[In the following essay, Fehrenbach argues that while King Henry's failure to be viewed as Henry IV 's protagonist is "understandable, " the characterization of the king has "unfortunate[ly]" received little critical attention. Fehrenbach then analyzes Shakespeare's portrayal of King Henry, maintaining that the characterization is achieved through indirect means, and is appropriate for a character who routinely masks himself to those around him.]

Despite the play's title, critics generally regard the central figure of 1 Henry IV as just about anybody except Henry IV. The usual candidates, of course, are Hal and Falstaff, but one also finds an occasional scholar asserting that Hotspur all but runs away with the play as the appealingly passionate quasi-tragic figure. Now and again someone will argue for the elevation of Henry to his rightful place as chief protagonist of his play as against those usurpers Hal, Hotspur, and Falstaff; but these departures from the critical tradition are rare and usually are not as revolutionary as they might first seem.¹

Relegation of the King to the status of a secondary character is understandable: when compared to Hal, Hotspur, and Falstaff, he has fewer speeches and fewer lines;² he is generally less active in the play and arouses less interest in the audience. As Bolingbroke in Richard II, a significant and immensely interesting antagonist, he has been the subject of considerable study.³ But as King in 1 Henry IV, Henry has received little attention,⁴ and virtually nothing has been written on the method employed by Shakespeare to make his character. This inattention is unfortunate, for Shakespeare's method of creating Henry is instructive. It illustrates how a master playwright marries characterization with character.

In a successfully constructed drama—and 1 Henry IV has always been considered one of Shakespeare's best plays—one expects to find methods of characterization appropriate to the characters depicted. This expectation is not disappointed in 1 Henry IV. The excessively passionate and open Hotspur is primarily revealed by honest and direct, if immature and unguarded, speeches, by active movement, and only incidentally by the more indirect method of description, which generally supports the characterization already created by what the young nobleman says and does. Falstaff, too, is an open book. His actions and statements on their face reveal a vain, irresponsible, and indulgent, if nonetheless likable, personality—a characterization supported by the less direct method of characterization: statements by others. Thanks to his famous soliloquy at the end of Act I, scene ii, Hal is also an open book. To be sure, he appears to be the profligate—and to a considerable degree he is a lover of good times—but owing to his soliloquy we know him to be a responsible and serious, even calculating prince. The several unfavorable comments about his character are made by men who lack the perspective of the audience; none of these comments coincides with Hal's true personality. Primarily by his actions and by his statements—which occasionally contain an irony clearly apparent to the audience because of the soliloquy in I. ii—and only to a small degree by the descriptions of others, do we understand the person of the Prince of Wales.

King Henry is a different kind of person, and his characterization is formed differently. He is by no means an open book; he is secretive and distant, more guessed at than known. He is a man we know but do not know, a man we watch but are not sure of. For reasons as selfless and politically necessary as they are self-serving and ambitious, Henry is a private man and a Machiavellian king, alone with his own thoughts of political responsibility and personal guilt. While Hal, Hotspur, and Falstaff are primarily created by direct means—appropriate to their open characters—Henry is formed primarily by indirect means—appropriate to his close character. For example, in contrast to the ways in which the speeches and actions of Hal, Hotspur, and Falstaff inform the audience about them, Henry's speeches and actions say more about him through indirection, through irony, and through a peculiar emphasis on what is left unsaid. Also, in a play abounding in character foils, Henry's person is especially dependent upon other characters, juxtaposed and compared to him, for his characterization. At the same time, descriptions of the King play a much larger role in creating the person Shakespeare intends us to know than do descriptions of the other three major figures. In short, to portray King Henry IV, Shakespeare employs methods of characterization that appropriately deny us intimacy with this necessarily private man, this troubled ruler who in his dual struggle against past sins and present threats must always be the masker. However advantageous masking is to Henry the King ruling a beleaguered state, it does not make Henry the man a warm and sympathetic figure.⁵

I

Occasionally, Henry's speeches and actions can be trusted to be literal and accurate presentations of his character. For example, his expression of concern about his son's apparent profligacy in I. i. 78-90⁶ and his agonizing, nearly confessional conference with Hal in III. ii convey his sincere fears for England and for the throne. His comment before the battle of Shrewsbury that "nothing can seem foul to those that win" (V. i. 8), along with his orders preparing for war in III. ii. 170-80 and those speeches and actions throughout Act V with which he directs his forces and swiftly metes out justice after Shrewsbury, reveal the King to be an adroit, efficient ruler and a no-nonsense military leader.

