Shakespeare and Response, Part Two

Listening

In Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning, Norman Rabkin maintains that “at a certain level of experience a work of art controls the responses of audiences who share its culture, even though each member of the audience may interpret those responses differently.” Yes, and further—Shakespeare’s plays can be said to be about response in that they draw attention toward how characters in a play respond to each other and, by extension, to how the audience of a play might respond to those responses. Accordingly, Rabkin invites critics “to learn to talk about the process of our involvement rather than our considered view after the aesthetic event.”

My word for this process of involvement is “listening.” In 2 Henry IV, Falstaff speaks of “the disease of not listening.” For a character who continually churns out a “throng of words,” his may strike us as a surprising complaint. Moreover, Falstaff has in fact attached himself to one of Shakespeare’s first competent and willing listeners. However painful we may find Hal’s ultimate rejection of Falstaff, by the time he becomes Henry V it is clear that he has mastered “a double spirit / Of teaching and of learning instantly.”

Hal’s listening begins as strategic rather than empathetic. In his first soliloquy, he admits to playing a part. He will “imitate the sun,” he tells us, allowing Falstaff and other “base contagious clouds” to smother up his beauty until such time as “this loose behaviour I throw off.” I write “tells us” in order to indicate that Shakespeare typically deploys the soliloquy in order to create an intimacy between character and audience. In addressing his audience so directly, Hal also flatters it, since by being taken into his confidence we are encouraged to feel that we are uniquely capable of sharing in his plans. Surely something more complex, however, than our feeling flattered is going on here. From the play’s opening scene, we are also made aware of being asked to listen to a master of manipulation, and so must count ourselves among those subject to being taken in by Hal’s long-laid plans.

Hal “studies his companions, / Like a strange tongue, wherein, to gain the language / ‘Tis needful that the most immodest word / Be looked upon and learnt.” It is as if he has chosen to enroll himself in a Berlitz crash course in wild speech. And he does gain the language he needs, proving more than competent to meet Falstaff jest for jest. Those who treasure Falstaff may find Hal’s strategic listening hard to stomach and his ultimate rejection of the fat knight unforgivable: “The King has killed his heart.” Given our foreknowledge of Hal’s plans, however, even such painful outcomes cannot be described as a surprise.

For the characters in the play on the other hand, Hal’s switch from “wildness” to “consideration” does seem to come out of the blue. “Never was such a sudden scholar made,” Canterbury says about the new King, in the opening scene of Henry V. We know rather that this “change” has been long in the making and that it did not happen “all at once.” Ely divines this to be the case: “the Prince obscured his contemplation / Under the veil of wildness,” like the strawberry that grows underneath the nettle.

We are also unsurprised at Henry’s turn if we have attended well to the fourth act of 2 Henry IV. There, in the scene with his dying father, we listen and watch as a prince becomes a king. In another painful psychomachia, this time a struggle not between a teacher and a student but a father and a son, Shakespeare invites Hal to try on the crown. As he takes it from his sleeping father’s head, a sleep Hal appears to mistake for death, the entire scheme of self-fashioning is put to the ultimate test.

Hal “puts the crown on his head” and exits the room. His father wakes, and cries for his crown. Informed that the Prince has “ta’en it hence,” the King then launches into...