[In the following essay, Peat considers contemporary stage interpretations of Act V, scene iii of Henry IV, Part 1 in which Hal is to throw a bottle of sack at Falstaff, arguing that postwar productions have tended to dispose of this action and in so doing have diminished Falstaff's overall comic potential.]

Toward the end of 1 Henry IV, the actor playing Hal is required to throw a bottle in anger at Falstaff. The stage direction “[He throws the bottle at him.] Exit” (5.3.56 s.d.) looks benign enough on the page, but throwing any object always poses staging problems and these multiply on an open stage.¹ As well as being problematic, the moment is also significant: how the bottle-throwing is played can change the balance of the scene, redefine the relationship between Falstaff and Hal, and perhaps even alter the effect of the play as a whole. This essay explores the possibilities of the scene through examination of two contrary staging solutions, arguing that one reflects several Royal Shakespeare Company traditions in relation to 1 Henry IV which appear to diminish Falstaff's comic role, while the other maintains it.

I

The bottle-throwing occurs during the battle at Shrewsbury. The scene begins with a single combat between Sir Walter Blunt, disguised as the king, and the rebel Douglas. Blunt is slain and in performance there is an important contrast between the swift exit of Hotspur and Douglas, with the stirring couplet “up and away! / Our soldiers stand full fairly for the day” (ll. 28-29), and Falstaff's slow entrance. Exit the heroic world, enter the world of anti-honor and blatant self-interest:

Though I could scape shot-free at London, I fear the shot here, here's no scoring but upon the pate. Soft! who are you? Sir Walter Blunt—there's honour for you! Here's no vanity! I am as hot as molten lead, and as heavy too: God keep lead out of me, I need no more weight than mine own bowels.

(ll. 30-35)

Falstaff's soliloquy is interrupted by Hal's entrance. The tension in the scene builds from this point until it explodes at the moment of the bottle-throwing. Hal's opening words emphasize the contrast between the battlefield heroes and Falstaff: “What, stands thou idle here? Lend me thy sword” (l. 40). Hal enters from the arena of action, and he wants a sword in order to return to it. Falstaff, very much in the mode of the earlier tavern scene (2.4), wants an interlude: “give me leave to breathe awhile—Turk Gregory never did such deeds in arms” (5.3.45-46). Only after Hal's third, increasingly exasperated request for the sword does Falstaff offer his pistol as an alternative:

PRINCE
Give it me: what, is it in the case?
FALSTAFF
Ay, Hal, 'tis hot, 'tis hot; there's that will sack a city.
[The Prince draws it out, and finds it to be a bottle of sack.]
PRINCE
What, is it a time to jest and dally now?
[He throws the bottle at him.] Exit.

(ll. 53-56)

The fat knight misjudges both the situation and the prince, having a joke about the pistol and the sack when Hal expects seriousness. The prince's angry retort, “What, is it a time to jest and dally now?” may well remind the audience of his opening soliloquy about “playing holidays” (1.2.199).

The scene's dramatic climax, the throwing of the bottle, is not only a striking mark of Hal's anger; it also seems to be a key symbolic moment. The rejection of the bottle may foreshadow the final rejection of Falstaff. The bottle is, after all, a symbol of the tavern world, which Hal has promised to reject. Perhaps the fact that it is offered instead of the sword, the symbol of the world of chivalry, is also significant. In a play that pits the tavern against the court, the balance appears to swing toward chivalry and honor and away from Falstaff's questioning of them. Falstaff's short soliloquy ends the scene:

Well, if Percy be alive, I'll pierce him. If he do come in my way, so: if he do not, if I come in his willingly, let him make a carbonado of me. I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath. Give me life, which if I can save, so: if not, honour comes unlooked for, and there's an end. Exit.

(ll. 57-62)

In another echo of that earlier tavern scene, these lines express Falstaff's realization that Hal has turned from him. He may be taken aback and, as his jokes fall flat, appear deflated, almost pathetic.

