[In the following essay, Calderwood assesses Shakespeare 's use of metaphoric language to explore the nature of kingship in Henry IV, concluding that Shakespeare emphasizes the redemptive value of lineal succession through Hal, and that Prince Hal's restoration of English royal succession similarly re-establishes verbal creativity in the English language.]

At the battle of Shrewsbury Field the ferocious but somewhat befuddled Douglas discovers a superabundance of kings, or at least of kingly clothes, for "The King," as Hotspur informs him, "hath many marching in his coats" (5.3.25). Not gifted with Falstaff s unerring instinct for registering the presence of the true prince, Douglas must resort to trial-and-error empiricism:

Now, by my sword, I will kill all his coats.
I'll murder all his wardrobe, piece by piece.
Until I meet the king.

(I Hen. IV, 5.3.26-28)

Douglas's problem is more difficult than it seems. When he has done away with the Lord of Stafford, coat and all, he comes to Sir Walter Blunt and is told that this time he faces the true king. Sir Walter in his turn goes to it, and the disgusted Douglas, on learning of his mistake, says:

A borrowed title hast thou bought too dear.
Why didst thou tell me that thou wert a king?

(5.3.23-24)

Since Henry has possessed himself of a "borrowed title" also—for which he too has paid dearly, though not so dearly as Richard II or Sir Walter—there is much reason in Douglas's doubts when he encounters him:

What art thou,
That counterfeit'st the person of a king?
Henry. The King himself. . .
Doug. I fear thou art another counterfeit.

(5.4.27-35)

Once the identity of the king is no longer certified by divine authority, any man may march in a royal coat. Kingly trappings such as crown, throne, and vestments must substitute for congenital royalty as a guide to the king's person.

Moreover, not all those who can lay some claim to kingship are marching in the king's coats at Shrewsbury Field. In the first place, one of them can not march very far on any field and could hardly get into the king's tent, let alone his coat. Yet at the end of the last chapter we saw that Falstaff, King of Misrule, could counterfeit Henry IV in the suspenseful dramas staged by the Boar's Head Inn players. For that matter—after the deposition of Falstaff—so could Hal, rehearsing for realities to come. And according to Douglas there is still another pretender to royalty—Hotspur, "the king of honour" (4.1.10), whose favorite horse is appropriately his "throne" (2.3.73). Henry himself has called our attention to Hotspur as a potential king when he upbraided Hal in 3.2:

Now, by my sceptre and my soul to boot,
He hath more worthy interest to the state
Than thou, the shadow of succession.

(lines 97-99)

If Falstaff is, as critics have suggested, a father-substitute, and hence a king-substitute, then Hotspur is a son-substitute, and hence a figurative heir apparent, a king in potentia.

Thus the striking picture of Douglas roaming Shrewsbury Field murdering wardrobes in hope of finding a king in the flesh as well as in the coat, this stress on royal counterfeits not merely reinforces the fact that Bolingbroke is prudentially devious, which we have known for a good while anyhow. Nor does it only reemphasize the spuriousness of Bolingbroke's title, which makes him indistinguishable from other counterfeit kings. It also emphasizes a situation not limited to the battle-field but pervasive throughout the play: the disappearance of authentic kingship among a host of counterfeits.

With the collapse of a language founded on names—a language in which words are true designators bonded firmly to the world of things, as the name of king seemed bonded to Richard—all language must hence-forth appear a collective lie, and all kings counterfeit. If true authority and kingship have not permanently disappeared with Richard's death, they have at least receded into conceptual vagueness—an unexampled ideal and abstract mystery. Since abstractions can be apprehended only indirectly, through metaphor,¹ we are presented in Henry IV with four metaphoric versions of kingship: the nominal King of England, the abdominal King of Misrule, the chivalric King of Honor, and the wastrel heir apparent. Or are they metaphoric? As we mentioned earlier it is part of the disarming nature of metaphor to march in the coat of the lie and to be identifiable only after a slaughter of wardrobes. For, like Bolingbroke, the metaphor and the lie are usurpers. They confiscate the names that rightfully belong to other concepts. But whereas the stealthy theft of names by the lie impoverishes reality and truth, it is only by means of such a theft, conducted openly by metaphor, that abstract realities and truths can be possessed at all. The trick is in knowing which is which, and it is a trick worthy of a prince's study:

The Prince but studies his companions
Like a strange tongue, wherein, to gain the language,
'Tis needful that the most immodest word
Be looked upon and learned; which once attained,
Your Highness knows, comes to no further use
But to be known and hated. So, like gross terms,
The Prince will in the perfectness of time
Cast off his followers. And their memory
Shall as a pattern or a measure live,
By which his Grace must mete the lives of others,
Turning past evils to advantages.

(2 Hen. IV, 4.4.68-77)

Warwick speaks truer than he realizes, for Prince Hal's vocabulary study extends beyond his rowdy followers. As the heir apparent in search of true kingship, Hal addresses himself to Bolingbroke, Falstaff, and Hotspur, the pretenders to kingship, as though they were words which he must study to determine whether each is a lie—a total counterfeit—or a metaphor containing a certain kingly truth. In the course of the two plays he imitates Douglas searching through counterfeits for the true king.

Warwick's speech should remind us of Hal's first soliloquy, his address to the audience in 1 Henry IV on the theme of turning evils to advantages, and especially of the passage in which Hal refers to his future reformation as a transcending of his word:

So when this loose behaviour I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes.

(1.2.231-234)

The soliloquy as a whole suggests certain connections between Hal and not only Falstaff but Shakespeare too. It may be Falstaff who says in 2 Henry IV that "A good wit will make use of anything, I will turn diseases to commodity" (1.2.276-278) and who then tries to make financial use of Shallow—as he has sought all along to make use of Hal—but in the soliloquy it is Hal who reveals himself as the man whose wit will make use of anything or anyone. He conceives here of a sophisticated version of Falstaff s world of pikes preying on daces. What Falstaff does not realize is that the princely dace he has been trailing around has, on closer inspection, a distinctly pike-like and snappish look to him. Unlike Falstaff, whose specialty is improvisation to satisfy present needs, Hal is capable of long-range calculations to secure the future. Indeed, as he presents himself here, Hal is a master plotter, a princely dramatist in whose political drama Falstaff and company are to play an unwitting role. Hal's drama is a history play in the comic/heroic mode, featuring the radiant emergence of the true king by means of a sudden peripeteia that brings the national audience of Englishmen to its feet united in patriotic feeling.

From the standpoint of language as well as that of plotting, Hal is an "interior" version of Shakespeare the controlling playwright. Whereas Falstaff is a walking hyperbole, the man whose speech dwarfs his performances, Hal is the embodiment of meiosis, the man whose deeds will as he says prove him "better than [his] word." As it stands, his word is very much in need of redemptive bettering, for as the instrument by which he will "falsify men's hopes" it is nothing less than a lie. And this too he shares with Shakespeare. Hal begins his "interior drama" as Shakespeare begins Henry IV, with a fallen language whose lack of inherent truth is emblemized in the lie. But as his soliloquy indicates, Hal is prepared to use the lie rather than wilt before it as Richard did. After all, he who uses Falstaff must by definition use the lie. But also, by creating from the false image of the wastrel prince a true symbol of English kingship, Hal will incorporate the lie into a constructive political program, a drama of skillful offence "redeeming time when men least think [he] will" (1.2.240). And that is Shakespeare's artistic goal as well—to wrest truth from a language devoid of divine or natural authority, to shape from the unseemly material of the lie an authentic order and meaning. No less than Hal, Shakespeare must turn past evils to advantages and prove better than his words.

