Henry IV's guilt
Shame can be transacted; until it finally comes home to roost
Robert Reich posed a question yesterday that set my braincogs whirling and recalled the time I had trodden the boards as Henry IV in 2016: nothing impresses upon one the depth of a character like playing him, and this was a seminal moment in my stage career that haunts me to this day (those in the know know why I say this). Reich wrote thus (The death of shame):
At President Biden’s State of the Union address last week, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene repeatedly yelled “Liar!,” Tennessee Republican Rep. Andy Ogles shouted, “It’s your fault!,” and another Republican yelled “Bullshit!”
Fourteen years ago, Republican Rep. Joe Wilson was formally rebuked by the whole House after shouting “You lie” at Obama.
Yet now, anything goes.
Anything went in 1399 as well. And what follows is how it went.
Image: myself as Henry IV, and Andrew Budds as his counsellor, Westmorland. Henry IV was a contraction of the two Shakespeare plays Henry IV parts 1 and 2, directed by Sven Delarivière. Photo by Marianne Farrah-Hockley.
Henry IV – born Henry Bolingbroke – stole England’s crown from Richard II in the only such coup d’état in England’s history (the fate of Charles I was more a revolution). The year was 1399. Henry reigned until his death in 1414. And, in that time, never ceased to have one eye looking over his shoulder.
His eldest son was called Hal in his youth; he befriended the scoundrel Falstaff – a character who appears or is alluded to in four of Shakespeare’s plays (Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor) and who was in real life a man named Oldcastle. Upon ascending the throne as Henry V, Hal would sally forth to beat the French at Agincourt in 1415 – following a suggestion made to him by his father as he lay dying. Of such things are history - and great mini-series - made.
Henry IV – if we look at Shakespeare at least – lived a life by “proverbs”: he had one for each and every situation. He was a man beset with guilt. Not for the peremptory executions he ordered of such as Vernon and Worcester, and not for anything else he might have done but simply for the fact he stole a crown. Simply. It all seemed so simple. At the time.
His last scene features his accusation against Prince Henry that his wayward son had stolen the crown from his pillow as he slept (in fact he was “trying it on for size”, an act that, at the time – at any time, really – is easily misread). Henry opens Part 1 by announcing his intention to visit the Holy Land – an act of contrition on his part, and deeply meant at that. He would never make it (rebellion at home forestalled that little plan to make peace with God), and he rued his failure, even on his death-bed.
He plays the classic sleepless scene in his bedclothes, whilst wearing the crown, so afeared he was that someone might pinch it: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” No, Henry, not all crowned heads lie uneasy. Just those that wear a stolen crown - and maybe not even then. But most fear that a crown stolen can very well be stolen from them. Even if it’s bestowed by universal suffrage.
His shame was predicated upon his fear that he had not done God’s will. That God had punished his mistreadings by giving him a profligate son, who associated with a band of thieves. He speaks to Hal in Part 1, Act 3:
I know not whether God will have it so
For some displeasing service I have done,
That in his secret doom, out of my blood
He’ll breed revengement and a scourge for me;
But thou dost in thy passages of life
Make me believe that thou art only mark’d
For the hot vengeance, and the rod of heaven,
To punish my mistreadings.
It was a rod of heaven that he slowly realised he’d forged for his own back. In Act 3 of Part 2, he rues his mistreadings, his blame turning from being pointed at Hal to woefully regretting his life’s fate:
O God, that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times …
O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.
In the death-bed scene in Act 4 of Part 2, he is still acutely aware, even as he knows his end is nigh, of how guilt has pursued his every action in life. He finally acquiesces, and lays the blame on his own hand. He speaks to Hal [explanations in brackets]:
God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook’d ways
I met this crown, and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head.
It seemed in me
But as an honor snatched with boisterous hand,
And I had many living to upbraid [I needed to chastise other people]
My gain of it by their assistances, [Who had helped me steal the crown]
Which daily grew to quarrel and to bloodshed, [And even to fight and kill them]
Wounding supposèd peace. [Which turned the peace I’d hoped for to something else]
How I came by the crown, O God forgive,
And grant it may with thee in true peace live!
Perhaps it is this kind of shame of which Robert Reich writes. Publicly, it’s not something to be discerned among today’s rulers. But, publicly, it never was, of any age’s rulers (barring, perhaps, Richard Nixon). Henry’s shame came after an act not unlike that which Donald Trump attempted: a coup. I cannot judge what confessors Donald may have made of his own sons. But I suspect he, rather, made of them acolytes.
However be it, a question arises: is shame the same thing as guilt? No, it is not. For, shame is accurately defined by Robert Reich as being - I paraphrase - contrition displayed for a breach of social mores. Guilt, on the other hand, is contrition imposed for breach of the law. With guilt, one has no choice; with shame, the choice is in the hands of him or her who feels it or not. Whilst guilt is a sense that I did something which was wrong, shame remains a sense that I did something which I feel was wrong, and there is a subtle difference.
Guilt is a product of judicial process and, without that process, many feel no guilt. Guilt is viewed perhaps as something that is wreaked upon culprits by an overseeing judicial system and that its findings of not guilty absolve one of shame; and that is false. Shame can even beset those not guilty in the eyes of the law - the law is, after all, an ass: it draws lines of demarcation between that which is criminal and that which is not, and these can be crassly arbitrary. But the technicity of the criminal law can even have the effect of rendering the criminally guilty devoid of shame.
What goes on in the minds of the persons named by Mr Reich? Of Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos, Jared Kushner, Elon Musk and Donald Trump? Who can say? No one, but we may conjecture: It is no crime to cry ‘Liar’ to the President as he reads the State of the Union. I have done nothing wrong by that, for it is no offence in law. And for that which is not criminal under the law, I need feel no shame.
What marks Henry IV out as both guilty and shameful is his construction of what is the law: for God’s law held as high a position in his sources of law as did the writ by which he ruled on Earth. And that’s perhaps the ultimate difference: Man’s law I can circumvent or be judged by on Earth; whether I will need ever to contend with God’s law is yet to be seen.