Shakespeare, Silver & Exact

One last hurrah for The Hollow Crown, in The Sunday Guardian.

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The last couple of months have been an interesting time for Brit-watchers worldwide. The economy continued with its very public meltdown. The republicans declined to be gentlemanly about the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations, and the left were vocal about the social engineering that was taking place in London in the name of the Olympics. Great Britain may not have stuck its fingers in its ears and said, ‘Not listening!’, but a good part of what was called the Cultural Olympiad seemed to be an effort to drown criticism with celebration.

There was a lot of poetry and theatre and despite the success of the Poetry Parnassus, the figure that stood, Parnassus-like at the centre of the Cultural Olympiad was Shakespeare. Versions of Shakespeare’s plays from all over the world are being staged at the Globe as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, including a couple of plays from India. Inevitably, many of these interpretations will be post-colonial readings of the Bard’s work (though so far no one has heard the Daily Mail call these performances plastic-Shakespeare).

It was only to be expected that Britain would wants its own version of Shakespeare – an ‘official’ version, as it were – if not competing, then rising above the competition. BBC2 very cannily commissioned Sam Mendes to produce a four-part series of Shakespeare plays titled The Hollow Crown, covering the plays Richard II, Henry IV Parts I & II and Henry V. This series was telecast on BBC2 through July with three different directors – Rupert Goold, Richard Eyre (directing both parts of Henry IV) and Thea Sharrock – taking charge of the plays.

Though differing somewhat in individual style, the four films are remarkably consistent in tone and world-view. This argues for a very clear brief given to each of the directors to keep their eyes on the title of the series. ‘The Hollow Crown’ comes from Richard II’s soliloquy in the play (III. ii): ‘for within the hollow crown/ That rounds the mortal temples of a king/ Keeps death his court,’ Richard says. We are to understand through these films that kingship is merely a loan and that death puts an end to all ambitions:

 Ill-weav’d ambition, how much art thou shrunk!

When that this body did contain a spirit,

A kingdom for it was too small a bound;

But now two paces of the vilest earth

 Is room enough.

                                    Henry IV Part I, V. iv.

Rupert Goold gilds Ben Whishaw’s brilliant Richard in the iconography of St. Sebastian; Richard Eyre makes of Henry IV a private soap opera about fathers and sons (even beginning the second film with a quick episode recap); Thea Sharrock makes – rather cleverly, if controversially – the boy who accompanies Bardolph & Co. to the French wars grow up to become the Chorus.

Death universalises everything but we must remember that of these four plays, Shakespeare called only one of them a Tragedy: Richard II. The other plays were clearly Histories. We could even call them historical fiction, because Shakespeare was writing in response to the politics of the Elizabethan era. He was attempting to create a narrative that answered questions about Britain’s identity as a nation-state – about divine right, inheritance (and the rights of women to inherit kingdoms), the disease of ‘civil blows’ and the uses of ‘foreign quarrels’.

Politics are absolutely central to the plays but The Hollow Crown deliberately drowns the political with the universal. The coup at the heart of Richard II is less important than Richard’s own self-dramatisation – though it could be argued that this was always in the script. The deeply-discomfiting warmongering of Henry V (which Lawrence Olivier unashamedly played up in the 1944 film commissioned by Churchill as part of the war effort) is deflected by a muted performance by Tom Hiddleston as Henry V. In fact, in one scene before the Battle of Agincourt, Sharrock has Henry kneel in a field to pray. He becomes aware of the Boy/Chorus watching him and hastily composes himself as if he knows that history must remember him as the king who never faltered. This is an interesting cinematic moment, almost prescient, because the next time these two characters are together in the same frame it is at Henry’s funeral, which also bookends the film.

It is only in the figure of Henry IV, played by Jeremy Irons, that we get a sense of a beleaguered king beset on all sides by civic unrest, hard-pressed for money, ailing and prone to fits of anger and insomnia. Henry IV may not be a tragic figure like the Richard II and Henry V of this series, but he is certainly made all too human.

There, if you want it, is the series’ politics.

