William Shakespeare Part 8

_Written._ (?)

_Published._ 1598.

_Source of the Plot._ Most of the comic scenes are the fruit of Shakespeare's invention. A very popular play, _The Famous Victories of Henry V_, by an unknown hand, gave him the suggestion for an effective comic scene. In the historical scenes he follows closely the _Chronicles_ of Holinshed.

_The Fable._ The play treats of the rising of Henry Hotspur, Lord Percy, against Henry IV of England, and of the turning of the mind of Henry, Prince of Wales, from low things to things more worthy his birth. It ends with the killing of Hotspur, by the Prince of Wales, on the battlefield at Shrewsbury. Hotspur is an uncommon man, whose uncommonness is unsupported by his father at a critical moment. Henry, Prince of Wales, is a common man, whose commonness props his father, and helps him to conquer. The play is about a son too brilliant to be understood, and a son too common to understand.

The play treats of a period some four years after the killing of King Richard II. It opens at a time when the oaths of Henry Bolingbroke, to do justice, have been broken on all sides, lest the injustice of his a.s.sumption of kings.h.i.+p should be recognised and punished by those over whom he usurps power. The King is no longer the just, rather kind, man of affairs who takes power in the earlier, much finer play. He is a swollen, soured, bullying man, with all the ingrat.i.tude of a king and all the baseness of one who knows his cause to be wrong. Opposed to him is a pa.s.sionate, quick-tempered man, ready to speak his mind, on the instant, to any whom he believes to be unjust or false.

This quick-tempered man, Lord Percy, has done the King a signal service.

Instead of asking for reward he tries to persuade the King to be just to a man who has suffered wounds and defeat for him. The King calls him a liar for his pains.

Percy, stung to the quick, rebels. Others rebel with him, among them some who are too wise to be profitable on a council of war. War does not call for wisdom, but for swiftness in striking. Percy, who is framed for swiftness in striking, loses half of his slender chance because his friends are too wise to advise desperate measures. Nevertheless, his troops shake the King's troops. The desperate battle of Shrewsbury is very nearly a triumph for him. Then the Prince meets him and kills him.

He learns too late that a pa.s.sionate longing to right the wrong goes down before the rough and stupid something that makes up the bulk of the world. He learns that

"Thought's the slave of life, and life, time's fool; And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop"--

and dies. The man who kills him says a few trite lines over his body, and leaves the stage talking of Falstaff's bowels.

Prince Henry, afterwards Henry V, has been famous for many years as "Shakespeare's only hero." Shakespeare was too wise to count any man a hero. The ways of fate moved him to vision, not heroism. If we can be sure of anything in that great, simple, gentle, elusive brain, we can be sure that it was quickened by the thought of the sun s.h.i.+ning on the just and on the unjust, and s.h.i.+ning none the less golden though the soul like clay triumph over the soul like flame. Prince Henry is not a hero, he is not a thinker, he is not even a friend; he is a common man whose incapacity for feeling enables him to change his habits whenever interest bids him. Throughout the first acts he is careless and callous though he is breaking his father's heart and endangering his father's throne. He chooses to live in society as common as himself. He talks continually of guts as though a belly were a kind of wit. Even in the society of his choice his att.i.tude is remote and cold-blooded. There is no good-fellows.h.i.+p in him, no sincerity, no whole-heartedness. He makes a mock of the drawer who gives him his whole little pennyworth of sugar.

His jokes upon Falstaff are so little good-natured that he stands upon his princehood whenever the old man would retort upon him. He impresses one as quite common, quite selfish, quite without feeling. When he learns that his behaviour may have lost him his prospective crown he pa.s.ses a sponge over his past, and fights like a wild cat for the right of not having to work for a living.

There is little great poetry in the play. The magnificent image--

"Baited like eagles having lately bathed"--

the speech of Worcester (in Act V, sc. i) when he comes with a trumpet to speak with the King, and the call of Hotspur to set on battle--

"Sound all the lofty instruments of war, And by that music let us all embrace"--

are all n.o.ble.