That interpretation is all right as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far. Having recognized the dramatic importance of the bottle, it conveniently forgets that the bottle exists as a stage property. Productions may choose to do likewise. In the BBC television version, for example, Anthony Quayle's Falstaff simply ducked as the bottle whistled over his head to conveniently vanish off-camera.² Something similar may happen on a proscenium stage as the bottle disappears into the wings. What might happen on an open stage, the kind for which the scene was written, and what would be the effect?

II

Michael Attenborough's 2000-2001 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company looked as if it would provide answers to these two questions. The Stratford production was taking place on the open stage of the Swan Theatre, and the program, at the head of its note on Falstaff's character, quoted the lines “Give me life, which if I can save, so: if not, honour comes unlooked for, and there's an end.” My expectations were high, but the moment of the bottle-throwing itself turned out to be an anticlimax. It was almost as if the stage direction had been rewritten “throws the bottle down.”³ This was precisely what happened as William Houston's Hal simply threw the bottle to the floor. The gesture was clearly meant as one of rejection, but the staging, far from showing anger, risked leaving Hal appearing petulant. The bottle was then simply ignored as Desmond Barrit's Falstaff turned back from watching Hal's exit to address the audience. He didn't respond to the prince's words or to his gesture but was intent on making the point “Give me life.” The production obviously saw this as a key moment, or the lines wouldn't have been reproduced in the program, but the intended effect was far from clear. As he spoke the lines, Barrit stretched out both hands toward the audience. John Peter, reviewing the play for the Sunday Times, heard the lines as “pleadingly life-affirming,” which he considered “quite wrong.”⁴ I wasn't sure exactly how we were to take either lines or gesture; whether the words were a real prayer or whether we, the audience, were somehow this Falstaff's “life.” Perhaps he was pleading with us not to reject him as Hal just had.

By downplaying the bottle-throwing itself and emphasizing Falstaff's lines, Attenborough hoped to engage the audience's sympathies on behalf of a rejected Falstaff. If so, he was working within what is almost an RSC tradition. In postwar RSC productions the idea of seeing 1 Henry IV as part of a tetralogy has meant that, toward the end of Part 1, Falstaff is usually well on the road to rejection.⁵ The qualities of the character found in Part 2 are read back into Part 1, and the play then “focuses on the Hal/Falstaff relationship, the rejection of Falstaff and the development of Hal's character to Kingship.”⁶ This was director John Barton's description of his RSC production for schools, When Thou Art King, a compilation of scenes from both parts. His comment was made in the 1960s, but similar thinking seems to have informed subsequent RSC productions. As a result, Falstaff has lost some of his importance and a good deal of his comedy, especially toward the end of Part 1. The process of diminution may have a long history. Writing in the 1940s about the popularity of Falstaff in the eighteenth century, Harold Child remarked: “Falstaffs, in fact, are so many as to suggest that the part was to the stage of those days what Hamlet is to ours.”⁷ By the time Child wrote the situation was already rather different, and the history of the role at the Royal Shakespeare Company over the past fifty years suggests that Falstaff's fortunes have continued to decline. There have been only six productions in that period, during which Falstaff has become, at best, a co-star and, at worst, a support for either Hal or Henry, who in recent RSC productions has become the starring role.⁸

The Attenborough production followed all these traditions. When I saw the production, it was playing in repertory with Richard II, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V and would eventually form part of the RSC's millennium project as one of the full cycle of history plays. Desmond Barrit was an excellent Falstaff, with a sonorous voice to match the largeness of his frame, but his comic presence was not allowed to dominate.⁹ Significantly, it was not his face featured on the advertising posters but that of David Troughton, the best-known actor in the company, who played Henry and who was firmly at this production's center. With Henry in this position and Hal developing “towards kingship,” there is a tendency to downplay Falstaff's comedy. I think this can unbalance the ending of Part 1.