It is hard to read these plays as anything but an examination of national identity but – in these fraught and multicultural times – The Hollow Crown does a very good job of helping Britain forget that. It is no mean achievement to make us watch a king and see everyman.

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Why must we care about kings? Why should the kings of another country and another time matter today? Is ‘king’ a codeword for ‘politician’?

Surely, at a time when politicians the world over are navigating the treacherous waters of failing economies, calls for self-determination or secession, and expensive and futile wars, these are questions we must ask? It’s hard not to make politicians out to be the villains of the piece. And never has their rehabilitation been more urgent, if we are to hold on to the template of the nation-state.

It has long been one of the functions of the dramatic arts to provide us with psychological insight into the minds of those we consider villainous. This rehabilitates the ‘villain’ and allows us to feel better about ourselves because of our ability to empathise with the struggles of a divided self. Everyone is humanised by empathy and all the things that divide us – our race, gender, nationality, our politics – are bridged by this impulse to see a bit of ourselves in even the most unsympathetic characters.

Once the Olympics are over, Britain must wake up from its pleasant daydream, of medals won, of happy guests and happier hosts. When it does, it should remember how the dream began: with Danny Boyle choosing Caliban over John of Gaunt to speak for the island nation.

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I'm realising that I am so random with my tags that I can't find my own posts when I look for them. One of these days I'm going to have to sit and tag all the ancient posts from the pre-tag  Blogger days...sigh.

So in the spirit of good housekeeping, all The Hollow Crown posts under this one roof:

Richard II (not really a post, I know)

Henry IV Part I

Henry IV Part II

Henry V

The Hollow Crown: Henry V

I really want to reserve judgement on Thea Sharrock’s version of Henry V that concludes BBC2’s Hollow Crown series, because I think the film warrants another, closer viewing. I won’t say I liked or disliked the film; my reactions are a little more complicated than that.

No pretty pictures here - I'm sorry. 

Brace yourselves for an epic post!

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The Bare Imagination of a Feast

To my mind, Henry V is first about the power of rhetoric and only afterwards about war and its consequences.

I know the play practically begs to be considered and interpreted as either a pro-war piece of flag-waving jingoism or at the very least as the bravery of the few faced with an enemy that appears all but invincible.

But consider how the play begins: the Chorus asks us to use our imaginations to populate the stage with all that stagecraft cannot provide. If imagination is the first step towards empathy, the audience has already half been won over to the point of view the Chorus wants to present to it.

Throughout Henry V, the King employs all kinds of rhetorical strategies: he turns the Dauphin’s insulting gift of tennis balls into a metaphor for retaliation; at the gates of Harfleur, Henry threatens to carry out the most horrifying excesses upon the people of Harfleur unless the Mayor surrenders – but precisely because he has made these ugly threats, he may have averted a greater loss of life; in disguise, the night before Agincourt, he argues with his soldiers (in what is, for me, the best scene of the play) about who should take responsibility for the consequences of war.

There are, of course, the two grandstanding speeches of the play: Harfleur and Agincourt. ‘Once more unto the breach’ and ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.’ They are, with good reason, the most remembered parts of Henry V. But let’s not forget that they are deployed by an embattled king with immense subtlety, to put heart into his dispirited soldiers.

If it were only Henry being rhetorical and strategic, the play would quickly grow tedious. The astonishing thing about Henry V is that for a play that mostly happens on grim battlefields and in camps, it has huge amounts of laughter and wordplay. The Princess Katherine has one scene with her lady in waiting that consists entirely of her learning to name various body parts in English. Some of this hilarity is carried over to the last scene, when Henry woos Katherine and their mutual deficiencies in language leads to some sweet and some risqué moments.

Captain Fluellen, in the King’s army, has a peculiar way of speaking that is meant to keep the groundlings in stitches; but under his rather odd word choices, he is always talking about the military conduct of kings in battles past, and about what is the just and right way to behave in battle.

