry. Falstaff participates in the role play with Hal but he is NOT a “double man”. Falstaff is a liar at times – a fabulist, a tall-tale-teller – but he does not lie to be malicious, he does not lie to cover anything up. He is transparent. He knows why he’s doing what he’s doing.

I think what I am trying to say is that here Shakespeare is starting to play around with something which reaches its absolute apex – not just for him as writer, but for all of us ever since – in Hamlet, and that is: portraying people who don’t know what’s going on with themselves, people who aren’t sure why they are doing what they are doing. This is very difficult to do! Shakespeare knew that a lot of times people’s behavior comes from what we now would call unconscious motivations. Freudian before Freud: The subconscious in the driver’s seat. I mean, Oedipus is all about this, right? Oedipus thinks he’s acting one way for one reason, but he has no idea what is REALLY going on (through no fault of his own). Shakespeare did not INVENT this psychic-split, but he perceived its dramatic possibilities in ways other dramatists at the time – focused on crafting plots and twists and characters – didn’t. Hal’s INTERIOR world is different from his outer world. We all experience this. Shakespeare uses soliloquies to explain the plot but also as a quick access to the interior.

When motives are unconscious, people act like hypocrites. One can smile and smile and be a villain, know what I mean? One need only point to the religious right, who proclaim they’re doing one thing, but what they’re REALLY doing is pointing people away from their OWN sins. It’s a cliche at this point. If you are a religious leader shouting homophobic things on any given Sunday, I just set an alarm for the inevitable headline revealing you’ve been hiring massage boys off of Craig’s List. Those who proclaim loudest how virtuous they are … keep a very close eye on them. And don’t trust them with your children.

“Counterfeit” and counterfeiting is a constant theme in the play, and it underscores the tension of Prince Hal’s “I know you all” and Prince Hal in general. He knows what he is doing. But what is the mask and what is the man? When is he play-acting and when is it real? What does he want? We have three full plays to get to know him. (We had three Henry VI plays too but Henry VI isn’t exactly a thrilling character.) Hal is sexy, wild, rebellious! He’s mesmerizing and charismatic. (I haven’t seen Branagh’s Henry V in a long time, but I think the first time we see Henry V, he’s sitting on the throne, this little blonde man, glamorous but strong, power in his stillness. Very effective.) Ambivalence towards power undid both Henry VI and Richard II. Neither of them were “fit” for the role. You don’t get the sense Prince Hal is this way, even though he’s avoiding his responsibilities and carousing around town with a bunch of low-lifes. When he goes back to claim his crown, he’s ready. He was ready at the start of the play, as the “I know you all” soliloquy shows.

When we see Prince Hal in action as the actual king in Henry V, we shouldn’t be surprised at his radical moves, aggressive stances, his willingness to be bold and surprising. We already saw his willingness to be all of those things in Parts 1 and 2. Agincourt is a huge victory but let’s not get things twisted: the entire campaign was a rapacious land grab, not exactly storming the beaches at Normandy. Hal’s lack of compassion is startling and upsetting but essential to understanding him. One could say that this quality – or lack – is why he was a born king. Hal is able to reject his mentor Falstaff. And the WAY he does it is almost worse than the actual doing. Similar to the truly frightening moment when he kills Hotspur, and finishes the dying Hotspur’s sentence with “For worms, brave Percy.” Cold as ice.

There’s a lot of talk about honor in the play. For Hotspur, honor is a creed, a word to live by (or die by). Hotspur has a death wish (“die merrily”) because when he dies he will die with honor. Falstaff recognizes the falsity of this. Honor is just a word, a “scutcheon” (a shield). He sees through all the lofty abstractions. Falstaff fights on the battlefield, with a bottle of “sack” in his pocket, and then plays dead. Which is so relatable. Later, he “rises” from the dead, sees the dead Hotspur, and then stabs Hotspur’s dead body – so he can take the credit! So yeah, “honor” doesn’t concern Falstaff.

I’m sure a bunch of different commentators have made this observation but I’ll just leave this here:

Fall-staff
Shake-Spear

To sum up, the experience of reading this play is a continuously surprising one. I know the scenes, I know the order, I look forward to certain moments, they always deliver. Falstaff rewards repeat “viewings”. You can’t get him on the first go-round. It’s dangerous to under-estimate Falstaff, and if you write him off as a charming bumbling drunk – a “scene stealer” – you’ve missed the point. Perhaps you wish Henry IV Part 1 was more straightforward. Perhaps you get irritated at the “comic relief” scenes, since they are “interruptions” to what you feel is the main action.

There is such a thing as a wrong opinion.

Falstaff is not “comic relief”. He is the whole shebang.

Quotes on the play

“Shakespeare’s own playgoers preferred Falstaff and Hamlet to all his other characters and so do we, because Fat Jack and the Prince of Denmark manifest the most comprehensive consciousness in all of literature, larger than those of the biblical J Writer’s Yahweh, of the Gospel of Mark’s Jesus, of Dante the Pilgrim and Chaucer the Pilgrim, of Don Quixote and Esther Summerson, of Proust’s narrator and Leopold Bloom.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

Listen, Harold Bloom is – notoriously – a little goofy about Falstaff, but there are gems in there. And Falstaff if worth talking about.

