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

Henry IV, Part 2

“We have heard the chimes at midnight” is prose in name only. For me, “chimes at midnight” is one of the peaks of literature, up there with “yes I said yes” (and equally as life-affirming.) The scene between Shallow and Falstaff is a fascinating example of how to play things on multiple levels simultaneously. You could take the scene on the surface and it works just fine. There’s charm, there’s humor and interesting characters. But the scene is a kaleidoscopic – a kaleidoscope maybe leading to a telescope? Does that metaphor work? The scene shifts and you don’t notice the shifts. The surface is engaging and then suddenly the bottom drops out. You don’t realize what’s happening until you’re there.

And of course I love Orson Welles for his love of Falstaff, and for making Chimes at Midnight.

Speaking of Orson Welles and Falstaff, here he is on the Dean Martin Show, transforming into Falstaff, and basically monologuing on the character. Where on earth would anything like this happen today? Something so earnest being given so much time? Like: ‘here, Orson, we have six minutes, what would you like to do with it?” Watching this feels like time stopping. So much has been lost. Thank God we have evidence of how things used to be.

Parts 1 and 2 are basically all the same work. Hotspur’s absence is felt in Part 2, and a couple of different characters pay tribute to him, in vivid language. The same thing happens in Henry V where we get to hear about Falstaff’s death. Shakespeare knew we needed to finish off those arcs, knew we were invested: Hotspur can’t just die and we never talk about him again. The audience needs a moment to grieve. Or, to put a better way, the characters are so alive they deserve a proper sendoff.

Part 2 has the same structure as part 1, juxtaposing the “high” with the “low”. The way Shakespeare handles this is so elegant and perfect. Everything flows. The scenes at the tavern with Falstaff, his pals, the prostitutes, etc., aren’t “comic relief”, not in the way they might be in another play. The low balances the high, the laughter flows into the politics the tension and back. The comedy is “wit” – mentioned a bunch of times, and wit is more philosophical, more of a world view, than “comedy”. Because of how the play is built, with these scenes placed back to back – what’s going on in the “low” world is reflected in the “high”, and vice versa. Mirror images. You also can see how Falstaff et al are not quite understanding what has happened, and they don’t quite see what’s about to happen. There will not be a place for them at the table like they thought there would be. Many of them are like, “Look, Ma, we finally MADE it!” They will not be movers-shakers in the new regime. They will be disposed of. There’s a certain amount of pathos as you see which way things are going.

Hal has already shown his steeliness. “For worms, brave Percy.” But we honestly saw it from the very start, with the “I know you all” soliloquy in part 1. Not everyone would be able to play a double game the way Hal does. Not everyone would be able to maintain two separate selves with no crossover. But Hal can. You know who else can? Psychopaths. Hal has a couple more romps with his friends but … time’s up.

We really can see this in the shocking scene where Prince Hal sits by his father’s death bed, and, believing his dad to be already dead, he picks up the crown lying on the pillow, puts it on his head and walks out of the room. Uneasy is the head that wears the crown, UNLESS you’re Prince Hal. The King wakes up and his crown is gone. The King’s men all rush into the room, looking for Henry … Henry eventually comes back, apologetic, like “I’m sorry, I know it looks bad but I didn’t mean it …” Oh ho but he DID mean it. This is the part of him Falstaff either misunderstands, misinterprets, or misses entirely. Falstaff assumed power would not change his Hal. Or … he assumed that power wouldn’t look all that different from the rabble-rousing they got up to as friends.

The rejection, the public rejection, is devastating. Hal says “I know thee not old man” and then continues on for 25 lines, each one meaner than the last. He says he “despises” his “dream”, and then banishes Falstaff and all his ilk, basically saying “If you come within 10 miles of me, you will be put to death.” Falstaff has all this time to absorb what is happening. Hal stops speaking and Falstaff turns to Shallow and says, “Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound.” Which is so perfect.

Falstaff thinks the rejection is part of Hal’s camouflage. Hal will surely reach out to him in private. Falstaff is like a desperate side piece. But of course Hal will not reach out to him privately. Maybe Falstaff isn’t in denial. Trying to “save face” doesn’t really seem Falstaff’s style. When your heart is broken, you don’t always cry.

