Shakespeare, Henry IV, 1 and 2; Henry V

There may be a touch of hubris--or perhaps just of laziness--in writing a single post about three separate Shakespeare plays, especially when we dedicated an entire post to one play last time. Yet the similarities among the Henries make them feel distinct from Richard II. For one thing, they relate the aftermath of Bolingbroke's usurpation of the throne, of the interruption of cosmic order by political savvy and physical force. For another, they are about a new political dynasty, that of Henry Bolingbroke and his son, Prince Hal. Even more significantly, they trace the development of Prince Hal, who is the true focus of all three plays, even the ones named for his father; the elder Henry, true to his advice to his son, remains aloof and largely unseen, both by his people and the audience. (Let's ignore the fact that I didn't much care for Henry V and don't have much to say about it except in relation to the Henry IVs.)

It is the interruption of order and the resulting chaos that I want to focus on, though it is by no means the only theme running through the plays. The recurring cosmological imagery, also present in Richard II, is another thread to follow. So, too, is the way in which power begets power, and falsehood falsehood; Henry's rise to the throne may have seemed unscrupulous and even Machiavellian in Richard II, but in these plays, Hal's political mind is revealed to be much greater than his father's, and the way in which he defines his own mythology, as the introduction put it, is fascinating and terrifying. The interruption of order, though, provides the best (or at least most interesting) lens through which to view the plays.

For example, the tension between order and chaos can be seen in the way that events through H4&5 repeat and, through repetition, devolve. The lively tavern scenes in 1H4 are bled of their mirth by H5; the ambition of Hotspur is replaced by the clowning of the soldiers under Henry V; and the miraculous faux-resurrection of the Falstaff only delays his silent off-screen death, a death that should remind us of the end that Mowbray feared in Richard II.

This post will be structured, then, not by chronology but by the different manifestations of this transition from order to chaos.  Let's listen to the words of Northumberland, at the opening of 2H4--the midpoint of the Henriad--upon discovering that his son died in battle:

“Let heaven kiss earth! Now let not Nature’s hand / Keep the wild flood confined! Let order die! / And let this world no longer be a stage / To feed contention in a lingering act. / But let one spirit of the first-born Cain / Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set / On bloody courses, the rude scene may end, / And darkness be the burier of the dead!”


Truth and Falsehood

“We fortify in paper and in figures, / Using the names of men instead of men.”

We know from having previously read Othello that Shakespeare is inclined to thinking about the relationship of one's actions to one's self. Iago, a consummate actor, is not what he is, and this quality is also within the young Prince Hal, of whose carefully curated appearance very little can be said with certainty. 

Without a doubt the most obvious manifestation of his falsehood is in his treatment of Falstaff, who for all his bawdy wisdom cannot figure Hal out, or perhaps just does not wish to. Yet the fat knight dotes upon him, and it is impossible not to love their relationship, which seems built upon a mutual love of puns, wordplay, and debauchery. Apart from this, there are many other reasons for Falstaff to love Hal so. The most obvious is that Hal is a surrogate son for Falstaff, who instructs the prince carefully in the ways of parody and thievery. He also appreciates that the soon-to-be ruler of England enjoys the company of tavern-dwellers as much as he does, something the current King Henry does not.

Status also motivates Falstaff to a degree: not, however, the currency of social status that so many others long for, but the ability to sit at the right hand of the king and be set for life, so to speak. When Hal is about the be crowned king, Falstaff rushes to his friend, certain that both of their futures are secure. Yet in the most devastating act of falsehood, Hal denies Falstaff his acknowledgement: “I know thee not, old man… / 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… / Presume not that I am the thing I was.” Falstaff becomes but a bad dream to the new king, and he plays that role well: by the time of Henry V, he is a shade, a man spoken of but never seen. (Similar, I think, to the way in which Henry IV is often heard about but rarely seen.)

To stay with this rejection for a moment, we should consider that some of the most heartbreaking scenes in literature focus on a rejection of knowledge: "Eveline" and "The Dead," two of Joyce's most famous short stories, close with rejection: the first, a fiancee's rejection of her betrothed ("Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition."); the second, the knowledge that a husband never even knew his wife at all. Similarly, Nora's decision to leave Torvald at the end of Ibsen's "A Doll's House" is motivated by her realization that her love for him and the life they built together is not as sure as she once believed. Perhaps there is no greater sorrow than that of betrayal, that sin for which one is devoured for eternity in the maw of Lucifer.

Perhaps Hal's rejection of Falstaff would have been difficult to predict, but one cannot deny that it was anticipated throughout 1H4 and 2H4. Hal was never "who he is," neither to Falstaff nor to his father. When Henry tells him how worried he is about his trajectory in life, Hal assumes the role of the faithful son, saying, “I shall hereafter, my thrice-gracious lord, / Be more myself.” We should be suspicious of people in Shakespeare who claim to be themselves, as if such a thing were simple to do. His uncertain selfhood is revealed all the more when he becomes king. When he tries to woo the French princess, Katherine, he asks her, "Do you like me," to which she tellingly responds, "Pardonnez-moi, I cannot tell wat is like me."

His most obvious rejection of the fixed nature of truth and self comes early on, in his first soliloquy, where he sets out his plan for becoming king, one which he follows with terrifying consistency: 

“I know you all [tavern-dwellers], and will awhile uphold / The unyoked humor of your idleness. / Yet herein will I imitate the sun, / Who doth permit the base contagious clouds / To smother up his beauty from the world, / That, when he please again to be himself, / Being wanted, he may be more wondered at / By breaking through the foul and ugly mists / Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. / If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to work; / But when they seldom come, they wished-for come, / And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents…” 

Notice, too, the shifting offices: sport is like work, work sport.

Moreover, when Hal asks Poins, hypothetically, what he would think of him if he--Hal--were to weep over his father's impending death, Poins responds that, since Hal clearly wants the throne, he would think him a hypocrite, and asks forgiveness for such a thought. Hal, however, does not begrudge him it: he says, "It would be every man's thought, and thou art a / Blessed fellow to think as every man thinks." Hal recognizes the utility of honestly believing what others believe, yet perhaps he is a little sullen that he himself does not.

