[In the following analysis of Henry IV, Part Two, Bergeron maintains that Falstaff serves as the means by which Shakespeare explores the concept of "ahistory."]

In the tavern scene in 1 Henry IV, Falstaff asks somewhat incredulously: "Is not the truth the truth?"¹ Shakespeare explores the province of history by wrestling with Falstaff s question, raising doubts about the very purposes of history that some critics have assumed define the history play. Nowhere is the evidence of making history more apparent than in 2 Henry TV, In Act IV the Archbishop of York says of King Henry: he will "keep no tell-tale to his memory / That may repeat and history his loss / To new remembrance" (IV.i.202-204).² Shakespeare uses "history" as a verb only this one time in the entire canon. This special focus on the word "history" corresponds to an unusually rich concern for the issues of history in 2 Henry IV, a self-consciousness about history that I do not perceive in the earlier English history plays.

This essay will explore the several versions of history that operate in the play, arguing that these strands culminate in Falstaff, the special artifice of Shakespeare's construction of history, the one who brings narrative history and narrative fiction face to face. Shakespeare summons selected details of the past, shapes that particular fiction, and gives it a dramatic present; in other words, he makes history. His characters provide the principal means by which Shakespeare examines and constructs history. They have independent lives in the fiction of the drama, but they also assist the investigation and production of history. Falstaff, for example, one of Shakespeare's most popular creations, amuses and amazes us; simultaneously, he aids and abets the production of history. The richness of these characters' fictional lives renders suspect any reductive attempt to limit their functions or impact. Their presence and actions in Shakespeare's narrative make unlikely the possibility that a single "historical truth" can be attained.

Constructing history underscores its fictional quality. Louis O. Mink writes: "narrative form in history, as in fiction, is an artifice, the product of individual imagination."³ Into the debate among contemporary historians about the function of narrative in historical writing—indeed, the occasional blurring of history and fiction—Shakespeare had already stepped several centuries earlier by means of his dramatic fiction. In fact, Shakespeare regularly "makes" history, especially in the early years of his dramatic career. He was, of course, not alone. The final two decades of the sixteenth century witnessed an outpouring of historical drama: plays by Marlowe, Peele, anonymous dramatists, and others.⁴The Famous Victories of Henry V, for example, lies as a probable source behind Shakespeare's Henry IV plays; his Richard II has close affinities with Marlowe's Edward II. One can multiply the examples of historical drama and Shakespeare's participation in this development as the century closes. Ribner says that a history play is "an adaptation of drama to the purposes of history" (p. 29), but therein lies the interpretive problem.

The ordered, providential concept of history, epitomized in Tillyard's seminal study of the history plays and accepted by Ribner,⁵ has given way to a recognition that Shakespeare exhibits a sophisticated and at times problematic understanding of the nature of history. David Quint has argued that in "Shakespeare's poetic treatment, history ceases to be the didactic instrument of classical humanism and becomes instead an occasion for historicist self-reflection."⁶ Graham Holderness takes the matter farther when he writes: "Shakespeare's historical plays are not just reflections of a cultural debate: they are interventions in that debate, contributions to the historiographical effort to reconstruct the past and discover the methods and principles of that reconstruction."⁷ Writing itself, as Michel de Certeau and others have noted, produces history. Certeau suggests that writing is an archive that makes possible the creation of a stable history.⁸ Anyone familiar with Shakespeare's use of his sources in the history plays knows how the dramatist reshapes history to suit artistic purposes.

This shaping of history is especially characteristic of 2 Henry IV. If, for example, we think of the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, we do not find there a grappling with historical problems on the magnitude of 2 Henry IV; these plays seem more a relatively straight-forward chronicle of events. Edward II, The Famous Victories, and The Life and Death of Jack Straw all focus on historical action without, I think, an understanding of the problematic nature of history itself. Even in Shakespeare's second tetralogy, 2 Henry IV stands out because it is more self-aware of its literary history. By this I mean that it pays relatively more attention to its indebtedness to the drama that has preceded it. It is, for example, the only one of the Henriad plays that quotes directly from its predecessor—in this case, Richard II. In a word, 2 Henry IV looks back with a historical perspective unlike the other plays of its group, including Henry V, which takes little notice of its precursors: witness the report of Falstaff s death, a sign of this play's distance from the others.