Usually, however, the King says or does little that can be taken at face value, little that does not ironically reveal an otherwise hidden part of his character. But the kind of irony associated with Henry IV is not the same as the dramatic irony surrounding Hal's words and deeds. Because of the Prince's soliloquy in I. ii, the audience enjoys a peculiar and intimate relationship with him, a relationship that allows us generally to know how to respond to him at particular moments. The irony surrounding Henry's words causes us to suspect and to guess, not really to know. There remains a distance between us and the King, and because we never get close to him we can never feel sure of him.

In his opening statement to the court in Act I, scene i, Henry would have us believe that now, tired of war but pleased with the end of civil strife, he would give thanks to God by traveling to Jerusalem on a crusade. Consider this pious vow in terms of the rest of that scene, especially Henry's subsequent speeches. The long-delayed crusade, if he sincerely wishes to organize one, is an act of penance for a sin Henry scrupulously and characteristically avoids mentioning (his responsibility for the murder of Richard II), but by the end of the scene we must question his guilt-born intention. It is likely that Henry has known all through his speech that the wars are not really over—in which case his call for a crusade becomes only a show of kingly piety. His haste in vowing to go to the Holy Land is matched only by his haste to "Brake off (I. i. 48) the intended crusade, which he "must neglect" (I. i. 101) until the matter of Hotspur's refusal to send him the prisoners captured at the battle of Holmedon is settled. Certainly the King had known of the battles in the North and of Hotspur's refusal when he made his public call for a crusade, for Henry himself relates to the court the details of young Percy's acts from news brought to him by Sir Walter Blunt. Before Henry made his vow to go on the crusade, he had already sent for Hotspur to provide an explanation for his decision to keep the prisoners (I. i. 100-102).⁷ Henry's penitential speech is, therefore, difficult to take at face value, and consequently we soon find ourselves suspecting the King's public expression of Christian commitment.

Henry's statement to Westmoreland which closes this first scene—

But come yourself with speed to us again;
For more is to be said and to be done
Than out of anger can be uttered

(I. i. 105-7)

—clearly tells the audience that the King does not consider a public, open discussion of Hotspur's rebuff (utter carries the Elizabethan meaning, "to make public") to be the most effective way of preparing for his confrontation with the Percy family. In secret, therefore, he and Westmoreland will prepare a strategy to counter the Percies.

When Henry next appears (I. iii), his plan has been determined and put into action. He now plays the role of a long-suffering ruler whose patience has been mistaken for weakness by his subjects. But a perceptive audience will probably laugh silently at such a picture of Henry. His characterization of himself as "smooth as oil, soft as young down" (I. iii. 7), and "Unapt" to have his "cold and temperate" blood stirred (I. iii. 1-2), only serves to disclose to the audience, through irony, an imperious nature and a real anger. If Henry has lost the "title of respect" as he says (I. iii. 8), the loss has hardly occurred because he has been too humble and malleable. Though Henry's words may deceive the Percies, Shakespeare reveals to the audience by ironic indirection that the King is angered, yet controlled, and, above all, that Henry is a subtle defender when crossed or threatened.

The royal dismissal of Worcester continues the indirect characterization of Henry. The King would have it understood that he dismisses Worcester because of the Earl's impertinence to "majesty," but what must equally offend him is Worcester's implicit reference to Henry's usurpation by reminding the King that the Percies aided him in gaining the throne:

Our house, my sovereign liege, little deserves
The scourge of greatness to be us'd on it;
And that same greatness too which our own hands
Have holp to make so portly.

(I. iii. 10-13)

Henry's testy reaction and his dismissal of Worcester with a self-serving statement about his majesty call our attention to his extreme sensitivity to the history of his climb to the throne—a subject he scrupulously avoids speaking about candidly throughout the entire play. Though Worcester's statement is uncomfortably pointed, his charge that the Percy house is being oppressed is substantiated by the facts. In requiring Hotspur to turn over all his prisoners to the crown, the King is demanding more than military custom allows.⁸ However accurately Henry judges Worcester to be a danger, therefore, the temper of the King's reaction, his defensive imperiousness, reveals that the Earl has touched a sensitive nerve and that one subtle plotter has recognized the threat of another almost intuitively.

