It was always yet the trick of the English nation if they have a good thing to make it common.

Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all; all shall die.  How a good yoke of Bullocks at Stamforth Fair?

Shakespeare wrote his ten English history plays when it suited him.  It is instructive to view both the history of England and his development in the chronological order of the plays.  (The references to the shows are to those on Arkangel.)

King John (1199-1216)

(c1596)

This is a vitally medieval play – the king against his barons; the French against the English; and God and his Church over all.  We may as well be on Mars – but for the humanity of the playwright.  It is about perfidy and treachery on high – a favourite theme in drama. 

But the actors that get to us are not noble –the Bastard ( the son of Richard Coeur de Lion), Hubert, and the Papal Legate (Pandulph) – put there to fire up a Tudor Protestant audience (and the modern one I was in when in London once).  Constance is a pain.  (Very unlike Connie in The Godfather.)   The bastard is like a Greek chorus on the nobles – and he prefigures the politician.  Hubert is humanity in the raw – and an English man to boot.

King John is a rat.  He is the epitome of weakness – he urges brutal murder – and then he blames the chosen killer – who has had to defy ‘superior orders’.  The king is one of God’s gifts to the English – provocative but containable.  (The Stuarts in embryo.)  He would lead ineluctably to rebellion and Magna Carta – the foundation of the rule of law. 

Bill Nighy as Pandulph is insidiously malicious – like a gliding taipan in uncut grass.  The intervention of a foreign potentate will come to an end in the last of these history plays, Henry VIII.  The ‘supremacy’ vainly asserted by King John is a reality under King Harry.  What a difference a king makes. 

This  play is in my view sadly very underrated as theatre.  It  is high political drama.

Richard II (1377-1399)

(c1595)

Possibly because the first recording of Shakespeare that I bought had Sir John Gielgud in this role, it has remained very high in my favourites.  It has the aural beauty of Iussi Björling.  As a passion play, it has the pathetic majesty of The Saint Matthew Passion.  (And the recording has Leo McKern groaning that this other Eden is ‘now leased out’ – King John had hocked the kingdom to the Vatican.)

Another weak king is brought to heel – this time terminally, by deposition and death.  Put to one side the law – if a medieval English king did not measure up, he risked being deposed – on a good day.  It is the familiar story of a weak king surrounded by flatterers.  The play starts with full medieval chivalry – that would be detonated in the next play.  The last Plantagenet aborts the process of the law and then unlawfully seizes the property of one side.  This is the dilemma of the whole series – if you take the law into your own hands, how do you stop someone doing the same to you?  ‘How are you a king but by fair sequence and succession?’

Bolingbroke reminds me of the Inquisitor of El Greco – shifty.  And with him we now get populism and a new world.  He is seen to court the commons – ‘Off goes his bonnet to an oyster wench.’  Dead right.  He is the first spin doctor.  He will school his son in stealing ‘all courtesy from heaven’ – and young Harry will be a ready pupil in or out of the stews of London.  We will even get the phrase ‘vile politician’.  When the coup is complete, the rebels prefigure the Inquisition and Stalin.  They want to give a ‘confession’ to the Commons.  The flatterers had said that the love of the Commons ‘lies in their purses’ – how very modern!   And this is another play where a ‘misunderstanding’ leads to the execution of a king or an heir. 

But here is pathos not seen since the Greeks – in the most operatic play ever written.  Rupert Graves grows into the role as the hero softens in his crashing descent.

Henry IV (1399-1413)

(c1597; c1599)

The whole world has changed.  In the second scene of the first of these two plays – which many say are the best this playwright put on the stage – it explodes with the entrance of his most famous character, Sir John Falstaff – and theatre would never be the same again.  Falstaff is fat, old, a liar, a coward, a drunk, a thief, and a womaniser – and that’s on a good day.  But the audience loves him.  He is the living repudiation of honour and chivalry, and he arrived at about the same time as Don Quixote, who was on a similar mission.  But he has that most priceless attribute on the stage – he endears himself to the audience.

So does Percy Hotspur, that most feisty son of Northumberland (who had taunted Richard II, while Percy mocked the heir apparent).  He carries the audience with his reckless energy: he embodies the old world of chivalry.  He is in truth a hero, of the kind Wagner never got close to.  And he too rushes like a torrent to his inevitable death.  Percy also stands for the provincial nobility and the seeds of the Wars of the Roses.  ‘An if we live, we live to tread on kings’.