Falstaff, too, is capable of falsehood, to a degree that surprises even Prince Hal. When Hal observes the fat knight seemingly lying dead only to see him later, alive, Hal is astounded: “I saw him dead, / Breathless and bleeding on the ground. Art thou alive? / Or is it fantasy that plays upon our eyesight? / I prithee speak. We will not trust our eyes / Without our ears. Thou art not what thou seem’st.” Perhaps he did not expect his friend to be as protean as he; perhaps he feels he has underestimated him; and perhaps it is this recognition of Falstaff's cleverness that leads Hal to reject him when he gains power.


2Henry4Furious

Sequels in literature are few and far between. You have the Iliad and the Odyssey (and the fanfic spinoff, the Aeneid), but other than that, there aren't many examples. In order to help us elucidate the nature of the sequel, let's look to the wise words of the tagline of the film Scream 3: the first one makes the rules; the second one breaks the rules; the third one....there are no rules.

To put this idea in a more literary mode, let's see the introduction to 2H4: “Shakespeare returns to the familiar storyline of Henry IV, but in the process of satisfying our desire to revisit the past he causes us to examine our own appetite for such a return – and, ultimately, painfully, to renounce it... Shakespeare’s return to this world renders it both the same and irrevocably changed, a deliberate and distorted echo of its former self.”

Indeed, a feeling of devolution permeates the play, to the point that even the characters acknowledge it, however obliquely: "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 yet not come to life." (Cf. Machiavelli)

Though in these cases no one outright says, "Man, it feels like we're in a sequel, huh?" Although....

"Things must be as they may. Men may sleep, and they may have their throats about them at that time, and some say knives have edges. It must be as it may. Though patience be a tired mare, yet she will plod. There must be conclusions. Well, I cannot tell." 

That's Nym, a knight in Henry V's retinue, speaking in the final play of the tetralogy. It sounds an awful lot like this speech...

"It's the final chapter. It could be fucking 'Reservoir Dogs' [i.e., bloody] by the time this thing is through...So in closing, let me say good luck, godspeed, and for some of you, I'll see you soon. Cause the rules say some of you ain't gonna make it."

That's Randy, speaking of the nature of trilogies from beyond the grave via videotape in Scream 3. Now, it's expected that a horror movie to talk about blood, in the same way that a play about war talks about blood. But the important thing is the acknowledgement. This is a conclusion.

There are other clues that we are in a sequel. Consider the trajectory of Hal. From the outset, we have been uncertain about who Hal is. Though we have access to him through his soliloquies, even they rang false considering the rich tapestries of lies he can weave in an instant. How can we trust the protagonist if we even doubt him at his most candid and vulnerable moments?

In the Henry IVs, we had access to his interior, however murky it was. In Henry V, when he is king, we don't, not truly. Hal becomes fully king, a bright sun shining in the sky. Unlike his father, whose comet showed its face on rare occasions, Hal is never "off": he is an actor who is always onstage. And from the way in which he handles himself and his people, he seems pretty damn good at it. And there's the rub. How good is he? Can we imagine that, though he never acknowledges it himself, he is still the boy sitting in the tavern with Falstaff, plotting robberies?

Imagination is an odd thing in these plays. H5 features a chorus, a rare feature in Shakespeare, that asks us to use our imagination when watching the battles, as Elizabethan theater did not have the special effects we take for granted today. (Or, you know, the scenery.) The battles, they say, are not life-size, and they ask us to imagine that they are greater than they seem.

What do we make of such a choice? Given that our focus has been on Hal's falsehood, perhaps the chorus is something of an open acknowledgement of the falseness of this final play. If the chorus begs us to take the bare stage for a battlefield, should we not also take Hal's play-acting of a king for a real king, one whose intentions we have no reason to question? Or how about his love for Katherine? Are we to take that at face value?

I should hope not. If Falstaff carries over, even as a shadow, it must be so that we will not forget what Hal is capable of, no matter how much the chorus praises him and his leadership, no matter how playful the scenes between him and Katherine are, no matter how charming and smart and skilled he is, we must remember that Hal is above all a liar. Hal is the boy who rejected Falstaff, and no amount of victories can erase such a sin.

Should we then not enjoy the play? Should we watch Hal play king with our arms crossed, scowling, hoping that he notices us and realizes that we know who he truly is?

Do we in real life? Do we call out hypocrisy, falseness, sin? Do we let evil flourish? Do we stop it? 

Doing Things With Words

Of course, Shakespeare wouldn't be Shakespeare without incredible wordplay, and in that regard, Hal and Falstaff are two of his most outstanding characters. Joyce's power over language was reflected in his love of puns, and so too do Hal and Falstaff demonstrate their command of language by constantly making puns. I won't quote any of them because most of their punning is lost on me; 400 years later, their jokes need to be heavily, heavily annotated. Suffice it to say that their words are very powerful weapons. What is important to understand is that puns, as noted in the introduction, "change the value of a heretofore stable and singular meaning of a word;" they are the very essence of disorder.

So, too, is the work that parody accomplishes. Hal and the tavern mercilessly parody the court, effectively neutering any power that the king's words could have held. Again, the introduction notes that parody makes it "difficult for us subsequently to regard the assumptions of king and rebels with the gravity with which they take themselves."

Outside of his puns and parodies, Hal does not cease to use language to great effect. To return briefly to the rejection of Falstaff, what is most devastating is that Hal is more a progeny of Falstaff than of Henry in this sense: that Hal is the only character in the plays who can move between the king's court and the tavern as well as Falstaff--truly, even better than Falstaff. Hal, despite getting along well with the miscreants in the tavern, is just as comfortable in the political world, “where power belongs to those best able to improvise in response to constantly changing circumstances.”