Not all plays read well. Some plays only come alive when they’re up on their feet in front of an audience. They’re dead, “on the page”. The Henry plays, though, read so so well. Of course there’s nothing like seeing a great production, but just as scripts they are dazzling. You can’t put it down. There’s such variety in the different worlds and tones and characters – Shakespeare seems at home in them all. The early history plays – the Henry VIs, etc. – are a little monotonous in terms of their language (however beautiful much of it is). There are occasionally spikily interesting moments like Joan of Arc or Cade’s rebellion … Joan and Jack Cade are side characters, sideshows even. The main characters don’t speak, they declaim, there’s no getting around it.

The Henrys are such a leap forward it’s hard to even comprehend.

Quotes on the play

“He learned from [morality plays] to give many of his characters emblematic names: the whores Doll Tearsheet and Jane Nightwork and the sergeants Snare and Fang in Henry IV, Part 2, the drunken Sir Toby Belch and the puritanical Malvolio (‘ill will’) in Twelfth Night. On rare occasions he went further and brought personified abstractions directly onto his stage — Rumour, in a robe painted full of tongues, in Henry IV, Part 2, and Time, carrying an hourglass in The Winter’s Tale. And for the most part his debt to the morality plays was more indirect and subtle.”
— Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“The Vice, the great subversive figure of the moralities, was never far from Shakespeare’s creative mind. With mingled affection and wariness, Hal refers to Falstaff as ‘that revered Vice, that grey Iniquity’ (Henry IV, Part 2); the mordantly funny, malevolent Richard III likens himself to ‘the formal Vice, Iniquity’, and Hamlet describes his wily, usurping uncle as ‘a vice of kings’ (3.4.88).”
— Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

“Shakespeare himself seems drawn to the experience of bottomlessness. In Troilus and Cressida he conjures up ‘the incomprensible deep’. In Hamlet, Horatio warns Hamlet against following the ghost because it might tempt him toward ‘the dreadful summit of the cliff … And draw you into madness’, There’s a strikingly similar moment in Lear in which Edgar, the good son, conjures up a dizzying vista of bottomlessness in the mind of his blinded father Gloucester … In Henry IV the elusive secrets of the future ‘sound the bottom of the after-times’. In The Tempest ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’ conjures up the temporal dimension of bottomlessness, the bottomless pit of the past … And when Bottom the weaver decides that he should write a ballad about his dream … he declares ‘It shall be called Bottom’s Dream because it hath no bottom.'”
— Ron Rosenbaum, The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups

^^ This book is absolutely amazing. I read it years ago, but doing this reading project has made me want to read it again.”

“The degeneration of Falstaff is not so much in his wit or even in his imagination as in his moral sensibility. The company he keeps grows more continuously low, and his treatment of Shallow and of his recruits shows an increasing hardness of heart.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“We do not notice the gradations by which Henry ceases to be Hal. Hal had said that the sun would rise clouded and then suddenly burst forth in all his glory. It was just the other way around. The sun rose clear and was gradually obscured … If the evidence so far presented for this view of Henry seems insufficient, more, in abundance, is found in the next play.”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“At the end Falstaff is physically destroyed but Hal is morally destroyed — he has no self left. Hotspur is a failure: he wants to be Hal, but he doesn’t understand the political situation and is destroyed. Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol try to be Falstaff, but they lack trust in the immediate moment.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“Shakespeare makes constant use of images of disease in the plays … The sickness of dissension in the body politic is counterpointed with various specific diseases: Falstaff’s great stomach, Doll’s syphilis, Northumberland’s sickness. We hear of the testing of Falstaff’s water.”
— W.H. Auden, 1946 lecture

