"Henry IV, Part 2" of The Hollow Crown Tetralogy

The frail Henry IV (Jeremy Irons) is finally reconciled to his son, Hal, before his death. When Hal (Tom Hiddleston) comes to the throne as Henry V, he is left to bury the ghosts of his father’s past while fighting both the French forces as well as his own inner demons.

Henry IV fights his frailty and dismisses the ministrations of his ministers, but there is no denying the approaching end.  From tumbling to the floor, to lying beside with his crown, to handing it over to Prince Hal, the stellar drama of The Hollow Crown thus continues.

The fact that I could hardly pay attention in the first half of this film is just my personal thing.  I can be easily distracted.  It doesn't speak to the drama Shakespeare so deftly and patiently unfolds in Part 2.  As I mentioned to my friend, Paul, I had read this play only once and had never seen it performed.  I was polite when I said that it's a very different tone than Part 1, which meant that I was frankly bored halfway through the film.

But, oh, how the second half is the fruition of Shakespeare's dramatic patience and prowess.

That sequence of scenes with Henry IV is superb.  When he awakens in a startle, with his bedside pillow empty, he rushes to his throne, only to find his eldest sitting on it and wearing his crown.  We know that things were not as they appeared.  So as Henry IV expends quite a lot of breath chiding Prince Hal, we cringe and want to say 'Dear King, it isn't so.'

But it's the "I know thee not, old man" passage in Act V, scene v that I found most heartbreaking.  It was the most heartbreaking when I read this play 30 years ago, too.  Falstaff is of course the ringleader among the demons of Prince Hal's youth, made incarnate as a jolly, cagey and lying fellow.  This exchange breaks my heart, because in the drama he is no abstract figure but a real person.  To be dismissed so flagrantly in public like that is mighty cruel of the now Henry V.  Simon Russell Beale acts this scene so so poignantly brilliant.  
After Falstaff finally catches the new King's attention with:

My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!

The King responds thus:

I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream'd of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell'd, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform'd the tenor of our word. Set on.

PBS makes the entire Henry IV, Part 2 available (free) November 5th.  So if you happen to read this article, watch it before then.  This, and The Hollow Crown series, are a superb production indeed.