At least three different but related strata of history operate in 2 Henry IV. Shakespeare explores "ahistory" in Falstaff, national history in Prince Hal and the royal party, and literary history within the text of his own play. He therefore reflects not only on political and military history but also on a fictional character woven into that history and on his writing. He meditates on and mediates literary history. I will argue that these various manifestations of history combine and meet in Falstaff. His rejection, expulsion, and imprisonment become the overthrow of "Rumour," or false history, so that a "correct" historical discourse can be inscribed in national life. Shakespeare makes a new history out of the source material available to him. This process questions the nature and method of historical writing. In each category the dramatist dismembers history in order to re-member it.

Any play that opens with the appearance of Rumour, "painted full of tongues, " invites a consideration of how one can know what even happened in the past. Given Rumour's function, this character initiates the exploration of national history where one of the principal activities will be to ascertain what happened. Through the fictions that Rumour offers, history is both created and distorted. As Rumour boasts:

Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,
The which in every language I pronounce,
Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.

(Induction, 6-8)

False reports lead to false history, as Rumour sends out word that Prince Hal has succumbed to Hotspur's sword in the battle at Shrewsbury. Most of the play's opening scene will be devoted to assessing conflicting evidence about the battle in order not to be reliant merely on rumor.

In fact, the political and military life in this play struggles to provide a reliable account of national history and to interpret its significance. Falstaff says of a battle in Act IV: "let it be booked with the rest of this day's deeds" (IV.iii.45-46). "Booking" national history is part of the business of 2 Henry IV, as it makes a fiction out of events, proceeding by synecdoche to offer what history can: a partial view of the past. Shakespeare's "book" produces history. Louis Mink observes that "historical narratives are capable of displacing each other" (p. 196). The struggle between competing narratives clearly functions in the play's opening scene. Out of such contests and displacing narratives the dramatist "books" national history.

In the play's first scene, Northumberland, eager for news about his son, welcomes the word from Lord Bardolph, who reports of the battle: "The King is almost wounded to the death; / And, in the fortune of my lord your son, / Prince Harry slain outright" (Li.14-16). Before he expresses his joy at such news, Northumberland pauses to ask: "How is this deriv'd?" (line 23). That is, what is the source; where is the evidence for such presumed fact? Northumberland had dispatched his own servant Travers to learn about the battle, who then enters with a contradictory report, having learned that the "rebellion had ill luck, / And that young Harry Percy's spur was cold" (lines 41-42). Lord Bardolph questions the reliability of Travers's source.

The historical impasse cannot be resolved until Morton enters. Interestingly, Northumberland sees in him a book: "Yea, this man's brow, like to a title-leaf, / Foretells the nature of a tragic volume" (lines 60-61). To Northumberland, Morton looks like a bound volume of some tragic history. Before Morton can give his account of Shrewsbury, Northumberland recalls the story of Priam, who too late discovered that half of Troy had been burnt. The construction of history proceeds therefore not only by synecdoche but also by metonymy.⁹ Morton has actually witnessed the Shrewsbury battle, unlike either Lord Bardolph or Travers. He reports:

But these mine eyes saw him [Hotspur] in bloody state,
Rend'ring faint quittance, wearied, and outbreath'd,
To Harry Monmouth, whose swift wrath beat down
The never-daunted Percy to the earth.