In one scene, excised from the film version*, the French army has just killed all the boys guarding the luggage vans. This is a particularly dastardly and unchivalrous thing to do. The King will shortly be furious; for now, Fluellen is also angry, and Gower tells him that because the French, in addition to having killed all the boys, have also looted the King’s tent, the King has ordered that the throats of all French prisoners captured during battle be cut.

“Oh, ’tis a gallant king!” concludes Gower and we suspect there might be some sarcasm involved.

This is Fluellen (remember that we have just heard some very horrifying news):

Flu: Ay, he was porn at Monmouth, Captain Gower. What call you the town where Alexander the pig was porn?

Gow: Alexander the Great.

Flu: Why, I pray you, is not pig Great? The pig, or the great, or the mighty, or the huge, or the magnanimous, are all one reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations.

Yes, well. I won’t labour the point, but to me this teeny little bit says huge amounts about why Shakespeare peppers the play with wordplay.

Words are important. They can win wars. They can win people over. They can frighten, convince, woo and persuade. In Henry V, they are nearly as important as the battles themselves.

Churchill knew that when he allowed echoes of Agincourt to sound in his speech (with a line borrowed from Henry IV Part I**). Obama also knew it when he became this decade’s King Arthur as he addressed a freezing but hope-filled public one January day.

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So Sweet a Hope

Making a film of a Shakespeare play is somewhat akin to making a graphic novel out of his work – a storyboard for a No Fear Shakespeare. There are all these scenes, all these words, but they just won’t fit! We could be here for hours, if we kept every word in the play. So of course there are excisions.

But if we take as given that cinema has its own language, as abstract as speech, as instinctively grasped and understood, then there must be ways to make the pictures say the things that words needn’t.

This has been part of the attraction of watching the entire series: to see what’s been left out and how the slack has been taken up by what’s left. There have been things I haven’t agreed with in the previous three films, but for the most part they have been immersive experiences.

Thea Sharrock’s Henry V is emphatically not an immersive experience. This does not mean I am disappointed – I think there were several interesting things she did that I will want to watch again closely – it just felt much more tentative than the other three films.

I don’t know much about Sharrock except that she has done a lot of very interesting plays on stage, and that this is her film/TV debut. Inexperience could account for a lot of what I find difficult to take in the film. Only lack of thought could account for the horrible, horrible music, which is the single most annoying thing about the film. If it wasn’t being laid on thick to emphasise important speeches it was generic, as if someone had picked out stock music from files marked War, Love, Funeral and so on.  I mean, Sharrock really should have trusted her viewers and her actors more.

Whatever the reason for Sharrock’s hesitant approach, its main effect was to drain the film of all the rah-rah chest-thumping of war. Someone apparently asked Sharrock whether she was going to tackle the film as pro- or anti-war and she was astonished that these were the only two options. It is to her credit that in her hands, this is less a film about war than it is about the futility of temporal ambitions.

The film begins with the funeral of Henry V, which Sharrock borrows from Henry VI. If Henry IV Part II, in Eyre’s hands, began with a Previously, Sharrock’s film begins with a flash forward, to a time when the fruits of all Henry’s labours have ended in death, and in the loss of the realm he has spent this entire play fighting for. In effect, everything that happens – all the battles, all the speeches, the wooing of Katherine, the hopes Henry had of uniting the two kingdoms under his rule – all of it is for nothing.

It is, actually, the only way to read the play – if this is to be the last episode of a series that calls itself The Hollow Crown. Richard, feckless though he was as a king, was prescient about how little kingship is worth:

[F]or within the hollow crown

That rounds the mortal temples of a king

Keeps Death his court; and there the antic sits,

Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp;

Allowing him a breath, a little scene,

To monarchise, be fear’d, and kill with looks;

Infusing him with self and vain conceit, –

As if this flesh, which walls about our life,

Were brass impregnable; and humoured thus,

Comes at the last, and with a little pin

Bores through his castle-wall and – farewell, king!

Having begun with a farewell, where do we even go from here?

Sharrock could have had Henry blithe and unaware of his mortality; this would make the end that much more shocking. She chooses, instead to have the fire in the belly of the king severely banked by a certain – what’s the word for it? I’m sure there’s one in Greek – awareness of endings, of what Donne called ‘a bracelet of bright hair about the bone’.