The rest of this important scene finds Henry insisting that Edmund Mortimer, the Earl of March and brotherin-law to Hotspur, traitorously surrendered to Glendower during the recent civil wars. This charge is not accepted by the Percies, nor is it accepted unequivocally by Shakespeare's sources: Holinshed's Chronicles and Samuel Daniel's Civil Wars. Holinshed, Daniel, and Shakespeare all agree (historically inaccurate though we know them to have been) that Mortimer was Richard II's designated successor, a fact known by Worcester and Northumberland and, one must assume, by Henry—though in keeping with his close nature the King never openly refers to that line of succession. More important, the Percies and Shakespeare's sources agree that when Henry charges Mortimer with treason, making him a traitor not deserving ransom, his objective is to avoid enlarging a rival to the throne.⁹ Although the audience is not likely to know Holinshed or Daniel, the force of the Percies' argument—the dramatic expression of the authority of the playwright's sources—causes us to suspect the King's motives to be politically self-serving (see I. iii. 145-59). Henry's speeches in these two early scenes arouse our skepticism not so much by what they say as by what they leave unsaid. The King's real motives, his true feelings, are kept at a remove from the audience, but they are not as well hidden as he would wish.

Appearing next in Act III, scene ii, Henry once again ironically and indirectly reveals what he, but not the dramatist, would hide. A. R. Humphreys has noted that Henry IV's expression of sadness at Hal's behavior indicates a "covert sense of guilt,"¹⁰ guilt about his usurpation to which he will not openly admit and on which he attempts to put a good face for Hal. Moreover, as he compares himself to Hotspur in praising the young man's leadership and prowess in battle, Henry ironically and unintentionally identifies himself with a plotter against the throne:

For all the world
As thou art to this hour was Richard then
When I from France set foot at Ravenspurgh,
And even as I was then is Percy now.

(III. ii. 93-96)

Later in this scene, Henry says that Hal is morally capable of joining the rebels, allying with the Percies to fight against his own father. Such an unfair attack reveals by indirection the King's own values and his own covert guilt. This is the "politician" talking, the man who views ambition for the throne as paramount and as a motive annihilating all other considerations. However profligate Hal may appear to the King, there is nothing in the son's actions to warrant the charge of treason and perfidy which the father lays against him.¹¹

After an absence of several scenes, Henry next enters in Act V, scene i. There he engages in an interesting exchange with the man who has become his archenemy: Worcester. The hostility between these men can be explained as much by their similar personalities as by their different goals. Worcester, who seeks Henry's dethronement as earnestly as the King seeks to retain his position, is as subtle and shrewd as the King himself. He is therefore more dangerous to Henry than the passionate, open, and frequently foolish Hotspur. The King attempts to disarm Worcester with statements. When they do not work, he treats Worcester with disdain, making an offer he must know Worcester will reject for the very reason the Earl has hinted at earlier: distrust of Henry.

Henry's self-serving description of Worcester's disruption of the King's peace and his call for his cousin's obedience, to say nothing of his attempt to elicit sympathy as an aging man reluctantly but dutifully suffering the discomforts of war (V. i. 9-21), contrasts sharply with Worcester's detailed, substantive charge that Henry is responsible for the civil strife because he broke faith with his early supporters:

Whereby we stand opposed by such means
As you yourself have forg'd against yourself
By unkind usage, dangerous countenance,
And violation of all faith and troth
Sworn to us in your younger enterprise.

(V. i. 67-71)

Worcester's accusation cannot be entirely dismissed as an argumentum ex nihilo after what we have seen of Henry's relationship with the Percies earlier in the play and heard in Henry's private conversation with Hal. As usual, Henry will not actually deny the accusation; rather, from the position of majesty, he disdainfully and sarcastically charges that Worcester has merely found a deceptively plausible justification for rebellion (V. i. 72-82). To be sure, Henry does not want war, but the peace must be on his terms. His offer of pardon, capped with the contemptuous and peremptory "So, be gone; / We will not now be troubled with reply: / We offer fair; take it advisedly" (V. i. 112-14), must be taken in context with his refusal to deal with the substance of Worcester's argument, no small part of which is the Earl's belief that the King cannot be trusted to keep his word. For the second time in the play Henry curtly dismisses Worcester. None of this is to suggest that Worcester's view of the King is the entire story or that his rebellious attitude is wholly without fault. But again, Shakespeare, through indirection, causes us to see more of the person of Henry than the close King would allow. What Henry leaves unsaid suggests more than what he says informs.

