SOURCE: "Virtue and Kingship in Shakespeare's Henry IV," in English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 5, No. 3, Autumn, 1975, pp. 313-43.

[In the following essay, an expanded version of a lecture given at the Shakespeare Association America in 1973, Hawkins examines the competing claims of virtue and lineage over the right to rule in Henry IV, maintaining that Shakespeare appears to stress virtue over lineage in these two plays.]

For a quarter of a century, criticism of Shakespeare's histories has been dominated by what E. M. W. Tillyard called the "Tudor myth." With its emphasis on the sin of deposing a lineal king in Richard II, Tillyard's "Tudor" myth—so Robert Ornstein argues—might better be renamed the "Yorkist" myth.¹ But it is possible (as both Essex and Elizabeth were well aware) to interpret Richard II in a way more sympathetic to the usurper. Thus Irving Ribner maintains that though Shakespeare never condones Richard's deposition, he glorifies the Lancastrian kings who replace him. The public virtues of Henry IV make up for his illegal title, while his son combines public and private virtues to become the greatest of English kings.² A stress on virtue here replaces the emphasis on lineal descent: if Tillyard is Yorkist, Ribner is Lancastrian. Thus the Wars of the Roses continue on the dusty fields of scholarship, and critics, with "helpe of some few foot-and-halfe-foote words / Fight over Yorke, and Lancasters long jarres."³

When Shakespeare's critics thus divide in camps and factions, the reason is usually some tension in the plays themselves. The rival claims of blood and virtue form a recurring theme in the histories, and Shakespeare clearly believed in both. The two tetralogies culminate in the contrasted portraits of Richard III and Henry V, and these polar opposites combine both claims: Richard is both tyrant and usurper as Henry is both the "true inheritor" and the virtuous king.⁴ But that is not to say that Shakespeare weighed the claims of blood and virtue equally. When Henry Tudor rescues England at the end of the first tetralogy, Shakespeare makes little of his Lancastrian lineage and nothing of his descent from Arthur. Richmond's right to rule is moral and religious, not genealogical: his victory over Richard is quite simply the triumph of good over evil.

But we shall seek in vain through the histories for a clear judgment between virtue and lineage. At a time when Richard II could be acted to incite revolt against Elizabeth, English history was uncomfortably "relevant"—especially for a playwright meditating the mysteries of dynastic succession. It is in Titus Andronicus—a drama safely remote in time and place—that Shakespeare works out almost paradigmatically the thematic conflict which underlies the first tetralogy. The play begins with the election of a Roman emperor. Two rival claimants enter from opposite sides of the stage and plead their title in neatly antithetic speeches of almost identical length. Saturninus, the emperor's eldest son, argues the claims of primogeniture, while his younger brother, Bassianus, argues the claims of virtue. Saturninus' right is his "age": "I am his first-born son that was the last / That ware the imperial diadem of Rome." But Bassianus' right is his "desert," his "justice, continence, and nobility." Titus asks to choose between the two, and he chooses—presumably to the applause of the Elizabethan audience—Saturninus and the claims of blood. But Titus' choice is wrong—like all his later choices in this scene—and he is the first to suffer when the legitimate heir proves a tyrant. He dies at the hand of the man he crowned, and the imperial diadem passes to his son, who proves by slaying the tyrant and freeing Rome that he is "true inheritor" of his father's virtues.

But perhaps Shakespeare's audience did not automatically applaud the choice of primogeniture. Much in what Tillyard called the Elizabethan World Picture suggests that it is virtue which truly makes a king. First there is the humanist myth of origins. Origins to the Elizabethans implied essences, and a tradition going back to Cicero and Herodotus held that virtue is the source of kingship.⁵ This myth of origins had its political application in the practice of elective monarchy, which persisted still in Shakespeare's century as it does in Shakespeare's plays, in Titus and in Hamlet. Primogeniture was the English custom, but kings could be made as well as born, and Shakespeare knew it. Political theorists continued to debate the relative advantages of heredity and election, and so influential a thinker as Erasmus preferred election precisely because it favors virtue.⁶ Then there is the conception of the "true king." From Plato to Jean Bodin, this develops in contrast to its opposite, the tyrant. One argument that monarchy is the best of governments was that its perversion is the worst: corruptio optima pessima. We must compare the worst and best, writes Juan de Mariana in De Rege, "the most pestiferous with the most salubrious form of government"⁷—in short, Richard III and Henry V. The distinction is basically moral, the way the monarch rules, not how he gains his throne. The "true king," writes Bodin, obeys the law of nature: that is, he fears God and shows mercy to the afflicted, is wise in council, brave in action, modest in prosperity, constant in adversity, a scourge of evil-doers and just to all men. This, Bodin declares, is the "authentic mark of kingship." Monarchy so administered is royal and legitimate, whether the ruler becomes king by heredity, election, gift, or conquest, either just or unjust, for "monarchies cannot be distinguished one from another by the method of succession, but only by the way they are conducted."⁸

