Heroes, Princes and Celebrities: Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part One
HEROES, PRINCES AND CELEBRITIES
Harry, Prince of Wales: Agincourt 1415
Harry Duke of Sussex: Invictus Games
Two Princes of London.
This essay deals with two Harries as above. Both likely lads on the London scene, in their early years, before seeing the light. One went on to become Henry V, the Hero of Agincourt. And one lives in Montecito, California. And the obvious thing to say, at this point, is that they are worlds apart.
But their stories, as presented in this essay, have some striking themes in common. In particular the role of Celebrity in the making of a Hero – and its place, too, in the creating of a Villain, in this case the Usurper, the notorious Bolingbroke, more widely known as Henry the Fifth’s father, Henry the Fourth, the man responsible for the death of the anointed king, Richard the Second.
Long before the digital revolution brought us all into the most astonishing levels of contact with one another all the time and all across the world, the exploiting of celebrity and fame as a potent political weapon was under scrutiny by the strongest minds of the age– and in Shakespeare’s time that mind was his. As we watch what unfolds on the field of battle in Henry the Fourth, Part 2 we can see extraordinary insights into the manipulation of public image, and all the lies and scheming involved in the creating of public figures and political power.
Plus ca change, as the French say, plus c’est la meme chose. They might have lost at Agincourt but they’ve always been right about this.
PART ONE: ACTION
1. Hal becomes a Hero
OK, so it’s time to turn our away from the current crowded scene of the current crowded world and write about the first Harry to attract such public attention for his wild life on the London scene – a scene in his time made up of taverns and brothels and vice and (almost daylight)robbery, madcap Harry and his bad companions, ‘squires of the night’s body’ as his boon companion, Sir John Falstaff calls them, ‘gentlemen of the shade, minions of the moon…’
‘The moon’s men,’ madcap Harry replies.
The Raven sighs, smelling his toast burning again as he rushes to get out. He’s late again after a heavy night before. Talk about Tavern scenes (a staple of Henry the Fourth, Part One) he thinks, looking out the window, now that we’re all out of lockdown. Out of lockdown and into lockup, he says aloud, if I drive. Still over the limit, he says.
He flings open the front door, rushes the steps and vaults into his saddle – well, onto his bike in this case, from the fourth step down. He does it so superbly that momentarily he feels prince-like too, thinking of the earlier Harry, who vaults into the saddle before the battle of Shrewsbury in 1403. And in doing so vaults into his position in history.
But it’s easier on a horse, - to be Heroic, that is. It’s hard to even look like a Hero on a bicycle. Except insofar as winning a bike race makes you a hero, which it does, in a global but limited sort of way. And a horse has definitely got the edge on a bicycle mythologically speaking that is, as far as creating a mythic image of yourself. And thinking about heroes and the unfair advantage a horse gives you as far as image-making goes, he heads off to the library to look up the battle of Prince Harry’s rehabilitation, the skirmish that turned him from a London bad lot, rascal and potential ASBO recipient into the man that every English actor wants to play, the mighty Henry the Fifth, riding amongst his troops ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead.’
That was Agincourt, in 1415 as you know, twelve years after Shrewsbury. There’s a tragic difference in that in 1403 England is fighting no external enemy; the country is riven by a civil war that has been smouldering since Prince Harry’s father, the evil and insidious Bolingbroke, usurped the throne and murdered the anointed king, Richard the Second. (It is thought that he let Richard starve to death in captivity – no way to produce a kingship approved by either man or God.)
The battle of Shrewsbury is to prove definitive in legitimising the dynasty which will go on to produce Henry VIII and Elizabeth the First. In 1403 the Welsh and the Scots are roused and the great forces of Northumberland and Worcester (these are men, not counties) are up. But the battle is decided before it begins because so many on the rebel side find they can’t make it on the day.