(lines 107-10)

Morton reports many other details of the battle and concludes: "The sum of all / Is that the King hath won.../.. . This is the news at full" (lines 131-35). Eyewitness interpretation drives out rumor, thereby making possible a credible report of the past. Functioning like a historian, Northumberland has sifted the conflicting reports and made a history of the Shrewsbury battle: the past is a fiction of the present.

In the closing lines of Act I, scene i, Morton reports that the Archbishop of York is rallying troops for the rebels' cause. Morton explains the Archbishop's technique: he "doth enlarge his rising with the blood / Of fair King Richard, scrap'd from Pomfret stones" (lines 204-205). In this especially telling, if not grotesque, way, the Archbishop galvanizes his troops through historical recollection. Like the ghost of Hamlet's father, Richard's blood seems to cry out: "Remember me." History is memory. As they round up men and materiel, the rebel forces hope to have sufficient to wage battle because, as Lord Bardolph says, "Conjecture, expectation, and surmise / Of aids incertain should not be admitted" (I.iii.23-24). The Archbishop responds: "'Tis very true, Lord Bardolph, for indeed / It was young Hotspur's case at Shrewsbury" (lines 25-26). They remember the foolhardiness and desperation of Hotspur's plight, "Eating the air and promise of supply" (line 28). In this case, memory instructs.

King Henry IV s speech in Act III, scene i, has special importance for the subject of history. He says: "O God, that one might read the book of fate, / And see the revolution of the times" (lines 45-46); that is, if only one had the power of a special, privileged historical perspective and could divine the future. If that were possible, Henry says, even the happiest youth "Would shut the book and sit him down and die" (line 55). For better or for worse, we cannot know the future; we know instead the past and draw from it whatever significance we can. In this sense, the book of the future remains closed to us; the book of the past is open—that is the province of history. Warwick responds: "There is a history in all men's lives / Figuring the nature of the times deceas'd" (lines 80-81); from such, Warwick suggests, "a man may prophesy, / With a near aim" (lines 82-83). While this sentiment hints at a predictive value of history, rather like Richmond's final speech in Richard III the dramatist here stops short of accepting it. Historiographers construct the past, remember it; they carry with them no special gifts of prophecy about the future.

Knowing and reconstructing the past may, of course, affect one's actions; that is, history may provide a basis for one's decisions. This idea Shakespeare demonstrates in the case of Northumberland. His wife Lady Northumberland and widowed daughter-in-law Lady Percy gather around him in II.iii, attempting to dissuade him from joining the wars. They succeed. Lady Percy's poignant recollection of the past persuades with special force: history may not predict the future, but it surely may shape it. More tellingly than elsewhere in this examination of national history, Shakespeare here focuses on the matter of death, a topic crucial in the making of history. Because Shakespeare essentially drops the Northumberland story from the remainder of the play, this scene calls attention to itself, reinforcing the dramatist's process of constructing history. The scene functions as synecdoche: a partial instance for the whole issue of death in understanding and making history.

Writing history, Certeau suggests, "plays the role of a burial rite" (p. 100); it "speaks of the past only in order to inter it" (p. 101). He adds: "writing makes the dead so that the living can exist elsewhere," making it possible to connect "what appears with what disappears." Shakespeare understands this function well; his character Lady Percy focuses on the dead in order to open space for the living and the choices that they must make in the present. Shakespeare's writing of the dead both buries the past and commemorates it, what Certeau might characterize as "a labor of death and a labor against death" (p. 5). Lady Percy illustrates this point. She begins by remembering Northumberland's failure to come to the aid of his son at Shrewsbury, when she says, "my heart's dear Harry, / Threw many a northward look to see his father / Bring up his powers; but he did long in vain" (lines 12-14). Out of this past Lady Percy summons a recollection of her husband: "He was the mark and glass, copy and book, / That fashion'd others" (lines 30-31). Yet he was abandoned "To look upon the hideous god of war / In disadvantage, .../.. . so you left him" (lines 35-38). Had the necessary soldiers been supplied, Lady Percy says, "Today might I, hanging on Hotspur's neck, / Have talk'd of Monmouth's grave" (lines 44-45).

