The young Kenneth Tynan once wrote that if he had only an hour to spend in theatres “and could choose at large, no question but I would choose here.” The “here” in question was the Gloucestershire estate of Master Robert Shallow, Justice of the Peace, site of three wonderful scenes in Henry IV, Part Two. They must have been especially wonderful in the production, in London at the end of the war, on which Tynan was reporting, one in which Shallow was played by Laurence Olivier and Sir John Falstaff, his fair-weather guest, by Ralph Richardson. But even without that twice-knightly casting those scenes are amazing. They aren’t quite like anything else ...in Shakespeare. Set largely in an orchard, they contribute to the autumnal tone of the whole play, but there is a hyper-naturalism about them that sets them apart. They’re written in a prose that captures, not just the main currents of everyday speech but its bywaters and eddies. Shallow’s own words, ingratiating with Falstaff, rambling and gossipy with his cousin Silence, float along on the old man’s stream of consciousness. “How a good yoke of bullocks at Stamford Fair?” That line on its own, spoken a split second after he’s been meditating on the inevitability of death, is enough to disprove the idea that anyone but “the man from Stratford” can have written the plays. Gloucestershire is next door to Warwickshire where Shakespeare grew up. In his youth, he must have seen and observed many men like Shallow, though perhaps not quite so many like Falstaff. Falstaff was one of a kind.

Some ten years later Tynan was proclaiming that the two Henry IV plays were “the twin summits” of Shakespeare’s achievement, contrasting them favourably with the tragedies as “great public plays, in which a whole nation is under scrutiny and on trial”. Whether they are in fact greater than King Lear or, come to that, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is open to question, but there’s no doubt that they paint an extraordinarily broad and comprehensive canvas, comical and tragical as well as historical.  The production that so inspired Tynan was at the Old Vic in 1955 and was generally agreed to be one of that company’s finest, directed by the history specialist Douglas Seale, fresh from his triumphs with Henry VI. I begged to be taken to it, but there were no tickets to be had. The Gloucestershire scenes in that one, with Paul Rogers and Paul Daneman, two of my favourites, as Falstaff and Shallow, must have been amazing.

I was especially keen to see Part Two as I had already seen Part One. This was in 1954 at the King’s Theatre in Hammersmith – pretty much my local theatre, soon to be taken over by the BBC like the even closer Shepherd’s Bush Empire – and it was presented by Donald Wolfit’s company. Wolfit directed it, “devised” the setting (I think that’s how the program put it) and – naturally – played Falstaff. One of a great generation of English actor-knights – the others being Olivier, Richardson, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave and Alec Guinness – he stood apart from all the rest. They were professedly ensemble actors, even when they were running the ensembles themselves. They were also metropolitan animals. Wolfit was an actor-manager, practically in the Victorian tradition, touring the country with supporting players who were generally thought to be woefully inadequate. I can’t say they struck me that way in my innocent youth (I seem to remember a rather good Hotspur, recently out of the Royal Air Force and sounding like it) but there is no doubt that it was Wolfit, a steam-hammer of an actor, whom people came to see and that he knew it. And he gave great value, certainly as Falstaff. Probably he sentimentalised the role, probably I’d think now that he made the old reprobate too lovable, but he had enormous gusto, enormous command, and he made the great set-pieces enormously funny. I was not to see another Falstaff as richly spoken and acted until Douglas Campbell (an actor somewhat in the Wolfit tradition) made the last of his many assaults on the role at Stratford, Ontario. Wolfit himself, I think, never played it again and never played Part Two at all; that Hammersmith season was for practical purposes his company’s last. But of all the knights, he was the one whose work, when I was growing up, I knew best because, unlike the others, he appeared regularly on radio and television. On radio he played, irresistibly, a genial succession of Elizabethan roisterers; on TV he thankfully re-created what some think was his greatest stage role, Ben Jonson’s Volpone. Volpone is Venetian but there was something Asiatic about Wolfit’s performance: sharp, savage, luxuriant and unapproached by any other actor I have seen play it. Volpone might be described as Falstaff without the grace-notes and the regrets: rogue unvarnished.

