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THE LANGUAGE OF DECEPTION

James L. Calderwood (essay date 1973)

SOURCE: "Henry IV: Art's Gilded Lie," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter, 1973, pp. 131-44.

[In the following essay, Calderwood studies the way in which Falstaff's language in 1 Henry IV seems to refer as much to the "counterfeiting" or deception practiced by actors as it does to his own actions within the play.]

After the collapse of Richard II's divinely certified symbolism, Shakespeare begins Henry IV with a fallen language whose verbal emblem is the lie and whose human form is Falstaff, the corporealized lie. Falstaff, however, is by no means the only dealer in deception. As an interior playwright, Hal begins his drama of emergent royalty—which might be titled "The Prodigal Prince and the Reformed King"—with a lie, a deliberately beclouded identity by means of which he will "falsify men's hopes." Surrounded by...

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1. Introduction
2. The Language Of Deception
3. Male Fear Of Deception
4. Self-Deception
5. Shakespeare's Deception Of His Audience
6. Further Reading
7. Copyright

1. William Shakespeare