IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON
And so, as we continue through the Summer Season of history plays at Shakespeare’s Globe — supported by principal partner Merian Global Investors — to Henry IV: Part Two, which opens this week. This is, for my money, the most complex and moving of this sequence of plays – where the just-about-comic and just-about-heroic elements of Part One show their seamy side. It’s a play full of melancholy, sickness and regret: the death of the old king looming in the background. It’s where, to cite Morrissey, ‘That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore’.
The scenery-chewing monster of Part One, Sir John Falstaff, gets half the play here, his story twined in a double helix with that of Prince Hal, though the two seldom meet onstage. Jolly Sir John is physically sick (a doctor pronounces his urine healthier than the patient), broke, and in danger of being caught by the law.
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