“For Hamlet, the self is an abyss, the chaos of virtual nothingness. For Falstaff, the self is everything.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Falstaff is larger than the Henry IV plays, superb as they are, even as Hamlet seems to need a sphere greater than Shakespeare provides him.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“And all great humorous writers show a willingness to attack the beliefs and the virtues on which society necessarily rests. Boccaccio treats Hell and Purgatory as a ridiculous fable, Swift jeers at the very conception of human dignity, Shakespeare makes Falstaff deliver a speech in favor of cowardice in the middle of a battle.”
— George Orwell, “Funny But Not Vulgar” (1945)

“Shakespeare is to return to [Faulconbridge’s] attacks in Hotspur, who will lead it for him still more brilliantly, and indeed will finish it so that it need never be undertaken in English again. Hotspur will be the full creature for whom Faulconbridge is still no more than a sketch.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“When the play is done, there is about as much left of ‘honor’ as there was of the divine right of kings at the end of Richard II. In fact the sentimental Richard and the pugnacious Hotspur are closer to each other than they look. They are both victims of words.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

^^ This sounds like some deep abstract thought, but when you read the play this is so perfectly clear.

“In Richard II, Shakespeare interred the doctrine of the divine right of kings. In Henry IV he tries out what can be said for the opposing theory. The twentieth century has fought two wars at enormous cost of life and treasure to avert the threat of the ‘strong’ man. It is a pity that it could not here paid more attention in advance to Shakespeare’s analysis and annihilation of this type and theory in his Henry plays, particularly to the story of King Henry IV … Henry, whatever he became, was natively neither cruel nor tyrannical, but a man of intelligence and insight and not devoid of a sense of justice. His story for that reason approximates tragedy.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

On Henry’s soliloquy on sleep:

“The lines have been called out of character. They are Shakespeare the poet, we are told, running away with Shakespeare the dramatist; Henry was incapable of anything so imaginative. On the contrary, the soliloquy is a measure of the amount of imagination that must be repressed before nature will permit one of her own creatures to be transformed into a worldly. It defines the distance Henry has travelled from innocence, and, in contrast, with his diurnal aspect, the thickness of the mask that rank imposes…The soliloquy on sleep tell us what he might have become.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

On Hal’s “I know you all” soliloquy:

“It is true that the soliloquy is unlike Hal. Yet there is not a speech in the role more strictly in character. How can that be? It can be for the simple reason that it is not Hal, primarily, who makes the speech at all. The Prince makes it. There are two Henrys. This is no quibble; it is the inmost heart of the matter. We saw that there were two older Henrys. The King who had Richard murdered bears little resemblance to the man who utters the soliloquy on sleep. There are two younger Henrys who resemble each other just as little.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“These vaunted modern discoveries about dual and multiple personalities are not discoveries at all. Shakespeare understood all about them in the concrete.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The moment we follow Falstaff’s lead and cease thinking of Henry as Henry and conceive him as Hal-and-the-Prince, we see how right Shakespeare was to build this play on an alternation of ‘tavern’ scenes and political-military ones. Instead of being just chronicle play relieved by comedy (as historians of the drama are bound to see it), what we have is a genuine imagination, both psychological and dramatic, the alternating character of the scenes corresponding to the two sides of a dual personality.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“[Falstaff is] a besotted and disgusting old wretch.”
— George Bernard Shaw, who was also appalled by the dirty-ness of The Dubliners.

“We, too, after all, like Prince Hal and Mrs. Quickly, take to a man because of his charm, if it be big enough, not because of his virtue; and as for Falstaff, we are bewitched with the rogue’s company.”
— Elmer Edgar Stoll

“[Falstaff] has nothing in him that can be esteemed.”
— Samuel Johnson

^^ There were a couple of centuries of commentary like this.

“Those who think about Falstaff before they fall in love with him may say some just things about him, but they will never enter into his secret.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“To grasp Falstaff … we must see him, as Titania did Bottom, without imagination, not with our senses.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

^^ I love this.