Put another way, Sharrock’s Henry, Tom Hiddleston, is a man who seems to be aware that he is playing in a tragedy, while everyone else is under the impression that they are participating in a romance or an adventure or even a comedy.

If Sharrock did nothing else right – and there is plenty she could have done better – she did this very well indeed.

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Odious Comparisons

My major problem with the film was the lack of thought given to shot-taking, lensing and suchlike.

There were two scenes that I thought were very interestingly composed and shot: the tennis ball scene and the penultimate one where Henry asks Katherine to marry him. In both, there are often more than two people in the frame, at different depths of field. In each scene, the camera takes one full circle around a stationary character, following Henry as he speaks to this mostly off-camera person. (In the proposal scene, he is accompanied – with comic effect – by Katherine’s lady-in-waiting, Alice).  In the first, in conveys menace and in the second, a kind of nervous restlessness***.

The relationship of camera to actor to mise-en-scène is rarely used as well in the rest of the film. There are some acute cut-aways and voice overlaps, and for the most part these are okay. But for most of the film, the shot-taking is unimaginative and stodgy.

This is a real pity, because I couldn’t help comparing Thea Sharrock to someone like Julie Taymor.

I see Taymor as basically a theatre person who has been presented with the whole box of tricks that is cinema and she is so delighted with the gift that she wants to try everything out at once. Sharrock, on the other hand, seems to be the kind of director who would rather use one thing at a time and see how it works and decide if she wants it or not. Until then, the rest of the stuff just sits there.

If Julie Taymor is a kind of Orson Welles, Thea Sharrock is like an even earlier pioneer of cinema who hasn’t yet evolved or theorised her style; is intent upon the subject and hasn’t considered the medium’s own plasticity.

Perhaps the one true measure of the success of a film is the effect is has on the viewer. Despite all its faults, Henry V left me feeling immensely sad – and, like a good tragedy, cleansed. And that, I think, is as it should be.

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Epic though this post already is, I must mention the other book I’ve been reading through the watching of this series: Juliet Barker’s Agincourt is a fascinating account of Hal’s early years, his preparations for Agincourt and the battle itself.

The real Henry V was not as he is depicted in Shakespeare. He was 16 when the Battle of Shrewsbury was fought; far from being the wastrel he’s made out to be in the plays, he campaigned hard and for many years in Wales; took his place on the Council when Henry IV was ill and introduced the kind of fiscal discipline that the reigns of both Richard and Henry IV severely lacked.

Among the hugely absorbing things described in the book:

Hal took an arrow in his cheek at Shrewsbury, and while the shaft was removed, the arrowhead was lodged in his cheek for weeks. The King’s doctor finally devised a kind of tong-cum-screw thingy with which he pulled out the head. The wound was treated with honey, apparently, and herbs, for weeks and weeks. And, of course, no anaesthetic.

Speaking of arrows, Barker’s account of how arrows were made, how many arrows a King’s archer must be able to shoot, how the arrows were stockpiled and so on, had me riveted; it was as if I was watching The Dark Knight Rises on an Imax screen.

Bonus comic, for being patient: The Agincourt Gambit

Shockingly good read the book is, I promise you.

Ok. I’m done now.

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* I don’t approve of a lot of the excisions. I think Fluellen should have been given his proper due. And the film need not have so literally assisted the Chorus in its descriptions. But the most egregious deletion is Henry’s long and complex argument with his soldiers the night before Agincourt. This speech - I must emphasise that the scene itself isn't deleted - is absolutely essential and so much else could have been cut to make place for this one.

** “England never did owe so sweet a hope”.

***Henry V is, as Sellar and Yeatman might say, A Restless King. Hiddleston never sits still for a moment. He sits on his throne maybe three times, each time for less than half a minute. For the rest of the film, he’s prowling around, or riding, or falling to his knees in prayer. Or talking, of course.