Politically gifted, Hal avoids the pitfalls of Kafka's characters, who mistake the trappings of authority with authority itself: Hal “never [takes] the sign of royalty for literal truth” and “can easily move among the necessary symbols as the occasion requires.” To be king “is to know how to manipulate signs and symbols and stories, to be master of all, but believe in none.” [All quotes from the introduction.]

Hal and Falstaff are not, however, the only characters in the play who command language. Hotspur, the analogue of Hamlet's Laertes, uses the language of knighthood in a world where the value and future of chivalry is uncertain. From the introduction: 

“Hotspur is the ‘theme of honor’s tongue’… [his] world is the traditional one of ‘History,’ a record of events written by the winners, of the doings of great men enacting God’s design, with little recognition of what goes on behind the scenes of battle. He is as ill at ease with political negotiation as he is with domestic life.” 

We have noted at other points in our reading that adhering to outmoded conceptions of honor is a sure way to disaster, and in this, “Hotspur is ultimately the tragic figure of the play, caught by his own flaws in a machinery larger than his own power to direct it.” The tragedy of Hotspur is exactly that his conception of a firm truth is simply not justifiable in the world of the plays. “The problem in this universe is that sincerity of speech or action—in the sense of originality and authenticity—is long gone, eroded by the climate of ever feebler echoes of long-lost first truths.”

It is hard, though, to feel all that bad for him: when, for example, he makes fun of soldiers for using “lady terms,” or when he talks about “fill[ing] up chronicles in time to come” with his deeds. His idea of honorable speech is just unrestrained ego: “By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap / To pluck bright honor from the pale-faced moon, / Or dive into the bottom of the deep, /…/ And pluck up growned honor by the locks.” Of this speech, it is said: “He apprehends a world of figures here, / But not the form of what he should attend.” This, of course, is supremely different from Hal.

Yet as we learned from John of Gaunt in Richard II, nothing bequeaths command of language (or at least the appearance of such command) as effectively as death, and in death, at the hands of young Hal, Hotspur almost becomes a poet:

"O Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth! / I better brook the loss of brittle life / Than those proud titles thou hast won of me. / They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh. / But thoughts the slaves of life, and life time’s fool, / And time, that takes survey of all the world, / Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy, / But that the earthy and cold hand of death / Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust, / And food for—" 

Yet he doesn't achieve the transcendence that Richard did: his speech is cut off in the middle.

(As an aside, notice that the speech is in verse. While R2 was completely in verse, the other plays of the Henriad are a mix of prose and verse, often (I think?) divided between prose tavern scenes and verse court scenes. This seems a characteristic of the same tendency toward disorder felt elsewhere in the play: the court tries to retain a sense of old-world decorum, while the tavern lives to subvert it.)

The killing of Hotspur by Hal feels like the only possible outcome in the world of the plays, for without such a decisive event (death may be the only remaining certainty, though Falstaff avoids it once) there would be no way to choose between their contending claims to the throne: we cannot arbitrate between them because neither owns “the language of right and order”: it is “just a language, to be spoken more or less convincingly by any speaker who chooses.” Language can provide semblance of order, but it is not order itself. As such, only the finality of death can settle the matter.

I often dislike climaxes (climaces?) that rely on one person living and another dying (since we can usually guess who will live, and when we can't it's somehow even more heavy-handed), but this is an example of the best way of handling such an ending. There could have been no other way of deciding the outcome, and as Judge Holden said in Blood Meridian, "This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select."


Ambitions, Fulfilled and Unfulfilled

Alluded to at the end of R2, Jerusalem becomes something of a symbol in the remainder of the Henriad. Throughout Henry IV's kingship, he talks about going to Jerusalem to fight a holy war. Yet he always finds excuses to avoid it; his "holy purpose" is not holy enough for him to follow through. This is but a symptom of the decline of the king's office. As the introduction notes, once Henry overthrows Richard, “Politics is no longer a matter of high ideals and high tempers, but an ignoble and repetitive motion of declining momentum.” Henry's repeated putting-off of his crusade is not an anomaly, but a fact of this brave new world.

In the end, though, he does make it to Jerusalem, dying in a room of his palace so named, fulfilling a prophecy that he will die “in Jerusalem.” From the introduction: “It is a fulfillment that brilliantly figures the loss of the former sacred truths and their replacement by the far more mundane terms of realpolitik.” To Henry, “’Jerusalem’ has always meant the latter.” Notice, too, the devolution implicit in his death: Henry aims (or claims to aim) for Jerusalem, yet ends up dead in a parody of the holy city.

His son, however, is far more skilled in political campaigns than his father. Not only is he more convincing in his feigned religiosity--his first line in 2H4 is "Before God, I am exceedingly weary"--but we get the impression at the beginning of H5 that Hal will make it to Jerusalem: he effectively uses reverse psychology to convince the archbishop (who needs very little convincing) to bless the Jerusalem campaign: “And God forbid, my dear and faithful lord, / That you should fashion, wrest, or bow your reading.”


Stray Observations

• I expected my hubris to catch up to me, and in a way it did: there was far too much material in these plays to cover in one post. Yet the most fascinating material lies in the intersections between the plays. I do find it useful to see the way chaos seeps into every crack, and in that regard, a bird's eye view is useful. Yet the individual plays, particularly the Henry IVs, just have so much that I wish I could have looked at alone. Alas, another time.
• “There is some soul of goodness in things evil, / Would men observingly distill it out.”
• Falstaff: "A plague upon it when thieves cannot be true to one another." This is very similar to the opening of The Dark Knight, itself a sequel, wherein the manager of the bank the Joker robs says, "Oh, criminals in this town used to believe in things. Honor. Respect. Look at you! What do you believe in, huh?" Even among thieves, there is honor, yet Hal, who robs the robbers, seems to be a new breed of villain.
• Well, honor, what do you think of that, Falstaff? “Well, ‘tis no matter; honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. What is honor? A word. What is that word honor? Air – a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis an insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction [slander] will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon [coat of arms]—and so ends my catechism.” 
• Wow, another Falstaff quote, you don't say: “Emboweled? If thou embowel me today, I’ll give you leave to powder me and eat me too tomorrow. ‘Sblood, ‘twas time to counterfeit, or that hot termagant Scot [Hotspur] had paid me scot and lot too. Counterfeit? I lie; I am no counterfeit. To die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life of a man; but to counterfeit dying when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed. The better part of valor is discretion, in the which better part I have saved my life. Zounds, I am afraid of this gunpowder Percy, though he be dead. How if he should counterfeit too, and rise? By my faith, I am afraid he would prove the better counterfeit. Therefore I’ll make him sure; yea, and I’ll swear I killed him. Why, may not he rise as well as I? Nothing confutes me but eyes, and nobody sees me.”
• "Past and to come seems best, things present worst."
• Lol tennis balls.