“To the vulgar, Falstaff will be forever just vulgar.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“All through these dramas the finer Falstaff symbolizes the opposite of farce. When anything military enters his presence, it instantly looks ridiculous and begins to shrink. Many methods have been proposed for getting rid of war. Falstaff’s is one of the simplest: laugh it out of existence. For war is almost as foolish as it is criminal. ‘Laugh it out of existence’? If only we could! Which is the equivalent of saying: If only more of us were like Falstaff!
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The grosser Falstaff is himself a parasite and a dishonorable man, and coming from him the speech [on honor] is the creed of Commodity and the height of irony. But that does not prevent the man who loved Hal and babbled of green fields at his death from revealing in the same words, as clearly as Saint Teresa, that life was given for something greater than glory or than the gain that can be gotten out of it.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Who can doubt that Falstaff, in the phrase ‘double man,’ is also having a thrust at the dual role of the man he is addressing, or that Shakespeare, in letting Falstaff deny his own doubleness, is thereby calling our attention to it? At the very least the expression proves that the world did not have to wait for Dostoevsky before it heard of the double man.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Years afterward the poet passed judgment on Prince Henry’s conduct in this scene in a singular and possibly unconscious way. The feather! Every lover of Shakespeare will instantly think of another feather that did not stir, the one King Lear held to the lips of Cordelia. The depth and genuineness of the emotion there becomes a measure of its absence here.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The characters who are absent from Shakespeare’s plays are often as significant as those who are present. What became of the Chief Justice in Henry V?”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“It has become a commonplace that the poet rated ingratitude among the deadliest of the sins.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

Hal and Falstaff roleplay father/son:

“…a rehearsal of the rejection of Falstaff. But the little scene it introduces is such a masterpiece in its own right that it throws us off the track of its connection with what has come before, and what is to follow, in the main play. Poetry, like the sun, can blind as well as illuminate…The little play within a play, two plays within a play, each with its player-king, may well warn us that Hamlet himself is barely around the corner.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Within the confines of this brief scene … half-a-dozen Falstaffs and Henrys jostle and elbow, come in and go out, split, disintegrate, and recombine, a veritable phantasmagoria of spiritual entities.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“Falstaff was a teacher of genius with lamentable weaknesses. Henry should have rejected those weaknesses and turned the genius to account in his position as king. Instead of distilling out the soul of goodness and throwing away what was left, he carefully kept what was left and threw away the soul of goodness. It is a strong statement, but the rest of the next play, if not this one, amply justifies it.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“There is something like critical agreement that Shakespeare’s three greatest achievements in character portrayal are Falstaff, Hamlet, and Cleopatra, to whom Iago is sometimes added as a diabolic fourth. Now Falstaff, Hamlet, and Cleopatra, different as they are in a hundred ways, have this in common: they are all endowed with imagination, and especially with dramatic and histrionic power, to something like the highest degree. Each is a genius of play. (Even Iago is in his perverted way.) In a word, they all are in this respect like their creator, a kind of proof that even Shakespeare could draw people better who resembled himself than he could others. Who would not like to have had Shakespeare as a teacher? Prince Henry did. A huge slice of him at least. And then he went and threw away his education.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“…the love of life for its own sake, of human friendship or the good family on a social scale, of play in its adult estate. Shakespeare himself is an example of one who took that way. He taught us all to play … Plato held that humanity will be saved only when philosophers became kings or kings philosophers. Falstaff-Hamlet-Cleopatra-Shakespeare go Plato one better. They cast their vote for poet-and-player-king.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

Goddard’s focus on “play” in his chapter on the Henry IV plays is fascinating and I resonate with it hard.

“The poet was beginning to perceive that history has no significance until it is seen as comedy — and tragedy. Imagination was beginning to assert its mastery of fact.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“It is difficult to imagine that a historical play as good as Henry IV will ever again be written.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Most dishonest are those who are unaware they are acting, or who come to believe their own act. Honesty with one’s self requires that you know you are an actor … You can be dishonest with others and still be honest with yourself. Hotspur can be honest with others, but is dishonest with himself. Falstaff counterfeits dishonesty. Henry V is dishonest both ways — his formal will and a powerful ego are the only things he has left.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Henry IV is conscious of the corruptions of power because he has had to struggle for power, Henry V is less conscious of it, because he is always successful and Henry VI pays the price.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Prince Hal. Yes, he is the Machiavellian character, master of himself and the situation — except that in the last analysis Falstaff is right when he tells him ‘Thou art essentially mad without seeming so.’ Hal has no self.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Hal and Falstaff are eternal antitypes, sworn foes. Hal is the type who becomes a college president, a government head, etc., and one hates their guts. On the other side, we can’t govern ourselves. If Falstaff were running the world, it would be like the Balkans. Neither Hal nor Falstaff can do without the other.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Falstaff, like Hamlet, is an actor living in a world of words. Falstaff is attached positively to life through Hal, and when he is rejected, he dies. Hamlet is attached negatively to life by the crime of his mother and uncle, and he sees politics as personal relations … [Falstaff] is the artist — but not really. He will talk, but he can’t sit down to convert possibility into reality. The artist has to mix Falstaff and Hal, Falstaff’s childlikeness and Hal’s Machiavellianism and prudence.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“If Shakespeare’s fondness for the ludicrous sometimes led to faults in his tragedies (which was not often the case), he has made us amends by the character of Falstaff.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Wit is often a meagre substitute for pleasurable sensation … Falstaff’s wit is an emanation of a fine constitution.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“The unrestrained indulgence of [Falstaff’s] own ease, appetites, and convenience, has neither malice nor hypocrisy in it. In a word, he is an actor in himself almost as much as upon the stage, and we no more object to the character of Falstaff in a moral point of view than we should think of bringing an excellent comedian, who should represent him to the life, before one of the police offices.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

Spoken like a true Romantic.