In the end, Henry is understandably indignant with Worcester in his public chastisement of the Earl for not conveying the royal offer of pardon (V. v. 1-10), and Worcester admits to an attempt to save his own skin by his deceitful actions. But there was never any question about Worcester's concern for his safety. The important question, whether Henry could have been trusted to keep his promise to pardon all rebels, is not answered. The seeds of doubt, having been planted so plausibly by Worcester's statements and by Henry's reaction, grow so that Henry's character is affected as much by what we do not know as by what we do.

II

As our understanding of Henry comes less from what he says than from what he does not say, our acquaintance with other characters in association with Henry often tells us more about the King than do his own actions. In a play virtually structured around characterfoils, Henry's character is notable for its subtly rich contrasts and comparisons with other actors in the drama. Thus, the almost natural hostility revealed in the exchanges of Worcester and Henry—appropriate antagonists—is in great part explained by their similarity in cunning, shrewdness, and self-concern. As Henry makes his own comparison with Hotspur (III. ii. 96), we note his ironic self-identification with rebellion. Their argument over Hotspur's prisoners and Mortimer's behavior in battle, however, causes us to be aware of the two men's contrasting temperaments and, further, forces us to doubt Henry's sense of honor when his highly questionable motives are compared with his honor-driven young cousin's impulses. And, of course, Hal, who asserts that he is the "king of courtesy" (II. iv. 10) and who promises when he is King of England to command the "good lads of Eastcheap" (II. iv. 14), contrasts markedly with the present King of England, who demonstrates no particular friendship with the commons and is anything but a "king of courtesy." Because each of the other characters is more open, even more visible in these comparisons with Henry, the foil-relationships are more indirectly informing about Henry than they are about Worcester, Hotspur, and Hal.

The incident, however, that serves most vividly to characterize Henry through other characters is the famous mock-king scene (II. iv. 413-528) in which both Falstaff and Hal play the King. When Falstaff first stands for Henry IV, he chooses props at hand to represent the accoutrements of office. Hal's humorous comments on these objects carry ironic implications about his father's realm: "Thy state is taken for a joined-stool, thy golden sceptre for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown!" (II. iv. 418-20). The King's regality as parodied by Falstaff and Hal is considerably less than grand, appropriate for a throne that is as unmajestic and troubled as Henry's.

Hal's rotund drinking companion then adopts the broad rhetorical style of Preston's Cambises, saying: "Give me a cup of sack to make my eyes look red, that it may be thought I have wept; for I must speak in passion, and I will do it in King Cambyses' vein" (II. iv. 423-26). Falstaff s role as a weeping king is appropriate to the character of the suffering Henry IV, who, guilt-ridden, grieves over his son's apparent irresponsibility and sees it as divine retribution for Richard's murder. At least three instances of the King crying are found in the play—weeping which derives from fear of his son's profligacy, from guilt (III. ii. 90-91), and, as Hotspur would have it, from deceit (see IV. iii. 63, 81-84).

King Falstaff s jocular comment that Hal is unlike his father parodies the King's earlier speech about Hal's lineage (I. i. 78-90) and prepares us for the King's later chastisement of Hal in Act III, scene ii. Falstaff s charge that Hal would depose King Falstaff-Henry (II. iv. 479) parodies the threat of the rebels and introduces the King's fear, as yet unexpressed in the play by the King himself, that Hal will turn against him. Only after Act III, scene ii (the private conversation between the King and the Prince at court) do the serious implications of these otherwise comic exchanges become clear. When Henry appears in that scene with his son, his actions and speeches are reminiscent of the earlier tavern scene, and their full meaning is underscored by what Falstaff-Henry has already shown us. In short, if we have been perceptive, we already know a significant part of Henry's personality—especially regarding his attitude toward Hal—through another: Falstaff.

Hal also presents a side of Henry not introduced by the worried, less than majestic King Falstaff-Henry. It is the severe, intolerant, no-nonsense Henry IV that King Hal-Henry portrays in his rhetorical attack upon the "villainous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan" (II. iv. 508-9). As Hal reveals to those who would hear how he as Henry V will react to Falstaff and the world old Jack represents ("I will," he says to Sir John's plea not to banish Falstaff), he also conveys Henry IV's reaction to the corpulent old man: "I do," he says to the same plea as the Prince-King (II. iv. 528).

Whether or not Hal and Falstaff are consciously portraying these facets of the character of the King—I suspect that Hal, with his perception, knows precisely how accurate his portrayal of the King is and is suggesting, however indirectly, that he is Henry's son and will be so proven in the future—it is clear that one of Shakespeare's purposes in this delightful scene is to disclose as much, if not more, of the character of the King by this indirect method as we already know by Henry's actual speeches and actions.