Shakespeare, Richard II

“Richard’s defeat is the necessary pre-text [for the rest of the Henriad], and Richard seems obsolete and doomed. To wish Richard had kept his throne is to resist history’s progression and the plays’ focus.” 

The volume of pre-Shakespearean texts is not equal to the volume of post-Shakespearean texts; we have arrived not at the midpoint of our reading list, but something like the close of the first third. Like Dante before him, Shakespeare represents a ledge in our climb: a lookout point upon which to pause and consider how far we’ve come—and how far we still have to go.

It is out of necessity no less than enjoyment that we will be spending many weeks doting upon the Bard. Of his 37 extant plays, we will read 23; of his poetry, we will be reading all of the sonnets and at least one of his longer poems. The majority of these texts will be new to me. If I am forced to commit to the metaphor of the ledge, we will not be spending our time picnicking; this will be work. 

We begin with the histories, which I have never touched before. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I maligned all things historical as part of an extended joke with my father (one that I have not informed him I’m still playing). So not only are the plays new to me, but the history which they narrate. The Henriad—encompassing the plays Richard II, Henry IV parts 1 and 2, and Henry V—tells the story of the events leading up to the War of the Roses. Today’s entry on Richard II deals with Henry IV’s deposition of Richard and his ascension to the throne. Richard was the rightful king by divine succession, the process whereby a new king is selected through a lineage instituted by God [citation needed], and Henry’s challenge of that lineage ushers in a period of turmoil, in which many struggle for the throne.

To speak broadly about the histories for a moment, the above quote seems particularly relevant. For us, and for Shakespeare’s original audience, Richard’s divine right to kingship is meaningless in the face of historical fact. Though playwrights take liberties with the truth—and Shakespeare is no exception—it was known that Henry would triumph over the king, and the force of history that drives the action of the play is ineluctable. Which leads us to a consideration: the deposition of Richard represents a rift in history, a point at which the divine order of the world is supplanted by force, both physical and political. Northrop Frye says that it would have been highly unlikely for Shakespeare to have read Machiavelli, but the parallels between the politics of the histories and the Italian’s advice loom large in the landscape of the play. Henry, through his might, unkings Richard; the former exile becomes the monarch, while Richard becomes withdrawn, introspective, and ultimately, a great poet. 

Office Space

The changing titles become a literal representation of what [preface writer] called the “profound uncertainty created by political upheaval.” We would do well to remember Kafka and his world characterized by shifting offices. As the play goes on, the character formerly known as “King” becomes “Richard;” “Henry,” “King.”

Yet more than its heavenly or political association, the identity of king is, like so many of Shakespeare’s offices, “a role to be played.” In the same fashion, the role of the deposed monarch is played to a T by Richard, who seems to gain the ability to wax poetic (in some of Shakespeare's most incredible monologues, in my opinion). “Richard, the consummate actor, must bear the humiliation of being perceived as the lesser performer, who follows ‘a well-graced actor’ on the stage and whose ‘prattle’ is found, in comparison, ‘tedious.’”

Richard, though, seems far more suited to the office of king than Henry. Sure, Henry is the better politician and perhaps even the better leader. But when it comes to divinity, Richard has Henry beat. Consider the evidence. Richard has a deep connection to the earth: he returns to the shores of England, greeting them as “a long-parted mother with her child.” Moreover, he refuses to prune and weed his garden, despite his gardeners pleas. And his dying words anticipate his own afterlife: “Mount, mount, my soul! Thy seat is up on high; / Whilst my gross flesh sinks downward, here to die.” In falling from kinghood, Richard achieves transcendence. (Also, remember what John of Gaunt says: It doesn’t matter what people have done in their lives; the most weight will be placed on their last words.)

Man of Sorrows

Yet perhaps our exaltations of Richard are due to his receipt of the most powerful form of "dramatic currency", sympathy. Though we hear much of how poor a king he is, we see it rarely compared to the long and supremely poetic speeches we hear him give. 

Perhaps it is an indication of how long it’s been since I’ve read Shakespeare, but I loved Richard II most for its powerful statements of sorrow. As we discussed, it is the sorrow of Richard over his deposition and imminent death that leads him to become a great poet. His lines will come later; first let us see how other characters deal with sorrow.

Henry and Mowbray duel over the latter's alleged treason, but both are exiled by Richard, Henry for ten years and Mowbray for life. Henry’s sentence is then commuted to six years by the “breath of kings” (that is, Richard's words).

When Mowbray is allowed to speak, he laments not the family and friends that he will leave behind, but something much more personal: his language. “And now my tongue’s use is to me no more / Than an unstringed viol or a harp / … / What is thy sentence then but speechless death, / Which robs my tongue from breathing native breath?” His exile is tantamount to death, for he has lost the breath of life. (Note also the double meaning of "sentence.")

Though Henry’s six years are a drop in the bucket compared to Mowbray’s sentence, there is another factor: Henry’s father, John of Gaunt, is very old and will likely die before Henry returns (spoiler: he does). For Gaunt, his son may as well have been sentenced to die, for “blindfold death” will not let him see his son. First the dumbness of Mowbray, now the blindness of John of Gaunt.

