King Henry IV, Part 1

Dr Harry Newman
Harry.newman@rhul.ac.uk
 Structure

• Dramatizing history

• Kings and clowns: ‘main-plot’ and ‘sub-plot’

• Hal: prodigal prince to chivalric hero

Dramatizing history
The Shakespeare First Folio (1623)
 Shakespeare: history play specialist
• King John (first performed 1596)
• Richard II (1595)
Second tetralogy: late
• Henry IV, Part One (1596-7)
C14 to early C15
• Henry IV, Part Two (1597-8)
• Henry V (1598-9)
• Henry VI, Part One (1592; with First tetralogy: mid-C15
Thomas Nashe and others) to late C15
• Henry VI, Part Two (1590-1)
• Henry VI, Part Three (1591)
• Richard III (1592-3)
• Henry VIII (1613; with John Fletcher)
 Supply and demand

Purpose-built
playhouses

• Theatre (1576)
• Curtain (1577)
• Rose (1587)
• Swan (1595)
• Globe (1599)
• Fortune (1600) Cha-ching!
• Hope (1614)
 Supply

‘Without the copiousness of narrative material and the broadening of popular literary taste
created by the new communications technology of the printing-press, the London
playhouses might well have been a short-lived enterprise, closed down for lack of profits
long before Marlowe and Shakespeare arrived in the capital in search of a career.’
Martin Wiggins, Shakespeare and the Drama of his Time (OUP, 2000), p. 25
 Supply

Key source-texts
for Henry IV, Part 1
• Raphael Holinshed,
The Chronicles of
England, Scotland and
Ireland (1577, 1587)
• John Stow, Chronicles
of England (1580)
• Samuel Daniel, The
Civil Wars (1595) The Holinshed
Project:
http://www.cems.o
x.ac.uk/holinshed/
 Demand
Why pay to see a history play?
• History lessons…with a
twist
• Communing with the dead
• Special effects
• Defining/re-enforcing
English identity
How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the
terror of the French, to think that after he had
lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should
triumph again on the stage, and have his bones
new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand
spectators at least (at several times) who in the
tragedian that represents his person imagine
they behold him fresh bleeding. … [W]hat a
glorious thing it is to have Henry the Fifth
represented on the stage leading the French
king prisoner, and forcing both him and the
Dolphin to swear fealty. "Aye, but," will they
say, "what do we get by it?" Respecting neither
the right of fame that is due to true nobility
deceased, nor what hopes of eternity are to be
proposed to adventurous minds, to encourage
them forward, but only their execrable lucre
and filthy unquenchable avarice.
Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless,
His Supplication to the Devil (1592)
 Demand

‘The history play arose at a time when the sense of nationhood was
crystallizing in England as in other European states, part of a
heightened interest in earlier times that took in chronicles, ballads, and
pamphlets as well. Elizabethans looked to events and figures from
those times – not only kings and their battles but country squires, folk
heroes, and common soldiers with their different activities and
perspectives – to anchor the corporate English identity they were
newly defining.’
Susan Snyder, “The genres of Shakespeare’s
plays,” in The Cambridge Companion to
Shakespeare, ed. Margreta de Grazia and
Stanley Wells (CUP, 2001), 91
 Popularity
‘… let but Falstaffe come,
Hall [i.e. Hal], Poines, the rest, you scarce shall have roome
All is so pester’d [i.e. crowded]’
Leonard Digges, “Upon Master
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, the
Deceased Author,” Poems (1640)
Kings and clowns: ‘main-plot’ and ‘sub-plot’
 The plots
‘MAIN’ PLOT ‘SUB’ PLOT
• King Henry IV • Sir John Falstaff
• Lord John of Lancaster, younger son to King • Poins
• Earl of Westmorland • Bardolph
• Sir Walter Blount • Peto
• Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester • Hostess/Mistress Quickly
• Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland • Francis, a drawer
(Worcester’s older brother)
• Vintner
• Henry Percy/Hotspur, Northumberland’s son
• Gadshill
• Lady Percy/Kate, Hotspur’s wife
• Chamberlain
• Lord Edward Mortimer, brother to Lady Percy
• Lady Mortimer, daughter to Glendwr, a Welsh
nobleman
• Owain Glendwr, a Welsh nobleman

? Prince Henry of Wales (Hal/Harry) ?