“The true spirit of humanity, the thorough knowledge of the stuff we are made of, the practical wisdom with the seeming fooleries in the whole of the garden-scene at Shallow’s country-seat, and just before in the exquisite dialogue between him and Silence on the death of old Double, have no parallel anywhere else. In one point of view, they are laughable in the extreme; in another they are equally affecting, if it is affecting to show what a little thing in human life, what a poor forked creature man is!”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“Hotspur had a voice, a particular voice; one so specific in its quality as to sound now [Part 2, II.ii] in his widow’s ears a bit abnormal. ‘Speaking thick’ — speaking, that is, too rapidly, without precise articulation — was the one blemish nature had given him and his astonishing and unconventional vocabulary… it can scarcely be doubted that he lived for her in his voice; as indeed he still lives for any reader of the play.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“[Shakespeare] will lavish two scenes of the second play upon the memory of a man whose death in the first play he must have regretted as much as the audience did.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“[Henry IV, Part 2] pauses at the start to fix the memory of Hotspur in our minds, to render his death still more unthinkable than it had been, to honor him after such mischance. Shakespeare cannot let him go without such obsequies.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The ripest piece of Falstaff’s miming is reserved, however, for a series of scenes toward the close of the second play, when Sir John happens upon an old friend … the now doddering Justice Shallow. Shallow has lost all the juices that Falstaff has kept … Falstaff takes in the truth at a glance … There is something noble in the instantaneous decision — to fall in with his way of speech, to grant him just what he desires.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

On “we have heard the chimes at midnight”:

“The last and best of these sentences sums up all that Shallow could hope to say in twenty quavery years, and does it so briefly that the breath of any hearer must be taken; and expresses its speaker so completely that he can never be absent from our consciousness henceforth. We may not know the man who says this, but we know that a man says it, and we know him better than we do most members of his race.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

I love this.

“…magnanimity [is] the groundwork of [Falstaff’s] humor.”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare

“The form of such a man grows clearer with everything he utters, and his dimensions increase. We could not have known that he would say it; and afterwards we cannot imagine him saying anything else or better…”
— Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (more on “chimes at midnight”)

“The predictions of the ‘I know you all’ soliloquy [in Part 1] are already coming true.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

Such an important soliloquy.

“Shakespeare gives us more than enough evidence to suggest that part of Hal is a colder hypocrite than even his father Bolingbroke is and was.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“Falstaff’s high theatricalism is prophetic of Hamlet, of Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure, most darkly of Iago, most gloriously of Cleopatra, Falstaff’s truest child. Falstaff, always himself, surpasses the self-same in the improvised but elaborate plays-within-the-play that present shadows of the coming confrontation.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

On the Falstaff/Shallow/Silence scenes, Act III, scene 2 and Act V, scenes 1 and 3:

“As the shadows of Hal’s forthcoming rejection darken Henry IV, Part Two, Shakespeare distracts us (and himself) by the scenes shared by Falstaff with the two country justices, Shallow and Silence … Shakespeare never surpassed these scenes in the vein of pure naturalism.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

On Falstaff’s repeat reference to Jesus’ parable of the glutton and the beggar:

“Three times Falstaff alludes to this fierce parable; I will suggest that there is a fourth concealed allusion when Falstaff kneels and is rejected by King Henry V in his new royal purple, and manifestly there is a fifth when the Hostess, describing Falstaff’s death in the play he is not permitted to enter, Henry V, assures us that Falstaff is ‘in Arthur’s bosom’, with the British Arthur substituting for Father Abraham.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“What seemed lively, improvised, energetic, and hopeful in Part 1 now seems enervated, tawdry, and corrupted.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Rumour appears in the play as the principle of disorder in language, the proliferation of fake tongues (‘Stuffing the ears of men with false reports’) and, characteristically, Rumour produces a lie: the false report that Hotspur lives and that Prince Hal is dead. This lie is the pattern and the prefiguration of the larger lie that the play as a whole will have to refute: the lie that Hal is still an incurable wastrel, and that under his kingship order will die. ‘Let order die!’ is the desperate declaration of Northumberland, the father of Hotspur (Harry Percy), when at last he receives the news of his son’s death.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“For virtually everyone in this play is sick. ‘[W]e are all diseased,’ says the Archbishop of York, ‘of which disease / our late King Richard, being infected, died’ (4.1.54-58). The disease that afflicts them is the lingering curse of anarchy and usurpation, of having offended God.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Henry IV, Part 1 presented a psychomachia, Prince Hal’s choice between Falstaff and Hotspur as alternate models. In Part 2, although Falstaff’s stance in the world has gone up (he has his sword and buckler borne before him by a page, and wants 22 yards of satin for his cloak and breeches). The man is shrunk, or rather swollen, into a mere metaphor of himself. Where in Part 1 he descanted on the concept of honor, if only to question and reject it, in this play his corresponding long soliloquy is not on honor but on sack. The change from ‘honor’ to ‘sack’ is a parodic example of material culture, the devolution from principles to potables.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Psychomachia” is a new word to me. I like it. A soul struggle.

