Clayton G. Mackenzie (essay date 1995)


Clayton G. Mackenzie (essay date 1995)

SOURCE: Mackenzie, Clayton G. “The Third Face of the Elizabethan Mars: The Fallacy of Heroism in 1 Henry IV.Neohelicon 22, no. 2 (1995): 185-203.

[In the following essay, Mackenzie examines the mythological allusions in Henry IV, Part 1, and finds that the play lacks a truly heroic protagonist and presents a vision of England as both “tragic and unheroic.”]

The apparent paucity of significant mythological allusion in 1 Henry IV is puzzling. There is, as James Hoyle has shown, a...

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