Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Twelfth Night: Down Wit' O.P.P.

Gabe drop a load on em.

OPP, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it.

See O is for Original, like OG, oh say can you see? 

The first P's for Practices -- not on your mattresses -- this P is clean for your families -- P.

 The last P is simple... it's for Production.


     I saw Twelfth Night in 2003 at the old Guthrie in Minneapolis when it was next to the Walker Art Center and the Cherry in the Spoon. It was an Original Practices Production done by the touring Globe Theater. And it was the best thing I’ve ever seen on stage.

      Wit' OPP the actors wear costumes made from the fabrics that were used in the seventeenth century (no velcro or zippers to ease costume changes), oak sets, no changes in lighting, and of course all the women's roles are played by men.

     Mark Rylance, who was also artistic director of the Globe Theater at the time, played the Countess Olivia. He breathed comedy into almost every moment of the show. When he walked he would only turn in right angles. It was a perfect satire of the formality of Olivia’s station, which stands in for the formality of her grief, which is undone by the fool:


FESTE: Good madonna, Why mournest thou?

OLIVIA: Good fool, for my brother’s death.

FESTE: I think his soul is in hell, madonna.

OLIVIA: I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

FESTE: The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul, being in heaven. (1:5)


     Feste the Fool played the lute and sang his songs, which were sad and funny and beautiful, and the entire sense of the play as a revelry to accompany the feast of the epiphany on the twelfth and final night of Christmas was captured perfectly.

     OPP is long. This one was four hours. There were two intermissions and I wanted it to never end.

     I wished I were a mouse, so that I might stow away on the Globe Theater caravan among the sour costumes and prop swords. Venturing countryward to mimic and master the intricacies of their stagecraft, living off morsels peppering the warped wooden floors of taverns and actors’ pubs. 

As they performed for the human population, I might gather the critters of every hamlet and present the vicarious artistry of my patrons. Until the day when there was a call for someone to stand in. To play the dagger I see before me or Yorick’s skull, perhaps Desdemona’s handkerchief or the lark, who sings from yon pomegranate tree. Becoming a passing component of the bard's lore. The Shakespearean mouse.

Thinking about OPP has caused me to reflect on some of the plays I’ve already read without considering them in terms of staging, or as I’m going to discuss in this post: casting.

Viola in this play, is disguised as a boy named Cesario for most of the show. Olivia falls in love with Cesario, not realizing he is a girl. When all the women's roles are played by men, so much comedy comes from the confusion of the sexes on stage. A level of hilarity is achieved at seeing a man play a woman like the formal Olivia that wouldn’t precisely exist in gender-appropriate casting of the role. This is not to underestimate the humor available to a female actor who could find her own masterful comedy in the nooks and crannies of the role. But it would be different... and it wouldn't be OPP.

In The Taming of the Shrew, the youngest sister Bianca is the fair and beautiful of the pair. So assuming that within the troupe of men who play these roles there is one who is the fairest and most eunuch of the lot, he would be cast as Bianca, so that this love story might play as sincerely as possible. However, the role of Kate would be played by a man of some greater masculinity.

Add to that the fact that The Taming of the Shrew is actually a play within a play, being acted out for the drunk: Christopher Sly, who has been fooled into believing that his drunken life was a dream and that he is actually a mighty lord. One could surmise that the role of Kate might be played for pure slapstick comedy and the most brutish man in the company may have been cast in the role so as to provide maximum delight to Christopher Sly and the lowest common denominator he personifies. Imagine Ogre from Revenge of the Nerds dressed as a cheerleader.

This would allow all of Petruchio’s abuses against Kate to be seen as comic, as well as all of his musings on her beauty, which seem to be sarcastic anyway. 

And the happy end of the play, Kate’s speech on the submissive role of the wife, would be hilarious before she and Petruchio march off to consummate their marriage, the image of which would cause all those in attendance to vomit slightly in the backs of their mouths or laugh and tuck away their rotten fruits and vegetables for another play.

Shakespeare was a popular playwright, he was entertaining people. All of his works are poetic and eloquent, but they're not treatises. I was pretty harsh on The Taming of the Shrew when I read it in November, without considering comedy's liberty to be naughty by nature. 

I’d forgotten that these are plays. And plays are meant to be staged. It's an important lesson for we stowed-away mice to remember.