The Hollow Crown: Henry IV Part II

[with a small diversion via Heyer]

Henry IV Part II begins, puzzlingly, with a recap. Previously, a super says, and takes us through the important plot points of Part I. If anything could emphasise how far from the stage this four-part series is, how carefully conceived for the small screen, here is proof. Richard Eyre treats the beginning of Part II as he would a soap opera. As though in the space of only a week our attention-deficit memories need to be massaged awake.

That was my first thought; but I wonder if I groaned in disappointment a little hastily. Title sequences in films are often very revealing. So much of what is to come is precis'd in the first couple of minutes. What Eyre does is encapsulate a whole play/film into two minutes and in retrospect, it's quite well done. It's less about bringing viewers up to speed - who's going to come in on Episode 3 of the series, after all? - and more about laying out what was important about the previous film. The recap emphasises the King's disappointment in his son, Hal's wildness, Falstaff's standing in for his father, and - after the rebellion led by Hotspur - Hal's transformation into a warrior prince. We finish with Falstaff stating his expectations of Hal, because clearly, this last is going to be important. It sets up Falstaff's eventual, inevitable downfall.

Falstaff, without Hal - upon whom his gaze snagged often and with some desperation in Part I - is a much more complex character in this film. Barring two scenes with Hal, Falstaff is seen with all kinds of people and in all kinds of contexts and this allows him all the freedom to be bombastic and plausible, often weary and sometimes tender.

But this film belongs to Irons. As the King beset by rebellion, wracked by guilt and troubled by ill-health, still worrying about his heir - lost to him almost as soon as found - Irons is superb. His anger often borders on the querulous but that is the rage of a man not in control of his body. Because these plays are about kingship and mortality, the health of his body and that of the kingdom is identical.

Possibly my two favourite scenes in this film are the two major soliloquies: the King's 'uneasy lies the head that wears the crown' and Hal's speech when he takes away the crown. Eyre stages these two speeches so well: instead of letting them talk to the camera, or in voice over, he lets them say their piece to themselves, and allows them all the time they need.

Irons murmurs to himself and wanders through his Palace as if sleep-walking, past his bedroom (and a bed he has no use for) where a musician plays a soft tune, past guards falling asleep on their feet in chilly corridors but who draw themselves up as the King passes, and to the throne room, where at last he sits in lonely state, unable to sleep or rest.

In the other Hal comes to sit with the King who is asleep after recovering from a fit, and finds the crown on the pillow, and, thinking the King dead, takes it away. Hal also makes his way to the throne room where he wears the crown. This scene is both moving in its tenderness and cringe-inducing for how much Hal is exposing himself to the King's wrath and how invidious his position is, how difficult to believe his excuses.

If I watched nothing else in the film again, I would it watch it for these two scenes (though the scene in Eastcheap with Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet comes a close third).

What is interesting about the play itself is how Shakespeare displaces the political into the personal. The reign of Henry IV was fraught with so much rebellion: Wales, the border towns of the North and the marauding raids by the French along the coast. And yet, all the battles in the play are deflected: Northumberland retires to Scotland in deference to the pleas of his wife and Hotspur's widow, even though his rage at the death of his son was intemperate and extreme. What could have been another pitched battle between the armies led by the Archbishop of York and his allies on the one hand and John of Lancaster and Westmoreland on the other, is averted by what can only be called treachery.

This frees up Shakespeare to meditate on what, for him, is the more important matter: how to be a king. If not by divine right - as Richard II claimed his kingship - how will Henry IV, a ursurper, justify his reign? If Hal has a better right than the King, because his kingship will be inherited and not snatched, then isn't his premature assumption of the crown a kind of treason? These questions and those of allegiance, loyalty, betrayal, guilt, expectation and duty play themselves out in the very human interactions between characters both major and minor.

Hal's transformation into the austere but - by most readings - just king that he becomes, is chilling. If I was slightly uncertain about Hiddleston's Hal in Part I, I think he really owns the character in this film. Though he makes few appearances, every scene makes large demands on his range as an actor and Hiddleston delivers, with subtlety and depth.