It appears as we move from Richard II into Henry IV that the lie and the metaphor are the joint consequence of the collapse of a language of names. If so, it is not by accident that both verbal forms abound in Henry IV. Not of course that earlier Shakespearean plays are devoid of lies and metaphors but that lie and metaphor do not in themselves rise to thematic prominence or become incorporated into a metadramatic development. Perhaps it is worth noting that even the word lie appears far more often now than in earlier plays—twice as often in 1 Henry IV, for instance, as in a lie-fraught play like Richard III. As for metaphor, how deeply Shakespeare's imagination has delved in figuration in these plays needs little documentation at this late date. Working chronologically through the early plays, and especially through the histories, one is taken aback by the sudden plenitude of comparatives, analogues, parallels, versions, and similitudes in Henry IV—all the vast network of metaphoric association by which everything appears in the likeness of something else. With characters, actions, and images multiplying with the spontaneous fertility of Falstaff s men in buckram, we may despair of isolating any one feature of the play for consideration, and despair no less of encompassing the whole. But because it figures in Hal's quest for true kingship among various usurping counterfeits, let me linger a bit over Shakespeare's metaphoric employment of the double plot.

That double plots may be structural metaphors is perhaps most obvious in The Merchant of Venice, where by playing Belmont off against Venice Shakespeare dramatizes the metaphor "love is a form of commerce," or in Troilus and Cressida, where the two plots embody the metaphor "love is a form of war."² In similar fashion 2 Henry IV places the major actions of the historical and the nonhistorical plot in metaphoric juxtaposition to dramatize the notion that "Shrewsbury is a form of Gadshill," which suggests that the English rebels are merely history's cutpurses—as anxious to split their take in English soil (see 3.1.70-141) as Falstaff s "gentlemen of the shade" are their liberated gold—and that the two great leaders, Falstaff and Hotspur, may have a kind of half-faced fellowship despite vast differences.

More important in light of Prince Hal's search for kingship is the fact that at Gadshill and Shrewsbury the heir apparent both protects a crown and seizes a crown. What is being robbed at Gadshill is in large part Henry himself—"There's money of the King's coming down the hill; 'tis going to the King's exchequer" (2.2.56-57)—and what is stolen is pointedly associated with the royal symbol of office, the crown, as in Poins's invitation, "If you will go, I will stuff your purses full of crowns" (1.2.145-146). In low-life metaphor Falstaff, by stealing crowns from the royal exchequer, usurps Henry's crown and so becomes a mock-king, as befits a King of Misrule. And Falstaff suffers from Henry's royal ailment also—a reign marked by internal dissension. After a brief but heroic skirmish against armies of rebellious knaves in Kendall green and buckram, Falstaff is "uncrowned" by Hal, who subsequently restores the crowns/crown to the dispossessed Henry ("The money is paid back again," 3.3.200). Later in the Boar's Head Tavern, Hal uncrowns Falstaff twice more, once metaphorically when he makes the master of humor the butt of the whole joke and once theatrically when he demotes him from a kingly to a merely princely role:

Prince. Dost thou speak like a king? Do thou stand for me, and I'll play my father.

Falstaff. Depose me? If thou dost it half so gravely, so majestically, both in word and matter, hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-sucker or a poulter's hare.

(2.4.476-481)

At the battle of Shrewsbury Field the metaphors of robbery, crowns, and kingly coinage are convened again. Douglas, fighting his way from one counterfeit king to another, finally locates Henry and comes dangerously near seizing his life and crown before his robbery is prevented by Hal, "Who never promiseth but he means to pay" (5.4.43). The major highwayman in the rebel company, however, is Hotspur, who has spent an almost furiously busy life relieving chivalric travelers of their martial reputations. His roadside cry is not Falstaff s "Your money or your life" but "Your honors and your life." On the one hand, as leader of the rebels at Shrewsbury, Hotspur is in the role of robber attempting to seize Henry's life, land, and crown, which Henry has of course robbed from Richard. At the same time Hotspur is himself the victim of a robbery. In this role he is, in Douglas's phrase, the "king of honor" and is concerned to retain his title despite the challenge of Hal. Thus their encounter is figured as a contest for a crown, as in Hal's baiting remarks on their dual sovereignty:

I am the Prince of Wales; and think not, Percy,
To share with me in glory any more.
Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere,
Nor can one England brook a double reign
Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales.