More on Twelfth Night in 2010.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Of Choruses, Serenades and Nirvana

Two days ago I went out to get lunch and walked past a tinny radio sitting outside a Coke truck that was playing "All Apologies." The radio was slightly mistuned, so Nirvana was infused with static and some contemporary ass-pop playing on a lesser station. When Kurt Cobain wrote that song did he think about all the crappy radios on which it might be played in the future? All the places his music might go decades after his death.

When I was in Ecuador in 1999, I remember walking down Avenida Doce de Octubre in Quito and hearing Celine Dion’s voice echoing across the cityscape. I couldn’t pinpoint where the song was coming from; it was penetrating and omnipresent. The soundwaves ricocheted between the modest, semi-vacant skyscrapers and the inclined slope of the active volcano, La Pichincha, like an image reflected against itself in parallel mirrors. Did she think her voice would ever go there?

When someone writes a song, don’t they imagine it in divine places? Concert halls and movie scores. Or playing in the background while the better men who came before us dine at the long tables of Elysia. Musical ambrosia.

Shakespeare’s education was vast because he lived after the invention of the printing press. The myths, the Bible, and other stories that were already thousands of years old were reverberating in academic halls during his formative years. He must have understood the enduring capabilities of the written word.

But did he imagine this staying power for himself? Did he ever think his plays would be so frequently butchered by disillusioned actors of the distant future? Or that he would have his own section carved out in books and music megastores? A category unto himself. More than literature. More than theater.

A play’s a fleeting thing. I used to have a theater company in Minnesota, and every year we would participate in the Fringe Festival. For ten days in August Minneapolis theaters are bombarded with more than 100 new plays, and most of them are forgotten mere hours after the closing night party on the rooftop of Joe’s Garage. What hubris it would be to imagine that a play I wrote would endure in memory and performance years, decades or centuries after my last keystroke.

At the end of Henry V the Chorus comes on stage and makes a quick reference to the Henry VI trilogy, which was written and performed before Henry V debuted. England has just conquered and united with France when the Chorus says:

 

Henry the Sixt, in infant bands crown’d King

Of France and England, did this king succeed;

Whose state so many had the managing;

That they lost France, and made England bleed;

Which oft our stage hath shown; and for their sake,

In your fair minds let this acceptance take. (Epilogue)

 

The Riverside Shakespeare Second Edition I’m reading from describes this as an allusion “to the great popularity of the Henry VI plays.” (p.1015)

There’s something very personal about the Chorus’s line. Almost as though the company feels a kinship with the audience. Knowing that these people, in attendance of this production are the same people for whom they’ve performed in the past. Shakespeare knew them, he saw them when he acted for them. He could smell them and drink with them.

He’s not like a novelist who toils in obscurity and never appreciates the critical clamor over his posthumous publications. He was clapped on the back and applauded. He knew ovations and -- I imagine -- the admirational flirtation and trim that is a poet’s supplement.

Why would he need to think into the future? Why would he care to dream of the distant media that his words would inhabit? Or the weary young man who sits at a table at Border’s mining his work for inspiration. If anything he probably assumed that his stories would be taken and repurposed by playwrights in the future, as he had done with the stories the printing press delivered to him.

Aside from the myths from which he borrowed, there’s the Italian Novella written by Giraldi Cinthio, Hecatommithi, published in1565 that became Othello. And Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles was the major source for all his histories. He knew stories were to be retold and touched up, otherwise they fall into that infinite echo between the two mirrors of the world.

Some days after I heard Celine Dion in Quito, I went on a serenade. Joselo, Francia, Fernando, Maria, Ivan and I stood in the damp street on the slopes of La Pichincha and sang up to the third story apartment of Francia’s parents on their wedding anniversary. Joselo strummed the charango, Ivan on Guitar, Fernando drums, Maria the pan pipes and myself on tambourine. We sang a song called La Chinchinal, an Andean folk song that beckoned windows to open all along the avenue like a warm, wafting aroma.

 

Dios Quiera poner las manos sobre la cima

Del Chinchinal,

Y asi divisar la tierra donde nacio.

Ay Corazon de mi alma, donde estaras?

Quisiera verle a mi guambra, donde estaras?

 

It was amazing. One of the best things of which I’ve ever been a part. But as we sang the words they melted into the black cielo Ecuatoriano, into the reflected cacophony we know as silence.

