Caveat Lector

When I was a sophomore in high school, I fell utterly in love with Henry IV Part One’s Hotspur. This, I presume, surprises no one? Idealistic (though his ideals are somewhat constrained), passionate, honest, believing the best of his allies, eager to excel himself, possessed of considerable native ability, jawdroppingly unstrategic, even more jawdroppingly tactless, intolerant of stupid lazy bureaucrats and not politic enough to hide or move past it, eyes too fixed on the prize to give way merely because of impossible odds.

Mm. Yes. Can’t imagine why such a character would resonate with me, even then… truthfully, I’m at once intrigued and appalled that my character was apparent so early as my sophomore year in high school.

He had to die. I understood that even in high school, and I understood that more was happening than mere plot. It is to Shakespeare’s credit that he took a historical necessity and made it a dramatic necessity. Now that I am older, I understand even better; honesty and excellence without charisma and politico-psychological awareness are not proof against treachery born of calculated cowardice. It is not Prince Hal who dooms Hotspur; it is not even Hotspur’s own weaknesses, many and tragic though they are. It is Northumberland and Worcester, those canny self-preserving politicians. (Shakespeare must have liked his Hotspur at least a little, to have gloated so in Worcester getting ‘the guerdon of his guile,’ as E.R. Eddison would have put it.)

I have a weakness for well-constructed drama leading to a sense that the denouement is perfectly inevitable and perfectly fitting. Henry IV Part One is pure brilliance in that regard. The finely-wrought difference between the relationships Hal and Hotspur have with their fathers (leaving Falstaff out of it for the nonce, though I wholeheartedly agree that Falstaff is Henry IV’s foil) makes me happy. No matter how unhappy Henry is with his wastrel son, he trusts him enough to leave him be, and when Hal makes a real promise of reform, Henry accepts it and acts upon it, though every ounce of sense must suggest otherwise. Northumberland squanders his son’s excellence because he will not, cannot believe in it.

You’re probably wondering what brought this on. Last weekend was a rental-car weekend, and I decided to splurge big on American Players Theatre tickets. It couldn’t have been more glorious weather for it, and there won’t be much more glorious weather in the Frozen North, and Henry IV Part One is my favorite Shakespeare play (edging out King Lear by a nose), so off we went. The pale-faced half-moon showed to beautiful advantage during the play; I could only smile at that.

We stopped first in Festge County Park for a few good walks and a picnic dinner. The nature trails there are unmarked (except at trailhead) and single-foot narrow, but worth the traversal. Summer is meditating giving way to autumn: hickory nuts and acorns litter the ground, spiderwebs are everywhere, burr-plants attach their cargo hopefully at the least provocation, and the trees look a little tired even though most are still deep-green. We happened upon a cute little toad in the woods, and an impressive woolly-bear in the picnic area. I brought a beautiful melon, caprese salad, baba ghanouj and hummus with pita to put it on, a bag of Terra Chips and a box of gingersnaps, and we were well content. I certainly can’t complain about the tomatoes, eggplant, basil, and melon from our CSA farm!

The only complaint I have about American Players Theatre is that the audiences are too polite. I did my best to be a proper groundling, laughing and cheering and hissing as appropriate, but I tell you what, Midwesterners are just not constitutionally capable of the groundling way of being. This is a pity, because my sense is that the company is more than capable of playing well off groundlings.

I thoroughly enjoyed David Daniel’s Hotspur. Although I understand that the production was trying to ground Hotspur in his basic churlishness, and I think that a reasonable decision, I do also think it a pity they cut his speech about honor from which this post’s title is taken. Leaving aside that it’s my favorite speech in the play (edging out Falstaff’s brilliant cynical battleground response to it by a nose), Hotspur’s idealism is his fuel and his raison d’etre; the blind recklessness it generates is his tragic flaw if you are a resolute Aristotelian (which I admit I’m not; I think tragedy is a systemic and interpersonal rather than purely individual phenomenon, and I hope this post speaks to that belief). Yes he’s tactless, yes he’s thoughtlessly stubborn, yes he’s a headstrong idiot—but it’s because he is too in love with his ideals, understands them too well and too thoroughly, to bend himself to earthly compromises, and the APT production lost that.

Both Henry and Hal, by contrast, are of the earth. Henry IV does not come out any too well in his own plays: a haunted conscience-stricken regicide, a rationalizer, a battleground coward (“the king hath many marching in his coats”), a cold and censorious father. Hal learns leadership in all its essential inglory from this father, and what the lack of leadership leads to from his second father Falstaff. (Hm. Falstaff as Northumberland’s mirror. Discuss.) Like his father, Hal employs whatever rationalizations come easily to hand to justify his bad behavior—the business about being a playboy now to make his reformation later all the more amazing is just weak sauce. Like his father, Hal learns to do what he must even when it hurts when the situation calls for it; the slaying of Hotspur and the rejection of Falstaff (and the hanging of Bardolph in the subsequent Henry V) all speak to that. Hotspur cannot bend so far, and so he is broken instead. Like his father—and I have argued that this is his father’s sole redeeming quality—Hal trusts his family, treating his younger brothers as brothers when he ascends to the throne, where a lesser king might have suspected or even executed them.

I would be remiss not to mention Brian Mani’s gorgeous Falstaff. It was such a perfectly comfortable performance; Mani managed the false paunch and the antiquated insults with equal easy glee, and the stage lit up with energy whenever he was on it. The hard edge here is that Falstaff and Hal are consciously and cruelly using each other, Hal for release, Falstaff for future illegal and immoral favor. When it comes down to it, neither really likes or appreciates the other. Hal grows beyond his self-indulgence when necessity demands it; Falstaff cannot, repeatedly does not, and that is why he must be turned away at the last.

It was a fine production of a play I love, even if I think the mashup needed a little work. (Henry’s death scene was, I’m sorry, interminable, and it didn’t fit thematically, either. The Greek convention of offstage deaths and Messengers could have been used to advantage here!) Though the drive home was a trifle scary owing to the lateness of the hour and intermittent fog, I wouldn’t change a thing—I had a glorious day.

Quite a few of my friends are struggling acutely with health problems of late. As I gird myself to go back to the doctor and reassess my own cardiovascular issues, I find that I feel compelled to do this kind of local travel, learn my area and hike in it and take advantage of the best that it offers, while I still can. “Able-bodied” and “financially solvent” are temporary and contingent conditions at best. It’s important that I make the most of them.