From Hal to Henry

This chapter explores the presentation of gender and sexuality in Gustav Holst’s At the Boar’s Head (1925), a one-act ‘musical interlude’ based on the Eastcheap tavern scenes from Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Holst’s third opera was received initially as an ingenious but ultimately trivial exercise in combining Shakespearean material with traditional English folk music. More recently, however, it has been interpreted as a work which encapsulates the profound sense of nostalgia and trauma present in British society during the post–Great War period. This chapter argues further that At the Boar’s Head’s liminal, microcosmic tavern space reveals the disruptions and reactive consolidations of gender identity and sexual expression that occurred during the First World War. Through the contrasting figures of its central ‘couple’, Prince Hal and Falstaff, the work especially scrutinizes the capacity of war to alter male personality and desire, the pressure placed on men to conform to a ubiquitous image of heroic, heterosexual masculinity, and the complex, conflicting reactions of soldiers at their moment of recruitment. Paying particular attention to Hal’s two intensely introspective arias, ‘I know you all …’ and ‘Devouring Time’, the chapter dissects the young prince’s protean journey to attaining the paradigmatic manliness of his later incarnation, Henry V, who was celebrated as the inspirational embodiment of British, martial male identity during the war years.