 Mingling kings and clowns

‘all their plays be neither right tragedies nor right comedies,

mingling kings and clowns, not because the matter so carries it,
but thrust in the clown by head and shoulders to play a part in
majestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion; so as
neither the admiration and commiseration, nor the right
sportfulness, is by their mongrel tragi-comedy obtained’

Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie

(composed early 1580s, published 1595)
 Stealing crowns
POINS We may do it as
secure as sleep. If you will go, I HOTSPUR
will stuff your purses full of But shall it be that you that set the crown
crowns; if you will not, tarry at Upon the head of this forgetful man
home and be hanged. And for his sake wear the detested blot
Of murderous subornation – shall it be,
FALSTAFF Hear ye, Yedward, if I That you a world of curses undergo,
tarry at home and go not, I’ll Being the agents, or base second means,
hang you for going. The cords, the ladder, or the hangman rather?
POINS You will, chops? (1 Henry IV 1.3.160-65)
FALSTAFF Hal, wilt thou make
one?
PRINCE Who? I rob? I a thief? KING HENRY
Not I, by my faith.
FALSTAFF There's neither God knows, my son,
honesty, manhood nor good By what bypaths and indirect crooked ways
I met this crown; and I myself know well
fellowship in thee, nor thou How troublesome it sat upon my head.
cam’st not of the blood royal, if … It seem'd in me
thou darest not stand for ten But as an honor snatch’d with boist'rous hand
shillings.
(1 Henry IV 1.2.124-34) (2 Henry IV 4.3.312-20)
 Counterfeiting

FALSTAFF Never call a true piece of gold a counterfeit. (2.4.478-9)

FALSTAFF ’Sblood, ’twas time to counterfeit, or that hot termagant Scot had
paid me scot and lot too. Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit. To die is to
be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man who hath not the life
of a man. But to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no
counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed. (5.4.112-118)

DOUGLAS What art thou,

That counterfeit'st the person of a king?
KING
The King himself; who, Douglas, grieves at heart
So many of his shadows thou hast met OED v. counterfeit
And not the very King. … 1.a. To make an imitation of, imitate
DOUGLAS (with intent to deceive)
I fear thou art another counterfeit (5.4.26-34)
1.b. To make a fraudulent imitation of, to
forge (e.g. a coin).
Hal: Prodigal prince to chivalric hero
 Hal’s soliloquy
PRINCE
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness.
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.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behaviour 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.
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will. (1.2.185-207)
 Hal’s models: a ‘triangulation of forces’

King Henry IV ‘[Hal] stands in the middle of [a] triangulation of

forces. His pragmatic father is at one point of the
triangle, at the head of the political world that one
day must be Hal’s own to rule; his self-indulgent
father-surrogate Falstaff stands at a second,
seemingly offering an escape from the pragmatic
calculation of the political world; and the third is
the impetuous Hotspur, whose exuberant heroic
commitments stand as an inviting alternative to
Hal’s apparent scapegrace idleness.’
David Scott Kastan, “Introduction,” Henry IV, Part
1, ed. Kastan (Arden Shakespeare, 2002), 5
Falstaff Hotspur
 The two Harrys

KING
thou mak’st me sad and mak’st me sin
In envy that my Lord Northumberland
Should be the father to so blest a son,
A son who is the theme of honour's tongue,
Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant,
Who is sweet Fortune's minion and her pride;
Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,
See riot and dishonour stain the brow
Of my young Harry. 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. (1.1.77-90)
 ‘What is honour?’
HOTSPUR
By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fathom-line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks
(1.3.200-4)
FALSTAFF
Well, 'tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but
how if honour prick me off when I come on? How
then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm?
No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No.
Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is
honour? A word. What is in that word “honour”?
What is that “honour”? Air. A trim reckoning. Who
hath it? He that died o'Wednesday. Doth he feel
it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible, then.
Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the
living? No. Why? Detraction [i.e. slander] will not
suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. (5.1.129-39)