Henry gives his most powerful speech here, as well: 

“Nay, rather every tedious stride I make / Will but remember me what a deal of world / I wander from the jewels that I love. / Must I not serve a long apprenticehood / To foreign passages and, in the end, / Having my freedom, boast of nothing else /But that I was journeyman to grief?” 

Journeyman to grief. John of Gaunt tries to comfort his son, telling him to think of the foreign countries he will see, and that he must “teach [his] necessity to reason thus: / There is no virtue like necessity.” Gliding past that pregnant Shakespearean statement, Henry continues his lament: 

“O, who can hold a fire in his hand / By thinking on the frosty Caucasus? Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite / By bare imagination of a feast? / Or wallow naked in December snow / By thinking on fantastic summer’s heat? / O, no! The apprehension of the good / Gives but the greater feeling to the worse. / Fell sorrow’s tooth doth never rankle more / Than when he bites, but lancet not the sore.”

John of Gaunt’s sorrows do not end with his son’s departure, because soon after, surprise, he’s dying. Richard says some things to him that may or may not be comforting (take a guess), but when he tells Gaunt encouragingly that he (Gaunt) will live for many years, Gaunt replies, “But not a minute, king, that thou canst give.” Despite “the breath of kings” adding years to Henry’s life, it has proved artificial in the face of a much more powerful and imperious force.

For yet another beautiful example of sorrow from the beginning of the play, we turn to the Queen, Richard’s wife. The queen's attendant tries to comfort her about Richard's future by telling her that her worries are not founded in reality, that they are mere shadows: 

“Each substance of a grief hath twenty shadows, / Which shows like grief itself, but is not so; / For sorrow’s eye, glazed with blinding tears, / Divides one thing entire to many objects, / Like perspectives, which rightly gazed upon, / Show nothing but confusion – eyed awry, / Distinguish form.”

Of course such words of comfort are no balm to the Queen’s heart. She responds just as shrewdly: 

“It may be so; but yet my inward soul / Persuades me it is otherwise. Howe’er it be, / I cannot but be sad – so heavy sad / As, though on thinking on no thought I think, / Makes me with heavy nothing faint and shrink.”

When her servant argues that it is nothing but conceit (that is, imagination), the Queen, heavy sad, responds:

“’Tis nothing less. Conceit is still derived / From some forefather grief. Mine is not so, / For nothing hath begot my something grief, / Or something hath the nothing that I grieve. ‘Tis in reversion that I do possess; / But what it is, that is not yet known – what, / I cannot name. ‘Tis nameless woe, I wot.”

‘Tis nothing less, she says. This brief sentence carries two possible meanings. First, it could be that her feeling is indeed nothing less than conceit; yet, she continues, conceit comes from reality. Alternatively, she could mean that by calling her emotion conceit, he has not reduced it in any way (i.e., “‘tis nothing less” for being called conceit). Regardless of the meaning, the queen asserts the power of imagination to wreak great havoc on her soul.

(Also, as an aside, holy shit what an incredible few lines. “For nothing hath begot my something grief, / Or something hath the nothing that I grieve.” Either her grief, which is real, has come from nothing, from conceit; or she is grieving over something that exists yet has not been identified yet, for it is only “in reversion”, i.e., hindsight, that a vague presentiment becomes reality.)

“Comfort’s in heaven, and we are on the earth.”

Since the play relies heavily on the difference between the divine king Richard and the earthly power of Henry, we see considerable celestial imagery throughout the play. It will come up more often in the two parts of Henry IV, but we see beginnings in Richard II. Salisbury comments that Richard’s glory reminds him of “a shooting star / Fall[ing] to the base earth from the firmament.” Richard is like a heavenly body that has descended to the earth from on high.

One thing I would love to research is whether Shakespeare was influenced by the science of the time. In the 1400s, Copernicus put forth his theory that the earth revolved around the sun, inspiring scientists like Kepler and Galileo to investigate; Thomas Kuhn in his book, The Copernican Revolution, does a masterful job of explaining its significance. But one interesting facet of this debate was the theological twist it received. For centuries, astronomy had been working to reconcile Aristotle’s cosmology with Biblical descriptions of heaven, achieving its most influential representation in Dante’s Inferno. Suddenly, science and religion were inseparable (weird, huh?) and casting doubt on one was tantamount to rejecting both. The order of Dante’s cosmos, unfortunately, stands in stark contrast to the way the real universe works. How aware was Shakespeare, or his England in general, of Copernicus and heliocentricity? Did it influence his writing? 

We will return to these questions in the Henry IVs, but for now, they are interesting to consider.

Woe’s Slave

It is often said that the protagonist of the Henry IV plays is either Falstaff or Prince Hal; in the past, Hotspur was considered the main role; rarely does anyone think that the titular king is the focus of the play. Perhaps people consider the soon-to-be-king Henry the main character of Richard II in the same way he is not the main character of his plays; but if we are talking about compelling characters, Henry would be very, very low on the list. And to me, Richard ranks very, very high. When he is to be deposed (as his stage name changes from “King” to “Richard”), he finds words to match his sorrow. As he comes to terms with his fate—“A king, woe’s slave, shall kingly woe obey,” he laments—he also becomes the unexpected hero of the play. 

Two major speeches showcase his newfound way with words. When he learns about the rebellion effort led by Henry, he becomes despondent, while his supporters urge him to fight. Yet Richard, like a petulant child, does not want to fight; he wants to “sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings!” He continues by describing the burden that comes with wearing the king’s “hollow crown”:

“And there [in the king’s crown] the antic sits / Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp; / Allowing him a breath, a little scene, / To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks; / Infusing him with self and vain conceit, / As if this flesh which walls about our life / Were brass impregnable; and humored thus, / Comes at the last, and with a little pin / Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king! / Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood / With solemn reverence. Throw away respect, / Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty; / For you have but mistook me all this while. / I live with bread like you, feel want, taste grief, / Need friends. Subjected thus, / How can you say to me I am a king?”