“The secret of Falstaff’s wit is for the most part a masterly presence of mind, an absolute self-possession, which nothing can disturb. His repartees are involuntary suggestions of his self-love; instinctive evasions of everything that threatens to interrupt the career of his triumphant jollity and self-complacency.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“[Falstaff] has no qualms of conscience.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“[Shakespeare] appears to have been all the characters and in all the situations he describes. It is as if either he had had all their feelings, or had leant them all his genius to express themselves. There cannot be stronger instances of this than Hotspur’s rage when Henry IV forbids him to speak of Mortimer, his insensibility to all that his father and uncle urge to calm him, and his fine abstracted apostrophe to honor, ‘By heaven methinks it were an easy leap to pluck bright honor from the moon.'”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Shakespeare never permits us to forget Hal’s sober side.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The life of Henry V, indeed, is not in the handsome boy who will be Henry V. But he is the foil to that life, the brocaded curtain against we watch it moving; he is the mold it is trying to break, the form of which it is the foe.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“Hotspur is one of Shakespeare’s most copious poets, as well as one of his best.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

On Hotspur’s speech in Act I, sc iii:

“[Hotspur’s] great speech of 42 lines … he flows on, spilling his scorn in flawlessly natural lines of blank verse which he seems not to recognize as verse.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“‘I tell you what: he held me last night at least nine hours.’ That is blank verse, but it is also speech, and it is as difficult to scan as a casual remark. In Hotspur Shakespeare has learned at last to make poetry as natural as the human voice — as natural, furthermore, as Falstaff’s prose, or, as the whole conduct of the incomparable action which is Henry IV.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The father’s turmoil of mind is more than an expression of his conscience; it is an adequate tribute to the finest figure Shakespeare has been able to carve for the serious portion of his History. For Hotspur was very serious. He was almost, indeed, insanely serious. He did not know that he was amusing. He did not understand himself. As handsome as Hamlet, and apparently as intelligent, he was not in fact intelligent at all. He was pure illusion, pure act, pure tragedy, just as Falstaff at the opposite pole of Henry IV is pure light, pure contemplation, pure comedy.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“[Falstaff’s mind] is at home everywhere, and it is never darkened with self-thought.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The essence of Falstaff is that he is a comic actor, most of whose roles are assumed without announcement.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“He does not live to drink or steal or lie or foin o’nights. He even does not live in order that he may be the cause of wit in other men. We do not in fact know why he lives. This great boulder is balanced lightly on the earth, and can be tipped with the lightest touch. He cannot be overturned. He knows too much, and he understands too well the art of delivering with every lie he tells an honest weight of profound and personal revelation.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“When an audience turns from the poetic world [of Richard II] to the world of Henry IV, Part 1, it might well be astonished at the sheer dramatic energy of the play. Prose comes to life, ‘low’ characters come to life, expressing themselves in the characteristic patois of their station. The range of the play is as wide as the early modern world itself, from these vernacular splendors of prose to the high and lofty language of Hotspur, the plastic, subtle language of Hal; the puns and wit of the tavern scene, and the heroics of the battlefield.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

This is what I’m saying. Reading these in order is revelatory and within moments of starting Henry IV Part 1, it’s apparent something very different is going on in this one.

“The most striking aspect of Henry’s persona as the audience encounters him in 1 Henry IV is that the buoyant, optimistic, and ambitious Bolingbroke of Richard II is now suddenly old… King Henry is a man weighted down by a double sin, the usurpation of Richard’s throne and the subsequent murder of Richard. The language that pursues him through the play is the language of costume and counterfeiting.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The England of Henry IV is a fallen world, a world, we might say, made up too much of politics and plotting, and not enough of fellowship and love.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Hotspur alone is characterized in these epic, and pagan, terms. Prince Hal, his counterpart, will be described in terms that one insistently biblical and Christian.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“[Hotspur’s] is the most fragile of creeds, the creed of the epic warrior, and his time is passing in England. The Hotspurs of this world, like the Tybalts, cannot survive, although a world deprived of their spirit and their quixotic idealism is a world less valuable to live in.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“To Falstaff, honor is just the empty sign of something, not a commodity, an agent, or anything actually palpable or useful. Hotspur had sworn to pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon; Falstaff will have none of it. Again, it should be no surprise that Falstaff lives, while Hotspur dies. In many ways Falstaff provides a necessary antidote to the excessive idealism of Hotspur.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“[Falstaff] is not a misunderstood roly-poly Everyman.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

^^ Very important.