There is very little that is endearing about Prince Hal.  He is cold and calculating.  He will use Falstaff and his rough mates and others in the taverns until it suits him to drop them.  He is two faced, and in some cultures repudiating a mate is the ultimate crime.  Percy calls him a ‘vile politician’ – ‘a fawning greyhound’ who proffers ‘a candy deal of courtesy.’  Falstaff said Hal is ‘essentially mad without seeming so’.  Auden did not hold back.  He says ‘Hal has no self.’  Auden compares the ‘scoundrel’ Henry V with Richard III.  ‘Hal is the type who becomes a college president, a government head, and one hates their guts.’  Boy – does that ring a bell! 

At least Hal is honest.  ‘I’ll so offend to make offence a skill.’  Say hullo to Boris.  Hotspur?  ‘It were an easy leap to pluck bright honor from  the pale-faced moon.’  Falstaff?  ‘What is honor?  A word.’

Richard Griffith and Alan Cox are up for the leads and the tavern scene is a triumph.

Those who seek to exculpate Hal for his premeditated betrayal of Falstaff are blinded by the poetry, and forget that the object of the game for Shakespeare was to give the audience a great show – one that tells big truths.  If Hal stands for chivalry, was not Falstaff right to repudiate it?  And might we say the same for Hotspur, who seemed to think more of his horse than Kate and who resembles the crazy Siegfried as he staggers laughing to his doom?

In Part I, we get stews and pubs like those in Measure for Measure.  In Part II, we get the middle class and landed gentry like those in Merry Wives of Windsor.  We are a very long way from King John and the feudal barons, and the word ‘feudal’ was not in use then – and Rome is nowhere in sight. 

The whole mood is now autumnal.  ‘We have heard the chimes at midnight.’  (And somehow, I see the gaze of Orson Welles flickering in the firelight.)  And another son of Bolingbroke breaks his word in a way that would have thrilled Hitler, before we get to the scene of the transmission of the Crown – and there are not many scenes as strong as that.

Someone said that watching Shakespeare was like touching the face of God.  Falstaff is a paternal Master of Fun with roots in commedia.  But, as Sir Anthony Quayle said, he is also ‘frankly vicious.’  Well, he is human and so are we.  That I think led Tony Tanner to say that we ‘invariably feel a spasm of pleasure and liberation when someone blows the gaffe on human nature as Falstaff so often, consciously or subconsciously, does.’

That’s when you hear the chimes at midnight.  It is pure alchemy.  Which is to say: it is beyond analysis. It is, like the Pieta, what it is.

(Opera-goers might note that the Falstaff of Verdi, my favourite of his operas, is not that of these plays, but the watered down and worn-down version of Merry Wives of Windsor – a rom.com that the poets turn their noses up on.)

But there remains the conundrum of Falstaff.  He trades in human souls.  He figures that only three of his 150 ragamuffins will survive the battle.  The Hostess complains that she has been ‘fubbed off, fubbed off, and fubbed off.’  The truth is that Falstaff rides roughshod over the whole lot of them.  All chivalry is gone.  It was at best a pretty conceit to soften the brutality of the ethnic cleansing of the Crusades.

Donald Trump could have modelled himself on Sir John.  If you are going to lie, lie big.  The more you outrage the Establishment, the more popular you shall be.  He gets away with things quite out of our reach.  We should forever bear in mind the caution of Dr Johnson. 

The moral to be drawn is that no man is more dangerous than he that with a will to corrupt hath the power to please ;and that neither wit nor honesty ought to think themselves safe with such a companion when they see Henry seduced by Falstaff.

Or vice versa.

And at the end – there is a new player.  ‘Now call we our high court of Parliament.’  And the next play begins with power brokers discussing a bill in the Commons.  The political landscape is shifting massively.

Henry V (1413-1422)

(c1599)

Prince Hal is now King Henry.  As promised, he has cast off Falstaff et al and he is justly blamed for Falstaff’s death.  He and the Holy Church are fit to prey on each other.  The Church will fund a war of national pride.  Honour.  This leads to posturing on both sides.  And tennis balls.  And bloody carnage.

The puppeteer can now play deadly games with traitors before issuing blood-red threats of war crimes before the gates of Harfleur.  Then he presides over the death of Bardolph with sickening hypocrisy.  ‘I know you not old man’ becomes ‘We would have all such offenders so cut off.’  Then he does commit a war crime by ordering the killing of prisoners.  Olivier and Branagh left that out.  For Olivier and Churchill, the Second World War was the reason: I am not sure for Branagh.  Those who do not paint the full picture leave us with Kiplingesque jingoism that is not Shakespeare, no matter how much it warms the cockles at home.  Auden thought ‘the most brutal scene in Shakespeare is Henry’s wooing of Katherine’, and I know what he means.