Reverence is a mockery of humanness. Respect is to be cast aside. How can your heart not break when the king of England says “I live with bread like you”? 

His supporters are not so dramatic. The response to his lament?

“My lord, wise men ne’er sit and wail their woes, / But presently prevent the ways to wail. / To fear the foe, since fear oppresseth strength, / Gives, in your weakness, strength unto the foe, / And so your follies fight against yourself. / Fear, and be slain – no worse can come to fight; / And fight and die is death destroying death, / Where fearing dying pays death servile breath.”

Is this not an answer worthy of Machiavelli? Did we not discuss how the Italian urged people not to accept fate but to “prevent” chance from interfering in their lives at all? Perhaps that is the right advice. But like the attendant's advice to the Queen, it falls upon deaf ears. For how can grief be overcome by wisdom? You simply can’t get there from here. 

Harold Bloom writes that Richard II is unique in its changes in tone, similar to those in Romeo and Juliet, part of a triad of lyrical plays including Rick 2 and A Midsummer Night's Dream. However, whereas the tone shifts in R&J are "overwhelming," those in Richard II seek to "distance us from pathos as far as possible." 

Indeed, watching a performance of the play magnifies the alienation we feel from Richard, whose theatricality is surprising to his friends and flatterers—and to us. Richard is woe's slave, he has no vizier to bear his burdens, and more to the point, he is absolutely unlike the others in the play: he is nearly divine. Henry approaches the kingship with pragmatism, beginning his reign by planning for wars in the Holy Land (which was a sensible thing, apparently), but Richard—who may have once been pragmatic, we don't know—ends his reign with a bang and a whimper.

Bear with me for the following digression. One of the few things I like about the television show The Big Bang Theory is Jim Parsons, who plays the king of social ineptitude, Sheldon Cooper. While the women on the show are the most likable characters, and the other men are by degrees annoying and comically one-dimensional, Sheldon is the only one who is truly weird: weird to his friends, weird to himself, and most importantly, weird to strangers. The episodes where he interacts with the public at large—I'm thinking particularly of "The Egg Salad Equivalency," where he talks with the university's sexual harassment counselor—are the only worthwhile parts of the show. To see how his strangeness is received by those who are not used to it is excellent, and Parsons plays the role admirably.

So too with Richard. While his speeches are incredible, and the cast of characters generally interesting, it is the way others react to him that is so fascinating. In the BBC version of the play, starring Derek Jacobi as Richard, we see the king giving the above speech—and boy does he look out of place. The monarch sitting upon the ground like a child and begging his counselors to sit with him and tell him tales.

Let's close this entry with Richard's final soliloquy. It is direct: he speaks in the first person, unlike Hamlet’s third-person musings on nonbeing. It is concrete, comparing his prison to the world at large. We see him struggling; he is not as effortlessly brilliant as Falstaff, or Prince Hal. Nor is he Prince Hamlet, but his speech is a great matter. Let’s listen in:

"I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world:
And for because the world is populous
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it; yet I'll hammer it out.
My brain I'll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father; and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humours like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermix'd
With scruples and do set the word itself
Against the word:
As thus, 'Come, little ones,' and then again,
'It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a small needle's eye.'
Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot
Unlikely wonders; how these vain weak nails
May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls,
And, for they cannot, die in their own pride.
Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves
That they are not the first of fortune's slaves,
Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars
Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame,
That many have and others must sit there;
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortunes on the back
Of such as have before endured the like.
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king'd again: and by and by
Think that I am unking'd by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate'er I be,
Nor I nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleased, till he be eased
With being nothing. Music do I hear?

Music

Ha, ha! keep time: how sour sweet music is,
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men's lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To cheque time broke in a disorder'd string;
But for the concord of my state and time
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
For now hath time made me his numbering clock:
My thoughts are minutes; and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch,
Whereto my finger, like a dial's point,
Is pointing still, in cleansing them from tears.
Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell: so sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours: but my time
Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy,
While I stand fooling here, his Jack o' the clock.
This music mads me; let it sound no more;
For though it have holp madmen to their wits,
In me it seems it will make wise men mad.
Yet blessing on his heart that gives it me!
For 'tis a sign of love; and love to Richard
Is a strange brooch in this all-hating world."

Stray Observations

• We will talk about Henry IV in our next post, but here’s a preview of who this guy is as king. When his hired gun Exton kills Richard, Henry refuses to thank him, saying: “They love not poison that do poison need, / Nor do I thee. Though I did wish him dead, / I hate the murderer, love him murdered.” What a dick.
• Aumerle: “Comfort, my liege. Remember who you are.” Richard: “I had forgot myself.”
• John of Gaunt’s wife, the duchess of Gloucester: “Yet art thou slain in him. Thou dost consent / In some large measure to thy father’s death / In that thou seest thy wretched brother die, / Who was the model of thy father’s life. / Call it not patience, Gaunt; it is despair. / In suff’ring thus thy brother to be slaughtered / Thou showest the naked pathway to thy life, / Teaching stern murder how to butcher thee. / That which in mean [common] men we entitle patience / Is pale cold cowardice in noble breasts.” This invective against patience is really fascinating.
• A late-breaking addition: Samuel Coleridge writes that "the Play throughout is an history of the human mind, when reduced to ease its anguish with words instead of action... the characters all talking high, but performing nothing." We might be tempted to say that many of Shakespeare's plays emphasize words over action; not so with the histories (or at least with the portions of the Henriad that I've read so far), for history is full of action. Yet in this (chronologically) first play about a long struggle for the crown, how is the king deposed? Almost voluntarily. There is no battle, little violence. Richard surrenders the crown.

Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion

As much as I've been enjoying my chronological reading, I've noticed that such an undertaking often gives an incomplete view of the discourse of the age. For example, when we read St. Anselm, we were lucky enough to be able to read with his Proslogion the reply of Gaunilo, another monk, followed by Anselm's reply to him. In doing so, we understood that Anselm's achievement was eclipsed to a degree by challenges from contemporary religious figures. As much as one would like to believe--or maybe it's only me--that a chronological reading provides a full picture of intellectual development, it is mostly the vertical history that ends up being covered. The horizontal history--the way in which contemporaneous minds interact and influence one another--is often lost.

