Henry IV, Part 1

Overview

Henry IV Part 1 is the second play in a sequence of four, running Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V, written between about 1595 and 1599. It stands on its own better than most sequels, but the situation it opens with comes from Richard II: Henry Bolingbroke has deposed and murdered an anointed king, and everything that follows is the bill arriving.

The formal innovation is the double plot. Shakespeare alternates court scenes in verse with tavern scenes in prose, and the alternation is never decorative. A scene of rebels planning is followed by a scene of Falstaff planning a robbery; a father rebuking a son is followed by a mock-rebuke performed with a cushion for a crown. Each half comments on the other, and Hal is the only character who moves freely between them.

Falstaff was originally called Sir John Oldcastle, the name of a real Lollard martyr, and his descendants complained, so Shakespeare changed it and added an apologetic note to Part 2 saying Oldcastle died a martyr and this is not the man. The traces survive in the text, where Hal calls him my old lad of the castle.

What happens

The king opens the play planning a crusade to Jerusalem, which he will never take, as a way of uniting a country he has divided. News arrives instead of fighting on two borders. Young Harry Percy, called Hotspur, has won a battle in the north and is refusing to hand over his prisoners, and the king remarks aloud that he wishes this were his son and that some night-tripping fairy had exchanged the two in the cradle.

His actual son is in a tavern in Eastcheap with Falstaff, who wakes up and asks what time of day it is and is told he has no business caring, since his day is spent on sack, capons, brothels and the leaping-houses. They plan a robbery on Gad’s Hill; Poins proposes a further joke, that he and Hal rob Falstaff afterwards in disguise to hear what lies he tells about it. Left alone, Hal tells the audience that he knows exactly what these men are, that he is imitating the sun in permitting clouds to hide him, and that his reformation will show the brighter for being unlooked for.

The Percys meanwhile are negotiating themselves into open revolt. Their grievance is straightforward and they say it plainly: they made this king, and he has treated them as strangers ever since. Hotspur is the reason they will fail. He is brave, funny, entirely without patience, and cannot sit through a strategy meeting without quarrelling about the course of a river or mocking his allies’ superstitions.

The robbery goes as planned, including the second robbery, and back at the tavern Falstaff reports being set upon by two men, then four, then seven, then eleven, in buckram, and the number rises as fast as he can invent. Hal lets him run and then produces the truth, and Falstaff, caught, claims instantly that he knew all along and would not kill the heir apparent. Then, hearing that Hal must face his father in the morning, they rehearse the interview, Falstaff playing the king with a cushion on his head and delivering an enormous defence of himself as the only honest man in Hal’s company, until Hal, taking the part of his father, answers: I do, I will.

The reconciliation in Act III is the pivot. The king accuses his son of being a degenerate, compares him to Richard II, and holds up Hotspur as the better man. Hal promises, in plain and serious verse, to redeem all this on Percy’s head, and is believed.

At Shrewsbury the two plots finally touch. Falstaff, given a command, has taken bribes to release able men and filled his company with scarecrows, of whom he observes that they will fill a pit as well as better. Before the battle he delivers the catechism on honour: it cannot set a leg, or an arm, or take away the grief of a wound, it is a word, the word is air, and the dead do not feel it.

Hal saves his father’s life, and then meets Hotspur. They fight, Hotspur is killed, and he dies mid-sentence with Hal completing the line for him. Falstaff, who has been lying on the ground playing dead to avoid being actually dead, gets up, stabs the corpse in the thigh, and carries it off claiming the kill. Hal, who watched, says nothing and lets him have it.

How to read it

Read Hal’s first soliloquy and then keep returning to it. Everything you think about the play depends on what you make of a young man who announces his own calculated charm in the first act.

Read the tavern scenes as closely as the court scenes. The prose is some of the best Shakespeare wrote, and the play’s argument is made in the juxtapositions rather than in any speech.

Take Hotspur seriously as an alternative. He is the last person in the tetralogy who believes that honour means what it says, and the play kills him in the first of four parts.

Read the honour catechism against Hotspur’s speech about plucking honour from the moon, and notice Shakespeare has given the two positions to a coward and a fool, and made both of them magnificent.

Then read Part 2 and Henry V, or at least the rejection scene. Falstaff is told, by the new king in public, that he does not know him, and whether that is necessary statesmanship or a betrayal the play has been preparing us to accept is the question the whole sequence exists to raise.

Note the source of the dispute among critics. One tradition, running through Samuel Johnson and A. C. Bradley, takes Falstaff to be the play’s life and Hal’s coldness to be its cost. Another sees a prince learning a difficult trade in the only school available. Both readings survive the text.

Questions it raises

• Is Hal’s first soliloquy honest self-knowledge, a young man’s bravado, or a dramatist reassuring an audience that the prince will turn out well?
• Falstaff says honour is a word. Is he a coward rationalising, or the only person on the field saying something true?
• Hotspur dies for reputation and is mourned generously. Does the play admire him, or diagnose him?
• Hal lets Falstaff claim the kill. What is that: kindness, contempt, or a payment on an account he means to close later?
• Three father figures, and Hal takes something from each. What exactly is the education, and is it one anyone should want?
• The king seized the crown and cannot rest. Does the play think the rebellion is unjust, or merely unsuccessful?