“Names in general in this play … show a great deal about its shrunken character. Many characters could almost be described as Lord Bardolph describes the rebel troops as ‘the names of men instead of men’. The surnames of the women in the brothel – ‘Quick-lie,’ ‘Tear-sheet’ — proclaim their owners’ profession, in the style of ‘humor’ associated more frequently with the city comedies of Shakespeare’s contemporary Ben Jonson, whose characters rejoice in names like Subtle, Face, Lovewit, Doll Common, Morose, and Epicene. In Henry IV, Part 2 we encounter not only Doll Tearsheet and Mistress Quickly, but also sergeants called Fang and Snare, and foolish justices called Shallow and Silence — ‘Silence’ being a very suitable name, as Falstaff notes, for a justice of the peace.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“One way of mapping the decline is to notice how much of this play is written in prose. Almost every scene in verse is followed immediately by a longer one in prose, full of topical humor, bawdy puns, sexual innuendo and braggadocio, and endless discussions of how much things cost. The prose world is swallowing up the world of poetry.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Instead of Hotspur, the valiant epic warrior who was ‘the theme of honor’s tongue’ in Part 1, we now have Ancient Pistol…Pistol replaces Hotspur as the spokesman of heroic sentiment, and becomes yet another sign of what is happening in this play’s world.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“We noted in connection with Hotspur’s character and language that they closely resembled, and also seemed dryly to comment upon, the actions and speech of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine … With this model in mind, the audience of Henry IV Part 2 encounters an Ancient Pistol who constantly spouts jumbled fragments of Marlowe and other Elizabethan playwrights. Thus, for example, Pistol invokes ‘pack-horses / And hollow pampered jades of Asia” in place of Tamburlaine’s great challenge to his enemies, ‘Holla, ye pamper’d jades of Asia!’, spoken by Marlowe’s hero when he has harnessed the Asian kings to his chariot and strikes them with a whip. Taken out of context, spoken by a posturing mock-heroic or antiheroic opportunist like Pistol, Tamburlaine’s heroic verbiage becomes merely empty and ludicrous display … Shakespeare once again ‘sends up’ his rival Marlowe even as he records his own admiration for the sounding periods of his verse.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

That is so cool.

“In one of the most chilling moments in Shakespearean drama, John persuades the rebels that they will be given mercy, watches serenely while their armies disband, and then arrests them for treason and sends them to be executed, concluding sanctimoniously, ‘God, and not we, hath safely fought today’ (4.1.347). This lofty sentiment, spoken by so cold and antipathetic a character, will be repeated with a difference in Henry V, when after the hard-fought battle of Agincourt, the King will say gratefully, ‘God fought for us.'”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“It is worth nothing that in Henry IV, Part 2, a play deftly designed to be a counterfoil and answer to Part 1, the central tavern scene is once again located in Act 2, scene 5, and the audience comes upon the Prince and Poins about to perform another play, about to disguise themselves as they did in Part 1 when they became ‘buckram men’ and robbed Falstaff. But Hal now sees this act of costuming — in this case, as ‘drawers’, tavern waiters or tapsters — as a ‘low transformation.’ It is now explicitly intended as a fictive vehicle for him, allowing him to descend to the tavern world. In fact, his entry into the world of Falstaff and company now looks more like a classical ‘descent into the underworld,’ undertaken by a hero (Ulysses, for example, or Aeneas), who is on a greater quest. ‘She’s in hell already,’ says Falstaff of Doll Tearsheet — but she is not the only one. Like Falstaff and the others who inhabit it, the tavern is now a shadow or shade of its former self. Its energy seems to have been sapped. The tavern world, manifestly unfit for the new play’s reality, turns warfare into a dirty joke.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Again, just as in Part 1, the King and the Prince are cleverly kept apart by the playwright until the moment of greatest drama and greatest suspense, which here falls very late — in this case Act 4, scene 3, at the King’s deathbed, where Hal, thinking that his father is dead, puts the royal crown on his own head. His action, in crowning himself, is the reversal — and the dramatic redemption — of Richard II’s deposition ceremony. ‘With mine own hands I give away my crown,’ says Richard. Hal, with his own hands, takes it back, and thus initiates an upward movement, a movement of kingly ascension, that will continue through, and culminate in, Henry V.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“The last Englishman named in these plays who died a heroic death in the Holy Land was Thomas Mowbray, Henry’s first opponent at the beginning of Richard II. His last opponent, here in Henry IV, Part 2, is Falstaff, the living embodiment of anarchy, misrule, and dissent within England — Falstaff, who had once been Mowbray’s page.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