The rebel cause is left to Harry Percy, son of Northumberland known by his many admirers as Hotspur. (Yes, Tottenham used to be a part of the Percy estate, and the Tottenham Hotspurs (Yay, the Spurs!) take their very name from the man who is the only genuine candidate for the role of Hero in this sequence of plays – until, that is, Harry literally puts on the garments of nobility and takes on the role himself. But that doesn’t mean that he is genuinely a Hero, does it. Suaver,colder, more successful and contriving than Harry Percy, more modern, less doomed, more successful in worldly terms – still not a Hero yet – he needs the victory at Agincourt, twelve years ahead.
And here we might bring Hamlet into the picture and imagine his thoughts if he were one of the onlookers standing on the sidelines at Shrewsbury, the battle which does so much to begin the process of legitimising the Bolingbroke dynasty, of making Prince Hal’s succession seem like a good thing – better anyway, not that it’s saying much, than what transpires in Denmark (spoiler alert) with the deaths of both Claudius, the Usurper, and Hamlet, and the cleaning of the rotten state of Denmark. (Those of you who feel that in writing that something is ‘ rotten in the state of Denmark Shakespeare might be casting more than a sidelong glance at English history have an interesting case to make. Go for it).
2. Hotspur loses the PR battle
Hotspur is the very figure of Honour and wild martial energy, and recklessness. As we have seen above, Hotpsur, also known as Harry Monmouth, has been the only contender for the position of hero in the first long three acts of the play.
During this time ‘royal’ Harry has been disgracing himself and tarnishing his royal reputation, hanging round in rough company in the taverns and brothels of London. But as we know from the soliloquy that ends Act One Scene 2 (just before our first encounter with Hotpsur in scene 3) this is a deliberate and immoral tactic, central to a cold young man’s strategy. Significantly he uses the same description of this strategy that we later here his father boast of.
Not only does Hal have to become a hero in the eyes of the world he lives in. Shakespeare also needs to make him more attractive to us – by presenting him as a hero of almost mythic proportions – and here it is, the remarkable PR presentation that changes everything , reducing even the Raven’s cynicism about professional image-makers and power-grabbers. As the forces of battle converge Hotspur, waiting for the first clash of arms, listens with some consternation to Vernon’s description of the new version of the Prince of Wales as Hal starts on his career as the almost, godlike scion of the house of Bolingbroke.
It seems to the Raven that all of these terms and concepts still apply, effortlessly, to modern times. Prince Hal and his gang have been acting like Celebrities. Now on the field of battle, in the theatre of war, they are turning into heroes and leaders. Vernon, one of Hotspur’s allies, is dazzled as he watches the moment in which Hal transforms himself. He rushes back to Hotspur with the news. The description that stops Hotspur in his stride is of Prince Hal as something that Hotspur can never be – A Royal Being, a future King amongst his noblemen
All furnished, all in arms,
All plumed like estridges that with the wind
Bated, like eagles having lately bath’d,
Glittering in golden coats like images,
As full of spirit as the month of May,
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer…’
This emphasis on appearance, costume and celebrity (in golden coats like images) immediately links the field of battle to the London world of lavish behaviour, as if the Rolling Stones of the sixties or the movers of the current club scene had gone to war.
Wanton says Vernon as youthful goats, wild as young bulls. And at the apogee Hal, the Prince not only as Hero but, in the Shakespeare anyway (no one would claim this of the current Harry, no one would want to and he wouldn’t want to either) a god made visible. Notice how deep the intonation of the poetry becomes here, and at the same time how lightly it soars, and how high. I will leave you to experience this for yourselves (say it aloud!), with no closer comment than to remark that there is no doubt that Shakespeare is deeply in the grip of his material, that his full poetic and epic imagination is engaged here. And that if you are looking for Irony (in the very exaggeration perhaps? ) you might have quite an argument on your hands.
And of course the language is evocatively Superb - because of course these were the days before special effects, or direct visual media themselves - Thus all the power and beauty of besuty, the immensity of imaginative effect, has had to be created in the language itself
I saw young Harry with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly armed,
Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury,
And vaulted with such ease into his seat
As if an angel dropped down from the clouds
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus,
And witch the world with noble horsemanship.
