Rufus Sewell's Hotspur is fired by righteous outrage, stabbing his finger at the family tree to emphasise the royal succession, while Ronald Pickup's rueful King is at the mercy of events - his 'uneasy lies the head' soliloquy occurs much earlier, casting a doom-haunted pall over what follows. There, a manipulative Falstaff had the upper hand over a naГЇve Prince, but Calder's huge-bellied knight seems permanently soused, spending his rare moments of hungover lucidity feeling sorry for himself, while Firth's Hal is much more cynical and knowing. The interplay between Falstaff ( David Calder) and Hal ( Jonathan Firth) is strikingly different from that in the BBC Television Shakespeare version (tx. All of which is entirely forgivable given that Shakespeare's original was hardly a model of historical accuracy. Falstaff's encounter with Doll Tearsheet ( Part II) is followed by Hotspur's leave-taking of Lady Percy ( Part I), the King's upbraiding of Hal ( Part I) is intercut with the Lord Chief Justice's interrogation of Falstaff ( Part II), and so on, and all the battle scenes are telescoped into a single encounter at Shrewsbury near the climax. Key scenes were generally retained, but often shortened to dramatic essentials and repositioned. Richard Loncraine) - the medieval-cum-Elizabethan setting at least remains true to the original - it certainly rivals it for gripping immediacy and overall clarity. If it's not as radical a reinvention as the same year's big-screen Richard III (d. Huge cuts were made to the original text ( Caird said that he'd removed almost everybody named after an English county), much of the remainder was reshuffled, and additional material was interpolated from Richard II, Henry V, Henry VI Part III and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Made on an unusually large budget of ВЈ1 million, John Caird's adaptation of Henry IV was the BBC's biggest Shakespeare project since the close of the BBC Television Shakespeare (1978-85) a decade earlier, and was considerably more adventurous than any of those productions. The life and death of King Henry IV, and the coming of age of his son Prince Hal.

Henry iv part 1 bbc 2012