(5.4.63-67)

Hal's uncrowning of Percy is suggestive of Bolingbroke's uncrowning of Richard. Henry himself a bit earlier had claimed that history was about to repeat itself, but in rebuking Hal for bad conduct he put him and Hotspur in the wrong roles:

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.

(3.2.93-96)

In fact, of course, Hal the careful plotter and manipulator of his followers has been very much his father's son; and Percy, despite his un-Ricardian life of action, has been like Richard in that for him the split in speech, the breakdown of a monistic language of names, has never occurred. Hotspur still lives in a world in which honor, Esperance, and truth have real and substantial being and in which a man's name or reputation is a possession as dear as life itself.

Percy's defeat at the hands of Hal, then, is appropriately a usurpation of "name." Like his father coming ashore at Ravenspurgh, Hal is essentially nameless compared to Hotspur, who complains, as titled champions will, of having nothing to win and everything to lose:

and would to God
Thy name in arms were now as great as mine.

(5.4.69-70)

Thus when Hotspur dies it is not the loss of "brittle life" but the loss of "those proud titles thou hast won of me" that grieves him deepest (5.4.78-79), which might remind us of Richard's loss of identity and his sense of personal emptiness once he is deprived of his kingly name (Rich. II, 4.1.255-262). That emptiness is a measure also of the Hotspur code of value, and the question of the Shrewsbury moment is whether in conquering the King of Honor Hal has not only taken Hotspur's crown but adopted his limited moral vision as part of the spoils too.

That Hal might not only defeat but in a sense become Hotspur seemed a real danger when, in his interview earlier with his disapproving father, he spoke of redeeming his sorry reputation:

Percy is but my factor, good my lord,
To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf.
And I will call him to so strict account

That he shall render every glory up,
Yea, even the slightest worship of his time,
Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

(I Hen. IV, 3.3.148-152)

Here Hal translates Falstaff s world of daces and pursuing pikes into financial terms. Falstaff collects purses, Hotspur collects titles of honor, and Hal—a princely internal revenue service—collects from both. But whereas Hal has earlier been capable of registering amusement at the extravagant self-absorption of Hotspur's code of honor (2.4.113-125), in his remarks now to his father and again to Percy just before they fight it does not seem apparent to Hal that all he can collect from Percy are counterfeit "crowns."

But the Gadshill parallel holds true in the event. Just as Hal transcended Falstaff s pursetaking by returning the Gadshill money to the king's exchequer, so now, after Hotspur's death, he transcends Hotspur's obsession with names and titles of honor not only by surrendering his rightful earnings to the old horsebackbreaking highwayman himself—

There is Percy. If your father will do me any honour, so. If not, let him kill the next Percy himself. I look to be either earl or duke, I can assure you.

(5.4.143-146)

—but by even contributing amusedly to the thievery:

For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,
I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have.

(5.4.161-162)

In so doing he earns title to a far more impressive kingship than any of the pseudo-versions put before him throughout the play.

And yet Hal registers in each of these counterfeit kingships a certain metaphoric truth in the process of transcending them, collecting something from each as he prepares to pay England the debt he never promised. His most glorious payment to England occurs at Agincourt, where all debts come due, and it is there that his "factors" Falstaff and Hotspur pay off for him as well. Without expatiating on the kingly and human lessons Hal learns from the men he has uncrowned—an old theme—we can merely observe that his easy way with men, which is summed up on the eve of battle by the choral phrase "A little touch of Harry in the night," is as inconceivable without Falstaff and Gadshill as his rallying Saint Crispían speech, with its "But if it be a sin to covet honour / I am the most offending soul alive" (Hen. V, 4.3.28-29), is without Hotspur and Shrewsbury.³