“Between these two poles, the Hotspur world and the Falstaff world, Hal must find his own position, his own identity. It is a measure of Shakespeare’s tremendous power as a dramatist that these two worlds came so vividly to life in this play.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On Hal’s “I know you all” speech:

“Hal … is in disguise, performing — like Richard III in the play that bears his name — a role that he can defy at will. Whereas Richard III was a ‘devil’ pretending to be an angel, Hal is a virtuous man pretending to be a madcap and a thief — or is he? Whom is he addressing when he says ‘I know you all’? Surely it is not only the ‘loose companions’ who have just exited the stage, but also the audience in the theatre. We are not only his confidants and confederates but also the objects of his deception and manipulation.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“We could say that in 1 Henry IV the chief study for the rising Prince is the study of language. Language, after all, was the problem that so vexed the world of Richard II, leaving no middle ground between soliloquy and command, between poetry and law.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Role-playing in Henry IV emphasizes the flexibility and changeability of roles, their impermanence. There will come a time when Hal must abandon playing, abandon holiday, to preserve the unchanging role of ‘Prince’ and then of ‘King’. But that time is not yet.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Although Falstaff’s power as a dramatic character was, and continues to be, enough to assure him a starring role in productions from the 18th century to the present, one that often upstages the more centrist Prince, who is trammeled by considerations of state, office, and history, both audiences and critics are invited by the structure of the play to judge him. The real figure who ‘rises up’ at the end of this play is Prince Hal.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“But Hal, Prince Hal, is by role and by nature himself a ‘double man,’ a living perspective painting, which takes one form when viewed directly and another when viewed awry. The design of Shakespeare’s play — and it is a very brilliant and intricate design, but also a very clear and balanced one — makes this point extremely clear.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Shakespeare found Falstaff in Shakespeare, though the language and personalities of Berowne, Faulconbridge the Bastard, of Mercutio and of Bottom, do not prepare us adequately for Falstaff, who speaks what is still the best and most vital prose in the English language.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

Harold Bloom, notoriously, has a “thing” for Falstaff – and he does tend to go on. I like a lot of what he has to say, so I’m just including some of the things that struck me, with the caveat that when I read Bloom, I often think, “O-KAY, Harold, I GET IT.”

“The sage of Eastcheap inhabits Shakespeare’s histories but treats them like comedies.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“I wish that Shakespeare had not told us of the death of Falstaff in Henry V but instead had carried Sir John off to the forest of Arden, to exchange wit with Rosalind in As You Like It. Though he incarnates freedom Falstaff’s liberty is not absolute, like Rosalind’s. As audience, we are given no perspective more privileged than Rosalind’s own, whereas we can see Prince Hal’s Machiavel-like qualities more clearly than Falstaff bear to do …”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Falstaff, not a Marlovian, is quite Chaucerian: he is the son of the vitalistic Wife of Bath … Marlowe, after an initial inspiring effect, doubtless obsessed Shakespeare; Chaucer did not because Shakespeare’s own genius for comedy came to him far more spontaneously than did an aptitude for tragedy.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“It is the comprehensiveness of Falstaff’s consciousness that puts him beyond us, not in Hamlet’s way of transcendence, but in Falstaff’s way of immanence. Only a few characters in the world’s literature can match the real presence of Falstaff, who in that regard is Hamlet’s greatest rival in Shakespeare.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“The Falstaffian spirit is a great sustainer of civilization. It disappears when the state is too powerful and when people worry too much about their souls … There is little of Falstaff’s substitute in the world now, and, as the power of the state expands, what is left will be liquidated.”
— Anthony Burgess

ADORE this.

“Shakespeare, and his contemporary audience, got Falstaff right; it is much of the scholarly tradition that keeps getting Falstaff wrong. The Wife of Bath, Falstaff’s literary mother, divides critics pretty much the way that Falstaff does…Falstaff, to most scholars, is the emblem of self-indulgence, but to most playgoers and readers Sir John is the representative of imaginative freedom, of a liberty set against time, death, and the state, which is a condition that we crave for ourselves.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“You define who you are by your reaction to Falstaff, or to his younger sister, Cleopatra … Those who do not care for Falstaff are in love with time, death, the state, and the censor. They have their reward.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

I mean …. he’s right.

“At a performance my immediate reaction is to wonder what Falstaff is doing in this play at all … As the play proceeds, our surprise is replaced by another kind of puzzle, for the better we come to know Falstaff, the clearer it becomes that the world of historical reality which a Chronicle Play claims to imitate is not a world which he can inhabit.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Falstaff’s resourcefulness gathers together the florabundance of Love’s Labour’s Lost with the more aggressive verbal energies of Faulconbridge the Bastard and the negative exuberance of Shylock. After Falstaff’s prose, Shakespeare was ready for Hamlet’s prose, which rivals the Prince of Denmark’s verse.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“The great villains — Iago, Edmund, Macbeth — invent Western nihilism, and each is an abyss in himself. Lear and his godson Edgar are studies so profound in human torment and endurance that they carry biblical resonances in a pre-Christian, pagan play. But Falstaff, Rosalind, Hamlet, and Cleopatra are something apart in world literature.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Falstaff is the first major joke by the English against their class system; he is a picture of how badly you can behave, and still get away with it, if you are a gentleman — a mere common rogue would not have been nearly so funny.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

This is a very good point.

