Celebrating heroism, debauchery and unsparing human truths
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People often ask me which is my favorite Shakespeare play. I always answer the same way: it’s whichever one I’m doing at the moment.
So it’s Henry IV, Parts One and Two for me, with RSC productions, currently on an international tour.
What I love about the twin plays is their giant, panoramic view of England, from the passionate political arguments in the court of King Henry IV to the riotous nights and hungover mornings in the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap, and everything else in between: whether the chaotic violence of the Battle of Shrewsbury or the peace and silliness of Justice Shallow’s country estate in Gloucestershire.
And what a gallery of characters people this England! The king himself, who, as Bolingbroke, has usurped Richard II’s throne, and is now sick, fuming with anger and guilt. Prince Hal, who journeys from a recklessly wild youth to the sober, weighty responsibility of kingship. The battle-hungry Hotspur, leader of the rebels. The red-nosed Bardolph, the explosive Pistol, the Beckettian double-act of Shallow and Silence. And the women: Lady Percy, a fiery match for her husband, Hotspur; the tavern’s hostess, Mistress Quickly, who argues and adores with the same scatter-brained energy; the young prostitute Doll Tearsheet, who has a surprisingly tender affair with the fat old knight, Sir John Falstaff…
Falstaff is the part I’m playing, so he holds my attention in a special way. The renowned American Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom has said that Falstaff and Hamlet are the Bard’s greatest creations. Falstaff is an astonishing Lord of Misrule. He shocks us even now, so what must he have been like to Shakespeare’s audience? A man who, while people are fighting and dying on the battlefield, says that honour is worthless (“I’ll none of it”); that he’s exhausted (“I am as hot as molten lead”); and that it’s best to play dead (“Time to counterfeit”).
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