At Gadshill and Shrewsbury Prince Hal defeats Falstaff and Hotspur on their own terms, stealing a laugh from the one, a life from the other, and a metaphoric crown from both. There remains in the plays a final version of kingship—the king himself. If we wonder what metaphoric truths hal discovers in Henry or what debts he collects from him, we are obliged to consider the deathbed scene in 2 Henry IV (4.5), for it is here that hal uncrowns Henry. Both men give and receive. With Henry's apparent death, Hal picks up what is owing him, the crown, and relinquishes what he has long owed Henry, the tears of genuine personal feeling:

Thy due from me
Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood,
Which nature, love, and filial tenderness
Shall, O dear father, pay thee plenteously.
My due from thee is this imperial crown,
Which, as immediate from thy place and blood,
Derives itself to me.

(4.5.37-43)

Like Falstaff and Hotspur, Henry it appears is also Hal's factor, to engross up not easy ways or glorious deeds but that one indispensable possession of a king, the crown itself. Not that Hal has hungered for power—but even so, no heir apparent is unconscious of what he is heir to (as Hal has made clear since his first soliloquy). At any rate, when Henry has an untimely recovery, Hal finds himself in a most unpleasant, even Falstaffian situation.

Standing before Henry, crown in hand, Hal appears in the likeness of the one-time tutor and feeder of his riots, Falstaff himself, who was always quick to seize crowns going to or from the king's exchequer. He must also call to mind Hotspur, whose Shrewsbury exploits, had they proved successful, would have uncrowned Henry before his time. Finally and most significantly, Hal must remind us of Bolingbroke himself, who "met this crown," he is shortly to tell Hal, by "indirect crooked ways" (4.5.185-186). But if Hal's apparent theft of the crown raises the image of usurpation, Shakespeare's intention is to suggest a likeness in order to point a difference. Unlike all the counterfeit kings, who in their various fashions are or would be usurpers, "player kings," Hal is not feigning kingship. The role of the man cultivating kingly virtues he has deliberately avoided playing; he has not coveted the crown and pretended otherwise:

if I do feign,
O let me in my present wilderness die
And never live to show the incredulous world
The noble change that I have purposed!

(4.5.152-155)⁴

And unlike Hotspur and especially Henry himself, Hal has not contended for the crown. He has raised no armies against England's monarch, sent no soldiers to their deaths, killed no king. His only contest is with the crown, a private inquiry and test of merit:

Thus, my most royal liege,
Accusing it, I put it on my head,
To try with it, as with an enemy
That had before my face murdered my father,
The quarrel of a true inheritor.

(4.5.165-169)

That Hal's contest with the crown is only a metaphoric battle, the "quarrel of a true inheritor" instead of the ambitious struggles of a usurper, is owing to Henry himself. To Richard II, despite all his keening over it, the crown was essentially an irrelevant possession. Symbols of kingship confer nothing on one who so luminously and infallibly is king, who has been king from birth, and who is descended from a line of kings. For Bolingbroke, possession of the crown is another matter; the symbols of kingship are his only identifying marks. Having killed a king to gain a crown, Bolingbroke has spent a restive reign suffering from the guilt of his possession and from the fear of dispossession—even down to this final moment. But what was a piece of stolen property in Henry's hands is modified by its transfer to his son:

To thee it shall descend with better quiet,
Better opinion, better confirmation,
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth. It seemed in me
But as an honour snatched with boistrous hand.
And I had many living to upbraid
My gain of it by their assistances,
Which daily grew to quarrel and to bloodshed,
Wounding supposed peace. All these bold fears
Thou see'st with peril I have answered—
For all my reign hath been but as a scene
Acting that argument, and now my death
Changes the mode. For what in me was purchased
Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort,
So thou the garland wear 'st successively. 