Instead, she remains alone to champion her husband's history:

so came I a widow,
And never shall have length of life enough
To rain upon remembrance with mine eyes,

For recordation to my noble husband.

(II.iii.57-61)

National history, not merely an accumulation of facts and events, here powerfully convinces us and Northumberland with its recordation of the dead. Lady Percy as Shakespeare's representative historian labors against the potential death of Northumberland by remembering her husband's death. Shakespeare inscribes death into the discourse of history with unusual force.

As a historian, the dramatist also recalls his own work; therefore, 2 Henry IV pays attention to literary history, another self-conscious attribute of this play. When Falstaff, for example, in II.iv asks Prince Hal, "Didst thou hear me?," Hal answers: "Yea, and you knew me, as you did when you ran away by Gad's Hill; you knew I was at your back, and spoke it on purpose to try my patience" (lines 303-305). Hal cannot be remembering actual history since Falstaff is essentially ahistorical; rather, he recalls II.ii of Shakespeare's I Henry IV, the Gadshill robbery scene. Shakespeare joins the links between history and fiction by reproducing his fictionalized versions of national history from earlier dramas. History therefore, and explicitly here, contains a fiction. In 2 Henry IV the dramatist works into his historical fiction recollections of his own writing; he makes history in part out of his own artistic history, providing thereby an intertextual construct.

References to Shakespeare's Richard II abound.¹⁰ At the end of Act I, the Archbishop of York speaks at length about the fickleness of the public that scorned Richard II when he lived and now would venerate him: "They that, when Richard liv'd, would have him die / Are now become enamour'd on his grave" (I.iii.101-102). The Archbishop's next example specifically recalls Shakespeare's earlier play:

Thou that threw'st dust upon his goodly head,
When through proud London he [Richard] came sighing on

Cry'st now, "O earth, yield us that King again."

(I.iii.103-106)

In V.ii of Richard II the Duke of York had revealed to his Duchess the contrasting behavior of the London crowds toward the disgraced Richard and the newly exalted Bolingbroke. His account interrupted by weeping, York asks his wife, "Where did I leave?" The Duchess responds: "At that sad stop, my lord, / Where rude misgoverned hands from windows' tops / Threw dust and rubbish on King Richard's head" (lines 3-5).¹¹ York adds a few lines later: "No man cried 'God save him!' / No joyful tongue gave him his welcome home, / But dust was thrown upon his sacred head" (lines 28-30). Because such details are unique to Shakespeare's version of this event, here in 2 Henry IV the dramatist obviously quotes himself.

Having mulled over what it would be like to know the future, King Henry in III.i turns to a memory of the past:

'Tis not ten years gone,
Since Richard and Northumberland, great friends,
Did feast together, and in two years after
Were they at wars.

(lines 57-60)

A mere eight years ago Henry and Percy were closest of friends, Percy even assisting in the defiance of Richard II. Pursuing this train of thought, Henry then recalls a specific moment in which Richard predicted Northumberland's future treachery. Richard "with his eye brimful of tears" spoke these words, according to Henry:

"Northumberland, thou ladder by the which
My cousin Bolingbroke ascends my throne"

"The time will come, that foul sin, gathering head,
Shall break into corruption."

(III.i.70-77)

Henry quotes directly and more or less correctly from Shakespeare's Richard II V.i.55-59. Since Henry Bolingbroke was not present in the scene in Richard II, one wonders how he could know this, unless it has become part of historical record. On the other hand, he obviously can know it because Shakespeare remembers his own literary history.

