Complete Plays, The (76 page)

Henry IV, Part I
.—To the development of Henry V from the wayward prince to one of England's most beloved heroes, Shakespeare devoted three plays,
Henry IV
,
Parts I
and
II
, and
Henry V
. The historical event around which the first of these centers is the rebellion of the Percies, which culminated in the defeat and death of Harry Percy, 'Hotspur,' on Shrewsbury field. In
Richard II
, Shakespeare had foreshadowed what was to come. The deposed king had prophesied that his successor, Henry Bolingbroke, crowned as Henry IV, would fall out with the great Percy family which had put him on the throne; that the Percies would never be satisfied with what Henry would do for them; and that Henry would hate and distrust them on the ground that those who had made a king could unmake one as well. And this prophecy was fulfilled. Uniting with the Scots under Douglas, with the Archbishop of York, with Glendower, who was seeking to reëstablish the independence of Wales, and with Mortimer, the natural successor of Richard,  the Percies raised the standard of revolt. What might have happened had all things gone as they were planned, we can never know; but Northumberland, the head of the family, feigned sickness; Glendower and Mortimer were kept away; the Archbishop dallied; and failure was the result. This situation gave Shakespeare an opportunity to paint a number of remarkable portraits; but the scheming, crafty Worcester, the vacillating Northumberland, the mystic Glendower, are all overshadowed by the figure of Hotspur, wrong-headed, impulsive, yet so aflame with young life and enthusiasm, so ready to dare all for honor's sake, that he is almost more attractive than the Prince himself. Over against the older leaders of the rebellion stands the lonely figure of Henry IV, misunderstood and little loved by his sons, who has centered his whole existence upon getting and keeping the throne of England. To this one end he bends every energy of his shrewd, strong, hard nature. Such a man could never understand a personality like that of his older son, nor could the son understand the father. Prince Hal, loving life in all its manifestations, joy in all its forms, could find small satisfaction in the rigid etiquette of a loveless court so long as it offered him an opportunity for little more than formal activity. When the rebellion of the Percies showed him that he could do the state real service, he seized his opportunity gladly, gayly, modestly. On his father's cause he centered the energies which he had previously scattered. With this new demand to meet, he no longer had time for his old companions. His old life was thrown off like a coat discarded under stress of work.  Even before that time came, however, Hal was not one who could enjoy ordinary low company; but the friends which had distracted him were far from ordinary. In Falstaff, the leader of the riotous group, Shakespeare created one of the greatest comic figures in all literature. Never at a loss, Falstaff masters alike sack, difficulties, and companions. He is an incarnation of joy for whom moral laws do not exist. Because he will not fight when he sees no chance of victory, he has been called a coward, but no coward ever had such superb coolness in the face of danger. Falstaff's conduct in a fight is explained by his contempt for all conventions which bring no joy—a standard which reduces honor to a mere word. So full of joy was he that he inspired it in his companions. To be with him was to be merry.

Date
.—The play was entered in the Stationers' Register, and a quarto was printed in 1598. Meres mentions the play without indicating whether he meant one part or both. The evidence of meter and style point to a date much earlier than Meres's entry, so that 1597 is the year to which Part I is commonly assigned.

Source
.—For the serious plot of this play, Shakespeare drew upon Holinshed. He had no scruples, however, against altering history for dramatic purposes. Thus he brings within a much shorter period of time the battles in Wales and Scotland, makes Hal and Hotspur of approximately the same age, and unites two people in the character of Mortimer. The situations in the scenes which show Hal with Falstaff and his fellows are largely borrowed from an old play called
The Famous Victories of Henry V
, but this source furnished only the barest and crudest outlines, and gave practically no hint of the characters as Shakespeare conceived them. The reference in Act I, Sc. ii, to Falstaff as the 'old lad of the castle' shows that his name was originally  Oldcastle, as in
The Famous Victories
. Oldcastle was a historical personage quite unlike Falstaff, and it is supposed that the change was made to spare the feeling of Oldcastle's descendants.

