“There’s honor for you,” Falstaff says over Sir Walter Blunt’s cooling corpse on the battlefield in 1 Henry IV. He knows he could easily be next. As Prince Hal leaves Falstaff’s world of revelry and petty crime to ascend in honor and glory, Sir Jack tags along to punctuate the heroic fights with cynicism and fear. It’s great storytelling, a dramatic structure we all recognize: the hero needs a less heroic sidekick.
Watching the play, we are both hero and sidekick. We know we must accept our destiny and fight our circumstances. But we’re also afraid, and kind of jaded — “Toasts-and-butter with hearts in our bellies no bigger than pins’ heads.” I’m having a ton of fun making Falstaff’s grim jokes, reminding everyone that the gout and the pox are waiting for them if they escape a sword’s point. But I mist the hell up listening to Hal, now Henry V, give that Agincourt speech. I want to stand a-tiptoe when this day is named.
Of course, I have to reflect on what Hal is so effectively inspiring us all to do. Invade France?! Which England has no chance in hell of keeping or governing? (Sorry, spoilers!!) After the battle, Hal gives all the credit for the victory to God. After his death, Joan of Arc will hear God tell her to kick the English out of France. God seems to switch sides some, like Warwick. (Spoilers!!)
We’re still living in an Anglo-centric world here in the 21st-century US, in Washington, DC, with all of our Shakespeare companies. France is still fun to beat up on. Scorpio, Homer Simpson’s supervillain boss, asks him “Who do you like least, France or Italy? …No one ever says Italy.” When people refer to “the Queen” in this democracy, they don’t mean the Queen of the Netherlands. It’s almost invisible how early modern English nationalism slides into our love of country.
I’m hoping that, as Falstaff, I can undercut that 400-year-old patriotism a little without ruining it for you. Brave Spirits is hoping that, by honoring Shakespeare’s excellent writing and structure, we can fill you with the power and hope of unity in struggle simultaneously with the lives lost, uprooted, or erased by civil war and imperial conquest.
This is our job. This is my job. After years of war and shifting justifications for war, I’m deeply suspicious of the rhetoric of honor and glory, of the calls to rally together to repel “Them.” As an artist, I have the opportunity to critique that rhetoric, to highlight it as what it is. Whether I’m playing a self-serving tyrant or a self-justifying coward (see my career at Brave Spirits), I’m a weapon in the quiver of a feminist theatre company with a decolonizing mission. Part of a team. Part of a unit.
Oh. We tavern layabout artists are the troops. The rhetoric of unity, the bonding power of shared adversity, the maniacal dedication to a shared goal, are of course essential to this art. We form elite units with every production. We sacrifice time with loved ones. We spend hours drilling to be as effective as we can.
The scale of this Histories project is so much bigger than anything I (or, I imagine, most of us) have done, that it is kind of like shipping out to France. We’ve got to believe in something bigger to sign up for a tour of a couple of years. And this is such an opportunity for most of us, to play so many amazing parts, to be part of something we hope will be, well, historic — I believe we will stand a-tiptoe when this rep is named.
It creeps me out, and I hope it creeps you out, to know to what uses really good rhetoric — and really good art — can be put. Shakespeare’s at the center of a canon some want to wall off and defend. I hope, though, that really good art can continue to speak to the times it’s traveling through. I hope that we’re bringing out all the voices — heroes and scoundrels, believers and doubters, perps and vics — in this immense series of Histories. I’m not trying to get you to “close the wall up with our English dead.” I’m trying, with the voice of an old fat unrepentant alcoholic, to help pry open the gates, see the whole picture, and hear all the voices.
— Ian Blackwell Rogers
With Richard the Second and Henry the Fourth, Part 1 now playing, you can see the first half of The King’s Shadow onstage now. Henry the Fourth, Part 2 opens February 13 and Henry the Fifth opens March 12!