(4.5.188-202; my italics)

The major function of this scene is to present us with a transfer of the crown from Henry to Hal that is made to look like an act of usurpation, a theft—

Thou hast stolen that which after some few hours
Were thine without offence

(4.5.102-103)

—but that, upon reinterpretation, is seen to be a matter of direct lineal descent. After Hal exonerates himself, both he and Henry recognize that the kingship Bolingbroke so craftily sought for himself has been his only to hold in trust. In the drama of history his role has been that of keeper of the crown, as Hal's has been that of the prince who must withdraw into seeming dishonor, playing truant to his royal calling, so that the stain of his father's usurpation will not discolor his own kingship in time to come.

We asked what debts Hal collects from Henry. Concerning true kingship Henry can hardly offer much. But then Hal does not demand much:

My gracious liege,
You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it to me.
Then plain and right must my possession be.

(lines 221-223)

The crown's the thing—not in itself, as seized possession, but as the symbol of regal inheritance. Possession of the crown may not guarantee true kingship—it certainly has not in Bolingbroke's case—but it is the sine qua non of the royal succession, the means by which an "honour snatched with boist'rous hand" can be transformed into "the garland [worn] successively," or what Hal calls "this lineal honour":

and put the world's whole strength
Into one giant arm, it shall not force
This lineal honour from me. This from thee
Will I to mine leave, as 'tis left to me.

(4.5.44-47)

The crown is the instrumental thing, but the succession is the thing itself, so powerful is Shakespeare's stress. The circular and tortured redundancy of Hal's last sentence—"This from thee / Will I to mine leave, as 'tis left to me"—helps hammer home the redemptive virtues of the royal succession, of lineal descent. Henry's death, as he says, "changes the mode." Because of him, history's scapegoat, Hal, can enter on kingship "in a more fairer sort" (4.5.201), relatively unburdened of guilt for the past, capable of creating "King Henry the Fifth" in his own image, after his own style, and yet conscious that "King" and "Henry" are two things and that the crown does not grow to his head. It is just this that was impossible in Richard's time, for the absolute fusion of "King" and "Richard" implied, at least in Richard's imagination, that the institution of kingship could not survive its incumbent. The price of Richard's autonomous Divine Rightness, pressed to such extremes of faith, was that it accompany him to the grave. Whoever followed Richard would of necessity "change the mode," for so long as his view of kingship prevailed there could be no such thing as a succession. "The King is dead; long live the King" could only be "Richard is dead; kingship is dead."

The "change of mode," then, liberates kingship from its corporeal bonds to Richard and makes possible a "line" of English kings. It also has a crucial bearing on the verbal issues discussed earlier. As I read him, Shakespeare dramatizes his realization that the lie is the price language pays for metaphoric creativity. A fully monistic language of Richard's kind, a language of names invested with automatic truth and consonance to nature, though it looks appealing to the poet, would actually be a linguistic version of maximum entropy—a thought-benumbing collection of verbal signs pinned to a dead universe of things.⁵ If in Richard's conception of kingship there can be no new kings (hence maximum political entropy), in a language directly bonded to nature there can be no new meanings. The price of infallible speech is a language and a nature mutually sealed off from change, as Edenic language and nature appear to have been before the beguiling satanic hiss introduced new and dangerous notions, among them newness itself.⁶ Once divine authority and human faith are withdrawn from such a language—once Richard is deposed—words must seem hopelessly disengaged from nature and quite incapable of transcending their fallen state. The emblems of this fallen state in politics are the counterfeit usurping king, in language the lie, and in drama that gross, open, palpable father of lies himself, Falstaff.