These Stratford traditions might create a general context for the Attenborough production's interpretation of the bottle-throwing scene, but I suspect their staging of the moment itself was the result of simple practicality. In the Swan, with the audience seated around the open stage and with the heads of playgoers in the front row no more than three feet from it, this staging solved a problem. If you throw a bottle at someone on an open stage, something is likely to go wrong; throw it down, and you minimize the danger. Why, then, does the original stage direction use at, and how did this manage to get through the quartos and Folios unchanged?

III

Hal throws the bottle after an exit line. Since his eagerness to return to the field of battle is obvious, on an Elizabethan open stage he may already be heading for the tiring-house when he “finds it to be a bottle of sack” and turns to throw it at Falstaff (5.3.55). The First Folio seems to support such an action, as the word Exit appears at the beginning of the stage direction: “Exit. / Throwes it at him” (TLN 2948-49).¹⁰ Because the original property bottle was probably made of wood or leather rather than glass, the bottle could miss without breakage; but if it ended up in the audience, there was risk of another sort. If the bottle hit a groundling, this would entirely undercut the prince's gesture and run the further risk of the actors losing control when the bottle was thrown back. Shades of the Red Bull riot! The assumption here is that the bottle misses Falstaff; perhaps this is the problem. What if the bottle doesn't miss? What if Falstaff catches it?

Catching the bottle may make a point in itself. After all, in Falstaff's world a bottle is obviously more useful than a pistol, so he may exert himself to ensure it isn't lost. Once the actor has the property in hand, he isn't likely to ignore it. The earlier interpretation ignored something else, too: the changing relationship between the stage and the audience in the course of this scene. During the opening exchanges, the fight, and the speeches of Hotspur and Douglas members of the audience are simply observers; but with Falstaff's entrance this alters. Falstaff speaks to the audience in soliloquy; the move from verse to prose emphasizes this change. His relationship with the audience turns intimate and direct—a relationship that he alone has with them in this scene. To an extent, Falstaff stands outside the action, commenting on it in his role of critic. He is an intermediary between the audience and the other actors. With Hal's entrance the audience members again become observers, but at the end of the scene Shakespeare gives Falstaff a property and, as so often in this play, gives him something else besides—the last word. What are the possibilities?

I explored this question in 1985 when I was the group leader of a University of Sydney activity entitled A Weekend in the Country with William Shakespeare, a study school for continuing-education students. The weekend included a workshop production of 1 Henry IV, and I suggested to Gordon MacDougal, an experienced actor, that he catch the bottle and, if possible, use it to reestablish his relationship with the audience. This is what happened.

The opening word of line 57, “Well,” became the transition as Falstaff turned to address the audience after watching Hal's exit. Then the bottle became a sword as he used it to run through an imaginary Percy on “if Percy be alive, I'll pierce him. If he do come in my way, so …” (there was an echo here of his earlier Gad's Hill mime). Exhausted by his exertions, this Falstaff followed with the self-parody of “if he do not, if I come in his willingly, let him make a carbonado of me.” Then Falstaff again reminded the audience where Hal's chivalric world could lead—“I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath”—and he finally put the bottle to its right use, uncorking it and taking a good swig on “Give me life.” This led him into the final line, when he discovered he'd emptied the bottle, upended it to check, and then clapped the cork back in, on “there's an end.” The audience roared its appreciation.

I should emphasize that I didn't direct MacDougal to do the things described above. The performance was his response to my suggestion that he catch the bottle and my general comment about reestablishing his relationship with the audience. We know there wasn't a director, as such, in Shakespeare's time, and it is quite possible that Shakespeare's actors made similar interpretive decisions. I don't think the actor was playing against the lines. I think he was allowing Falstaff to be as comic as he used to be. The playing stressed both Hal's criticism and Falstaff's comic response; in the process, it maintained the balance of the scene, which, when Falstaff is cowed at the end, is tipped in favor of Hal. What the playing wasn't doing was placing the emphasis, as recent Stratford productions have tended to, on the rejection of Falstaff.

