Henry IV - To be so Pestered with a Popinjay

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Bardseye is currently palpating the oddly persistent parallels of the Henry IV plays with the events of our times. Joining late? scroll down or use the archives from October, 06 onward.


When we left off, Hotspur, a member of the Percy family that put Henry IV bloodily and uneasily on the throne, is describing for the king a prancing and unmartial royal messenger. This messenger had arrived on the battlefield, just after Hotspur had put down a rebellion, to convey the king’s order that Hotspur deliver his prisoners to the king. Hotspur explains why he reacted so badly to the arrival of this message-bearer:

Hot: “With many holiday and lady terms
He questioned me, amongst the rest demanded
My prisoners in Your Majesty’s behalf,
I then, all smarting with my wounds being cold,
To be so pestered with a popinjay,
Out of my grief and my impatience
Answered neglectingly I know not what,
He should, or he should not; for he made me mad
To see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet,
And talk so like a waiting-gentlewoman
Of guns and drums and wounds – God save the mark! –

Clearly, on this day in early November, 2006, it makes sense to cast the American people themselves in the role of the royal messenger. After all, they have just delivered their message in the recent US election, expressing their dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war in Iraq by voting out of office the Republican congress.

This new pacifist America, a sweet-smelling popinjay, steps daintily over corpses both Iraqi and American to deliver a peremptory and insulting note to those who fight, bleed and die for that very popinjay’s freedoms. Even so, the US military, for whom Hotspur in his wounded dignity speaks, professes its loyalty to royal (but we would translate that to democratic and civilian) control:

Hot: “And I beseech you, let not his report
Come current for an accusation
Betwixt my love and your high majesty.”

After this speech, a royal counselor named Blunt intercedes, advising the king that Hotspur’s - the American military's - explanation is reasonable. The king – in whose role we are casting the American electorate, is having none of this:

King: “Why, yet he does deny his prisoners,
But with proviso and exception
That we at our own charge shall ransom straight
His brother-in-law, the foolish Mortimer,
......Shall our coffers then
Be emptied to redeem a traitor home?
Shall we buy treason…?
No, on the barren mountains let him starve!”

A little explanation is in order. The king refers to the fact that Hotspur is conditioning his transfer of the prisoners on the king’s agreement to ransom Hotspur's brother-in-law Mortimer. Mortimer was taken prisoner by “that great magician, damned Glendower, whose daughter, as we hear, [Mortimer] hath lately married.” It appears that Mortimer has made himself comfortable in Scotland, marrying his jailor’s daughter.

Now then, just what hallucinatory parallel can Bardseye muster for this rather specific set of events?

Well, obviously, Mortimer represents the American military’s honor. Mortimer - our military's honor - is held hostage in Iraq (Scotland, in the play) and can only be ransomed by the sovereign American people (that is, by the English sovereign, in the play). Alas, both the American people, who just voted in a pacifist democrat congressional majority, and Henry IV, king of England, are unwilling to make the trade. In the noble enterprise of the pacification of Scotland – that is, the noble enterprise of the liberation of Iraq – defeat is to be grasped from the jaws of victory. In 1991 we betrayed the Shia. This time we are preparing to betray the Sunnis. A new American idea of fairness? No wonder Hotspur is outraged:

King: “Send us your prisoners, or you will hear of it.

Hot: “An if the devil come and roar for them
I will not send them….”.

To be continued….

Betwixt the Wind and His Nobility

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Bardseye is currently palpating the oddly persistent parallels of the Henry IV plays with the events of our times.

We cast the play as follows:

Prince Hal (a youthful prince struggling to
do good but subject to temptation): America

Falstaff (a charming rogue who seeks to
mis-educate the Prince): Western Europe

(Falstaff's understudies: The UN and the New York Times)

Joining late? scroll down or use the archives from October, 06 onward.

Shakespeare departs from Prince Hal’s internal struggles to return to affairs of state. Hal's father, Henry IV, is engaged in some diplomatic mopping-up operations following the quelling of rebellions in Wales and Scotland. The King is bristling at the expectations of the Percy family, whose scion Worcester exhibits an equal prickliness.

King: “You tread upon my patience. But be sure
I will from henceforth rather be myself,
Mighty and to be feared,…”

Wor: “Our house, my sovereign liege, little deserves
The scourge of greatness to be used on it –
And that same greatness too which our own hands
Have holp to make so portly.”

Portly here means potent, not fat, and yes, he said holp, meaning helped. The Percys basically put Henry IV on the throne, and no royal likes to be reminded of his former dependency:

King: “Worcester, get thee gone, for I do see
Danger and disobedience in thine eye.
O sir, your presence is too bold and peremptory…”.