“Sir John Falstaff is the greatest vitalist in Shakespeare, but while he is certainly not the most intense of Shakespeare’s nihilists, his strain of nihilism is extraordinarily virulent. Indeed, Falstaff’s nihilism seems to me his version of Christianity, and helps account for the darkest elements in the great wit, his realistic obsession with rejection, massively to be realized at the end of Henry IV, Part Two.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Falstaff’s prose and Hamlet’s verse give us a cognitive music that overwhelms us even as it expands our minds to the ends of thought. They are beyond our last thought, and they have an immediacy that by the pragmatic test constitutes a real presence, one that all current theorists and ideologues insist literature cannot even intimate, let alone sustain. But Falstaff persists, after four centuries, and he will prevail centuries after our fashionable knowers and resenters have become alms for oblivion.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“The playwright understood the magnitude of his creation. Scholars tend not to, which is why we have the nonsense of what they, and not Shakespeare, continue to call the Henriad. We do not need Henry V, and he does not need us. Falstaff needs his audience, and he never fails to find it.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Shakespeare’s use of this material in a work ostensibly devoted to the politics of Henry IV’s reign was a stunning innovation, for by the introduction of a lowlife comic element he achieved a counterpoint in action, style, and theme that is the glory of these plays.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“Not all the earlier histories are so gravely uniform as Richard II, which contains no prose at all, but they are pitched upon a high and stately plane, and even when they do descend to common men — as in Horner’s fight with Peter and in the Jack Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI — the talk is anything but gay. In the Henry IV plays, however, the double theme of Henry’s hard-fought rise to uncontested power and Hal’s probation for the throne requires a universe of action that Shakespeare had not touched before. A single style or mood or plot could no longer serve his purpose. Here the brassy declamation and the facile patriotism of Henry VI, the dark, pervasive evil of Richard III, the rhetorical excesses of King John, and the univocal lyricism of Richard II yield to life itself , and as a result, Henry IV, in its vitality and variety, is unmatched by any other history play. It is the triumph of the form.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“[Hotspur is] one of Shakespeare’s most engaging characters… he is generous, brave, and witty, and so superbly vocal — as when he explains his conduct to the King or twits Glendower’s pretensions — that, like Mercutio in Romeo & Juliet, he dominates each scene he is in.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“Hotspur is so dazzling and bewitching that we endorse Hal’s tribute to his fallen foe (Part I, V.iv) and Kate’s assessment of her ‘wondrous him’ (Part 2, II.iii) but we realize, to our sorrow, that the safety of the realm required his death and that he was vanquished by a better man.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“If we wish to see the force of human genius, we should read Shakespeare. If we wish to see the insignificance of human learning, we may study his commentators.”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Falstaff is so various, so equivocal, and so overwhelming that he would seem to baffle judgment, but since the 18th century he has probably prompted more discussion than anyone but Hamlet — and, like Hamlet’s, his mystery is secure.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“A virtuoso in the arts of language, [Falstaff] can hardly speak a line that does not, like all great literature, sharpen our response and jolt us into new perceptions. He throws us from our stance and makes us look at things afresh.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“[Falstaff] is more than merely witty. His verbal skill is but a function of his complex comic vision, and this vision, if it can be defined at all, may perhaps be said to rest upon a tonic or corrosive disrespect not only for the slogans and the solemn plausibilities to which most men yield asset but also for the values — moral, social, and political — whereby most men organize experience and whereon the social structure rests. Therein lies his fascination and his peril.”
— Herschel Baker, Riverside Shakespeare

“All the Henry plays are very much concerned with language-learning, with the different patois and dialects of ‘high’ and ‘low,’ and with the tensions that attend upon trying to unify a nation where Welsh and Scots, Irish and English all speak different varieties of the ‘same’ language. The English lessons of Catherine, the French princess, and the gentlewoman Alice in Henry V quickly disclose, as does the comic Latin lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor, that translation is itself a very tricky and dangerous business.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

Quotes from the play

 

O that it could be prov’d
That some night-tripping fairy had exchang’d
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call’d mine Percy, his Plantaganet!
Then would I have his Harry and he mine.
— KING HENRY, I.i.86-90

Indeed, you come near me now, Hal, for we that take purses go by the moon and the seven stars, and not by Phoebus, he, that wand’ring knight so fair. And I prithee, sweet wag, when thou art king, as God save thy Grace—Majesty, I should say, for grace thou wilt have none–
— FALSTAFF, I.ii.13-18

Yea, and so us’d it that were it not here apparent that thou art heir apparent.
— FALSTAFF, I.ii.56-57

Wisdom cries out in the streets, and no man regards it.
— PRINCE HAL, I.ii.88-89

Sir John stands to his word, the devil shall have his bargain, for he was never yet a breaker of proverbs. He will give the devil his due.
— PRINCE HAL, I.ii.117-118

I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humor 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 wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work,
But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promisèd,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And, like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
— PRINCE HAL, I.ii.195-217

^^ it’s such an extraordinary moment. It’s only Act I, scene 2. we are just being introduced to him and he turns to us, letting us know he knows what he is doing is an “act”.