[diversion into Heyer begins]

While I was watching Henry IV Part I & II, I was simultaneously reading Georgette Heyer's My Lord John. It was her last, and unfinished book. Her ambition was to actually write a three book series covering the life of John, Duke of Bedford (who, in the play, is Lancaster) which roughly coincided with the entire period from the last years of Richard II's reign to the death of Henry V and John's guardianship of the infant King Henry VI.

For various reasons, mostly financial, Heyer had to keep writing her Regency romances and could work only intermittently on her Plantagenet trilogy. It's a pity, because what fragments of the books there are that make up the single unfinished volume, are characteristically well-researched. Heyer always wore her scholoarship lightly and managed to make the dullest military campaign thrilling because of how well she sketched the characters involved.

My particular weakness is for historical fiction and I can very easily be beguiled into total immersion by one well-told tale. So I've spent the last couple of weeks not just reading the Henriad, but also Heyer, and also another related text on the Battle of Agincourt. In jumping ahead of the tale, as it were, before this Saturday's Henry V, I muddied the waters somewhat but I regret nothing.

There's a lovely bit in My Lord John where Heyer allows the reader into the head of the newly-deposed Richard as he attends the coronation of Henry Bolingbroke. Richard, even in Shakespeare, is a difficult man to empathise with (though I think Ben Whishaw's performance will now be the gold standard for me). In this little first-person diversion, just a page and a half long, Heyer manages to create a character who compels our sympathy and understanding, and is more subtle - if still capricious - than we had supposed.

My posts on Henry IV Part I & Richard II.

The Hollow Crown: Henry IV Part I

At the beginning of Henry V, Shakespeare brings on a Chorus that urges us, the viewers, to use our imagination to fill out the stage with battlefields, soldiers in their numbers and kings.

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts:

Into a thousand parts divide one man,

And make imaginary puissance;

Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoof i’ the receiving earth;

For tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings.

For those of us used to reading, rather than watching the plays performed, this hardly needs to be said: of course we imagine everything. But when we begin to watch a performance, the demands on our imagination becomes variable. The proscenium stage still asks us to supply with our mind’s eye what it cannot provide in detail or in quantity.

Film is a different beast altogether. It can be as particular or as stylised as it likes but more often than not it falls on the side of particularity and realism, and leaves less to the imagination than the stage or the page.

I was thinking of this Chorus when I began watching Eyre’s adaptation of Henry IV Part I and going over some portions of Richard II. When Richard returns from Ireland and makes his ‘tell sad stories of the death of kings’ speech, he is drowned out by the roaring of the sea. In all the times I’ve read the play, it never once occurred to me – though I knew this was happening on a beach – that the sound of the sea would be so overwhelming and must be taken into account while listening to this fantastically self-pitying screed. Right there was an instance of my inadequate imagination being shown up by a careful filmmaker. How would it be exercised in Henry IV?

The film began, I thought, promisingly: the first two scenes are intercut with each other in a way that Shakespeare himself might have approved of. The contrast between the dour and bleak palace and the noise and warmth of Eastcheap was quickly drawn. Because so much of the first part of the play depends upon performance, the imagination perforce takes a break while we pay attention to the actors. But once the Battle of Shrewsbury began, I thought the film lost much of its force because it had neither the choreography nor the numbers to make it film-real. This would have been a good place to stylise the action and let the viewer’s imagination supply the numbers and the blood.

My biggest problem with the film, though, was the interpretation of Falstaff. Falstaff is nothing if not an anarchic counterpoint to kingship’s roll call of honour, valour and fairness. He is the opposite of Henry IV: cunning, venal, guilt-free in the performance of his petty crimes; what's more, he thinks that ‘honour is a mere scutcheon’.

In this version, played by Simon Russell Beale, Falstaff is a needy old man who is constantly watching Hal to measure the extent of his affection and loyalty. In playing Falstaff as an alternate father-figure to Hal, Eyre and Beale have unfortunately leached the - shall we say - glorious purpose from Falstaff's character.

