Notice how the darkness itself becomes active in this thought. The darkness becomes an agent of finality, assisting with the closure attendant upon the dead. The words are spoken by the Earl of Northumberland in Henry IV part 2 (Shakespeare’s sequel to his Henry IV part 1). Northumberland implies that instead of standing on ceremony, instead of maintaining a civilised pretense of honour or decorum, we may simply abandon the dead to nightfall. Shadowed silence will remove the dead from our view, perhaps without any actualy burial at all.
Northumberland’s disillusionment has ample foundation. His son, Harry Percy, the capable Hotspur who was seen as a more talented parallel to King Henry’s son, Prince Hal, has been slain at the battle of Shrewsbury in Henry IV part 1. This loss alone would prompt bitterness, but the grievances of Shrewsbury also persist unresolved.
Yet, Henry IV part 2 is more than sequel to the play that comes before it. It is, in a sense, a reframing of familiar elements that casts them into a different context.
The same world seen through a different kind of lens, becomes a world reflecting dis-ease in this second play. It is as if not only the monarch himself but also court and broader country show their age and wear. Henry IV part 2 is a play which emphasizes not only the cracks in the facade, but also the decaying structure beneath it.
This is the court of a king who gained his throne under circumstances that many felt were may have been questionable, and dark chickens have come home to roost. Instead of ‘coming of age’ as it does in part 1, the world of part 2 already came of age some time ago. Its court is worn, weary of conflict, and still rests uneasily upon the troubled foundations laid when King Henry IV originally took the throne in a revolt against his cousin, King Richard II.
Opening with the character of Rumour, Henry IV part 2 offers us a world where king, state, people, and politics all seem to have fallen ill. Replete with images of sickness and disease, the play almost seems to hound its audience with the idea of decline. Seeming old before his time, both King Henry’s own ‘body’, and his ‘body politic’ seem to be failing him, and physical, spiritual, and psychological malaise, are emphasized in various ways throughout the text.
No exception, Prince Hal’s second ‘father figure’ also stands on the precipice of declining health in part 2. In part 1, Sir John Falstaff seems a wicked clown, representing the comic side of irreverence. His inventive connivances are amusing, and he acts as a kind of Peer Gynt foil to King Henry’s often dull and moralistic Brand. Falstaff frequently bends or breaks the rules to his own advantage. In part 2, however, Sir John becomes a tragic figure, and the shadow of his impending decline casts a shadow over his dialogue in his first scene of the second play.
The contrast is plain. In part 1, Falstaff’s opening lines joust lightly with Prince Hal:
FALSTAFF Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?
Henry IV part 1 1.2.1-35.
PRINCE Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old
sack, and unbuttoning thee after supper, and
sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast
forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst
truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with
the time of the day? Unless hours were cups of
sack, and minutes capons, and clocks the tongues
of bawds, and dials the signs of leaping-houses,
and the blessed sun himself a fair hot wench in
flame-colored taffeta, I see no reason why thou
shouldst be so superfluous to demand the time
of the day.
FALSTAFF 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—
PRINCE What, none?
FALSTAFF No, by my troth, not so much as will serve to
be prologue to an egg and butter.
PRINCE Well, how then? Come, roundly, roundly.
FALSTAFF Marry then, sweet wag, when thou art king,
let not us that are squires of the night’s body be
called thieves of the day’s beauty. Let us be Diana’s
foresters, gentlemen of the shade, minions of the
moon, and let men say we be men of good government,
being governed, as the sea is, by our noble
and chaste mistress the moon, under whose countenance
we steal.
PRINCE Thou sayest well, and it holds well too, for the
fortune of us that are the moon’s men doth ebb and
flow like the sea, being governed, as the sea is, by
the moon.
Falstaff plays with the idea of thieving, even imbuing the practice with a suggestion of nobility and mystique. Yet, there are also hints of what is to come in this first play. Falstaff’s opening question about the time of day hints at a lateness of the hour–lateness which extends not only to the day in question, but also to Falstaff himself. For while the dialogue remains playful, the Prince’s measured responses, and his mention of Falstaff’s superfluity, suggest that Falstaff’s relationship with the prince may stand on borrowed time. Even in his agreement with Falstaff, Hal specifically mentions change. Hal’s “the fortune of us that are the moon’s men doth ebb and flow like the sea” offers a subtle note of foreboding.
Tides change, and the moon does too. Hal’s words suggest shifting phases moon, of tides, and, along with changing fortune, the allegiances of a prince due to, at some point, become a king. As one of the moon’s men, Hal subtly suggests that he, and perhaps his friendships, will ebb and flow as well.
Falstaff’s opening lines in part 2 are more specific. Tellingly, in this opening scene, it is no longer Prince Hal who is his companion, but a young squire, who has apparently carried Falstaff’s urine to a doctor for examination.
FALSTAFF Sirrah, you giant, what says the doctor to my
Henry IV part 2 1.2.1-24.
water?
PAGE He said, sir, the water itself was a good healthy
water, but, for the party that owed it, he might have
more diseases than he knew for.
FALSTAFF Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me.
The brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is
not able to invent anything that intends to laughter
more than I invent, or is invented on me. I am not
only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in
other men. I do here walk before thee like a sow
that hath overwhelmed all her litter but one. If the
Prince put thee into my service for any other reason
than to set me off, why then I have no judgment.
Thou whoreson mandrake, thou art fitter to be
worn in my cap than to wait at my heels. I was never
manned with an agate till now, but I will inset you
neither in gold nor silver, but in vile apparel, and
send you back again to your master for a jewel. The
juvenal, the Prince your master, whose chin is not
yet fledge—I will sooner have a beard grow in the
palm of my hand than he shall get one off his cheek,
and yet he will not stick to say his face is a face
royal. God may finish it when He will.
