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Chapter 6 Rewriting Shakespeare The Henriad with and without Falstaff C hapters four and five have addressed some of the counterfactual scenarios , the “what ifs” posed by historical fiction: what if secular drama evolved directly in response to acting companies’ interventions in local events? What if Queen Elizabeth bore a child, or was secretly married, or was vulnerable to blackmail because of her sexual activities? Such speculations question traditional historical metanarratives. This chapter looks at novels that pose alternative scenarios of a rather different order. Shakespeare’s renditions of English history have long been such familiar fixtures in British and North American culture that readers tend to be taken aback by interpretations that dispute them. Even when based on detailed research, such accounts—whether fictional, scholarly, or both—seem paradoxically less “real” than the plays’ familiar portrayals of the English kings, their allies, families, and enemies. Many Shakespeare plays have inspired fictional appropriations and offshoots , some motivated by a desire to fill in gaps and resolve critical cruxes, other ranging from the playful and irreverent to the bitterly satirical. Such fictions often exploit the reader’s resistance to tampering with the Bard’s words and characters, and in doing so send us back to the playtext with new questions, new readings, new awareness of passages or clues passed over or taken for granted.1 A recent example of this kind of fictional rethinking of a Shakespeare play is John Updike’s Gertrude and Claudius. This extended 143 144 Constructing a World speculation about the events that led to King Hamlet’s death belongs at once to the past of Shakespeare’s sources and to the present of Updike’s many novels and stories about male-female relationships. Shakespeare’s history plays lend themselves to this kind of revisioning because they are themselves historical fictions. Working from histories, chronicles, hearsay, and politically biased documents of various kinds, Shakespeare reimagined episodes in Western history from the death of Julius Caesar to the early reign of Henry VIII. Like nearly every subsequent writer in the genre, he took the liberty of adding fictitious characters to his cast of historically documented ones. In the fifteen historical or quasi-historical Shakespeare plays derived primarily from Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans and Holinshed’s Chronicles, no invented character is comparable to Falstaff. Falstaff appears or is mentioned in four plays, including The Merry Wives of Windsor, a wholly fictitious comedy written after 1 Henry IV specifically as a showcase for further Falstaffian exploits. This chapter focuses on two historical novels of the 1970s inspired by the Henriad (1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V). Falstaff is entirely absent from one novel; in the other, he is the narrator and principal subject of a mock memoir that runs to 450 pages. Edith Pargeter’s A Bloody Field by Shrewsbury and Robert Nye’s Falstaff employ entirely different historical fiction strategies, for each novel is descended from a discrete lineage of fiction writing with its own conventions and posture toward the hypothetical reader. However, both novelists presume upon the reader’s familiarity with the plays and thus critique, interpret, and embellish the documented historical accounts from which Shakespeare and his contemporaries derived their understanding of the past. In all of the editing and revisions that Shakespeare’s work has been subjected to, there has never been a 1 or 2 Henry IV without Falstaff. It goes without saying that Falstaff is intrinsic to these plays in the way that Bottom, for example, is intrinsic to A Midsummer Night’s Dream; both display a comic genius that makes their roles star turns, and unlike their near relatives, the Porter or the Gravediggers, both have names and a recurring presence in their plays. Falstaff’s popularity may well have prompted Shakespeare to write 2 Henry IV, and there is a legend that The Merry Wives of Windsor was written expressly at the request of Queen Elizabeth, who wanted to see Falstaff in love. When Shakespeare’s plays were subjected to the rules of decorum during the Restoration and eighteenth century, important characters such as Lear’s Fool disappeared altogether and virtually all of the plays performed during those years were radically transformed so as to minimize bawdy and broadly comic elements. The Henry IV plays fared otherwise: John Russell Brown notes that as early as 1612, 2 Henry IV seems to have been called Sir John Falstaffe when performed at court and in 1625 the...

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