Festivity and Topicality in the Coventry Scene of 1 Henry IV | Charles Whitney, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Festivity and Topicality in the Coventry Scene of 1 Henry IV
Charles Whitney, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
The Henry IV plays are often said to present a "Saturnalian" kind of popular festivity that temporarily inverts or neutralizes social hierarchy. The plays depict a prodigal son, Prince Hal, moving from Falstaff's Saturnalian holiday tavern world to what will be his everyday world of royal duties. Taking Mikhail Bakhtin's lead, both Graham Holderness and Michael Bristol argue that traditional festive holiday practices as adapted in the plays' tavern scenes and elsewhere validate traditions of dissent and transgression among the lower orders.1 For Bakhtin, such pre-modern carnival festivity can oppose the social hierarchy that structured everyday life, offering an alternative "second world" of "community, freedom, equality, and abundance"2 that reveals the positive value of struggle and change. Like the...
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