On Henry’s speech in Act V, sc 3 ‘My father is gone wild into his grave’:

“This speech is, structurally and emblematically, the pendant or reply to his ‘I know you all’ soliloquy in Part 1. It is not, of course, itself a soliloquy, but rather a formal address to the nation. Hal, now Harry, is no longer a prince in training, or a man in disguise.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“Henry’s rejection of Falstaff is “one of the most devastating [moments] in any of Shakespeare’s plays.”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

“‘Promise not that I am the thing I was,’ is the final echo of ‘I know you all’ and indeed of the clipped and chilling ‘I do; I will’ with which a younger Hal responded to Falstaff’s ‘banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.'”
— Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All

The final lines belong to John of Lancaster:

“…a person whose sole distinction lies in the fact that he is the most dastardly character in it … the man whom Falstaff in just six words caused us to cast forth into everlasting darkness: ‘a man cannot make him laugh.'”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The true spirit of humanity, the thorough knowledge of the stuff we are made of, the practical wisdom with the seeming fooleries in the whole of the garden-scene at Shallow’s country-seat, and just before in the exquisite dialogue between him and Silence on the death of old Double, have no parallel anywhere else. In one point of view, they are laughable in the extreme; in another they are equally affecting, if it is affecting to show what a little thing in human life, what a poor forked creature man is!”
— William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays

“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

“Shakespeare’s immortal Falstaff suffers the terrible final humiliation of public rejection but retains pathos, dignity, even a kind of nobility as he goes down, a Lazarus to Henry V’s purple-clad Dives.”
— Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human

“[Henry V] is a play produced on the heels of Henry IV, practically contemporary with As You Like It and Julius Caesar, and just preceding Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida, and Hamlet. Judged by these titles, Shakespeare was incapable of producing anything but masterpieces at this time. (Even Merry Wives is one in its inferior kind.)”
— Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare

“The Falstaff of the Henry IV plays is a carnival king fighting to maintain his equilibrium in a hostile world of political intrigue. When events force him out of his tavern-citadel, he discovers that as a master of illusions himself he can survive, at least for a time, in a cold climate by recognizing and turning to his own advantage the illusions — of honor, justice, military glory, or swashbuckling youth — which other people mistake for realities.”
— Anne Barton, Riverside Shakespeare

Quotes from the play

From Rumour’s tongues
They bring smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs.
— Induction, 39-40

Said he young Harry Person’s spur was cold?
Or Hotspur, Coldspur?
— Northumberland, I.i.49-50

Far from his metal was his party steeled,
Which once in him abated, all the rest
Turn’d on themselves, like dull and heavy lead,
And as the thing that’s heavy in itself
Upon enforcement flies with greatest speed,
So did our men, heavy in Hotspur’s loss.
Lend to this weight such lightness with their fear
Than did our soldiers, aiming at their safety
Fly from the field.
— MORTON, I.i.116-125

In poison there is physic, and these news,
Having been well, that would have made me sick,
Being sick, have (in some measure) made me well.
— NORTHUMBERLAND, I.i.137-139

For that some word, rebellion, did divide
The action of their bodies from their souls,
And they did fight with queasiness constrain’d
As men drink potions, that their weapons only
Seem’d on our side; but for their spirits and souls.
This word, rebellion, it had frozen them up,
As fish are in a pond. But now the Bishop
Turns insurrection to religion.
— MORTON, I.i.194-201