Virtue, then, in this tradition is the origin and substance of kingship. But what are the "king-becoming graces," the virtues fit for a king? Most obviously those that enable him to carry out his royal office. The first of these is justice, for which Cicero says kings were first created. "The idea of a king," writes Aristotle, is "to be a protector of the rich against unjust treatment, of the people against insult and oppression."⁹ But if the king is to protect his subjects against injustice from without and within, he will need valor as well as justice. Thus according to the great fifteenth-century jurist Sir John Fortescue, "to fight and to judge are the office of a king."¹⁰ As Ernst Kantorowicz has shown, this tradition goes back to the Prologue to Justinian's Institutes, succinctly summarized by Bracton: "Two things are necessary to the king who rules rightly, that is, laws and arms, by which he can govern rightly in time both of wars and peace."¹¹

Fortitude and justice correspond to necessary functions of the governor—at least of government—even today. But one important function of a king reflects a Renaissance conception of the state that is closer to Aristotle than to modern politics. Aristotle believes that the state, like the individual, aims at the good life, that is, the life of virtue: ". . . political society exists for the sake of noble actions."¹² This view, strange to us, was a Renaissance commonplace. "All who have discussed the subject have agreed," asserts Bodin, "that the end of all commonwealths is the encouragement of honor and virtue."¹³ It follows that one duty of the ruler is to make his subjects good. And this he accomplishes by being good himself. It is not enough, writes James I, for a king "by the scepter of good laws .. . to governe, & by the force of armes to protect his people, if he joyne not therewith his virtuous life .. . by good example alluring his subjects to the love of virtue and hatred of vice."¹⁴ To the force of this royal example the Renaissance attributed almost magical power. No precept is more often repeated in institutions of the prince than the aphorism Cicero attributes to Plato, qualis princeps, talis populus, together with its scriptural parallel, ". . . what manner of man the ruler of the city is, such are all they that dwell therein" (Ecclus. 10.2).¹⁵ Thus the king is, in the traditional image of Chelidonius, the "Mirror" whereby his subjects should frame their actions and order their lives.¹⁶

Justice and valor, then, are not enough for a perfect king. "Do these two virtues onely make in a Prince the fulness of a florishing fame?," asks William Blandy's interlocutor in his dialogue, The Castle,,¹⁷ No, replies Blandy, there are two other "most necessarye" virtues, prudence and temperance. He cites no authority, but perhaps none is needed, for the qualities he lists—prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance—are the cardinal four, the oldest and most familiar of all secular paradigms of virtue. That these are the kingly virtues we have the testimony of kings themselves. When she first took the scepter, Elizabeth told her parliament, she began with "such religion as both I was borne in, bred in, and I trust shall die in. . . . Then entered I further into the schoole of experience, bethinking what it fitted a king to do: and there I saw, he scant was wel furnished, if either he lacked justice, temperance, magnanimitie, or judgement." As for the last two, fortitude and wisdom, the Queen went on with uncharacteristic modesty, "I will not boaste, my sex doth not permit it."¹⁸ The lesson Elizabeth claimed to learn in the school of experience she might also have got from books. The association of the cardinal virtues with kings goes back to Isocrates and Xenephon; to trace it is to rehearse Western intellectual history, moving from Solomon and Plato through Cicero and Macrobius and then to medieval ecclesiastics like Alcuin and Rabanus Maurus and thence to Renaissance mirrors for magistrates and treatises on royal education, the socalled "institutions of the prince." In Shakespeare's day it occurs in popular handbooks like those of Bryskett and Hurault; we find it, too, in popular iconography. On the title page of the Bishops' Bible, Elizabeth, like other monarchs before her, is portrayed surrounded by the cardinal virtues. They appeared with fine impartiality in the pageants that greeted Katherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn near the beginning of the Tudor era and James I at its end. And we find them as virtues of the governor in literary contexts ranging from the ideal to the comic or grotesque, from Sidney and Castiglione to Cervantes and Rabelais.¹⁹