This Prince in action is everything that the Hamlet, the noble but curiously paralysed Prince of Denmark is not. Hamlet sees a universal dilemma in our consciousness (‘conscience’) of death when in Act 3, Scene I he agonises over his own inertia in the soliloquy, perhaps the most famous in Shakespeare, To be or not to be. Instead of contemplating action he is trying to sound to the very bottom of the theme of suicide, the form of action that is uppermost in his mind at this stage. Even here, contemplating this great evasive tactic, he finds himself wanting:
Thus conscience (awareness) does make cowards of us all
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.’
With Hal, however, there is no such sickliness. Here as he vaults into the saddle, facing the most crucial ‘action’ of his life so far, there is no impediment to resolution within his nature. Rising ‘like feathered Mercury’ he is Hamlet’s ‘paragon of animals’ in action, and because of being in action, he is ‘how like a god’ . It’s really worthwhile to link Harry/Hal and Hamlet in these speeches. And to take the link a bit further it’s worth pointing out a few more of the differences, that, when studied together, show Shakespeare working over time at the Idea of what a Hero is.
PART TWO: THOUGHT
Hal may not be a Hero of thought as Hamlet is (although, as we’ve seen above he certainly fits the bill for the Hero as Celebrity.) And yet Hamlet’s phrase, the pale cast of thought, has applied to him earlier in the play. In soliloquy, as we’ve seen, he shows a very cool head, a calculating and devious intelligence – it’s thought all right, but there’s nothing noble about it. If you have read one of the earlier Raven letters, the one comparing and contrasting Hamlet with Camus’ Meursault, you will remember Hamlet’s speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act 2, Scene 2 . It’s a speech where we see the full beauty of Hamlet’s conception of the world, of this goodly frame the earth - a speech that is a brilliant portrait of Hamlet as a Renaissance man, with his love of the world. Even though at this point Hamlet’s vision has become tainted with bitterness and the mould of horror its nobility is still clear.
In fact, on the issue of Nobility, these two plays (Henry IV Part 1 and Hamlet) converge. They both ask ‘What makes a man noble?’ And what makes a man a good King? And it is this question that is so relevant to our own times, which are times of war and making war and, on the other side of the coin, the cultivating of consumerism and the cult of the celebrity. And in between them, trying to defeat both forms of calamity, war-mongering and excessive self-indulgence and materialism, are great human Festivals like the Invictus Games and the Olympics where we can see, coming in from all parts of the world, what a noble species we can be.
All these issues are condensed here where Hal is being presented by Sir Richard Vernon. First off he is being presented as a Celebrity, that is, in outward show and appearance he looks Gorgeous, he’s got the whole epic thing sewn up. It could almost be called Performance, and although he does go on to prove himself as a genuine warrior on the scene of battle, we are reminded all through the final Act that battle is a ‘Scene’, a show (here think of the still current phrase ‘the theatre of war). War, or action on the battlefield, is consistently presented as a series of performances. Take, for instance the number of Henry IV’s nobles who impersonate the King (as the Player King in Hamlet’s little improvised play ‘The Mousetrap’ impersonates Claudius) in order to draw the enemy’s fire.
Another king! exclaims Douglas, the fiery rebel from the North
They grow like Hydra’s heads.
I am the Douglas, fatal to all those
That wear those colours on them. What art thou
That counterfeitest the person of a king.’
This time, though, he’s hit the jackpot – it IS the King, The King himself, says Hal’s father, Henry IV, of whom Douglas has already met so many counterfeits:
(So many of his shadows …And not the very King.)
But the fabulous thing here is that this isn’t simply just a question about superficial trickery and the faking of appearances. The question
What art thou
That counterfeitest the person of a king’ goes to the very heart of history, Henry IV, Hal’s father Bolingbroke, son of John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster IS a counterfeit king, having usurped the throne of the rightful king Richard II, his first cousin, in 1399. Gorgeous and epic though it is the description of young Harry with his beaver on can’t disguise the fact that he comes from a compromised line of succession. And the question is- and here is the relevance to our own times - the question is: are force of action, celebrity appearance and success in eliminating one’s foes enough to make a man of value, to confirm a man as Good, as a Hero, a Noble Prince, an incarnation of the Ideal man and king of Renaissance thought?