Certainly, Shakespeare's strategy in 1 Henry IV is to keep the audience waiting for Falstaff's rejection by Hal and to show Falstaff making a series of brilliant recoveries. His “By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that made ye” (2.4.263-64) is perhaps the most famous of these. The audience keeps wondering, “how will he get out of it this time?” The bottle-throwing is another such moment of recovery.

The first part of Henry IV presents a problem of comic tone, and the comic richness of the play, which largely centers on Falstaff, undercuts the world of honor and chivalry. At the end, that ethos may appear to be dominant as Hal and Henry triumph at Shrewsbury, but the point, in this play at least, is that Falstaff isn't rejected, and Shakespeare goes to considerable lengths to sustain the fat knight's importance to the end. On an open stage, as I have suggested, a character develops his most intimate relationship with an audience through the direct address of soliloquy. In the final act of Part 1, Shakespeare gives Falstaff no fewer than five soliloquies, but he goes even further by allowing him to have the last word in three of Act 5's five scenes. Notably, Falstaff's very last lines have a connection with the earlier bottle-throwing:

I'll follow, as they say, for reward. He that rewards me, God reward him! If I do grow great, I'll grow less, for I'll purge, and leave sack, and live cleanly as a nobleman should do.

(5.5.160-64)

The reference to sack concludes a sequence that began back in Act 4, scene 2, where Falstaff instructed Bardolph: “fill me a bottle of sack” (ll. 1-2). We've seen the sack masquerade as a pistol, and we've seen the bottle thrown across the stage. In the Sydney workshop performance, on the final lines, Falstaff simply patted his holster with a knowing look at the audience, who gave the familiar moan that reveals disbelief. Ever since leading their responses in his “honour” catechism (5.1.127-41), Falstaff had been goading them to react, and there were even some who cried “No!” Falstaff exited to a grand ovation, the “reward” he had suggested. Such a triumphant comic exit might go some way toward suggesting why the knight's original audience wanted him to return. When he did so in 2 Henry IV, his character would be very different, and now the reading back of the character's fate into Part 1 may deny the triumph entirely.

It will be obvious that I consider the bottle-throwing a key moment in the play. It came as a surprise to me, then, to find that it rarely attracts a comment in reviews or in promptbooks.¹¹ I can only wonder whether the sheer technical difficulty of the bottle-throwing, especially when it must be repeated, performance after performance, means that productions take an easy way out, as Attenborough's did. About the status of Falstaff at Stratford the evidence is much better. In the postwar age, as 1 Henry IV has focused on Hal or Henry, Falstaff appears to have “grow[n] less.” Perhaps even though he doesn't catch the bottle, he got the sack after all.

Notes

1. Quotations of 1 Henry IV follow the Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (Walton-on-Thames, UK: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1998), 361-92.

2. Henry IV, Part I, BBC and Time-Life Television Productions, Inc., dir. David Giles, 1979.

3. The promptbook for Anthony Quayle's 1951 Stratford production, now part of the Shakespeare Centre Library collections, reveals that this is precisely how the direction was rewritten for that production. As I suggest, this production seems to be at the start of several recent Stratford traditions, and perhaps the staging of the bottle-throwing is another of these.

4. John Peter, Theatre Record, 8-21 April 2000, 504.

5. Influenced by J. Dover Wilson's ideas about the continuities of the histories (see The Fortunes of Falstaff [Cambridge: The University Press; New York: Macmillan, 1944], 1-36, esp. 17), the tetralogy was performed in 1951 with Anthony Quayle as co-director. Since then, 1 Henry IV has never played alone at the RSC. In the 1960s the two parts played with Henry V. In the 1970s The Merry Wives of Windsor joined these plays to form a new tetralogy. In the 1980s the RSC opened its new London home, the Barbican, with Henry IV, a play in two parts. In the 1990s Henry IV again accompanied Richard II and Henry V. In the 2000 season at Stratford the RSC presented this same tetralogy, designed to build during 2001 into the full sequence of the histories entitled This England.