That’s where these words will end up too. Where most of the things we make go. Where all the forgotten songs and plays and creations of man mingle forever in invisible vibrating waves between volcanoes and skyscrapers.

 

 

 

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Henry V: England Kicks Ass

When we were boys we dreamed of warfare.

We played guns with sticks and bats, pinecones were grenades, and death was a five-second interval of stillness on the ground, preceded by a melodramatic choreographed collapse. It was glorious fun.

I remember imagining relationships of enmity with people we didn’t know. Behind our Grandpa Smith’s house there were some older kids we called the Bad Boys. Fear of them prevented us from riding our Big Wheels around the block like the fear of folkloric trolls squatting in wait beneath rickety bridges.

And when I played youth soccer, our team was the Crusaders and our rivals were the Dragons. Their treachery and deviance on the field surely spilled over into real life. When they beat us for the Kenosha Area Soccer League championship in 1989 it was like Pearl Harbor, and my juvenile bloodlust was grand. Having enemies gave purpose to our militaristic machinations.

I wanted to be a soldier. I used to see pictures of my grandpas in their World War II uniforms and I would pray that there would be a war for me to fight in when I was old enough. To prove myself on the battlefield, to be brave in the face of danger, to conquer evil and kill mightily.

Henry V is the fulfillment of boyish dreams. The great masturbatory celebration of England’s destiny as a force for righteousness and military achievement.


Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,

The game’s afoot!

Follow your spirit; and upon this charge

Cry, “God for Harry, England, and Saint George!” (3:1)


Henry delivers a rousing speech that outdoes a blue-painted Mel Gibson telling his kilted fellows: “They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our FREEDOM!”

Henry V tells the story of England’s great victories over France at Agincourt and Harfleur. I’ve only read to the middle of Act IV so far, but it is clear that Henry is going to meet no real resistance from the French army.

His bullying hubris begins in Act 1 when the Archbishop of Canterbury tells him that he has a claim to the French throne. And continues when the Dauphin of France warns the English King not to invade France and sends him a gift of tennis balls to silence his ambition and make fun of him. Mostly it makes King Henry V mad:


And tell the pleasant prince this mock of his

Hath turn’d his balls to gun-stones, and his soul

Shall stand sore charged for the wasteful vengeance

That shall fly with them; for many a thousand widows

Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands;

Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;

And some are yet ungotten and unborn

That shall have cause to curse the Dolphin’s scorn.

But this all lies with the will of God (1:2)


Henry V has a warmonger's habit of telling the soon-to-be victims of his army’s fury that they have brought it on themselves, as he tells the people of Harfleur:


What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause,

If your pure maidens fall into the hand

Of hot and forcing violation? (3:3)


It’s not Henry’s fault if he rapes their women, it’s the Frenchman’s fault for not surrendering.

But the play operates on two levels. It’s a pageant and a satire. Like Starship Troopers, you laugh at the military ridiculousness of Casper Van Diem’s sincere battlecry: “Kill 'em! Kill ‘em All!” before he unleashes thousands of rounds into alien bugs, but you sort of get a kick out of all the badass action sequences and the fist fight soundtracked to Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.” It’s ridiculous and fun.

It’s not difficult to determine that there was some satiric sentiment motivating Shakespeare. In Henry IV part 2, Henry IV tells his son (who is about to become Henry V) the key to domestic tranquility:


Therefore my Harry,

Be it thy course to busy giddy minds

With foreign quarrels, that action, hence borne out,

May waste the memory of the former days. (Henry IV Part 2, 4:5)


Use war as a distraction, lest the people remember that the throne of England was unnaturally taken when the rightful King Richard II was deposed and beheaded by Henry IV. This is a method used by leaders all the way up until 1984:


WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

(1984, Orwell, p. 4, 16, 26, 104)

“And at the same time, the consciousness of being at war and therefore in danger, makes the handing over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.” (1984, Orwell p. 192)

More hard evidence of this strategy's efficacy can be observed in Presidential Approval polls September 2001 – September 2003.

You can’t blame a country for trying to hold onto some hope in a dark period of its history, when all its industry seems futile against the maturing will of God. The battlefield victories are for the boys who have to dream of such things when they’re young. And when they’re older they might understand. They may learn the value of human life and be dissuaded from military glory by a simple argument, the way I was eventually dissuaded from the service by my Uncle Alfie.