In Act IV Shakespeare again recalls the reign of Richard II and the play on that subject. In scene one Mowbray remembers his father, so prominent in Act I of Richard II. In fact, Mowbray offers a glorious account of the tournament in I.iii of the earlier play. He tells the rebels here in 2 Henry IV:

Henry Bolingbroke and he [Mowbray],
Being mounted and both roused in their seats,
Their neighing coursers daring of the spur,
Their armed staves in charge, their beavers down,
Their eyes of fire sparkling through sights of steel,
And the loud trumpet blowing them together,
Then, then, when there was nothing could have stay'd
My father from the breast of Bolingbroke,
O, when the King did throw his warder down,
His own life hung upon the staff he threw.

(IV.i.117-26)

This superb description of the tournament at Coventry, Mowbray summons in memory of his father. The young Mowbray, who could not have been present, nevertheless has stored up a history of his father and now tells a crucial moment of the story.

Mowbray concludes his version with an interpretation of Richard's action: "Then threw he down himself and all their lives / That by indictment and by dint of sword / Have since miscarried under Bolingbroke" (lines 127-29). This historical analysis picks up on his father's warning in Richard II. As he went off to a banishment imposed by the king, Mowbray bade farewell with these words: "But what thou [Bolingbroke] art, God, thou, and I do know, / And all too soon, I fear, the king shall rue" (Richard II I.iii.204-205). Father and son both see in Richard's fateful action a curse for the future, one which the younger Mowbray views as having been fulfilled.

But such history is subject to ongoing and sometimes contradictory interpretation, a process that assists in distinguishing reliable account from rumor. The rebel leader Westmoreland in fact contradicts Mowbray's interpretation of the Coventry tournament: "You speak, Lord Mowbray, now you know not what" (line 130). Westmoreland reminds the listeners that Bolingbroke's reputation was very high at the time of the Coventry tournament. Therefore, Westmoreland adds:

Who knows on whom Fortune would then have smil'd?
But if your father had been victor there,
He ne'er had borne it out of Coventry;
For all the country . . .

Cried hate upon him.

(IV.i.133-37)

Instead, the country "doted" on Bolingbroke. This squabble about history brings into focus the function of evidence, memory, and literary history. The exchange does not indulge some grand scheme of history, such as a providential view; rather, it underlines immediate problems of evidence and interpretation as the dramatist recalls his own artistic history in the process.

The curious Epilogue to 2 Henry IV also raises the matter of literary history. First, the speaker refers to some former play: "I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it, and to promise you a better" (lines 8-10). What play he refers to we cannot know. Further, the speaker promises another play: "our humble author will continue the story, with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Katharine of France" (lines 27-29)—an obvious statement of the intention to write Henry V. In such a play, the Epilogue speaker says, "for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already a be killed with your hard opinions; for Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man" (lines 30-32). Shakespeare, responding to the protests of the Cobham family, makes clear that he intends no identification between his John Falstaff and John Oldcastle, though rather obviously he had such a thing in mind at one point. The Epilogue to 2 Henry IV helps rewrite literary history, even as the dramatist has responded to political pressure. In creating Falstaff, Shakespeare has constructed a past out of the present; that is, "ahistory" serves the purpose of his literary history, embedded in the national history of England.

Falstaff wanders between narrative truth and narrative fiction, between Shakespeare's rendering of national history and his creative license. Falstaff is historical because he exists in Shakespeare's literary history, clearly a fictional adjunct in the midst of political and military history. I argue that the dramatist also intends an identification between Falstaff and Rumour, a point also made by Porter and Abrams.¹² The Hostess says of Falstaff: "he's an infinitive thing upon my score" (II.i.23). Though she presumably means "infinite," the idea of Falstaff as "infinitive" appeals. Rumour in the Induction makes clear its infinitive: "My office is / To noise abroad" (lines 28-29). Similarly, Falstaff noises abroad all kinds of half-truths or lies. His infinitive? "To lie" or "to counterfeit," to cite his term from 1 Henry IV. He has, for example, promised to marry Hostess Quickly, but clearly does not intend to do that. As the Chief Justice notes, Falstaff has the "manner of wrenching the true cause the false way" (II.i.108-109). Falstaff claims later: "I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine" (IV.iii.18). This image deliberately recalls Rumour, "painted full of tongues" It is tempting to imagine Falstaff s costume as containing pictures of tongues. Such loose tongues, untroubled by constraints of truth, noise abroad, slander, and deceive. Rumour offers a link to Falstaff: "what need I thus / My well-known body to anatomize" (Induction 20-21). The best-known body would likely be Falstaff's. The emphasis on Falstaff s body underscores the carnivalesque quality of his character.¹³ His irreverent, threatening, unruly, ludicrous, and possibly subversive qualities derive in part from carnival. In Rumour and Falstaff Shakespeare epitomizes the difficulty of establishing credible history.

