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Henry IV (Masterplots II: Drama)

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The Play

The play opens on a stage set as a medieval throne room. A king’s councillor, Berthold, is puzzled that the monarch is the eleventh century German king Henry IV, not the French king Henry IV of the sixteenth century. Soon a group of visitors in modern dress arrives, and the situation becomes clarified: They have come to try to cure a man who twenty years earlier had struck his head and subsequently has lived with the delusion that he is the medieval German monarch Henry IV. The man, who is never identified by any name other than “Henry IV,” had in his twenties...

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