Alfie served in the Air Force during Operation Desert Storm and when I told him I was considering enlisting, he said it amazed him how many people tried to get out of the service during the buildup to Desert Storm. He said: “This is what you sign up for, so if you’re not willing to fight when the time comes, even if you don’t agree with what you're fighting for, then you shouldn’t do it.”

So I didn’t.

I have mixed feelings about that decision not to don a military-issue helmet. Because every boy wants to win wars. But it’s not just winning that makes the experience vital, it’s facing the fear. It’s the humility that comes from being a soldier, a cog in a vast, historic machine. Essential, yet expendable. It’s an elusive brotherhood and a special kind of courage that no amount of study can replace.

But I do find solace in the words Shakespeare gives to the French Duke of Orleance who quips about the English having no common sense:


That they lack; for if their heads had any intellectual armor, they could never wear such heavy head-pieces. (4:1)


Or as Joshua, the computerized defense system from the 80s movie Wargames, observes about Global Thermonuclear War: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”

Friday, December 11, 2009

Henry IV Part 2: 12th Grade Gabe Weighs In

AP English

Dr. Byrd

Henry IV Part 2

Reading Journal

12/10/95

 

As My First Act in Office I Shall Fail to Keep it Real

 

At the end of Henry IV Part Two Prince Harry becomes King Henry V and he wastes absolutely no time in undermining all of his hard-won street cred when he banishes Falstaff and the rest of his rolldogs in a massive failure to keep it real.

One of the most important qualities for a leader to have is the ability to keep it real. This is why Bill Clinton is such a great President. Dude is a player. Plays the sax, rocks the sunglasses, ladies all want a piece of Bill. When Harry was Prince, he knew this, he relished the thug life. But on his deathbed, his father mocks his coming administration:

 

And to the English court assemble now,

From every region, apes of idleness!

Now neighbors, purge you of your scum!

England shall give him office, honor, might;

For the fift Harry from curb’d license plucks

The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog

Shall flesh his tooth on every innocent. (5:5)

 

These apes of idleness and wild dogs are Falstaff and the rest of the Eastcheap Crew. Now we’ll excuse the mixed Wild Kingdom metaphors seeing as the king’s dying (and I omitted a line or two from the soliloquy), but still, you would think Harry would stay true to his boys. After all that talk in Henry IV Part 1 about how he was fixin’ to keep it real once he ascended:

 

They take it already, upon their salvation , that, though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am king of courtesy, and tell me flatly I am no proud jack, like Falstaff, but a Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy – by the Lord, so they call me – and when I am King of England I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap.

(Henry IV Part 1 – 2:4)

 

But lo, after Falstaff rushes to see this good ole boy in his regal fineries, what does Harry say to the man?

 

I know thee not, old man, (5:5)

 

COLD AS ICE!

 

I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,

So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane;

But being awak’d, I do despise my dream. (5:5)

 

Nevermore shall England kick it old school for the king has gone straight, and the OGs are sent packing.

You see, Dr. Byrd, I’m just like Henry V. Last year I was roommates with Schneider, who was a senior and a big screwball. You might not know it, but he nearly got expelled for peeing in the soccer players’ Gatorade during preseason last year. I drank some and foolishly blamed the acrid flavor on electrolytes.

We had a tumultuous year in Warner 103. He would watch Schindler's List while I was studying for my U.S. history midterm, he would invite people in to play Monopoly at midnight when I was sleeping, and then he mocked me for not having the balls to ask out a certain olive-skinned girl whose identity shall remain protected here. We wound up in a wrestling match over this one, which he easily won because he outweighed me by forty pounds.

So, it comes to the end of the year and I run for All-School President against Jimmy Larson, the nicest guy in the universe. And I win, cause everyone thinks I know how to keep it real what with being friends with Scheider through all of his reckless, unmedicated revolution.

But the first thing I do after I win is tell him what a dick he is. I mean, he graduated that spring, so it wasn't like I contrived his expulsion or anything (not that it would have been that difficult). But the point is we were friends and I hated him in the end.

I mean, I guess it’s better cause now I can be a moral, divinely-endowed executive of our student body, and as a result of my royal chastity we’re going to have a kick-ass prom and senior formal… but I don’t know. I failed to keep it real, so the pranks we had talked about – the papier-mâché penis we were going to install on top of the library, the goat we wanted to tether to Mrs. Hodgkins’ desk, the fake all-school meeting we were going to call so that we could bombard the underclassmen with water balloons – it can’t happen anymore. Cause I’m a tool of the man.