As things turned out, I had to wait a long time to see Henry IV Part Two on the professional stage. For fairly obvious reasons, it’s hardly ever produced on its own. I did see an amateur production, largely staged and performed by the stage-struck teachers at my school (and very good they were too). I also saw another independent Part One, staged by the Old Vic in its declining days. It was a featureless production with, as I recall, a notably ugly set. Douglas Campbell, making a brief British return from his adopted homeland of Canada, played one of his earlier Falstaffs and got poor reviews. He had played Bottom the same season, and if his Falstaff was anything like that performance then, yes, it would have been pretty routine. He had left the production by the time I saw it, to be replaced by my future friend Joss Ackland who was too young for the role but made an excellent shot at it. “You that are old” says Falstaff to the Lord Chief Justice “consider not the capacities of us that are young” and he has a point. His body is diseased and decaying but his mind sparkles. It’s logical that his should be a role that actors return to. It’s a shame – no, a tragedy – that Richardson, whose performance is legendary, never played it again. He had decades left. Ackland’s second chance came many years after his first, in the RSC’s inaugural production of both parts in their new, and as it turned out, short-lived London home in the Barbican. Trevor Nunn’s production was disappointing, certainly by his standards, but Joss offered a shrewd humane Falstaff, visibly shocked by some of the more cynical things going on around him.

My first professional Part Two was on television, part of the BBC’s complete history cycle An Age of Kings in 1960. This was a great undertaking of which the two parts of Henry IV were the unquestioned crown; each was even allowed an extra half-hour’s playing time. Apart from huge moment-to-moment vitality, Peter Dews’ productions were outstandingly intelligent, bringing out parallels between the plays’ public and private actions, between court and tavern, instead of, as often happens, letting each go its own way. Robert Hardy, who had played Prince Hal in the Old Vic production I had so tragically missed, got to play the role again and this time to carry it through into Henry V; he was charming, inspiring, calculating and ruthless. Hotspur was a still-emerging Sean Connery, and it’s astonishing, watching the series again on DVD, to realise how good he was: a mixture of shyness and bravado with the actor’s native Scots standing in very nicely for the character’s native Northumbrian. Smaller roles were lit up; the supporting rebel Lord Hastings, described by his opponents as “shallow, much too shallow”, was played as something of a fop: a minor revelation. The actor, Robert Lang, was a wily member of An Age of Kings’ permanent company who kept recurring throughout the cycle with guest players brought in for some of the principal male roles and all of the female ones. There was a broad sweep with lovely tiny moments; I have a fond memory of Shallow (William Squire) doing a little kick-step to illustrate the cry of “hem boys” from the mad days of his youth and of Silence (John Warner), in a world of his own, doing his best to follow along. This TV production remains, somewhat to my surprise, the best Henry IV double header I’ve seen.

The two plays had also by all accounts been the highpoints, Part One especially, of the 1951 Festival of Britain Richard II to Henry V cycle at Stratford-on-Avon. This was the most ambitious theatrical attempt up to that time to prove that the four parts are really one huge play. Whether it actually managed to do that was much debated, but the productions made their own kind of history and the cast seems incredible: Anthony Quayle, Stratford’s artistic director at the time, as Falstaff, Michael Redgrave as Hotspur, Richard Burton a hypnotic Hal. In 1964 the RSC, as it now was, honoured another celebration year – the Shakespeare Quatercentenary – by adding the same four plays to the previous season’s Wars of the Roses: the complete octology in fact and, at last if perhaps less momentously, my opportunity to cross Henry IV Part Two off my list. I confess to having been mildly disappointed. The productions (by the Roses team of Peter Hall and John Barton, plus Clifford Williams) were good, undoubtedly: very good in fact, thorough and intelligent and majestically designed. Ian Holm was a fine watchful Hal, clear and lucid with troubled and troubling depths. Roy Dotrice took on the Olivier double of young Hotspur and old Shallow, being himself somewhere between the two: a virtuoso performance hugely enjoyed by all including, perhaps too obviously, the actor himself. (Anyone who missed Dotrice’s Shallow could get a good idea of it from his long-lasting one-man show Brief Lives, the reminiscences of John Aubrey, senescent Elizabethan antiquarian. Oh the mad days that he had seen.) Henry IV himself, that bisected monarch, is one of those Shakespearean title characters (like Julius Caesar, Henry VIII and Cymbeline) who tends to get upstaged by those with stronger and usually longer roles, though his sickness and death in Part Two do much to set that play’s elegiac tone. The Henry in this production was Eric Porter, a highly intelligent and skilful actor who never quite attained to greatness. He had an impressive pedigree in the role, having played it in the 1955 Old Vic production. And before that, he had played Bolingbroke, Henry’s younger self, to the Richard II of Paul Scofield, in a production directed by Gielgud. This Stratford history season gave him the chance to put these earlier experiences together: to play the ambiguously reluctant usurper from youth to death. I wish I could remember more about his performance, or at least remember being excited by it.  What really bothered me, though it seemed to have delighted everyone else, was the Falstaff of Hugh Griffith, a Welsh wizard of an actor, fruity and flamboyant, perfect for Owen Glendower (whom he had in fact played the last time around at Stratford). He looked right and felt right; he even sounded right, in a generalised way. The specifics, though, got lost: gabbled and mumbled and sometimes absent altogether. Without his words, and his exact words, Falstaff, as he might have said himself, dwindles.

