Henry IV, Part 1

by William Shakespeare

  Prince Harry is a man of the future; his father is haunted by the past. Both parts of Henry IV are suffused with the memory of the “by-paths and indirect crooked ways” by which Bullingbrook “met” (or rather took) the crown. The king is revealed at his most vulnerable halfway through Part II, in a scene that may have troubled the censor: sick and sleepless, he meditates on the cares of state, the fragility of office, and the weight of his past sin. A usurper himself, Henry IV has no ground on which to base his authority over the rebels who were once his allies. The only basis of his power is victory on the battlefield. In each part, this is achieved by means of a trick. At Shrewsbury in Part I, the device consists of dressing several different men as the king in order to confuse the enemy. Having slain one of the impersonators, Douglas assumes that he is addressing another of them: “What art thou, / That counterfeit’st the person of a king?” This time, however, it is the king, not a counterfeit—which beautifully dramatizes the point that the king is a counterfeit because of his usurpation. In Part II, the king is too sick to fight his own battle, so at Gaultree Forest the Machiavellian strategy of reneging upon the terms of a negotiated truce is carried out by his second son, Prince John of Lancaster. Does that make Prince Harry into the true follower of Machiavelli, who advised that the effective prince is one who gets someone else to do his dirty work for him?

  At the beginning of Part I, the king says that he must postpone his Crusade to the Holy Land because of the new civil broils at home, the fresh wound upon the earth of England. His dream of expiating his sins by liberating Jerusalem from the heathen is never translated into action. The prophecy that he would end his life there is only realized ironically: he dies in the “Jerusalem chamber” of Westminster Abbey. Henry IV’s fear, apparently borne out by the bad company that Prince Harry keeps, is that the sin of the father will be visited upon the reign of his son:

  For the fifth Harry from curbèd licence plucks

  The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog

  Shall flesh his tooth in every innocent.

  O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows!

  When that my care could not withhold thy riots,

  What wilt thou do when riot is thy care?

  O, thou wilt be a wilderness again,

  Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!

  He imagines that the “riot” of the wayward prince will be translated into civil disorder when he becomes king. That is also Falstaff’s hope on hearing that his beloved Hal is now Henry V: “the laws of England are at my commandment…and woe unto my Lord Chief Justice!” But he is in for a shock: Hal immediately adopts Falstaff’s adversary, the Lord Chief Justice, as his new surrogate father. As in Part I he had startled the rebels by transforming himself from tavern idler to armed warrior on horseback, so in Part II he will prove that he has learned the civic virtues as well as the military ones.

  The prince’s self-revelatory soliloquy early in Part I began with the words “I know you all.” The newly crowned king’s rejection of Falstaff late in Part II begins with the words “I know thee not, old man.” The verbal echo is unmistakable: he has ceased to be Hal, he is now delivering on his promise that the time would come when he would throw off the companions and misleaders of his youth. As predicted in the soliloquy, Harry has succeeded in falsifying men’s hopes. His reformation glitters over his fault. Falstaff and company suddenly seem to be no more than instruments in a princely conjuring trick, a theatrical act of self-transformation designed to impress a public audience.

  Radically opposing interpretations thus become possible. By one account, the politic march of history stands in violent contrast to the humane virtues of friendship, loyalty, good humor, sociability, verbal inventiveness, self-mockery, and love. Humanity gives way to what the Bastard in King John called “commodity.” History is a Machiavellian nightmare of violence and self-interest. The alternative view is that Falstaff embodies the temptations of the flesh. He scores highly for at least three of the seven deadly sins—gluttony, lust, and sloth. He is the Vice figure of the old tradition of morality plays and his rejection is accordingly Hal’s final step on the path toward political and moral redemption. So it is that Hal can be played equally persuasively as a young man going on a journey toward maturity but still enjoying his departures from the straight and narrow path, or as one of Shakespeare’s Machiavellian manipulators—energetic and intellectually astute, a brilliant actor, but intensely self-conscious, emotionally reined in.

  We may perhaps reconcile the opposing readings by supposing that, in the character of Prince Hal, Shakespeare—perhaps as his own riposte to Marlowe—set out to create a new and distinctive kind of “good machiavel”: a political realist who is prepared to take difficult, even brutal, decisions when it is necessary, but who, instead of being atheistic and self-interested, always tries to do what he takes to be God’s will and so to serve the best interests of his nation and his people. Still, though, the dilemma remains: even as Falstaff uses Hal for his own advancement, he is always a truer father than the cold and politic King Henry IV can ever be. The point is made with beautiful clarity by the contrast between Falstaff’s heated engagement in the scene in which he and Hal act out the prodigal prince’s forthcoming interview with his father and the king’s chilly detachment in the interview itself.