So it is with that great theologian, John Calvin, and his magnum opus, Institutes of the Christian Religion. While it is certainly a monumental text, what might be the most interesting aspect--the interaction between Calvin, Luther, Erasmus, and others--is missing. Composed during one of the most intellectually vibrant ages in the history of the world, the Institutes is not an island, and reading it independently of its context can only be a detriment, and will have to be rectified in the future.

Yet much can be gained from its reading, if only because of its place in our current age. American Christianity owes a profound debt to Calvin, and churches across the country look to him as Catholics do to Augustine (or, indeed, as Calvin himself looked to Augustine). At the same time, his Brobdingnagian masterwork, spanning nearly 1500 pages, is absent in many reading lists of Western thought, cast aside in favor of Luther's more bite-sized works.

We won't try to delve into the controversies surrounding the Catholic church at the time, as if I had any insight into them. We know that Luther and Calvin split from the church, that through their close readings of the Bible and early church fathers they testified to how far Christianity had wandered from the strait and narrow. It will still be edifying for us to think about Calvin's work standing alone, as its sheer size obliges us to. And we will see that even my casual, absentminded reading produces great fruit.


Knowing

Thomas Aquinas' Summa began with about a dozen proofs of the existence of God from throughout history. Calvin similarly begins with the question of how men can know God, yet he sets himself apart from Aquinas and the Scholastics in his method. Whereas Aquinas came to know God through proof, with what we may think of as Aristotelian truth, Calvin's knowledge comes not from the brain but from the heart. Yes, though Calvin's reputation is that of the stern forefather of the Puritans, he emphasizes the authority of the heart in matters of faith, and it is this idea that guides the rest of the Institutes. "Each of us," he writes, "must, then, be so stung by the consciousness of his own unhappiness as to attain at least some knowledge of God."

Let us unpack this dense sentence. First of all, Calvin says that it is primarily (that is, in the first place) through unhappiness that we come to know God, for we "cannot seriously aspire to him before we begin to become displeased with ourselves." So unhappiness is not melancholy in a general sense, but rather specifically displeasure with oneself. It is only through this realization--that the way one is is not what one was meant to be--that the knowledge of God comes.

So what is knowledge in this case? To begin with, Calvin says that all men know God in the sense that all men yearn for a godlike figure. He writes that there is "no nation so barbarous, no people so savage, that they have not a deep-seated conviction that there is a God," that "the knowledge of God has been naturally implanted in the minds of men." While I am sure we could scan any textbook of anthropology to refute this claim prima facie, this does not detract from the force of his argument. For he is writing so as to emphasize the legitimacy of religion against critics who, like Marx a couple centuries later, would say that religion is the opiate of the masses, "invented by the subtlety and craft of a few to hold the simple folk in thrall by this device." (That's Calvin, not Marx.) Without even going into how this prefiguring is yet another proof that there is nothing new under the sun, we may note how closely Calvin's argument parallels that of Dostoevsky, who believed that the ability of men to imagine a better world is proof of the existence of such.

How are we then to know? If our hearts are inscribed with the knowledge of God, are we then free to follow our hearts to come to the knowledge of God, as new age philosophy would have us believe? Well, no. Calvin tells us that we are not "to fashion God according to our own whim." He continues: “We ought to observe that we are called to a knowledge of God: not that knowledge which, content with empty speculation, merely flits in the brain, but that which will be sound and fruitful if we duly perceive it, and if it takes root in our heart.” 

Empty is that which flits in the brains, rootless. Intellectual masturbation does not lead to the knowledge of God. This may be a good place to point out how much Calvin hates the Scholastics. Though we briefly touched on the difference between Aquinas and Calvin, it is difficult to overemphasize just how wrong the latter thought the Scholastic method was. Perhaps it is a sign of the times: others, such as Erasmus, had also rejected the Scholastic project in favor of different worldviews.

After quite a bit of build up, Calvin announces how it is we know God: “Consequently, we know the most perfect way of seeking God, and the most suitable order, is not for us to attempt with bold curiosity to penetrate to the investigation of his essence, which we ought more to adore than meticulously to search out, but for us to contemplate him in his works whereby he renders himself near and familiar to us, and in some manner communicates himself. The apostle was referring to this when he said that we need not seek him far away, seeing that he dwells by his very present power in each of us.”

If speculation about God drifts around our brain like a planetary body, in sight but out of reach, true knowledge of God is much more tangible and, to Calvin, is very much within our grasp. He claims that there are more than enough proofs of God that we can see without having to "rack our brains." With a flick of his pen, he casts away Aquinas' proofs of God as a vain intellectual exercise and asks men to ponder the "storehouse of inestimable riches" laying at their feet. 

His rejection of the Scholastic method comes as a result of this belief: that knowing, to Calvin, is not as simple as men make it out to be. Even those as apparently learned as the Scholastics are trapped by the "boundless filthy mire of error" that arises from the difficulty associated with our knowing. "Each man's mind," Calvin says, "is like a labyrinth," his preferred symbol of human frustration and confusion. He offers the following anecdote as illustration: 

“Some praise the reply of Simonides, who, asked by the tyrant Hiero what God was, begged to be given a day to ponder. When on the following day the tyrant asked the same question, he asked for two days more, and after having frequently doubled the number of days, finally answered, ‘The longer I consider this, the more obscure it seems to me.’…Yet hence it appears that if men were taught only by nature, they would hold to nothing certain or solid or clear-cut, but would be so tied to confused principles as to worship an unknown god.” 

Men taught by their minds cannot but fall into the mire of error. Therefore, we must seek truth elsewhere: in the world and, even moreso, in the Bible.