That fantastic set-piece at the Boar’s Head, when Falstaff urges Hal to rehearse his interview with the King in a little play-within-a-play and an audience-within-an-audience, things go well initially: Falstaff plays his King for laughs and he gets them. The audience is raucous and bawdy and Hal insolent as he offers to 'depose' Falstaff and play his own father. As Hal ascends the throne, Falstaff flounces in Hal’s discarded leather jacket most endearingly (reminding me strongly, for some reason, of Hoshang).

Tom Hiddleston as Hal mimicks Jeremy Irons as the King so well that it might well be the best inside joke of the film. Hal piles insult upon insult and Falstaff preens as if they were compliments. And then, when it comes to the ‘banish the world but not Jack Falstaff’ bit, it all falls apart: music swells over the last part of this scene and we have an egregious close up of Falstaff, all teary-eyed and emotional and it is such a huge misreading of the scene: if anyone is aware of the finitude of this friendship, it is Hal and not Falstaff.

The other great misstep with Falstaff is to make a voice-over of his Honour soliloquy. While there’s nothing particularly wrong with the use of the voice-over – Hal’s at the beginning worked well enough – it is completely misplaced on the eve of battle. After all, Falstaff’s plays the coward and the braggart completely unapologetically through the battle. He drinks sack, plays dead rather than fight, and claims Hotspur’s corpse as his legitimate booty, in the teeth of Hal’s almost-disbelieving astonishment. His ‘the better part of valour is discretion’ speech is addressed direct to the camera.

Which is why the effect of Falstaff walking along the camp watching the soldiers prepare, and say his Honour soliloquy in voice-over while he looks grave, is more farcical than tragic. It was counterfeit Battle of Helm’s Deep.

But what was lost in Falstaff was more than made up for in Harry Percy. Joe Armstrong chewed up every scene he was in and I was half-wishing that Eyre had kept every line in the play, even if it added another hour to the run time, if it could keep Percy on screen for longer.

[image]

On the whole, though, despite the less than compelling Falstaff and the indifferently staged battle scenes, there was plenty to like and think about in the film. And of course, the central relationship being between the King and Hal, those scenes were well thought-out and played; in any case, Hiddleston has always played troubled relationships with fathers rather well* and this one is practically textbook.

Though the play doesn’t indicate as much, I thought it was clever to emphasise the King’s illness at the very end of Part I, in preparation for Part II.

Henry IV Part II screens on BBC2 tonight.

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*That's probably a separate post in itself; perhaps another time.

The Hollow Crown: Richard II

Like a good girl, I have been re-reading each of the history plays that make up BBC 2's Hollow Crown series - Richard II through to Henry V - before each week's broadcast. My much-handled and tattered copy of Richard II, which saw me through both school and college provided me with many hours of simple, wholesome entertainment: my notes, highlighted lines, biographical lists, dates, obssessive lineage making etc.

Also, at some point while studying Richard II, I seem to have read Heyer's My Lord John with fangirly attention, because (and this makes me blush slightly) the first time John of Gaunt makes an appearance, I have scribbled Belsire! next to his name. Yes, with the exclamation.

So watching Richard II turned out to be easier to do than watching Saturday's Henry IV Part I, for reasons I won't go into (which is to say, I haven't even begun watching Henry IV Part I).

 Ben Whishaw was just simply brilliant. I loved watching the expressions flicker across his face as he decided from moment to moment who he wanted to play - he was a total drama queen, totally hypnotic. For the rest, I thought there were several nice touches (the St. Sebastian portrait, the monkey in the joust scene, the general campiness of the courtiers) but I disapproved of the decision to make Aumerle Richard's assassin, instead of the play's Exton.

Hope I manage to watch Henry IV Part I today; have just watched about five minutes of it and was pleased with the intercutting between King and Hal, but more on that film later.

For entertainment, please read Hello, tailor on Richard II (and thereafter the Henry post, if you wish). Also (I need hardly say this any more, I feel) Supriya's Hollow Crown posts are lovely.

Can I just say: I am really enjoying the Shakespeare re-read. Can't think why I don't do this once a year.