The doctor’s evaluation does not seem promising. At the same time, Falstaff offhandedly makes light of Hal’s beard, commenting on the prince’s maturity with a kind of familiar license, and taking the Prince almost for granted. Yet, again there seems to be a discordant note to the words, and something seems faintly ominous in “God may finish it when He will”. Darkness may become the burier of the dead, and of the living too.
Of course, King Henry IV part 2 is the play where Hal rises to power, and in so doing, he banishes Falstaff from him:
FALSTAFF God save thee, my sweet boy!
Henry IV part 2 5.5.42-73
KING
My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.
CHIEF JUSTICE, to Falstaff
Have you your wits? Know you what ’tis you
speak?
FALSTAFF, to the King
My king, my Jove, I speak to thee, my heart!
KING
I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester.
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane;
But being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing. Know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
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 turned 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.
Till then I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evils.
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. To the Lord Chief Justice.
Be it your charge, my lord,
To see performed the tenor of my word.—
Set on.
Although Falstaff assures his companions that this speech of the new king is but a public show, and that Hal, now King Henry V, will later come to Falstaff privately, this is not true. The king never returns to him at all, and Falstaff apparently never reforms.
When we next hear of him, in Henry V, Falstaff is on his death bed, and his position in the play has become decidedly minor. No longer does he enter in the second scene, but he is only mentioned in the first scene of the second act, when Hostess Quickly implores his friends to gather ’round his bed to say goodbye:
BOY Mine host Pistol, you must come to my master,
Henry V 2.1.79-86
and your hostess. He is very sick and would to
bed.—Good Bardolph, put thy face between his
sheets, and do the office of a warming-pan. Faith,
he’s very ill.
BARDOLPH Away, you rogue!
HOSTESS By my troth, he’ll yield the crow a pudding
one of these days. The King has killed his heart.
Falstaff quickly becomes the dessert for crows that Quickly has foretold. After an intervening scene where King Henry V catches out three traitors amongst his companions and orders them executed, we return to a scene where Falstaff’s friend are in mourning for him:
HOSTESS Nay, sure, he’s not in hell! He’s in Arthur’s
King Henry V 2.3.9-26
bosom, if ever man went to Arthur’s bosom. He
made a finer end, and went away an it had been any
christom child. He parted ev’n just between twelve
and one, ev’n at the turning o’ th’ tide; for after I saw
him fumble with the sheets and play with flowers
and smile upon his finger’s end, I knew there was
but one way, for his nose was as sharp as a pen and
‘a babbled of green fields. “How now, Sir John?”
quoth I. “What, man, be o’ good cheer!” So he cried
out “God, God, God!” three or four times. Now I, to
comfort him, bid him he should not think of God; I
hoped there was no need to trouble himself with
any such thoughts yet. So he bade me lay more
clothes on his feet. I put my hand into the bed and
felt them, and they were as cold as any stone. Then I
felt to his knees, and so upward and upward, and
all was as cold as any stone.
Treacherous leech of the prince’s early days or not, spirit of Northrop Frye’s ‘green world’ or not, force of nature, of humour, or irreverence or not, Falstaff is gone. Like the traitors apprehended by Henry V, Falstaff has been swept away by a greater current which has washed away the disease of Henry IV part 2, to replace it with King Henry V–a play showing us kingship in its compassion and its ruthlessness as well.
Here too, we see the cycle of the world, seasons governing the land and governing us as well. For we are always rising and fading, we are cadence, we are thunder and soft springs. No matter how lightly or how heavily we tread, the shadow falls over every doorway in time. Darkness buries not only other dead, but also buries us, as we eventually become the dead like any other.
As this post is written (in a passive voice more suitable for a ghost), the earth has shifted seasons again. Storms make their way across the United Kingdom and the United States. California has gone from soft deepening summer to the sudden scorching heat of high fire season within a single week. Dry weather brings skunks and other creatures ranging through the night, as they forage for diminishing supplies of food. Uncharacteristically, recent storms have whipped across the wine country too, their brief violence thundering through the early morning hours, seeming much like the violent opposition of ideas clashing in the land’s inhabitants. For frequently the natural world seems to reflect the undercurrent of the human world, however we might wish to escape the effects of either:
We seek for slumbering trout
W.B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child”, 32-42*
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
Sometimes we wish we could walk the soft moss ways, the tufted forest paths of bygone ages. Places where rabbits, toads, raccoons, or foxes prowl the gentler nights. We wish that it were not too late for this. That we could dive back into those endless evenings of our childhood–summer nights and winter snows. What we remember haunts us.
For now we stand now in a world like that of Henry IV part 2, a world become unwholesome and diseased. How we respond to that, what we choose to do from here, is up to us. Like Falstaff, we can fumble with the sheets and remember the green fields and flowers, or we can move forward, banishing treachery and disease from us with a hope that our doing so will not happen too late for times to come. The same time will pass no matter what we do.
Carl Sandburg captured this–the only seeming differences of time:
HERE is a face that says half-past seven the same way whether a murder or a wedding goes on, whether a funeral or a picnic crowd passes.
Carl Sandburg “Clocks”, 1918
A tall one I know at the end of a hallway broods in shadows and is watching booze eat out the insides of the man of the house; it has seen five hopes go in five years: one woman, one child, and three dreams.
A little one carried in a leather box by an actress rides with her to hotels and is under her pillow in a sleeping-car between one-night stands.
One hoists a phiz over a railroad station; it points numbers to people a quarter-mile away who believe it when other clocks fail.
And of course … there are wrist watches over the pulses of airmen eager to go to France…
What we do with our present time is up to us. Hate or heal. Depending on what we choose, where might we all be in a year? In five? In ten?