Henry IV, Part II
.—This part is less a play than a series of loosely connected scenes. The final suppression of the rebellion, which had been continued by the Archbishop of York, the sickness and death of Henry IV, and the accession of Prince Hal as Henry V, are matters essentially undramatic and incapable of unified treatment, while the growing separation of Hal and Falstaff deprived the underplot of that close connection with the main action which it had in the preceding play. Feeling the weakness of the main plot, Shakespeare reduced it to a subordinate position, making it little more than a series of historical pictures inserted between the scenes in which Falstaff and his companions figure. He enriched this part of the play, on the other hand, by the introduction of a number of superbly poetical speeches, the best known of which is that beginning, "O Sleep, O gentle Sleep." To the comic groups Shakespeare added a number of new figures, among them the braggart Pistol, whose speech bristles with the high-sounding terms he has borrowed from the theater, and old Justice Shallow, so fond of recalling the gay nights and days which are as much figments of his imagination as is his assumed familiarity with the great John of Gaunt. By placing more stress upon the evil and less pleasing sides of Falstaff's nature, Shakespeare evidently intended to prepare his readers' minds for the definite break between old Jack and the new king; but in this wonderful man he had created a character so fascinating that he could not spoil it; and  the king's public rejection of Falstaff comes as a painful shock which, impresses one as much with the coldly calculating side of the Bolingbroke nature as it does with the sad inevitability of the rupture.

Source and Date
.—The sources for this play are the same as those of its predecessor. Although the first and only quarto was not printed until 1600, there is a reference to this part in Jonson's
Every Man Out of his Humour
, which was produced in 1599. It must, therefore, have been written shortly after Part I, and it is accordingly dated 1598.

Henry V
.—In this, which is really the third play of a trilogy, Shakespeare adopted a manner of treatment quite unlike that which characterizes the other two.
Henry V
is really a dramatized epic, an almost lyric rhapsody cast in the form of dialogue. Falstaff has disappeared from view, and is recalled only by the affecting story of his death. This episode, however, brief as it is, reveals the love which the old knight evoked from his companions, while the narrative of his last hours is the more pathetic for being put in the mouth of the comic figure of Dame Quickly. Falstaff's place was one which could not be filled, and the comic scenes become comparatively insignificant, although the quarrels of Pistol and the Welshman Fluellen have a distinctive humor. A figure which replaces the classic chorus connects the scattered historical scenes by means of superb narrative verse. Each episode glorifies a new aspect of Henry's character. We see him as the valiant soldier; as the leader rising superior to tremendous odds; as the democratic king who, concealing his rank, talks and jests with a common soldier; and  as the bluff, hearty suitor of a foreign bride. In thus seeing him, moreover, we see not only the individual man; we see him as an ideal Englishman, as the embodiment of the type which the men of Shakespeare's day—and of ours, too, for that matter—loved and admired and honored. In celebrating Henry's victories, Shakespeare was also celebrating England's more recent victories over her enemies abroad, so that the play is a great national paean, the song of heroic, triumphant England.

Date and Source
.—Like its predecessors,
Henry V
is founded on Holinshed, with some additions taken from the Famous Victories. The allusion in the chorus which precedes Act V to the Irish expedition of the Earl of Essex fixes the date of composition between April 14 and September 28, 1599. A quarto, almost certainly pirated, was printed in 1600 and reprinted in 1602, 1608, and 1619 (in the latter with the false date of 1608). The text of these quartos is, therefore, much inferior to that of the Folio.