The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent any thing that intends to laughter more than I invent or is invented on me. I am not only witty on myself, but the cause that wit is in other men.”
— FALSTAFF, I.iii.7-10

My good lord! God give your lordship good time of day. I am glad to see your lordship abroad. I heard say your lordship was sick, I hope your lordship goes abroad by advice. Your lordship, though not clean past your youth, have yet some smack of an ague in you, some relish of the saltness of time in you, and I must humbly beseech your lordship to have a reverend care of your health.
— FALSTAFF, I.ii.93-100

Virtue is of so little regard in these costermonger’s times that true valor is turn’d bearard; pregnancy is made a tapster, and his quick wit wasted in giving reckonings; all the other gifts appurtenant to man, as the malice of the age shapes them, are not worth a gooseberry.
— FALSTAFF, I.ii.168-173

Well, I cannot last ever, but it was always yet the trick of our English nation, if they have a good thing, to make it too common.
— FALSTAFF, I.ii.213-216

A good wit will make use of any thing. I will turn diseases to commodity.
— FALSTAFF, I.ii.247-248

… who lin’d himself with hope,
Eating the air and promise of supply,
Flatt’ring himself in project of a power
Much smaller than the smallest of his thoughts,
And so with great imagination,
Proper to madmen, led his powers to death,
And winking, leapt into destruction.
— LORD BARDOLPH on Hotspur’s death, I.iii.27-33

The commonwealth is sick of their own choice,
Their over-greedy love hath surfeited
An habitation greedy and unsure
Hath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.
— ARCHBISHOP OF YORK, I.iii.87-90

Spoken like a true fascist. The people are sick of having choices, so let us choose FOR them.

O thoughts of men accurs’d!
Past and to come seems best; things present worst.
— ARCHBISHOP, I.iii.107-108

Like I always say: beware nostalgia, especially in politics. Those who want the world to turn back to the past are highly suspect. Those who view the past as better (politically) are usually up to no good, and are hoping to “go back” to a time when things were less equal for some.

Thine, by yea and no, which is as much as to say, as thou meet him, Jack Falstaff with my familiars, John with my brothers and sisters, and Sir John with all Europe.
— FALSTAFF’s letter, II.ii.131-134

Well, thus we play the fools with the time,
And the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.
— PRINCE HAL, II.ii.141-142

He was indeed the glass
Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves:
He had no legs that practic’d not his gait;
And speaking thick (which nature made his blemish)
Became the accents of the valiant;
For those that could speak low and tardily
Would turn their own perfection to abuse
To seem like him …
— LADY PERCY on Hotspur, II.iii.21-28

I love how Hotspur continues to be eulogized in Part 2. It’s fitting. This small section, spoken by his widow, has led to centuries of speculation about “speaking thick”: does Hotspur have a speech impediment? A stutter? It has been played that way.

Then (happy) low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
— KING, III.ii.30-31

There is a history in all men’s lives,
Figuring the natures of the times deceas’d,
The which observ’d, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
And weak beginning lie intreasured.
Such things become the hatch and brood of time.
— WARWICK, III.i.80-86

SHALLOW:
No, Sir John. It is my cousin Silence, in commission with me.
FALSTAFF:
Good Master Silence, it well befits you should be of the peace.
— III.ii.87-88

SHALLOW:
Doth she hold her own well?
FALSTAFF:
Old, old, Master Shallow.
SHALLOW:
Nay, she must be old. She cannot choose but be old. Certain, she’s old, and had Robin Nightwork by old Nightwork before I came to Clement’s Inn.
SILENCE:
That’s fifty-five year ago.
SHALLOW:
Ha, cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that that this knight and I have seen!– Ha, Sir John, said I well?
FALSTAFF:
We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow.
SHALLOW:
That we have, that we have, that we have.
— III.ii.205-217

A man can die but once, we owe God a death.
— FEEBLE, III.ii.234-235

O, give me the spare men, and spare me the great ones.
— FALSTAFF, III.ii.269

That you should seal this lawless bloody book
Of forg’d rebellion with a seal divine.
— WESTMORELAND to the Archbishop, IV.i.91-92

Thank God for separation of church and state, amirite?