No sooner does the king’s relationship with Worcester begin to disintegrate, but the aptly named Hotspur, also a Percy, responds to a royal summons to explain why he refused to fork over to the king’s representative some prisoners he took in quelling the latest rebellion.

Hot: “My liege, I did deny no prisoners.
But I remember when the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage and extreme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin new reaped
Showed like stubble land at harvest home.
He was perfumed like a milliner,…”

Clearly, the martial Hotspur in this scene represents our military, coated in sweat and grime and up to its elbows in the blood of Islamist terrorists and other enemies of democracy. And who is it that confronts the US Hotspur military in the very heat of battle – what soft-palmed, perfumed paper-pushing message boy from the very heart of government? Why it’s the Senate Intelligence Committee. Or perhaps the six retired generals out of 4700 who in a time of war publicly called for the resignation of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. Or, most apt of course, it is the Democrat party, calling for our soldiers to march backwards over the bodies of their own 2800 dead in retreat from Iraq, in full sight of the world and all its calculating despots, without completing the stabilization of the world’s first Arab democracy. The military, speaking through Hotspur in its outraged honor, continues:

Hot: “And twixt his finger and his thumb he held
A pouncet box, which ever and anon
He gave his nose and took ‘t away again,
Who therewith angry, when it next came there,
Took it in snuff; and still he smiled and talked,
And as the soldiers bore dead bodies by
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly,
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corpse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.”

To be continued...

The Foul and Ugly Mists

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Bardseye is currently palpating the oddly persistent parallels of the Henry IV plays with the events of our times.

We cast the play as follows:

Prince Hal (a youthful prince struggling to
do good but subject to temptation): America

Falstaff (a charming rogue who seeks to
mis-educate the Prince): Western Europe

(Falstaff's understudies: The UN and the New York Times)

Joining late? scroll down or use the archives from October, 06 onward.

When we left off, Prince Hal (that is, America) was alone on stage. He had spent the 1990’s ignoring his weighty responsibilities as the leader of the free world (for Hal, we translate that to England around 1400). Instead America has been cavorting with Falstaff, letting Falstaff steal money from pilgrims and traders, and then stealing the stolen money from Falstaff himself. In this, Falstaff most resembled Europe and Russia as they stole Oil-For-Food money throughout those same 1990’s, money intended for the desperately poor of Iraq, and yet stolen under the very auspices of the UN charged with the poor’s protection. Hal stole the stolen money back when he uncovered that self-same multi-billion dollar scandal in the aftermath of his invasion of France - whoops, that is, America did so following its invasion of Iraq.

Hal senses that England doesn’t take him seriously as the heir-apparent of his nation. Just as American prestige waned in the years following Vietnam, the un-avenged hostage-taking in Iran of 1979, the succession of unanswered terrorist attacks on American targets spanning the two decades following. Hal and America speak:

Hal: “Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.”

Well, if we are looking for the foul and ugly mists of vapors that do seem to strangle us, we are spoiled for choices. But I’ll plump for the Kyoto Treaty, a silly little diversion intended to tie down the great Gulliver of America with a thousand little Lilliputian strings of environmental regulation. Although this was last decade’s European ruse, it’s worth noting that the signatories, who only and ever intended the treaty to curtail American growth once a liberal US administration committed to it, have all now long since failed and for the most part given up on ever meeting its carbon-reducing goals.

So, will we drown in the spillover of melting icecaps as a result? If so, we’ll drown even if we adopt Kyoto, since fully implementing its provisions would result in only the tiniest reduction in expected global warming. No, technology is the dragon we are riding. Kyoto seeks to kill the dragon. Bardseye votes to tame it for ethical and moral ends. If there is global warming, and if it turns into a problem, only technology will fix it. Kyoto will destroy the economic growth that permits technology to advance, killing the goose before it lays the golden egg.

Wheew! Let’s return to Prince Hal, channeling 21st century America:

Hal: “If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work.”

Are you listening, Bill Clinton?

“But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.”

This speech I suppose presents America’s best sense of itself as seeking redemption from its own waywardness. Our arguably late entry into World War II, our half-victory, and therefore half-defeat in Korea, condemning the North to a half century of increasing horror, our abandonment of the people of South Vietnam in 1975, after the great victory of the Tet Offensive was portrayed as a massive defeat by the American media, our abandonment of the Iraqi Shia in 1991, and the list goes on. Amidst these failures of our national purpose (and, ahem, that would be the spreading of liberty), are of course a balancing, an-overbalancing scale of successes. But the world beyond our shores does indeed have cause to wonder, at those moments when we rouse ourselves to our national purpose, if we will falsify men’s hopes, or if our reformation, glittering o’er our faults, shall show more goodly and attract more eyes….

To be continued….