The scene of the death of Falstaff comes from the gutter.  It is wonderful theatre.  No other playwright has claimed this range.  And at the end, Harry still plays games with those beneath him.  Narcissus to the end.

Henry VI (1422-1461, 1470-1471)

(c1592- 1596)

‘The cease of majesty’.  These three plays are about the weakest king, and the strongest queen, my favourite character, Queen Margaret, the She Wolf of France, especially as played by the immortal Dame Peggy Ashcroft.  (A younger David Tennant is just right as this pathetic young king – like a lost child late for Sunday School.)

But somehow the times are out of joint.  Perhaps here the sequence of composition asserts itself and we seem to be going backward.  There is a jolt – a palpable jolt.  The fingerprints of the Church pervade.  Crashing warrior barons clash with each other and crash out of France.  A champion woman is cruelly treated because she is French – an English failing, and not this author’s high point.  It all feels so medieval.  There are king-makers whom no king can ignore.  And, then, for the first time, we see the masses rise up in the rebellion of Jack Cade: about three hundred years before the French Revolution.  (And that sounds about right on the scales of history.)

But above all, we see the inhuman misery of a weak monarchy and a grizzly civil war, that people I respect simply cannot bear to listen to.  It is like Mad Max.  The Wars of the Roses will be the last hoorah of the magnates.  Next, the English will celebrate Religious Home Rule in the Reformation, and the Stuart kings will cede sovereignty to Parliament. 

Perhaps my editor may forgive me for quoting my favourite lines of Queen Maragaret once again hissed out by Peggy Ashcroft.

Where are your mess of sons to back you now?
The wanton Edward, and the lusty George?
And where’s that valiant crook-back prodigy,
Dicky your boy, that with his grumbling voice
Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies?
Or, with the rest, where is your darling Rutland?

They would have blushed at that out the outer at Windy Hill or Victoria Park in 1948, the year of the blood premiership.  Even Quentin Tarantino might pause.  This is a long way from Midsummer night’s Dream, and this playwright is nothing if not rounded.

Taken as a whole, the three plays are I think sadly underestimated.  There is plenty of blood and guts.  Kings and nobles were in the front in the wars, but this was a time when winners could cut the heads off their enemies and display them in triumph.  In that they were savages.  Kings and nobles were merely human – but, like the rest of us, capable of dragging us back to the primeval slime. 

There are family or tribal vendettas like those in The Godfather.  The howling protests of the father and son in Part II have no parallel on our stage.  Chivalry?  A ‘gigolot wench’ looks with contempt at the ‘stinking and fly-blown’ corpse of a noble – who had murdered a child in cold blood. 

The plays are intensely political – and politics are about people, not policies.  It was only a matter of  time before the playwright let sex rear its potent head.  There is wall to wall duplicity – and faction, and grinding discord in the caucus.  One faction resorts to murder; another incites the mob to rebellion.  If you cannot get rid of your opponent lawfully, do what you must for the good of the state – or for your party – or for yourself.  What is the upshot of that policy?  ‘I am myself alone.’  And he is the subject of the last of this quartet of plays.

Richard III (1483-1485)

(c1597)

At the start of Act 4 in Part III, we see a bitchy split in the York brothers when Edward IV puts his sex drive before the crown.  Clarence defects.  Richard gives notice of future horrors.  Judas had nothing on him – played by David Troughton with lascivious malice.  ‘I am myself alone…Counting myself but bad til I be best.’

From weakness at the top and chaos below, to evil and misery everywhere.  The trouble is that this evil king sucks us the audience in with him.  The style and ambience are all so different.  This man lives for conflict – that is his oxygen: a small-scale Napoleon or Hitler or Trump.  He will be the last unguided missile to sit on the English throne, and the earth sighs with relief at his inevitable fall. 

This Richard has at least two things in common with Donald Trump.  First, his ego does not allow for a superego, or conscience.  Secondly, and relatedly, ‘he hath no friends but what are friends for fear / Which in his dearest need will fly from him.’  It is just a matter of time before someone who gets too close is cut off – with extreme prejudice.  ‘Richard loves Richard, that is I am I.’