Maybe Lake Forest Academy as an institution will be better off for having me as All-School Pres, but shiiiiiiiiiiit. Jimmy would have kept it real. And under his tenure I’m sure those underclassmen would have gotten more than one water balloon to the skull, and that ten-foot penis would have cast a long shadow over the formal gardens as it pointed erectly heavenward beckoning the gods of preparatory academia to suck it dry.

I wonder if Henry V will have any similar regrets during his reign.

Friday, December 4, 2009

Swords and Beer or How to be King of England


I played college soccer and at the end of every season we would celebrate the months of hard work and physical discipline by having a progressive. You are probably familiar with this type of party.
This is where all the men's soccer players get together and go from one player’s room to the next, drinking a different drink in each room -- staying just long enough to sing “Tubthumping” by Chumbawumba -- until finally meeting up with the women’s soccer team at a raging party where red plastic cups of Grainbelt Premium spill onto the warped hardwood floors of some notorious student house a few blocks from campus and the camaraderie of the season crescendos in dancing and vomit.
Unfortunately, when I was in college I didn’t drink.
Not a single goddamn drop.
So, when I went to meet the team in the first room and said I didn’t want a drink, the German captain of our team inquired: “Where are you? In college or in church?”
Everyone laughed and sang together: “I GET KNOCKED DOWN, BUT I GET UP AGAIN, YOU’RE NEVER GONNA KEEP ME DOWN!”
It was all good-natured, but somehow in my naive, self-conscious mind my sobriety was an insurmountable barrier to true fellowship with my teammates.
This, combined with my inability to use a sword, is how I knew I would never make a decent King of England.
According to Henry IV: Part One the most important characteristics for a King of England to possess are the ability to drink beer with the common folk and use a sword.
In the second half of the play Prince Harry returns to help his father fight off the rebelling Percy family, and he apologizes for his wantonness and prodigal absence:

So please your majesty, I would I could
Quit all offences with as clear excuse
As well as I am doubtless I can purge
Myself of many I am charged withal. (3:2)

And later:

I shall hereafter, my thrice-gracious lord,
Be more myself. (3:2)

But the King doesn’t fully accept his apology until they’re on the battlefield and the King is losing his fight to Douglas the Scot. Prince Harry comes in to rescue him and drive Douglas away with a strong showing of swordsmanship. And the King says:

Thou hast redeemed thy lost opinion
And showed thou mak’st some tender of my life
In this fair rescue thou hast brought to me. (5:4)

Despite his truant years, the King reinstates an honorable opinion of his son because of his ability to wield a sword.
And we already know that the Prince is an affluent consumer of grog.

To conclude, I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life. (2:4)

Convincing? Obviously. But wait, wait, there's more!
This isn’t the only story where we see these are the essential qualities of an English Monarch. There’s another King whose only success came with the drinking of beer and the wielding of weapons.
Of course, I’m speaking of King Ralph.
Ralph is a Vegas lounge singer, who becomes king when the entire royal family is electrocuted during a family photo shoot. He is an American alky with an affinity for strip clubs, so you would think he’d make a lousy King and you’d be wrong.
His blue-collar ways put off some stick-up-their-ass European nobility, but it isn’t long before King Ralph meets up with King Mulambon of Zambezi. They drink beer and throw darts, and afterward, King Mulambon shows Ralph the way they throw darts in his country: chucking spears at targets.
Spear-chucking is not quite swordsmanship, but for the purposes of this absurdly academic essay, it’s close enough. Eventually, Ralph steps down and lets Peter O’Toole take over as King, but not before he uses his bonding session with King Mulambon to create thousands of British jobs! Huzzah!
With such overwhelming evidence from two masterworks of English royal history, it’s no wonder that I wandered away from my soccer-playing comrades the night of the progressive. They marched into the brisk, autumnal night chanting one of Macalester’s many fine soccer cheers. While I trudged dormward, my hands in my pockets, all hope of kinship with the Windsors severed, bound for the white cinderblock room where my friends Bill and Mark and Brett were no doubt watching Twin Peaks and talking about Star Wars, instead of to the sexy, youthful enterprises of the other soccer players whose inebriation and swordsmanship gave them leave to dream a little longer of Buckingham.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Two Wrongs and Some Ass-Kicking

When I was 10 I was in A Christmas Carol at the Lakeside Players in Kenosha Wisconsin, playing the pivotal role of Boy 2. There was this other kid who played a character named Dick. One day Andy Becker, who played Young Ebenezer, overheard the kid who played Dick calling me gay because my name is Gabe and it sounds like gay which ten year-old boys think is funny.