He was more richly played, certainly more richly spoken, by Brewster Mason, an actor with a ripe clubman’s delivery, in the RSC’s next history bash ten years later, directed by Terry Hands. (Twin Henry IVs, with or without prequels and sequels, are now the almost invariable rule. One exception is a Stratford, Ontario production of Part One that was inexplicably abused for making Hotspur funny. But he is funny.) Hands’ Part Two was far better than his Part One. And this may mark a sea-change in the way the plays are regarded. Traditionally Part One has been given the palm, for being so neatly constructed. There it geometrically is: Hal in the middle, Falstaff on one side decrying “honour”, Hotspur on the other, fetishizing it: rival temptations. At the end Hotspur is dead, Falstaff vows reformation, Hal is free: reconciled with his father and marching off with him to future victories. And, Hotspur being as lively a character as Falstaff, the play’s two worlds are beautifully balanced. Part Two has been considered ramshackle by comparison, the new gang of rebels far less colourful than the old, Falstaff given more rope and taking over the play, Hal largely absent because his author  can’t find anything to do with him until the end when he breaks our hearts by breaking Falstaff’s. A critic in Shakespeare Survey once wrote that Part Two “has pot-boiler written all over it”: a sequel written to give the public more Falstaff, with a tavern scene placed at exactly the same structural point as its predecessor and a second reconciliation scene between king and prince, Hal having apparently been hurled back to where he started “as in some cosmic game of snakes and ladders”.

That’s a good phrase. But in fact Hal’s backsliding seems to me thoroughly believable. He’s proved himself at the battle of Shrewsbury but it has exhausted him, mentally if not physically. And court life seems as boring as ever. So he relaxes into old haunts and old habits, but not in the old frame of mind. One of the least remarked but most remarkable scenes in Part Two shows him complaining to Poins, the most presentable of his old companions, that he is “exceeding weary”. World-weary, I’d say: of both his worlds. When he enters the tavern, impersonating a drawer to spy on Falstaff, he doesn’t seem to take much joy in it, and it’s the last time he’ll do it. At the end of the scene, he’s called off to the wars, just as he was at the equivalent moment in Part One. But then he left with a jest on his lips; this time it’s with self-blame and a curt “Falstaff, good night” that will be the last thing he says to his old misleader until “I know thee not, old man.” The old man meanwhile is feeling his age and its ailments (“a pox on this gout – or a gout on this pox”) and waxing philosophical about it in a mode half tolerant, half cynical (“Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying”). Shakespeare’s capacity for getting inside his characters’ heads, catching their very accents while seeing them whole and unillusioned, was never more dazzlingly displayed than here.

“Doomsday is near”, cried Hotspur on the eve of battle in Part One, “die all, die merrily.” Nobody dies merrily in Part Two or thinks of doing so. They do think of dying, constantly; the king and Shallow, in their different ways, are resigned to it; Falstaff would rather not be reminded of it. “Do not speak like a death’s head”, he says to Doll Tearsheet, “do not bid me remember mine end”. (Fitting, perhaps, that in Henry V he should have the most memorable requiem in world literature: the saddest and the funniest. Shakespeare, having left him out of the play proper, must have felt he owed it to him.) When people in Henry IV are not speaking of death, they are speaking of sickness and linking it to the ill-health of England itself, never knowing who is its rightful king. Henry IV Part Two, as noted above, is an autumnal play, and by that measure a very modern one. The structural perfection of Part One seems chilly by comparison. Terry Hands professes finding the supposed greatness of Part One to be a mirage, while discovering infinite riches in Part Two; and though he may have been rationalising his failure with the first and his success with the second, he has a point. But we don’t have to choose. There is a marvellously unbuttoned feeling about Part Two; a sense, especially in the prose scenes, of the dramatist coming fully into his own and knowing it. “I am not only witty in myself”, Falstaff famously says, “but the cause wit is in other men.” His chutzpah is justified, and so is Shakespeare’s.