To many, the play is remarkable because it introduces Sir John Falstaff, the most notable figure in English comedy. Falstaff is that deeply interesting thing, a man who is base because he is wise. Our justest, wisest brain dwelt upon Falstaff longer than upon any other character because he is the world and the flesh, able to endure while Hotspur flames to his death, and the enemies of the devil are betrayed that the devil may have power to betray others.

_The Second Part of King Henry IV._

_Written._ 1597 (?)

_Published._ 1600.

_Source of the Plot._ The play of _The Famous Victories of Henry V_. Holinshed's _Chronicles_.

_The Fable._ Northumberland and the other conspirators against the King learn that Hotspur, their a.s.sociate, whom they failed to support, has been defeated and killed. The King's forces are now free to act against themselves. Northumberland retires to Scotland.

The others under a divided command, make head against the King's troops under John of Lancaster. They are betrayed, taken and put to death. Northumberland, venturing out from Scotland, is defeated.

King Henry's position is a.s.sured.

His safety comes too late to be pleasant to him. He is dying, and the conduct of his son gives him anxiety. He sees no chance of permanent peace. He counsels his son to begin a war abroad, to distract the attention of his subjects. Having done this, he dies.

Prince Henry begins his reign as Henry V by casting off all his old a.s.sociates.

The second part of the play of _King Henry IV_ is Shakespeare's ending of the tragedy of _Richard II_. The deposition of Richard was an act of violence, unjust, as violence must be, and offensive, as injustice is, to the power behind life. The blood of the dead king, and of all those killed in fighting for him, calls upon that power, and asks justice of it. Slowly, in many secret ways, the tide sets against the slayer, till he is a worn, old, heart-broken, haunted man, dying with the knowledge that all the bloodshed has been useless, because the power so hardly won will be tossed away by his successor, the youth with "a weak mind and an able body," the "good, shallow young fellow," who "would have made a good pantler," who comes in noisily to his father's death-bed with news of the beastliest of all the treacheries of the reign. Just as the play of _Richard III_ completes the action of the Wars of the Roses, this play completes the action of the killing of the Duke of Gloucester at Calais. The wheel comes full circle, crus.h.i.+ng many that looked to be brought high, making friends enemies and enemies friends. Life was never so brooded on since man learned to think, as in this cycle of tragedies. In this fragment of the whole we are shown the two cla.s.ses in human life, the people of instinct and the people of intellect, being preyed on by two men, one of them greedy for present ease, the other for temporal power. Both men obtain their will. Those who give up everything for one thing often obtain that thing. But it is a law of life that nothing must be paid for with too great a share of the imaginative energy. All excess of the kind is unjust, as violence must be, and offensive, as injustice is, to the power behind life. King Henry IV fails in the hour of his triumph from his manifold failures in life during the struggle for triumph. Falstaff fails in the same way. The prize of life falls to the careless and callous man who has struggled only in two minutes of his life, once, when he played a practical joke upon some thieves, and a second time when he killed Hotspur, the brilliant intellect, the "miracle of men."

Many scenes in this play are great. Shakespeare's instinctive power was as large and as happy as his intellectual power. In this play he indulged it to the full. The Falstaff scenes are all wonderful. That in which the drunken Pistol is driven downstairs is the finest tavern scene ever written. Those placed in Gloucesters.h.i.+re are the perfect poetry of English country life. The talk of old dead Double, who could clap "i'

the clout at twelvescore," and is now dead, as we shall all be soon; the casting back of memory to Jane Nightwork, still alive, though she belongs to a time fifty-five years past, when a man, now old, heard the chimes at midnight; the order to sow the headland, Cotswold fas.h.i.+on, with red Lammas wheat; the kindness and charm of the country servants, so beautiful after the drunken townsmen, are like the English country speaking. The earth of England is a good earth and bears good fruit, even the apple of man. These scenes are like an apple-loft in some old barn, where the apples of last year lie sweet in the straw.