So I said to Andy, "I guess you are what your name is in the play." Which didn't seem like a very good comeback to me, I mean I wanted to just call the kid a dick, but that was one of those words that if my dad heard me say he would get inexplicably mad and exhale impatiently.

Anyway, I guess the kid who played Dick heard what I'd said and I always felt really bad. Especially on the day when I found out that once our scenes were over he was playing GI Joe's in the old theater and I loved GI Joe's. We could have hung out and become friends, but instead he never auditioned for any of the other Christmas plays at Lakeside again and who knows what the hell happened to him. Maybe he died.

My point is that two wrongs don't make a right.

Take Henry IV for instance. Henry IV became king by rebelling against Richard II in the play that came before this one, Richard II. Now his old allies, the Percy's, want to overthrow him to restore order and justice to England. Do two treasons make a right?

Meanwhile, Prince Harry/Hal/Henry is gallivanting about Eastcheap with thieves and ruffians, the foremost of whom is Sir John Falstaff. Harry is convinced to partake in a robbery when his buddy Ned tells him that they're going to play a trick on Falstaff. They're going to let Falstaff commit the robbery, and then they'll put on disguises and rob Falstaff. Do two robberies make a right? What does Prince Harry think? Let's take a closer look, shall we?

Harry’s speech in act 1 scene 2 is open to some interpretation. The text has Harry claiming that he associates with Falstaff and these rapscallions because he wants to lower people's expectations for him and then he is going to make a grand entrance onto the political scene and be praised because of his previously perceived lack of kingly acumen.


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 vapours that did seem to strangle him. (1:2)


This lowering of expectations is a political move a son of America recently executed to disturbing presidential effect. But Shakespeare is a master of human nature, and I don’t buy this for a second. I think The Prince is just rationalizing.

We all do it. I can't tell you how many times I claimed that working as a concessionist at the Har Mar movie theater after graduating college was me "researching" life in order to be a better writer. Really I was just getting free movies and hanging out with high school students, who were pretty easy to fool into thinking that I was cool.

If I were Prince Harry and my father had overthrown the King and had him killed, I would hate him for making me heir apparent to a treasonous villain. I would be the target of vengeance as much as him. Who do you side with in this scenario? You can’t undermine your father and king, and you can’t stand with him since his claim to the throne is hardly just.

So you do nothing. You drink. You hang out with Falstaff. And you make excuses for yourself. You pretend to be better than them, when you're actually worse, because you're hiding from your true responsibilities. Just like Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings. Rangering around when you should be leading men. Luckily for Aragorn a great event happened that thrust him into battle.

Prince Harry has a similar stroke of fortune. The rebellion against his father begins. And Harry knows it’s his chance. Instantly, he begins his high-fallutin' moralistic ways and decides that two wrongs don't make a right. He says that he's going to return the money that he and Falstaff stole. ("The money shall be paid back again with advantage." [2:4]) And he puts down Falstaff something fierce when they do a little roleplay: "That villainous, abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan." (2:4) In context, these insults are somewhat playful, since Falstaff puts down himself in the same scene, but they're still pretty harsh things to say about a friend.

But what if the call from his father never came? What if Hotspur (Percy) never grew upset with the King and decided to rebel, but rather was all valor and loyalty? Then the King would have accepted him in his son’s place as he wishes he could in the first scene:

O, that it could be proved

That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged

In cradle clothes our children where they lay,

And called mine ‘Percy’, his ‘Plantagenet’;

Then would I have his Harry, and he mine. (1:1)

(Plantagenet is the King's surname.)

This would leave Prince Harry in the taverns of Eastcheap, drinking, and socializing. Waiting for the call from his father. Waiting for the crisis, the opportunity to prove his heroism and put his so-called brilliant political plot into action. Waiting forever.

But Harry does get the call from his old man. And he sees that two treasons won't make a right, and two robberies won't either. It's the new act -- returning the money -- that makes a right. Only right makes right. And in the case of the rebellion coming in the next few acts of this play, I'm pretty sure right is gonna be some serious ass-kicking.