Bolingbroke and his son, Hal are devious, calculating men. In a sense we could describe them as modern, exploiting the gap between their secret selves and motives and the way they present in public. Like modern war-makers saving us all from Weapons of Mass Destruction they know how to present themselves in the best light. In a minute we will listen to Bolingbroke’s admonishing of the wayward Hal of the Tavern scenes and describing his own devious route to the throne.
Presenting yourself in a certain light, that is what Bolingbroke has always been about. This is how he usurped the throne of the anointed King, playing to the public. Much the way television has created the cult of the celebrity, Bolingbroke has used public appearances as the oil in his machine, except that he exploited rarity where today we get the opposite, over-exposure, reality TV shows everywhere, Talent shows and their judges and the weeping and emotionalism everywhere, even in cooking and home makeover shows. We are as flooded with these cyclones of emotion as are the inhabitants of Garcia Marquez’ universe of rain and the forces of oblivion.
All these issues are present in Bolingbroke’s history of himself, except that it’s the foolish Richard II who over-exposes himself as a kind of popularity-seeking Celeb. and the canny, cold and pallid Lancastrian who withdraws into clouds of pseudo-mystery. He describes his own past tactics for grabbing the throne
Had I so lavish of my presence been (he says to his errant son Hal, rebuking him for his wild tavern life, Act 3 ii)
So common-hackneyed in the eyes of men,
So stale and cheap to vulgar company (THINK OF THE BIG BROTHER HOUSE here)
Opinion that did help me to the crown – public opinion, he means, that element so courted in today’s celebrity world
Had still kept loyal to possession ie to the current possessor of the throne, namely Richard II.
And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark or likelihood.
BUT he adopted the opposite tactic:
By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wondered at.
That men would tell their children, ‘This is he!’
He loves that image of himself as someone so rarely sighted that his appearance creates a stir of wonderment, and he keeps on with it:
Others would say, ‘Where!! Which is Bolingbrook??! (Don’t you get the sense of people craning and staring, of that buzz of enquiry which he is still remembering so vividly. It’s more vivid, we know from the rest of the play and from the weariness of Part 2, than his life as crowned King has subsequently been.)
Does he feel guilt? The hell he does!! Years later he is still gloating and still cruelly pleased at the pathetic trust his victim, Richard II, placed on the fact of his being the rightful King. There is no pity or remorse in Bolingbroke’s nature, no compassion or kindness, no respect for the plight of a man who was, as it turned out, foolish and naïve, almost a child. (In the play, that is Shakespeare’s Richard II, there is so much grieving for this character, the play grieves for him and is sorrowful. There is nothing of this here – listen to the contempt in what follows:
First his extended, gloating description of his own falsity, his cynical fouling of the truth, his indecency;
And then I stole all courtesy from heaven,
And dressed myself in such humility,
That I did pluck allegiance from men’s hearts,
Loud shouts and salutations from their mouths,
Even in the presence of the crowned King. (Isn’t he Ghastly!! And it gets worse….)
Thus did I keep my person fresh and new,
My presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne’er seen but wondered at…
Here the Raven paused for a minute remembering the nasty remark one of his colleagues had made recently about his absences from work (and well, yes, he had been taking a fair bit of time off in the last few months) BUT ‘Ne’er seen but wondered at’ had been a bit strong! But it was funny as well, and he had laughed, though it stung, and thinking about it now he felt the sting, and at the same time he laughed again.
Going back to the speech he sighed, for here was a truly piteous history, the folly and innocence of Richard II and the pitiless gloating of the man who destroyed him. Bolingbroke rejoices in the contrast between himself ‘….ne’er seen but wondered at..’ (look at the contempt for ordinary people that he shows in this repeating of the phrase ‘wondered at’) and trusting, foolish Richard, so unaware of his brooding enemy:
The skipping King, he ambled up and down,
\ With shallow jesters, and rash bavin wits…
………..Mingled his royalty with capering fools…
Grew a companion to the common streets so much so, (as Bolingbroke’s description keeps stressing)
That, being daily swallowed by men’s eyes, he became tedious; the people got sick of him. This, by the way, is a speech of over 60 lines, most of it taken up with Bolingbroke’s self-congratulation, contempt for the common man and spite against Richard II who
When he had occasion to be seen
He was but as the cuckoo is in June,
Heard, not regarded… and so it goes on and on.