To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose,
And plan this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke?
— HOTSPUR, I.iii.175-176

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honor from the pale-fac’d moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drownèd honor by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence might wear
Without corrival all her dignities.
But out upon this half-fac’d fellowship!
— HOTSPUR, I.iii.201-208

He said he would not ransom Mortimer,
Forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer.
But I will find him when he lies asleep,
And in his ear I’ll hallo “Mortimer.”
Nay,
I’ll have a starling shall be taught to speak
Nothing but “Mortimer,” and give it him
To keep his anger still in motion.
— HOTSPUR, I.iii.219-226

Yea, on his part I’ll empty all these veins
And shed my dear blood drop by drop in the dust,
But I will lift the down-trod Mortimer
As high in the air as this unthankful king,
As this ingrate and cank’red Bolingbroke.
— HOTSPUR, I.iii.133-137

He apprehends a world of figures here,
But not the form of what he should attend.
— WORCESTER, I.iii.209-210

… tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own.
— NORTHUMBERLAND to Hotspur, I.iii.238

I am joined with no foot-land-rakers, no long-staff sixpenny strikers, none of these mad mustachio purple-hu’d malt-worms, but with nobility and tranquillity, burgomasters and great oney’rs, such as can hold in, such as will strike sooner than speak, and speak sooner than drink, and drink sooner than pray, and yet, ‘zounds, I lie, for they pray continually to their saint the commonwealth, or rather not pray to her but prey on her, for they ride up and down on her and make her their boots.
— GADSHILL, II.i.73-83

I have forsworn his company hourly any time this two-and-twenty years, and yet I am bewitch’d with the rogue’s company.
— FALSTAFF, II.ii.15-17

That roan shall be my throne.
— HOTSPUR, II.iii.70

Go thy ways, old Jack. Die when thou wilt. If manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the Earth, then am I a shotten herring. There lives not three good men unhang’d in England, and one of them is fat and grows old, God help the while. A bad world, I say. I would I were a weaver. I could sing psalms, or anything. A plague of all cowards, I say still.
— FALSTAFF, II.iv.127-134

Falstaff the weaver. Like Bottom!

Give you a reason on compulsion? If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion, I.
— FALSTAFF, II.iv.238-40

Why, hear you, my masters, was it for me to kill the heir apparent? Should I turn upon the true prince? Why, thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules, but beware instinct. The lion will not touch the true prince. Instinct is a great matter. I was now a coward on instinct. I shall think the better of myself, and thee, during my life; I for a valiant lion, and thou for a true prince.
— FALSTAFF, II.iv.268-275

A plague of sighing and grief, it blows a man up like a bladder.
— FALSTAFF, II.iv.323-3

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 that I know is damn’d. If to be fat be to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be lov’d. 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 not him thy Harry’s company — banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.
— FALSTAFF ‘playing’ the Prince, II.iv.470-480

Goosebumps.

At my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes
Of burning cressets, and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shak’d like a coward …
I say the earth did shake when I was born.
— GLENDOWER, III.i.13-20

And I can teach thee, coz, to shame the devil
By telling truth: tell truth and shame the devil.
If thou have power to raise him, bring him hither,
And I’ll be sworn I have power to shame him hence.
O, while you live, tell truth and shame the devil!
— HOTSPUR, III.i.57-61

I had rather be a kitten and cry “mew”
Than one of these same meter ballad-mongers.
I had rather hear a brazen can’stick turned,
Or a dry wheel grate on the axle-tree,
And that would set my teeth nothing an edge,
Nothing so much as mincing poetry.
’Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag.
— HOTSPUR, III.i.127-133

HOTSPUR:
Come, Kate, I’ll have your song too.
LADY PERCY:
Not mine, in good sooth.
HOTSPUR:
Not yours, in good sooth! Heart, you swear like a comfit-maker’s wife! “Not you, in good sooth,” and “as true as I live,” and “as God shall mend me,” and “as sure as day” —
And giv’st such sarcenet surety for thy oaths
As if thou never walk’st further than Finsbury.
Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art,
A good mouth-filling oath, and leave “in sooth,”
And such protest of pepper-gingerbread
To velvet-guards and Sunday citizens.
— III.i.233-256

By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wondered at,
That men would tell their children “This is he.”
Others would say “Where? Which is Bolingbrook?”…
Thus did I keep my person fresh and new,
My presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne’er seen but wond’red at…
— KING, III.ii.46-57

… Enfeoff’d himself to popularity,
That, being daily swallowed by men’s eyes,
They surfeited with honey and began
To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little
More than a little is by much too much.
So, when he had occasion to be seen,
He was but as the cuckoo is in June,
Heard, not regarded
— KING, III.ii.69-76

I shall hereafter, my thrice-gracious lord,
Be more myself.
— PRINCE HAL, III.ii.92-93

