Page 88 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

The Hollow Crown I 77

ing the two, Hal combines the best of both without the worst of
either. Thus, as king, he will be warm yet orderly, an ideal prince.
John Gielgud was well chosen for "the old king," not only because
of his brilliant acting but due to his noticeably thin build; he exists
as a foil to Welles's fat Falstaff in physique as well as philosophy.
Gielgud's Henry IV, soliloquizing on his inability to enjoy the sleep
that commoners take for granted ("Uneasy is the head that wears a
crown"), reawakens that key theme. So does Hal, upon becoming
king, when he insists that he has actually "dreamed" his entire life
up to that point. He was "asleep" as to his responsibilities and
duties and is now awake for the first time. Falstaff is a part of that
prince's dream and must necesarily recede as the new king at last
opens his eyes.
When Henry IV dies and Hal is named king, Falstaff gleefully
shouts, "Take any man's horses; the laws of England are at my com-
mand." For Shakespeare, this was a horrific notion. If Falstaff were
to rejoin Hal, England would fall into chaos, once more an unweeded
garden. So when Hal ascends and sends Falstaff away, Shakespeare
presents Hal's transformation into a perfect prince, the polar oppo-
site of Richard III. Welles, however, lifted the opening scene from
Henry V, grafting it onto his movie's end, thereby providing a pes-
simistic ending, which details Falstaff's sad death. Clearly, Welles
and Will are, as artists, much like Beatrice and Benedick from Much
Ado About Nothing: Always there's a "merry war" between them.
Hal's imminent imperialism (the invasion of France) is something
Shakespeare heartily approved of. Welles does not; by having Keith
Baxter's Henry V step into the banners and all but disappear among
them, with his eyes suddenly sad, Welles visually implies that the
new king will be swallowed up by his role as world conqueror. To
present what Shakespeare actually intended, though, Welles would
more correctly have had Hal walk toward us, smiling broadly, ban-
ners waving wildly in the background. Welles was always less inter-
ested in filming Shakespeare, however, than using the source
material as a jumping-off point for an original work by Orson Welles.
In the most Catholic sense of the term, Shakespeare wrote a
redemption saga: Hal redeems himself by turning away from Fal-
staff. "Presume not," Hal tells his corpulent former companion,
"that I am the thing I was." Yet Hal's "noble change" in Shakespeare
is the prince's ignoble change in Welles—though, again to be fair to
the filmmaker, it's worth noting that audiences from the Eliza-
bethans to moderns have always fallen in love with Falstaff. The