It is one of the most sickening speeches in the whole of Shakespeare. And it plays right into our own times where the government of money and politics is so largely in the hands of faceless, contemptuous men who make their fortunes at the expense of the ordinary ‘commons’, as they used to be called, that’s us, women, children and men who are never in direct contact with the liars and cheats and manipulators behind the scenes. The ones who lie to us about ‘weapons of mass destruction’, the bankers who sell on toxic stock knowing that it’s toxic.
Think of the American film-maker, Michael Moore, trying to get into major banks in America after the sub-prime mortgage crisis swept away the money of middle-income and poor people across the nation. He carried a shopping bag in which to put the money back, Fat chance; he didn’t even make it past security. Think of Michael Moore and think of how he can’t win against today’s Bolingbrokes.
PART THREE. VICTORY ?
No. Because Bolingbroke isn’t a Winner. In every way he loses to Richard II.
Richard played the Fool to public opinion, courting the silliest kind of popularity. But the play Richard II grieves for him because he has no malice in his heart; he is a good man. Partly because of Shakespeare he goes into history as a good man, revered and pitied. That he is not a good King isn’t even up for argument. He has no ‘policy’. Yet Bolingbroke who admires his own ‘policy’, who celebrates the fact that he is a real piece of work, is politically far more bankrupt than is Richard II. For all his scheming his reign has been a failure. At the beginning of the play, years into his reign, the country is seething with civil war, the furious close of civil butchery, he calls it himself at the opening of the play.
Like many a modern leader he decides to turn this bloody energy outward and take a Crusade to the Holy Land (aka the Middle East, Palestine) in order to seem like a leader. (The modern parallels with US and UK politicians and the war on Iraq are so obvious they barely need pointing out.) Ironically the closest he gets to realising that somewhat morally compromised ambition is that room he dies in (the lodging, he calls it where I first did swoon) is called Jerusalem. ( Henry IV, Part 2, Act IV Scene iii , lines 362-370). It is an irony of which he is bitterly aware:
Laud be to God! Even there my life must end.
It hath been prophesied to me many years
I should not die but in Jerusalem
Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land.
So for all his schemings he dies unfulfilled; the ironies of history sweep him off into near-oblivion. His fame has not lasted. The question is, is he to be overtaken and bypassed by the next in line, King Henry V, currently Prince Hal?
Hard to answer. All that is clear at this point is that it’s a compromised world: Lies and contempt, the cult of entertainment, the courting of popularity by Celebrities and would-be Celebrities, the X-Factor hopefuls, the weeping girls who don’t make it into the next Top Model batch, the chefs and the Master-Chefs. Popularity and celebrity, the desire to be loved by strangers for no real quality or skill or virtue. Or, as the Raven’s friend, the Australian songwriter Ned Collette, has put it, in song called Your Golden Heart, that powerful satire of ‘the Golden Age’ we live in:
It seems that there’s nothing to fear though
In the days when a man loses weight and they call him a Hero…
(Ned Collette: Over the Stones, Under the Stars)
HERO. That word again, the Raven thinks, looking up. Outside the light is going; soon it will be dark. That thought is everywhere, that longing for the heroic, for what is genuinely good. But the term has been diminished, reduced to PR lingo, part of the whole pack of cards that Influencers and political systems deploy, Celebrities, Liars, War makers, Money makers, subprime mortgage dealers, men ransoming the planet and the world, the faceless ones, Arms dealers, Energy moguls, all the enemies not just of the best in mankind but of the very Earth itself.
So what does that make the rest of us, then?
And the Answer came ringing back: Dreamers and Fools
But that’s not my answer, he says aloud. Thinking like this is poisoning my mind, public language as a form of toxic waste. Hunting down his keys he decides to lock his bike to the railings and go and hear some live music, and spend the whole evening going from pub to pub, and walking home.