  REFORMATION AND REJECTION

  It is not known whether Shakespeare always intended Henry IV to be a two-part play or whether he discovered at some point in the writing or production of Part I that it would be dramatically unsatisfying to contain a double climax in a single play, to have Prince Harry prove himself a chivalric hero by defeating Hotspur on the battlefield and then immediately dissociate himself from Falstaff and the other thieves. Instead, the rejection of Falstaff is withheld until Part II, but anticipated in the play-within-the-play in Part I, where the prince’s return to his father is pre-enacted in the tavern.

  The scene is a glorious piece of improvised theater, with the actors changing roles and parodying different linguistic registers. Thus, for instance, when Falstaff plays King Henry he apes the affected courtly prose style of the once fashionable writer John Lyly: “for though the camomile, the more it is trodden the faster it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.” It is a mark of Shakespeare’s attention to detail that when Falstaff is playing the king he calls the prince “Harry” instead of his pet name, “Hal.” Though the language of the mock play is intricate and varied, the staging is simple: “This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre and this cushion my crown.” The meta-theatrical effect reminds the audience that they are in a theater, and at the same time suggests that power is itself a form of theater. There is no intrinsic reason why a golden crown is sacred and a stuffed cushion anarchic; whether in a theater or a palace, a throne may represent a “chair of state,” but it is still a mere chair.

  A chair is a chair and, as Gadshill puts it, “Homo is a common name to all men.” Falstaff may be “that reverend Vice, that grey Iniquity, that father Ruffian, that Vanity in years,” but he is also the embodiment of the shared frailty of all humanity: “If sack and sugar be a fault, heaven help the wicked: if to be old and merry be a sin, then many an old host that I know is damned.” To banish plump Jack is to banish “all the world.” “I do,” says Hal, playing the role of his father the king. “I will,” he adds, anticipating what he will do when he becomes king himself. As so often when Shakespeare’s art is working in its most concentrated form, judgment is left suspended. Is Hal “essentially made,” with or without knowing it? And is it possible to be a true friend and a true prince? At the end of the “play extempore,” he is friend more than prince, lying to an authority figure, the sheriff, in order to protect Falstaff. So is he—as some editors emend—“essentially mad,” fundamentally as opposed to temporarily a “madcap”? “The true prince may, for recreation sake, prove a false thief,” says Falstaff: is the playtime of “recreation” a space for a brief interlude of mis
rule or a crucible in which the self is re-created?

  There is little historical warrant for the story of Henry V’s riotous youth. A “prodigal son” narrative was attached to him in the chronicles and the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth in order to highlight the change he undergoes when he becomes king, submits to the rule of law, and so unifies and brings to order the nation that his father divided. The rejection of Falstaff and company is part and parcel of Harry’s symbolically becoming a new person at the moment of his coronation. The notions of “reformation” and the washing away of past iniquities clearly have strong religious connotations. Each time the prince returns to the court, he speaks a language of “fall” and “pardon.” When he fights well, his father tells him, “Thou hast redeemed thy lost opinion.”

  The rhythm of Prince Hal’s life is that of providential history, leading to his “reformation” and his assumption of the roles which attracted Queen Elizabeth to him: unifier of the body politic, victor over a rival kingdom, heroic leader of a great and independent nation. The rhythm of Falstaff’s life is that of the body and the seasons. In Part II he will journey into the deep England of Justice Shallow’s Gloucestershire orchard. We learn from Shallow that Falstaff began his career as page to Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk. This appears to be a Shakespearean fancy without source: it is true of neither the historical Sir John Falstaff, who flees the battlefield in Henry VI Part I, nor the historical Sir John Oldcastle, of whom the character of Falstaff was originally an irreverent portrait. Why did Shakespeare give his fictional Falstaff a past that began in the service of Mowbray? At one level, it links him with opposition to the Lancastrian ascendancy represented by King Henry IV and his son. Mowbray was Henry IV’s opponent when the latter was still Bullingbrook, back at the beginning of Richard II. Like father, like son: as Bullingbrook’s accusation of treachery was instrumental in the banishment of Mowbray from the land, so Hal will banish Falstaff from his presence. Mowbray departs with a moving farewell to his native land and language; the effect of his words is to suggest that love of the English earth and the English word goes deeper than dynastic difference. We do not hear similar patriotic sentiments in the mouth of the self- interested Bullingbrook; he does nothing to bring back the old England idealized in the deathbed speech of his father, John of Gaunt (whose name and whose England will also be remembered by Shallow).

  In Shakespeare’s own time, those who suffered banishment because of ideological difference, but who claimed that they were nevertheless loyal to England, were predominantly Catholics. And this suggests another level to the allusion that binds Falstaff to the Duke of Norfolk. To an Elizabethan audience, the name of Norfolk—the only surviving dukedom in the land—was synonymous with overt or suspected Catholic sympathy. The old Catholic ways persisted in the country long after the official change of religion inaugurated by Henry VIII’s break from Rome. The Catholic liturgy’s integral relationship with the agricultural calendar and the cycles of human biology could not be shattered overnight. There may, then, be a sense in which Falstaff’s journey into deep England is also a journey into the old religion of Shakespeare’s father and maternal grandfather. One wonders if it is a coincidence that, in fleshing out the skeletal character of the prince’s riotous companion that he inherited from the old play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, Shakespeare retained and made much of his own father’s name, John. It is ironic that Falstaff’s original surname, Oldcastle, had to be changed because the character was regarded as an insult to the memory of the proto-Protestant Lollard of that name: “for Oldcastle died martyr,” says the epilogue to Part II, “and this is not the man.”