The Chief Justice says to Falstaff: "You follow the young Prince up and down, like his ill angel" (I.ii.162-63)—another variation of Rumour. As such, Falstaff has "misled the youthful Prince" (line 143); to which Falstaff retorts: "The young Prince hath misled me. I am the fellow with the great belly, and he my dog." The Justice also likens Falstaff to a candle, "the better part burnt out" (lines 155-56). But Falstaff s presumed valorous past mitigates these charges: "Your day's service at Shrewsbury hath a little gilded over your night's exploit on Gad's Hill" (lines 147-48), says the Justice. One wonders exactly what "service" at Shrewsbury the Justice recalls; he has apparently accepted the story of Falstaff s slaying of Hotspur. If so, this scene, like the play's first, illustrates the process of constructing history—the selective use of detail, the synecdoche of history. With Falstaff involved, one always encounters difficulties. Despite his size, he functions like a moving target, impossible to pin down and possessing elusive, ahistorical qualities: a fiction that threatens the making of history.¹⁴

Having just learned about the "history in all men's lives" in III.i, we hear a different kind of history in III.ii: that of Justices Shallow and Silence, who focus not only on their past experiences but also on the issue of death. Shallow says: "Death, as the Psalmist saith, is certain to all, all shall die" (lines 36-37). Here in another key the dramatist through his characters confronts death as a constituent part of history, as he had in Lady Percy's appearance in II.iii. With Shallow's question, "O, Sir John, do you remember since we lay all night in the Windmill in Saint George's Field?" (lines 189-90), Falstaff enters their historical recollection, noting that they have indeed "heard the chimes at midnight" (line 209). Even "ahistory" may proceed by presumed memory. The synecdochic remembrance nevertheless must meet another test: credibility. Falstaff, the incarnation of Rumour, challenges the validity of the stories that he has heard, not unlike Northumberland's sifting of evidence in the play's first scene. Falstaff complains: "Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying! This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, . . . and every third word a lie" (lines 296-301).

Just as Westmoreland undermines Mowbray's account of his father's tournament encounter with Bolingbroke (IV.i), so Falstaff reinterprets the shallow and silent history of these minor justices. Justice Shallow's references to "John a Gaunt" particularly gall Falstaff: "I'll be sworn a [he] ne'er saw him [Gaunt] but once in the tiltyard, and then he burst his head for crowding among the marshal's men" (line 316-18). With delicious historical irony, Falstaff then says: "I saw it and told John a Gaunt he beat his own name" (lines 318-19). In this special moment Shakespeare combines in the ahistorical Falstaff national and literary history. Falstaff seems to be part of national history but is indeed credible only in Shakespeare's own artistic work. And yet in an irony that doubles back on itself, the ahistorical character challenges the historical veracity of other ahistorical characters who have invoked a memory of their involvement with a historically great figure, John of Gaunt.