All of those scenes seem to have been written easily, out of the fulness of an instinctive power. In the other scenes Shakespeare wrote with intense mental effort after brooding intensely on human destiny--

"how chances mock, And changes fill the cup of alteration With divers liquors,"

and on the truth that--

"There is a history in all men's lives, Figuring the nature of the times deceased; The which observed, a man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As not yet come to life."

There are two scenes of deep tragedy in the play, both awful.

Shakespeare never wrote anything more terrible. They are the scene in the fourth act, where John of Lancaster tricks and betrays the rebels, and the scene at the end where the young King cuts his old friends, with a word to the Lord Justice to have them into banishment. The words of Scripture, "Put not your trust in princes," must have rung in Shakespeare's head as he wrote these scenes.

Richard II flung down his warder at Coventry rather than let his friend venture in battle for him. From that act of mercy came his loss of the crown, his death, Mowbray's death, Hotspur's death, the murder of the leaders at Gaultree and the countless killings up and down England. At the end of this play the slaughter stops for a while so that a callous young animal may bring his country into a foreign war to divert men's minds from injustice at home.

At the end of the play there is an epilogue in prose, touching for this reason, that it is one of the few personal addresses that Shakespeare has left to us. In the plays the characters speak with a detachment never relaxed. They belong to the kingdom of vision, not to the mind through which they came. In this epilogue Shakespeare speaks for all time directly to his hearers, whoever they may be.

Who are his hearers? Not the English.

Our prophet is not honoured here. This series of historical plays is one of the most marvellous things ever done by man. The plays of which it is composed have not been played in London, in their great processional pageant of tragedy, within the memory of man.

_King Henry V._

_Written._ 1598 (?)

_Published_, imperfectly, 1600; as we now have it, 1623.

_Source of the Plot._ The play of _The Famous Victories of Henry V_. Holinshed's _Chronicles_. (Possibly) an earlier play, now lost.

_The Fable._ The play describes the determination of Henry V to fight with France, his progress in France, the battle of Agincourt, the articles of peace between the French and English, and the courts.h.i.+p of the King with Katharine, daughter of the French King.

It is a chronicle of the coming, seeing, and conquering of the "fellow" "whose face was not worth sun-burning."

The play bears every mark of having been hastily written. Though it belongs to the great period of Shakespeare's creative life, it contains little either of clash of character, or of that much tamer thing, comparison of character. It is a chronicle or procession, eked out with soldiers' squabbles. It seems to have been written to fill a gap in the series of the historical plays. Perhaps the management of the Globe Theatre, where the play was performed, wished to play the series through, from _Richard II_ to _Richard III_, and persuaded Shakespeare to write this play to link _Henry IV_ to _Henry VI_. The lines of the epilogue show that Shakespeare meant the play to give an image of worldly success between the images of failure in the other plays.

The play ought to be seen and judged as a part of the magnificent tragic series. Detached from its place, as it has been, it loses all its value.

It is not greatly poetical in itself. It is popular. It is about a popular hero who is as common as those who love him. But in its place it is tremendous. Henry V is the one commonplace man in the eight plays. He alone enjoys success and worldly happiness. He enters Shakespeare's vision to reap what his broken-hearted father sowed. He pa.s.ses out of Shakespeare's vision to beget the son who dies broken-hearted after bringing all to waste again.

"Hear him but reason in divinity,"

cries the admiring archbishop. Yet this searcher of the spirit woos his bride like a butcher, and jokes among his men like a groom. He has the knack of life that fits human beings for whatever is animal in human affairs.

His best friend, Scroop, plots to kill him, but is detected and put to death. Henry accuses Scroop of cruelty and ingrat.i.tude. He forgets those friends whom his own cruelty has betrayed to death and dishonour.

Falstaff dies broken-hearted. Bardolph, whose faithfulness redeems his sins, is hanged. Pistol becomes a cutpurse. They were the prince's a.s.sociates a few months before. He puts them from his life with as little feeling as he shows at Agincourt, when he orders all the prisoners to be killed.