  Indeed, it is not the man, for Falstaff is if anything an embodiment of those ancient Catholic rhythms which were suppressed in the name of Reformation. Vestiges of Oldcastle litter the text: “Falstaff sweats to death” suggests a martyr burning on a bonfire, and “if I become not a cart as well as another man” could suggest a religious dissident on the way to the stake as well as a criminal being taken to the gallows. Protestants, especially in the extreme form of Puritans, were traditionally lean; fat monks were symbolic of the corruptions of Catholicism. By making Sir John fat and not calling him Oldcastle, Shakespeare raises the specter of Catholic as opposed to Protestant martyrdoms. Falstaff is Malvolio’s opposite: he stands for cakes and ale, festival and holiday, all that was anathema to Puritanism. At the beginning of Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury confirms that Prince Harry’s transformation was completed with the rejection of Falstaff: “Never came reformation in a flood, / With such a heady currance, scouring faults.” If there is a proto-Protestant or embryonic Puritan in the plays, it is King Harry V, newly washed of his past, casting off his old companions, turning away England’s former self.

  ABOUT THE TEXT

  Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date—modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare’s classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can’t).

  But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elaborately produced First Folio text of 1623, the original “Complete Works” prepared for the press by Shakespeare’s fellow actors, the people who knew the plays better than anyone else. The other half had appeared in print in his lifetime, in the more compact and cheaper form of “Quarto” editions, some of which reproduced good quality texts, others of which were to a greater or lesser degree garbled and error-strewn. In the case of a few plays there are hundreds of differences between the Quarto and Folio editions, some of them far from trivial.

  If you look at printers’ handbooks from the age of Shakespeare, you quickly discover that one of the first rules was that, whenever possible, compositors were recommended to set their type from existing printed books rather than manuscripts. This was the age before mechanical typesetting, when each individual letter had to be picked out by hand from the compositor’s case and placed on a stick (upside down and back to front) before being laid on the press. It was an age of murky rushlight and of manuscripts written in a secretary hand that had dozens of different, hard-to-decipher forms. Printers’ lives were a lot easier when they were reprinting existing books rather than struggling with handwritten copy. Easily the quickest way to have created the First Folio would have been simply to reprint those eighteen plays that had already appeared in Quarto and work from manuscript only on the other eighteen.

  But that is not what happened. Whenever Quartos were used, playhouse “promptbooks” were also consulted and stage directions copied in from them. And in the case of several major plays where a reasonably well printed Quarto was available, the Folio printers were instructed to work from an alternative, playhouse-derived manuscript. This meant that the whole process of producing the first complete Shakespeare took months, even years, longer than it might have done. But for the men overseeing the project, John Hemings and Henry Condell, friends and fellow actors who had been remembered in Shakespeare’s will, the additional labor and cost were worth the effort for the sake of producing an edition that was close to the practice of the theater. They wanted all the plays in print so that people could, as they wrote in their prefatory address to the reader, “read him and again and again,” but they also wanted “the great variety of readers” to work from texts that were close to the theater life for which Sha
kespeare originally intended them. For this reason, the RSC Shakespeare, in both Complete Works and individual volumes, uses the Folio as base text wherever possible. Significant Quarto variants are, however, noted in the Textual Notes.

  Henry IV Part I is one of the plays where the Folio text was printed from a Quarto, though with reference to a playhouse manuscript, in which a large number of oaths had been removed in accordance with the 1606 Parliamentary “Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players,” whereby theater companies were prohibited from taking God’s name in vain. Most modern editors use the First Quarto of 1598 as their copy text but import stage directions, act divisions, and some corrections from Folio. Our Folio-led editorial practice follows the reverse procedure, using Folio as copy text, but deploying the First Quarto as a “control text” that offers assistance in the correction and identification of compositors’ errors in the Folio, of which there are many. The traditional notion of fidelity to Shakespeare’s first Quartos, on the grounds that they represent the texts closest to “what the author wrote,” is sometimes more an ideal than a reality. Early Quartos have errors too. And later Quartos made good corrections as well as introducing new errors. The lesson of textual transmission is the same as that of the theater: the Shakespearean text was mobile in its own time and remains ever mobile. Each time one of the plays is performed, whatever the “copy text,” the words will be slightly different, thanks to the tricks of actors’ memories. So, too, each time the play is edited, there will be dozens of differences of punctuation, emendation, and interpretation. Textual mobility is an essential part of Shakespeare’s evolving creative afterlife. Our text is a modernized version of one moment in that life—the moment of the Folio, when all Shakespeare’s history plays were gathered and put in sequence for the first time.