Franco, the Caudillo, used to read through the sentences of death of his enemies while taking his coffee after a meal, often in the presence of his personal priest.   He would write an ‘E’ against those he decided should be executed, and a ‘C’ when commuting the sentence.  For those he considered needed to be made a conspicuous example, he wrote ‘garrote y prensa’ (garrotting and press coverage).  Richard wanted to be told after supper in detail how the two infant princes died – after which he will again be ‘a jolly thriving wooer’.  Well, you could not levy that charge against Hitler, but the psychotic paring is there – and it all gets a bit too much.  The dramatic technique is evolving, but I still prefer the regal tragedy of Richard II.

But this author and producer has now found his feet, and he knows how to play with us.  If you can go the distance with the whole play, it is worth it.  It has about it the aura of an ancient Greek family cursed by fate, with discarded queens hissing curses from a barbed wire fence.  In that way, it is utterly timeless, as is the remark that all power corrupts. 

Plus ça change….

Henry VIII (1509-1547)

(c1613)

Home waters at last as in Yes, Minister – power, greed, corruption, deceit – and pure bullshit.  Above all , put not your trust in princes. 

The king has imposed a tax that makes him unpopular.  Naturally, he blames his first minister, and tells him to fix it.  In turn, the first minister, Wolsey, summons a flack: ‘let it be noised that through our intercession this relief comes.’  Sir Humphrey Appleby, eat your heart out.

It is a play of people falling from a great height, pushed by a randy British bulldog, not much of a rock to build a church on.  ‘Then in a moment, see how soon this mightiness meets misery.’  Given that the Armada and Guy Fawkes were well within living memory, Queen Katherine (Jane Lapotare as I saw it at Stratford and heard on Arkangel) is extraordinarily generously dealt with by Shakespeare, and the authors do not shy away from the issue of the impact of Harry’s sex drive on this world-shaking constitutional issue.  It is masked by high ceremony, that the English are so good at.  Buckingham feels ‘the long divorce of steel’, and the Queen and the Cardinal go their ways to God. 

Timothy West was made to play Cardinal Wolsey.  This ‘holy fox’ is the archetype of the modern politician.  He intrigues with the Vatican to prevent the king marrying Lady Anne, ‘a spleeny Lutheran’ – and he gets caught, and sacked.  When told of the appointment of Sir Thomas More: ‘That’s somewhat sudden.’  When told of the marriage of Anne: ‘There was the weight that pulled me down.’  In the end, he might resemble an up-market Paroles.  The kind Griffith, Katherine’s usher, said of him after his death: ‘His overthrow heaped happiness upon him/ For then and not until then, he felt himself.’  That is very Shakespeare – as is the remark about Cranmer – ‘He has strangled language /In his tears.’

Paul Jesson plays Henry VIII as a vicious manipulator, a man who fancies dark corners.  He reminds me of Churchill on Stalin – as I recall, it was to the effect that he smiled like a crocodile.  (I was told never to get between one and the water; with Putin, you steer clear of sixth floor windows.)  Lytton Strachey said that ‘the Defender of the Faith combined in a peculiar manner the unpleasant vices of meanness and brutality; no! he made the Reformation – he saved England – he was a demi-god.’  It would be left to a daughter to put a humane face on the House of God.

But Archbishop Cranmer survives in a great scene when the king puts the gutless plotters to shame.  It is wonderful theatre when the accused shows his accusers the royal seal.  It could be an ALP caucus in 1948 or a Liberal Party caucus in 2024.  And it is not kind to one of those leading the posse – Sir Thomas More – who would have to be axed before he could be ensainted.  (Which Rome was inclined to do for those killed by English kings.  Henry VIII was furious about their treatment of Becket.)

The king does not get his son, but the now Stuart audience gets a ritual salute to the birth of the daughter, Elizabeth Gloriana.  OK – this is propaganda, butto my mind, this play, although not intended as such, sits well as the epilogue of a great historical cycle.

And if you look back at this motley of kings, there is no stand-out.  This playwright was not there to glorify his kings – although his warmth to the realm is everywhere.  Rather, he is there to show us not just English kings, but the humanity in all of us.  And no one else has got even close.

I am forever reminded of that remark of Richard Burton, when he referred to the ‘staggering compassion’ of William Shakespeare.  The full comment in the diary was –

What chance combination of genes went to the making of that towering imagination, that brilliant gift of words, that staggering compassion, that understanding of all human frailty, that total absence of pomposity, that wit, that pun, that joy in words and the later agony.  It seems that he wrote everything worth writing and the rest of his fraternity have merely fugued on his million themes….