Construe the times to their necessities,
And you shall say, indeed, it is the time.
— WESTMORELAND, IV.i.102-103

But he hath forc’d us to compel this offer,
And it proceeds from policy, not love.
— MOWBRAY, IV.i.145-146

… to see you here an iron man, talking,
Cheering a rout of rebels with your drum,
Turning the word to sword and life to death.
— JOHN OF LANCASTER, again about the warlike Archbishop, IV.ii.8-10

Did Shakespeare ever write a naturally good and holy priest? Friar Lawrence is okay but he’s also an idiot. I can’t think of one positive portrayal of a priest – I could be wrong!

O, who shall believe
But you misuse the reverence of your place,
Employ the countenance and grace of heav’n,
As a false favorite doth his prince’s name,
In deeds dishonorable? You have ta’en up,
Under the counterfeited zeal of God,
The subjects of his substitute, my father,
And both against the peace of heaven and him
Have here upswarm’d them.
— JOHN OF LANCASTER, IV.ii.22-30

You are too shallow, Hastings, much too shallow,
To sound the bottom of the after-times.
— JOHN OF LANCASTER, IV,ii.50-51

A peace is of the nature of a conquest,
For then both parties nobly are subdued,
And neither party loser.
— ARCHBISHOP, IV,ii.89-91

Well, we definitely can see the truth of this. Or, at least, we HAVE in the past.

I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any other word but my name. And I had but a belly of any indifferency, I were simply the most active fellow in Europe. My womb, my womb, my womb undoes me.
— FALSTAFF, IV.iii.18-22

He saw me, and yielded, that I may justly say, with the hook-nos’d fellow of Rome, “There, cousin, I came, saw, overcame.”
— FALSTAFF, IV.iii.40-42

There’s never none of these demure boys come to any proof, for thin drink doth so over-cool their blood, and making many fish meals, that they fall into a kind of male green-sickness…
— FALSTAFF, IV.iii.90-93

[Sack] ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which, deliver’d o’er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit.
— FALSTAFF, IV.iii.97-102

I don’t really drink but this whole monologue about “sack” – and this is just a small part of it – is such a vivid description of what alcohol really does to the body and mind.

Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant, for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father he hath, like lean, sterile, and bare land, manur’d, husbanded, and till’d with excellent endeavor of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant.
— FALSTAFF, IV.iii.86-89

The Prince but studies his companions
Like a strange tongue, wherein, to gain the language,
‘Tis needful that the most immodest word
Be look’d upon and learnt, which once attain’d,
Your Highness knows, comes to no further use
But to be known and hated.
— WARWICK, IV.iv.68-73

You wish this weren’t true, but it is.

Well, Fortune never come with both hands full.
But write her fair words still in foulest terms?
She either gives a stomach and no food —
Such are the poor in health; or else a feast
And takes away the stomach — such are the rich,
That have abundance and enjoy it not.
— KING, IV.iv.103-108

How quietly nature falls into revolt
When gold becomes her object!
— KING, IV.v.65-66

Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance,
Revel the night, rob, murder, and commit
The oldest sins the newest kind of ways?
Be happy, he will trouble you no more.
England shall double gild by treble guilt,
England shall give him office, honor, might.
— KING, IV.v.124-129

Sounds familiar.

It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another; therefore let men take heed of their company.
— FALSTAFF, V.i.75-77

PRINCE HAL:
I’ll be your father and your brother too.
Let me but bear your love, I’ll bear your cares.
Yet weep that Harry’s dead, and so will I,
But Harry lives that shall convert those tears
By number into hours of happiness.
OTHER PRINCES:
We hope no otherwise from your Majesty.
PRINCE HAL:
You all look strangely on me, and you most.
You are, I think, assured I love you not.
— V.ii.57-64

FALSTAFF:
What wind blew you hither, Pistol?
PISTOL:
Not the ill wind which blows no men to good.
— V.iii.85-86

FALSTAFF:
My King, my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!
KING HENRY V:
I know thee not, old man, fall to thy prayers.
— V.v.46-47

Reply not to me with a fool-born jest,
Presume not that I am the thing I was.
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self.
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots.
— KING HENRY V, V.v.55-63