Thrice hath this Hotspur, Mars in swathling clothes,
This infant warrior …
— KING, III.ii.112-113

Do thou amend thy face, and I’ll amend my life.
— FALSTAFF, III.iii.24

FALSTAFF:
There’s no more faith in thee than in a stew’d prune, nor no more truth in thee than in a drawn fox, and for womanhood, Maid Marian may be the deputy’s wife of the ward to thee. Go, you thing, go.
HOSTESS:
Say, what thing, what thing?
FALSTAFF:
What thing? Why, a thing to thank God on.
HOSTESS:
I am no thing to thank God on, I would thou
shouldst know it!
— III.iii.111-119

Well, God be thank’d for these rebels, they offend none but the virtuous.
— FALSTAFF, III.iii.190-191

Offending the virtuous is a worthy lifetime goal.

Sick now? Droop now? This sickness doth infect
The very lifeblood of our enterprise.
’Tis catching hither, even to our camp.
He writes me here that inward sickness–
— HOTSPUR, IV.i.28-31

I saw young Harry with his beaver on,
His cushes on his thighs, gallantly arm’d,
Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury
And vaulted with such ease into his seat
As if an angel dropp’d down from the clouds,
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus
And witch the world with noble horsemanship.
— RICHARD VERNON, IV.i.104-110

Let them come!
They come like sacrifices in their trim,
And to the fire-ey’d maid of smoky war
All hot and bleeding will we offer them.
The mailed Mars shall on his altar sit
Up to the ears in blood. I am on fire
To hear this rich reprisal is so nigh
And yet not ours. Come, let me taste my horse,
Who is to bear me like a thunderbolt
Against the bosom of the Prince of Wales.
Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse,
Meet and ne’er part till one drop down a corse.
— HOTSPUR, IV.i.112-123

Doomsday is near, die all, die merrily.
— HOTSPUR, IV.i.134

Hotspur is wild. I love how so much of the response to him by other characters is “dude, you need to chill.”

PRINCE HAL:
I did never see such pitiful rascals.
FALSTAFF:
Tut, tut, good enough to toss food for powder, food for powder, they’ll fill a pit as well as better. Tush, man, mortal men, mortal men.
— IV.ii.64-67

Not a horse is half the half of himself.
— HOTSPUR, IV.iii.24

In Act V, scene i, Falstaff is – for the first time – in the group surrounding the King. He doesn’t say much, until he does, interjecting something into the group discussion, as though he is on equal footing. And everyone’s like “who are you? why are you here?”

WORCESTER:
… for I protest
I have not sought the day of this dislike.
KING:
You have not sought it, how comes it then?
FALSTAFF:
Rebellion lay in his way, and he found it.
KING:
Peace, chewet, peace!
— V.i.25-29

To face the garment of rebellion
With some fine color that may please the eye
Of fickle changelings and poor discontents,
Which gape and rub the elbow at the news
Of hurly-burly innovation.
And never yet did insurrection want
Such water-colors to impaint his cause,
Nor moody beggars starving for a time
Of pell-mell havoc and confusion.
— KING, V.i.74-82

This is SUCH a smart political play. “hurly-burly innovation” has killed millions upon millions.

What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ’tis no matter. Honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word “honor”? What is that “honor”? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore, I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.
— FALSTAFF, V.i.128-141

Mic drop.

O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long
If life did ride upon a dial’s point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.
An if we live, we live to tread on kings;
If die, brave death, when princes die with us.
— HOTSPUR, V.ii.81-88

Well, if Percy be alive, I’ll pierce him. If he do come in my way, so; if he do not, if I come in his willingly, let him make a carbonado of me. I like not such grinning honor as Sir Walter hath. Give me life, which, if I can save, so: if not, honor comes unlook’d for, and there’s an end.
— FALSTAFF, V.iii.56-61

What art thou
That counterfeits the person of a king?
— DOUGLAS, V.iv.27-28

Gruesome, but there is something comedic about the image of Douglas rampaging over the battlefield killing all the “decoys” dressed up like the King.

Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere.
Nor can one England brook a double reign
Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales.
— PRINCE HAL, V.iv.65-67

HOTSPUR:
O, I could prophesy,
But that the earthy and cold hand of death
Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust,
And food for —
PRINCE HAL:
For worms, brave Percy.
— V.iv.83-86

Cold as ice. So scary.

Counterfeit? I lie. I am no counterfeit. To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying when a man thereby liveth is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed. The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life.
— FALSTAFF, V.iv.114-121

Nothing confuses me but eyes, and nobody sees me.
— FALSTAFF, V.iv.126

I can’t even believe this play is real sometimes.

No, that’s not certain, I am not a double man —
— FALSTAFF, V.iv.138

This is the strangest tale that ever I heard.
— JOHN OF LANCASTER, V.iv.154

^^ another Midsummer echo, similar to Hippolyta’s comment on Pyramus and Thisbe. And Falstaff does “rise up” from playing dead, just as Bottom emerges from his dream.