Foreknowledge

Speaking as a Calvinist who could probably do to know more about Calvinism, it seems to me that Calvin's most influential idea is that of election; if it is not the most influential, then it is at very least his most controversial. In the following discussion, I will make no claims (alright, maybe some claims) about what Calvin does or does not believe, because I think this aspect of his theology--election, predestination, and free will--is not only contentious but incredibly subtle. For a better understanding, more than one reading is necessary (especially when that one reading wasn't very careful).

Some things, however, are not so opaque: "There is no such thing as fortune or chance," declares Calvin, sans qualification. Nor, it seems, is there definitive causality, despite what Aristotle might think: "Therefore a godly man will not make the sun either the principal or the necessary cause of these things which existed before the creation of the sun, but merely the instrument that God uses because he so wills; for with no more difficulty he might abandon it, and act through himself." 

We've seen a similar line of thinking before, in the Islamic philosophers. Recall the Ash’arite sect, to which belonged al-Ghazali, who claimed that cause and effect did not exist, that the answer to every question of "Why?" is "Because God willed it." For them, saying that one event caused another was tantamount to denying God's role in the process. Calvin doesn't go this far, although he rejects the idea of a passive god: "And truly God claims, and would have us grant him, omnipotence--not the empty, idle, and almost unconscious sort that the Sophists [here meaning the Scholastics] imagine, but a watchful, effective, active sort, engaged in ceaseless activity. Not, indeed, an omnipotence that is only a general principle of confused motion, as if he were to command a river to flow through its once-appointed channels, but one that is directed toward individual and particular motions." God's will is not directionless, the way al-Ghazali may have claimed (it is uncertain to me, but given the severity of his philosophy, it doesn't seem unreasonable). Rather, it is purposeful. We cannot believe in God and be deists; God must be an active God.

We may return briefly to Boethius, who gave what I consider the best explication of the eternal world of God in relation to the human world of men: that God experiences the whole of time as a lighted room, whereas men grope their way along its perimeter in the darkness. In this way, he was able to account for God's foreknowledge while still granting men free will: men are free to grope as they please, since it was all evident to God beforehand. Yet Calvin has no time for those who "babble too ignorantly of bare foreknowledge." True, Boethius' conception is too passive for Calvin. God is not merely "the first agent" since believers who suffer adversity can "comfort themselves with the solace that they suffer nothing except by God's ordinance and command, for they are under his hand." Foreknowledge does not grant God enough power. 


Election

Now that we understand Calvin's stance on foreknowledge, we can consider the question of election, which is for Calvin the true Christian equivalent of foreknowledge. The basic thesis is that certain people are elected by God to be saved. This election is secret: you don't know your status any better than another person does, regardless of your beliefs or behavior. Why are some elect and not others? "If you proceed further to ask why he so willed, you are seeking something greater and higher than God's will, which cannot be found." This may sound unusually Thomistic of Calvin, but it's interesting nonetheless. At bottom is God's will, period. "By thus covering election with a veil of foreknowledge, they [bad Christians] not only obscure it but feign that it has its origin elsewhere."

Besides, there is little use, Calvin might say, in quibbling about election when the great majority of the world is secret to us and known only to God. When Jesus says that men do not live by bread alone, Calvin adds that this is because "it is not plenty itself that nourishes men, but God's secret blessing." He additionally quotes the lovely Psalm 3:5: "I lay down and slept; I awoke again, for the Lord sustained me."

He also answers through Augustine, which is a really enthralling passage that I'm going to quote in full:

"You, a man, except an answer [about God, secrets, etc.] from me; I too am a man. Therefore, let both of us hear one who says, 'O man, who are you?' Ignorance that believes is better than rash knowledge. Seek merits; you will find only punishment. 'O depth!'* Peter denies; the thief believes. 'O depth!' Thou seekest reason? I tremble at the depth. Reason, thou; I will marvel. Dispute, thou; I will believe. I see the depth; I do not reach the bottom. Paul rested, for he found wonder. He calls God's judgments 'unsearchable,' and thou settest out to search them? He speaks of his ways as 'inscrutable,' and thou dost track them down?"

[*Romans 11:33]

To close the matter, he quotes Pseudo-Augustine (that is, Augustine with a devious mustache): "The Lord can therefore also give grace...because he is merciful, and not give to all because he is a just judge. For by giving to some what they do not deserve...he can show his free grace... By not giving to all, he can manifest what all deserve."



Stray Observations

• Law is not one of my major interests, so I glossed over the sections on government and such, but here is a characteristically Calvinist definition of natural law: "Natural law is the apprehension of the conscience which distinguishes between just and unjust, and which deprives men of the excuse of ignorance, while it proves them guilty by their own testimony." Unlike, say, Aquinas, who spoke of natural law as something like a subset of the whole law, Calvin asserts that it is there so that we cannot claim to not understand the concept of inherent law.
• Again about the law: "Was the law to be limited to our powers so as not to be given in vain? Rather, it was put far above us, to show clearly our own weakness!" Again, characteristically Calvin. We should also remember Kafka's parable: "The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope." 
• Okay, okay, maybe I care about law a little bit. Calvin claims that it was Paul's contention that Mosaic law was "the shadow of good things to come," not "the living likeness of the things themselves... Therefore its sole function was to be an introduction to the better hope that is manifested in the gospel." This is the same conclusion that Maimonides came to. 
• Speaking of Mosaic law, here's a wonderful bit about Judaism and its relation to Christianity: "In communicating his Word to them [the Israelites], he joined them to himself, that he might be called and esteemed their God. In the meantime, 'he allowed all other nations to walk' in vanity.... 'But when the fullness of time came' which was appointed for the restoration of all things, he was revealed as the reconciler of God and men; 'the wall' that for so long had confined God's mercy within the boundaries of Israel 'was broken down.' ...Therefore there is now no difference between Jew and Greek.... but 'Christ is in all.'"
• “Herein is man’s ignorance: when he comes to a particular case, he forgets the general principle that he has just laid down… the intellect is very rarely deceived in general definition or in the essence of the thing; but that it is illusory when it goes farther, that is, applies the principle to particular cases.”