It is therefore not surprising that the cardinal virtues form a recurring motif in the institutions of the prince, those educational treatises common in Shakespeare's century.²⁰ It is perhaps surprising that though many scholars interpret Henry IV as the education of Prince Hal, no one, to my knowledge, has consulted these treatises to see what Shakespeare's contemporaries thought the education of a prince should be.²¹ It turns out to be a training in ethics rather than politics in the modern sense: the institutions are at least as interested in morality as in statecraft. Through all their changing emphases persists the Platonic and Aristotelian notion that ethics and politics are inseparable and that education is central to them both.²² To this tradition Henry IV also belongs: the moral education of his prince is for Shakespeare a political theme and almost an obligatory one, the logical climax to his studies in kingship. But as to the specific qualities of such an ideal prince, tradition is not unanimous. Some treatises, like Budé's De l'Instruction du Prince, stress a single virtue, while others, like the Institutio Principis Christiani of Erasmus, are shapeless catalogues of all the desirable royal attributes. But in many of the most significant—Egidio Colonna's typically medieval De Regimine Principum; the De Regno of the Renaissance humanist Patrizzi; Elyot's Governour, which may have been known to Shakespeare himself—the cardinal virtues are primary. No wonder, then, that in the Basilikon Doron, James I tells his son, "I neede not to trouble you with the particular discourse of the foure Cardinall vertues, it is so troden a path."²³ Even when these virtues do not shape the argument or structure of a princely mirror or institution, they are likely to appear among its topoi. Thus James Yonge deliberately adds them to his translation of the Secreta Secretorum, which purported to be Aristotle's advice to Alexander the Great. All men should have these virtues, Yonge observes, but they pertain especially to a king and a prince.²⁴ Whether or not The Regement of Princes is actually organized around the cardinal virtues, as one scholar contends, Hoccleve is clear that "Prudence, attemperance, strength, and right, / Tho foure ben vertues principali."²⁵ It seems apt to end this survey with the Regement because, like most institutions of the prince, it is dedicated to a particular royal personage—in this case, that youthful Alexander, the future Henry V, Shakespeare's Prince Hal.

If, therefore, Henry IV is Shakespeare's dramatic institutio principis, showing England's future ruler trained in kingly virtues, it will not do to limit his curriculum to valor and justice. These virtues do indeed form the theme of Richard II. In the dual structure of that diptych play, Richard displays first his lack of justice in peace and prosperity, then his want of fortitude in war and misfortune. And certainly Tillyard and Dover Wilson are right in detecting these themes of valor and justice in Henry IV. Part I is peopled with warriors and ends in scenes of battle as Part II is peopled with justices and officers of law and culminates in scenes of trial: the dying Henry's trial of his son, the new King's contrasted judgments of the Chief Justice and Falstaff. Though there are rebellions in both plays, Hotspur's is put down by the sword, the Archbishop's by a legal trick. And although Falstaff damnably abuses the king's press in both plays, in Part I we see him lead his ragamuffins to death in battle, while in Part II we watch the chicanery by which he recruits them. Yet if decorum demands that all parts of a play reflect its meaning, important episodes in both parts remain unaccounted for. Certainly the tavern revelry in Part I is as memorable as the scenes of battle, and jokes about Falstaff s girth and gluttony are as frequent as jokes about his cowardice—but what have the tavern and its pleasures to do with fortitude? And if Part II has its judges, it is likewise full of counsellors both good and bad—Warwick and Westmoreland, the optimistic Hastings and the pessimistic Mowbray, even Justice Shallow's busy steward, Davy. Scenes of deliberation are as frequent in Part II as those of judgment: again and again the forward action halts while the characters seek to peer into the future or reminisce about the past. Clearly the boisterous revelry in Part I suggests the need of temperance, even as the failures of memory and prediction in Part II show the need of the wisdom that looks before and after, whose proper action is taking counsel, whose parts are memory, intelligence, and foresight because it surveys the past and present in order to predict what is to come.²⁶