6. From the program notes for When Thou Art King, adapted and devised by John Barton, 1969. Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that the RSC's latest attempt to stage all the histories should hark back to the last time they were involved in such an enterprise in the '60s with the various Barton productions. Barton also adapted and cut these together for BBC television to form an epic production, not unlike the 2000 season's This England, entitled An Age of Kings. Gareth Lloyd Evans described this approach to the histories as “a shrewd theatrical justification for the scholarly theory of their original serial conception by Shakespeare” (“Shakespeare, the Twentieth Century and ‘Behaviourism’,” Shakespeare Survey 20 [1967]: 133-42, esp. 136).

7. The First Part of the History of Henry IV, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1946), xxxvi. Harold Child provided a review of the play's stage history for this edition.

8. The last time the role of Falstaff went to a major “star” at Stratford was arguably when Anthony Quayle, in 1951, played Falstaff “with such determination to avoid clowning as to border on solemnity” (Evening Standard, 4 April 1951). With a young Richard Burton playing Hal in the production, the shift to the emphasis on the prince was ready to begin. In the 1960s Paul Rogers's Falstaff and Tony Church's sickly Henry were both overshadowed by Ian Holm as a very strong Hal. In the 1970s Paul Rogers, again as Falstaff, continued to play second fiddle to Alan Howard's prince. King Henry became the primary role with the launch of the RSC's London home at the Barbican in 1982. The star of Trevor Nunn's Henry IV, a play in two parts, if there was one (as Hotspur, Timothy Dalton, later to achieve fame as James Bond, virtually stole the show in Part 1), was neither Joss Ackland's Falstaff nor Gerard Murphy's Hal but Patrick Stewart's Henry. A case could be made for Robert Stephens being the exception to the “no-stars” rule. He played Falstaff in Adrian Noble's 1991 production, although, as Robert Smallwood noted, “[Julian] Glover's Henry IV gave the play's title more meaning than in any production I remember … he dominated Part 1” (“Shakespeare at Stratford-upon-Avon, 1991,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 [1992]: 341-56, esp. 343).

9. My own response was echoed by most of the reviewers who thought the emphasis of the production was on David Troughton's King Henry. Only Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph thought that Attenborough allowed “Desmond Barrit to dominate the proceedings, often gloriously, as Falstaff” (Theatre Record, 8-21 April 2000, 501). Reviewers described Barrit's Falstaff as “wistful and affectionate” (John Gross, The Sunday Telegraph), “less the jovial wit-cracker than a Christ-Wgure wreathed in silvery pathos” (Michael Billington, The Guardian), “the vein of melancholy beneath the laughter is there” (Robert Gore-Langton, The Express), “beautifully mellow and relaxed and tinged with camp” (Paul Taylor, The Independent), all quoted here from Theatre Record, 8-12 April 2000, 500-504.

10. Through-line-number citations of F1 follow The Norton Facsimile, The First Folio of Shakespeare, prep. Charlton Hinman, 2d ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996).

11. One exception was a review of a production in which “the bottle” wasn't thrown at all. In his coverage of a Shakespeare Santa Cruz production directed by Michael Edwards, Alan C. Dessen reports that the bottle was actually a can of beer, and Hal, realizing that Falstaff would suffer more if he couldn't get it back, decided not to throw it. Later in the battle a hot Hal drank from the can and tossed it to Hotspur, who did likewise (“Staging Shakespeare's History Plays in 1984: A Tale of Three Henrys,” Shakespeare Quarterly 36 [1985]: 71-79). In at least three of the RSC productions since Quayle's the bottle has not been caught.