This same Falstaff captures one of the rebels, Coleville of the Dale, in IV.iii as his fictional world intersects with Prince John's exploits. When chided for his tardiness in arriving at the battle, Falstaff replies: "Do you think me a swallow, an arrow, or a bullet?" (lines 32-33). An invisible bullet, Falstaff cannot be found in history's chronicles. But for his valorous "conquest" of Coleville, Falstaff insists that it should "be booked with the rest of this day's deeds" (lines 45-46)—or perhaps a ballad or picture to capture the moment before it speeds away from memory. With such recordations of his deeds Falstaff conceives an image of himself: "I in the clear sky of fame o'er shine you as much as the full moon doth the cinders of the element" (lines 50-52). In the clear sky of fame resides Rumour/Falstaff. The only "booking" that Falstaff receives is Shakespeare's play. Of course the news of Prince Hal's accession to the throne leads Pistol to assert to Falstaff: "thou art now one of the greatest men in this realm" (V.iii.85-86). Caught up in the excitement, Falstaff claims: "I am Fortune's steward!" (lines 126-27). The desire to be written down in historical chronicles, to shine in Fame's clear sky, and to serve as Fortune's steward reinforces Falstaff s vainglorious concept of himself. History will finally puncture this illusion and expel "ahistory."

When Prince Hal becomes Henry V in the play's last act, the dramatist returns to the question of rumor with which the play began. The new king makes a speech of reconciliation to the Chief Justice and to his brothers. He says:

My father is gone wild into his grave,
For in his tomb lie my affections;
And with his spirits sadly I survive
To mock the expectation of the world,
To frustrate prophecies, and to raze out
Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down
After my seeming.

(V.ii.123-29)

The history of Prince Hal, written down after his seeming, contains rotten opinion and rumor to which his new life as king will give the lie. As Abrams notes, in one sense Rumour is Hal's adversary (p. 485). His living history will supplant and subvert the record, establishing a truth not subject to rumor. Like the carnivalesque Falstaff, Prince Hal will mock expectations, rendering suspect historical prophecies about himself. Like Falstaff, the new king will mock conventional ideas about history; instead, he will construct a new history by erasing what has already been written about him. Overthrowing history is part of the process of making history. The new king readies himself to confront Falstaff in a final battle of competing histories.

Having borrowed a thousand pounds, having ridden night and day, having had no time to get new clothes, Falstaff nevertheless stands in the streets of London eagerly awaiting the new king's favor: "do but mark the countenance that he will give me" (V.v.7-8). In that excited conversation with Shallow and Pistol, Falstaff lets fall two phrases that impinge on his role in the historical strata of this drama: "not to remember" (line 21) and "putting all affairs else in oblivion" (line 26). In context these phrases make perfectly good sense; but if we focus on the making of history, we discern the fatal quality of not remembering and putting affairs into oblivion. This play has emphasized time and again the importance of recordation and snatching events from obscurity. Shakespeare underscores the inadequacy of Falstaff as historian.

As that large embodiment of Rumour, he must finally be expelled and imprisoned. He functions, of course, as a threat to Hal's sound government by his riotous behavior and lack of discipline. Hal says: "I have long dreamt of such a kind of man, / So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane" (lines 49-50). The new king must deny that dream, and he therefore banishes Falstaff. To expel and imprison Falstaff, as Hal does, may be in part to dispel Rumour, thereby making it possible to create a reliable history of Hal as Henry V. The expulsion of Falstaff also reveals written history's tendency to efface the other in order to imprint its image upon the erased surface. Though Falstaff anticipates only a momentary period of disgrace and banishment, believing that he will eventually be summoned by the king, in fact he does not again appear in historical drama, remaining only to have his death reported in Henry V Hal has somewhat ruthlessly if understandably decided to "raze out / Rotten opinion"—Rumour/Falstaff.¹⁵

As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has recently pointed out: "History consists in something more than 'just one damn thing after another,' in something more than random antiquarianism, even in something more than what happened in the past."¹⁶ Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV offers "something more." Throughout this play Shakespeare questions and probes the written account of history, acknowledging that recorded history must always be subject to correction by the history that lives in our lives that may mock expectation and frustrate prophecy. Shakespeare contributes to historiographical efforts to reconstruct the past and to discern the methods and principles of that reconstruction, in part by demonstrating how closely narrative fiction and narrative history come to each other. He makes history out of the archives that he inherited, out of his own literary production, and out of ahistorical imagination. Shakespeare's historical writing buries the past and commemorates it by being a labor of death and a labor against death, as Certeau claims. He "histories" the past to new remembrance, to new life.