Despite the appeal of a monistic language, however, Shakespeare evidently perceives that automatic truth—truth where there is no possibility of error—is not truth at all but merely tautology, an endless reaffirmation of what is. If this is the case, then Shakespeare realizes also that his verbal art rests on the most unlikely of foundations, the lie. For without the possibility of the lie there can be neither creative metaphor, nor meaningful truth, nor in any authentic sense poetry. As with language, so with politics: without the possibility of counterfeit kings like Bolingbroke, there can be no genuine kings like Henry the Fifth. Not "genuine" in Richard's lost sense of having perfect title granted by God but genuine in the only ways kings can be in an imperfect world where no title is infallible but must be earned with the familiar human equipment—courage, sense of justice, intelligence, knowledge, all the old virtues that, from the nation's perspective, spring up so miraculously in the redeemed Hal.

Thus the poet can never be exempt from the charge of lying pressed by Platonic camp followers like Agrippa and Stephen Gosson. Nor, so long as he aspires to be a maker of meanings, should he want to be. Like the young Hal taking the dubious route through Eastcheap on his way to Westminster Abbey and his coronation, the poet must put his reputation in jeopardy, not only acknowledging the lie as part of the language he uses but even taking on its unprotective coloration, in order to claim his right to metaphor and his title to truth. From this perspective, to reinstitute royal succession in England is to restore to English itself nothing less than the verbal creativity without which poetry cannot survive.⁷

Notes

¹ We can never satisfactorily conceive of abstractions like being, justice, relation, situation, by approaching them on their own terms, abstractly. That is what dictionary definitions seek to do as they send us back and forth inside a closed system of abstract reference: being means existence which means having actuality which means being, and so on. So we metaphorize, taking a detour through the concrete. Though we tend to think of poets as being in flight from abstractions, they are not; a language full of concrete metaphors is itself an index of the poet's concern with abstractions, because metaphor is the only way in which abstractions may be made intellectually accessible—which is why most abstract words are crystallized metaphors.

² In Some Versions of Pastoral (London, 1935), William Empson analyses double plots along these lines (pp. 25-84).

³ I should add here that Hal's covetousness about honor—his claim not to want an additional soldier present because he can't bear to divide up the glories of the coming day—is quite a different thing from Hotspur's refusal to await reinforcements at Shrewsbury in favor of a "Die all, die merrily" policy. At Agincourt there are no reinforcements to wait for, so Hal makes the rhetorical and military most of what he's got, adopting the Hotspur mode because, given the situation, none other is available.

⁴ The word feign here carries the meaning both of "act" or "deceive" and, in homonymic pun, "crave." The First Folio spelling, incidentally, is "faine." Thus, on the one hand, "if I do merely 'act' contrite" and, on the other, "if I do actually covet the crown" then "let me die."

⁵ Maximum entropy is of course a maximum extreme, not likely encountered. But the second law of linguistic thermodynamics holds good at more familiar ranges of experience too. When a culture still trusts its master metaphors after their semantic candlepower has dimmed, as the eighteenth century trusted the "great chain of being" metaphor and the twentieth century trusted Descartes' "ghost in the machine," or when living meanings surrender to cliché and platitude, or petrify into jargon, then the creative energies of symbolism have begun to dissipate, and the world turns gray.

⁶ In De Vulgari Eloquentia Dante spoke of Adam's language—Hebrew, he believed—as divinely created. It survived the confusion of tongues at Babel so that Christ "might use, not the language of confusion, but of grace" (I.vi). In canto 26 of the Paradiso, however, Dante speaks of language as created by reason and therefore subject to change:

for as they should,
Like leaves upon the branches of a tree,
The words of mortals die and are renewed.

(lines 136-138; trans. Dorothy Sayers,
New York, 1962)

The "renewing" is only possible in a language capable of change, as the poet in the act of creating meanings himself instinctively realizes.

⁷ Sigurd Burckhardt ingeniously translated the Shakespearean stress on royal succession into a question of whether Shakespeare himself in the second tetralogy is to proceed with the lineal, successive development of his creative talents or to repeat his own earlier, orthodox treatment of history as a circular, repetitive, restorative process submissive to divine order, as he had done in the first tetralogy (Shakespearean Meanings [Princeton, 1968]). . . .