III

The third major indirect method utilized by Shakespeare to create the character of Henry from a distance is description. References to Henry are often neutral, such as when he is called "king" or "father." Occasionally, however, they are totally unfair, such as when Hotspur says, "I think his father loves him not / And would be glad he met with some mischance" (I. iii. 231-32). But most of the descriptive comments provide both a credible and an unsympathetic picture of Henry. The major sources of the portrayal of the King by this method are hardly objective persons. But the contribution these descriptions make to our attitude to this guilt-ridden politician—through their cumulation and by their often powerful rhetoric, whatever their source—cannot be denied.

One of the first descriptions not only provides an unfavorable view of Henry, but utilizes as well the earlier device of character-comparison. Hotspur chastises his father and uncle for having "put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose, / And plant[ed] this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke" (I. iii. 175-76). The several uncomplimentary references to Henry by his patronymic and his dukedom—he is called Bolingbroke six times (I. iii. 137, 176, 229, 241, 246; III. i. 64) and Lancaster once (III. i. 8)—have the effect of portraying the King as a usurper and an impoverished claimant to majesty. The King's Machiavellian side is kept before us as Hotspur in his several speeches in I. iii describes Henry as "subtle," a "proud king, who studies," a "vile politician," the "king of smiles," a "fawning greyhound." To the youthful Percy, the King is an "ingrate," "unthankful" and "forgetful" of what others have done for him, a man who once offered the young supporter of his rebellion against Richard a "candy deal of courtesy" only later to prove himself a "cozener."

Henry's dismissal of the Percies with threats in I. i (an incident manufactured by Shakespeare) is cited by Worcester as an indication of the King's dangerous disloyalty to his earlier supporters. According to Worcester, this danger makes it necessary for them to defend themselves by taking arms (I. iii. 283-90). As selfserving as the Earl's speech is, its argument is sufficiently credible to make one wonder about the King. Henry the politician cannot be trusted. In a later attack upon the King that is more substantive than any of the charges brought by the firebrand Hotspur, Worcester details Henry's history of broken oaths (V. i. 30-71). Despite his dishonesty, even his treachery, Worcester offers a plausible justification for his refusal to convey the King's offer of pardon to the rebels (V. ii. 3-23), a justification also manufactured by Shakespeare. One must wonder why Shakespeare chose to relate the history of the usurpation and of Henry's ingratitude to his supporters twice in less than a hundred lines (IV. iii. 52-105 and V. i. 30-71) if not to impress us with the plausibility, perhaps even veracity, of the Percies' perspective on Henry. Never does the King openly deny the charges: he merely ignores or dismisses them with disdain.¹²

Hotspur's sarcastic statement to Blunt, Henry's conveyor of pardon, that

The king is kind; and well we know the king
Knows at what time to promise, when to pay

(IV. iii. 52-53)

is a fitting introduction to that passionate young man's unattractive description of Henry's earlier actions. According to Hotspur, when Henry arrived in England seeking his Lancastrian lands, he was "Sick in the world's regard," "wretched," "low," an "outlaw sneaking home." He appeared "to weep / Over his country's wrongs," and with this "face" captured the loyalty of all those he "did angle for." More recently, Hotspur says, the King unfairly "Disgraced" him in the midst of his victories and sought to "entrap" him with spies. Now Henry refuses to enlarge the Earl of March, captured by Glendower while fighting for the King's cause (see IV. iii. 52-105). Percy's rhetorically powerful denunciation of the King effectively overwhelms Sir Walter Blunt's earlier favorable, but by comparison formal and pedestrian, description (IV. iii. 38-51), neutralizing Blunt's representation of Henry as a merciful king offering pardon.

As a threatened, conscience-ridden, yet ambitious and coldly effective politician, Shakespeare's Henry IV must perforce mask both his personal self and his political self. Appropriately, the playwright forms this masking character not by means of intimate contact and not directly and openly, but as from a distance and indirectly. These indirect methods of characterizing Henry, methods that inhibit a familiarity with the man, create an almost unfailingly private man and an always political prince, who—to alter the meaning of Henry's description of himself—is "Ne'er seen but wond'red at" (III. ii. 57).

Notes

¹ Anne Marie McNamara, "Henry IV: The King as Protagonist," Shakespeare Quarterly, 10 (1959), 423-31; and Fredson Bowers, "Theme and Structure in King Henry IV, Part I," in The Drama of the Renaissance: Essays for Leicester Bradner, ed. Elmer M. Blistein (Providence: Brown Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 42-68.