Notes

¹1 Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys (New York: Vintage, 1960), II.iv.225.

²2 King Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys (New York: Vintage, 1967). All quotations from the play will be from this Arden edition.

³ "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument," in Historical Understanding, ed. Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob, and Richard T. Vann (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), p. 199. This essay first appeared in 1978.

⁴ For a handy survey, see Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare, 2nd edn. (London: Methuen, 1965), especially chapters 2 and 3, pp. 30 ff. Ribner is eager to see a development from medieval religious drama through Shakespeare to the "degeneration into romance in the seventeenth century and its consequent final extinction as a vital force in English theatre" (p. 29). He wholeheartedly accepts an evolutionary development of the history play.

⁵ E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Macmillan, 1944).

⁶ David Quint, "'Alexander the Pig': Shakespeare on History and Poetry," Boundary 2, 10 (1982): 50.

⁷ Graham Holderness, Shakespeare's History (New York: St Martin's Press, 1985), p. 31. In her recent study of Richard III, Marjorie Garber observes that Richard's "twisted and misshapen body encodes the whole strategy of history as a necessary deforming and reforming—with the object of reforming—the past." "Descanting on Deformity: Richard III and the Shape of History," in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988) p. 86.

⁸ Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), p. 215.

⁹ Albert Cook writes: "Written history aspires to the complete account, but it is constrained in the limitations of human knowledge, and also by the principles of its own domain"; therefore, "All writing of history is synecdochic." History/Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988), p. 137. Hayden White in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978) also explores the exclusionary nature of historical writing, its synecdoche.

¹⁰ A thorny problem in textual history occurs because the references to Richard II do not appear in Qa of 2 Henry IV. See Humphreys's extensive discussion of this problem, pp. lxviii-lxxxiv, in the Arden edition.

¹¹King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (London: Methuen, 1961). Citations from this play will be from this Arden edition.

¹² Joseph A. Porter, The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), p. 93; Richard Abrams, "Rumor's Reign in 2 Henry IV: The Scope of a Personification," ELR 16, 3 (Autumn 1986): 475, 491. Neither critic explores an identification of Rumour with the process of history.

¹³ See especially Holderness, Shakespeare's History, pp. 79-130; and Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (London: Methuen, 1985). Holderness says that carnival liberty is opposed to historical necessity (p. 119)—certainly valid for Falstaff.

¹⁴ Referring to the Hostess's description of Falstaff s death in Henry V, Geoffrey H. Hartman in Criticism in the Wilderness (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980) makes the pregnant observation that "in Shakespeare the visionary babble remains vision and babble" (p. 89). We rightly understand Falstaff to fulfill multiple purposes in the fiction: outrageously funny character and agent of Shakespeare's production of history. I thank Daryl Palmer for drawing my attention to the Hartman reference.

¹⁵ Abrams writes, "we the audience are finally made to bear responsibility for Rumor's overthrow through our own act of rebellion against tyranny" (p. 486). I disagree, as this interpretation takes us needlessly outside the play itself and imposes a moral burden that I doubt the dramatist intended. Near the end of his extended analysis of Rumour in the play, Abrams observes, "and as the country reunites, Rumor's reign paradoxically draws to a close and continues" (p. 494). This openended interpretation rather overlooks Hal's conclusive expulsion of rumor in the person of Falstaff. Of course, in one sense, rumor is always with us; but that recognition tells us little about this play.

¹⁶ Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Literary Criticism and the Politics of the New Historicism," in The New Historicism, ed. H. Aram Veeser (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), p. 216.