Falstaff Gets the Sack

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...