² According to Marvin Spevack, A Complete and Systematic Concordance to the Works of Shakespeare, II (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1968), the King has 30 speeches with a total of 341 lines (p. 295), while Hal speaks 170 times in 575 lines (p. 309), Falstaff 151 times in 621 lines (p. 268), and Hotspur 102 times in 562 lines (p. 284).

³ See, for example, Irving Ribner, "Bolingbroke, A True Machiavellian," Modern Language Quarterly, 9 (1948), 177-84; Brents Stirling, "Bolingbroke's 'Decision,'" SQ, 2 (1951), 27-34; Johannes Kleinstück, "The Character of Henry Bolingbroke," Neophil, 41 (1957), 51-56; and portions of two larger studies: John Palmer, Political Characters of Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1945), pp. 118-79; and H. M. Richmond, Shakespeare's Political Plays (New York: Random House, 1967), pp. 123-40.

⁴ Two notable exceptions are H. M. Richmond's observations on Henry in his discussion of 1 Henry IV in the work cited above, pp. 141-58, and Robert Ornstein's instructive comments about the King in A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 125-51.

⁵ J. Leeds Barroll has observed this indirect means of characterization, this making of a character by distancing, at work in Antony and Cleopatra. In "The Characterization of Octavius," Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1970), 231-88, Barroll argues that the effect of this "curious technique of distance" in Octavius' characterization provokes an ambivalent reaction in the audience, causing it to question Caesar's sincerity and to suspect his motivations, never knowing whether he is a hypocrite or a "well-intentioned, if slightly cold-blooded, ruler" (p. 236). Similar ambivalent reactions are provoked by Shakespeare's indirect characterization of Henry.

⁶ All Shakespeare quotations are from The Complete Works of Shakespeare, eds. Hardin Craig and David Bevington, rev. ed. (Glenview, III.: Scott, Foresman, 1973).

⁷ For a discussion of the question of Henry's sincerity, especially as it is related to the structural and textual complexities of I. i, see Samuel Burdett Hemingway, ed., The New Variorum Edition of "Henry the Fourth, Part I" (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1936), pp. 16 n. and 23 n.

⁸ A. R. Humphreys, ed., The First Part of King Henry IV (London: Methuen, 1960), p. 8 n. and The New Variorum Edition, pp. 21-22 .n.

⁹ Holinshed terms Henry's depiction of Mortimer as a traitor a "fraudulent excuse," and Daniel speaks of Mortimer as "A man the king much fear'd, and well he might / Least he should looke whether his Crown stood right." See Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, IV (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 182-85 for the section of Holinshed's Chronicles dealing with Henry and Mortimer; see IV, 209 for the portion of Daniel's Civil Wars that treats this incident.

¹⁰ Humphreys, p. 101 n.

¹¹ This distortion of the Prince of Wales is the result of Henry's inability to understand the whole man that the Prince is—or is becoming. Henry, a much narrower person than his son, is an emotionally limited human not unlike the cerebral, practical Brutus described by Marvin L. Vawter in "'Division 'tween Our Souls': Shakespeare's Stoic Brutus," Shakespeare Studies, 7 (1974), 173-95. Both Brutus and Henry are stiff, defensive men, uncomfortable with—perhaps even afraid of—that sensitive, emotional, warmer side of the human creature. In his almost single-minded pragmatism, the King views the fun-loving Prince of Wales as defective in character, and a defect in a crown prince could easily lead to the worst of disorders. When Hal reassures his political father that events will prove that "I am your son" (HI. ii. 134), the King's fears about the Prince are allayed, but one suspects that the father's bewilderment about his son remains.

¹² Shakespeare's several modifications of his sources in these scenes with the rebels are not insignificant. Larry S. Champion argues in "The Function of Mowbray: Shakespeare's Maturing Artistry in Richard II" SQ, 26 (1975), 3-7, that Shakespeare not only learned to modify history for dramatic ends, but also enlisted the words and actions of one character thus altered to provide subtle and indirect observations about the characterization of others. Thus Mowbray's words and deeds as found in Shakespeare's sources are artistically manipulated by the playwright in the first act of Richard II to inform us about the relationship of Richard and Bolingbroke. Similarly, Shakespeare's minor modifications of his sources regarding Worcester, especially the addition of the Worcester-Vernon conversation, indirectly tell us a great deal about Henry.