The Merchant of Venice
.—As usually presented on the modern stage,
The Merchant of Venice
appears to be a comedy, which is overshadowed by one tragic figure, that of the Jew Shylock, the representative of a down-trodden people, deprived of his money by a tricky lawyer and deprived of his daughter by a tricky Christian. Students, on the other hand, have maintained that to the Elizabethans Shylock was merely a comic figure, the defeat of whose vile plot to get the life of his Christian debtor, Antonio, by taking a pound of his flesh in place of the unpaid gold, was greeted with shouts of delighted laughter. As a matter of fact, Shylock, then as now, was a human being, and by virtue  of that fact both ridiculous and pathetic. In any case, whatever the dominant note of his character, he is not the dominant figure of the play. If he were, the fifth act, which ends the play with moonlight and music and the laughter of happy lovers, would be distinctly out of place. Yet it is in reality the absence of such defects of taste, the ability to bring everything into its proper place, to make a harmonious whole out of the most various tones, which best characterizes the Shakespearean comedy of this period. Instead of being a play in which one great character is set in relief against a number of lesser ones,
The Merchant of Venice
is a comedy in which there is an unusually large number of characters of nearly equal importance and an unusually large number of plots of nearly equal interest. There is the plot which has to do with Portia's marriage, in which the right lover wins this gracious merry lady by choosing the proper one of three locked caskets. There is the plot which deals with the elopement of the Jew's daughter, Jessica. There is the plot which relates the story of the bond given by Antonio to the Jew in return for the loan which enables Antonio's friend, Bassanio, to carry on his suit for Portia's hand, the bond, which, when forfeited, would have cost Antonio his life had not Portia, disguised as a lawyer, defeated Shylock's treacherous design. There is the plot which tells how Bassanio and his friend Gratiano give their wedding rings as rewards to the pretended lawyer and his assistant, really their wives Portia and Nerissa in disguise,—an act which gives the wives a chance to make much trouble for their lords. And all these plots are worked out with an abundance of  interesting detail, and are so perfectly interwoven that the play has all of the wonderful harmony of a Turkish rug, as well as its brilliant variety. No play of Shakespeare's depends more for its effect on plot, on the sheer interest of the stories, and no one has, consequently, situations which are more effective on the stage. It is, perhaps, an inevitable result that the individual characters have a somewhat less permanent, less deeply satisfying charm than do those of the comedies which follow. None of these successors, however, presents a larger or more varied group of delightful men and women.

Date
.—The later limit of the date is settled by the mention of this play in Meres's catalogue, and by its entry in the Stationers' Register of that same year. Basing their opinion on extremely unsubstantial internal evidence, some scholars have dated the play as early as 1594, but the evidence of style and construction make a date before 1596 unlikely. Two quartos were printed, one in 1600; the other, though copying the date 1600 upon its title-page, was probably printed in 1619.

Source
.—The story of the pound of flesh and that of the choice of caskets are extremely ancient. The former is combined with that of the wedding rings in Fiorentino's
Il Pecorone
(the first novel of the fourth day), a story which Shakespeare probably knew and may have used. Alexander Silvayn's
The Orator
, printed in English translation in 1596, has, in connection with a bond episode, speeches made by a Jew which may be the source of some of Shylock's lines. The combination of these plots with those of Jessica and Nerissa is, so far as we can yet prove, original with Shakespeare; but we cannot be certain how much
The Merchant of Venice
resembles a lost play of the Jew mentioned in Gosson's
School of Abuse
(1579), "representing the greediness of worldly chusers, and bloody mindes of Usurers."

The Taming of the Shrew
.—
The Taming of the Shrew
is only in part the work of Shakespeare. Just how  much he had to do with making over the underplot, we shall probably never know; but, in any case, he did not write the dialogue of this part of the play, and its construction is not particularly remarkable. The winning of a girl by a suitor disguised as a teacher is a conventional theme of comedy, as is the disguising of a stranger to take the place of an absent father in order to confirm a young lover's suit. The main plot Shakespeare certainly left as he found it. It tells how an ungovernable, willful girl was made into a submissive wife by a husband who assumed for the purpose a manner even wilder than her own, so wild that not even she could endure it. This story is presented in scenes of uproarious farce in which there is little opportunity for subtle characterization or the higher sort of comedy. What Shakespeare did was to give to the hero and heroine, Petruchio and Katherine, a semblance of reality, and to add enormously to the life and movement of the scenes in which they appear. Some of these scenes are very effective on the stage, but they are not of a sort to reveal Shakespeare's greatest qualities. The induction, the framework in which the play is set, is, however, quite another matter. The story of the drunken tinker, Sly, unfortunately omitted in many modern presentations, is a little masterpiece. A nobleman returning from the hunt finds Sly lying in a drunken stupor before an inn. The nobleman has Sly taken to his country house, has him dressed in rich clothing, has him awakened by servants who make him believe that he is really a lord, and finally has the play performed before him. The outline of this induction was in the old play which Shakespeare revised; but  he developed the crude work of his predecessor into scenes so delightfully realistic, into characterization so richly humorous, that this induction takes its place among the great comic episodes of literature.