Thus the evidence of the plays as well as the tradition makes it appear that Prince Hal's education must encompass all four kingly virtues. These divide with pleasing symmetry: temperance and fortitude in Part I, justice and wisdom in Part II. By these virtues, declares Macrobius, in a phrase that might serve as motto for Shakespeare's two-part play, "the good man is first made lord of himself and then ruler of the state."²⁷ For he who would govern others must first master himself.²⁸ Thus in Part I Hal overcomes his appetitive and irascible instincts as he abandons Falstaff and vanquishes Hotspur, achieving his identity as Prince of Wales. In Part II, he becomes King, learning the "regnative" virtues of justice and wisdom, which imply rule over others and which correspond to the intellectual faculties of will and reason.²⁹ His development is symbolically both temporal and physical. For the temperance is associated with childhood and fortitude with youth as wisdom is the virtue of age. And the faculties are located in an ascending bodily hierarchy, the appetite in Falstaff s mighty belly, the spirited or irascible part of the soul in Hotspur's "great heart," will and reason in the head.³⁰ Thus Hal "grows" up in a double sense, attaining, in the language of Ephesians, both the "age" and "stature" of a perfect man.³¹

The test of this theory is, of course, its fruitfulness, the degree to which it actually illuminates the plays, both in mass and in the detailed problems of staging, text, and allusion. Thus when Hal comes on in the great Boarshead scene of Part I, shouting tipsily for Poins, the actor should carry a bottle or a cup or both, making the drunken Prince an inverse image of Temperantia, who uses these traditional attributes to "temper" wine with water.³² Editors of Part I need no longer be tempted by the Folio reading of "intemperature" when Hal confesses the "long grown wounds of my intemperance": this is one of the play's most direct statements of its theme.³³ Nor need editors of Part II be puzzled that Falstaff calls his silk merchant a "whoreson Achitophel."³⁴ For wisdom implies self-knowledge, but Falstaff applies to Master Dombledon a name more fitting for himself, the false counsellor who encourages a youthful prince to revolt against his father and, like Falstaff, dies rejected when the young prince prefers his father's counsellor. But these are indeed details. It may prove more convincing to sketch the overall thematic patterns of temperance and wisdom in the two plays, since they represent the novel elements of this interpretation.

II

Much of Part I directly reflects the varying definitions of temperance in Cicero, Plato, and Aristotle, the three authorities who most influenced ethical theory in Renaissance princely institutions.³⁵ I shall deal with each of these in turn, beginning with Cicero. The commonplaces I have drawn from the Republic and the Nicomachean Ethics were available in many secondary sources, but Cicero's De Officiis was directly and painfully familiar to Elizabethan grammar schoolboys—including William Shakespeare and many of his audience.³⁶ This is important, for Cicero's temperance extends far beyond the usual notion of simple self-control. He associates it with decorum, an ideal of fitness or appropriateness which he illustrates by its literary and theatrical analogues. Ciceronian temperance thus embraces a wide range of themes in Part I from problems of conversational style ("Dost thou speak like a king?") to the science of opportunity, the art of doing the right thing at the right time ("What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day?"). Such temperate decorum includes the narrower ideal of self-control: it is fitting or appropriate to man's rational nature that he master animal appetites.

The demands of this rational human dignity Cicero exemplifies—significantly for our purposes—in terms of jests and amusements. Nature, he declares, has not brought us into the world for sport and play, but for serious purpose. We may, of course, indulge in such things, but only within limits and as relaxation from our graver pursuits. Temperance, then, admits the rhythm of holiday of which C. L. Barber writes so brilliantly, taking as his epigraph Prince Hal's soliloquy: "If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to work. .. ,"³⁷ For Falstaff, of course, every day is holiday, but in Hal Shakespeare shows us a young man whom nature brought into the world for graver purposes. The logic of the Prince's imagery shows that for him, sport has become tedious, even if he is not ready yet to work. For though he still pictures happiness as "playing holidays," he instinctively equates these, not with Falstaff s world of play, but with that wished-for future time when he will return to serious responsibility, choosing "again to be himself."

That "again" is self-delusion. Hal has never been himself, and the identity he will ultimately achieve he does not now even conceive. He is still of all humors, an accomplished mimic who can play any role but his own—in short, as my students instantly recognize, a young man in search of himself. But it is Cicero, not Erikson, who provides the best commentary on the Prince's problem of identity. For besides the rational humanity we share with other men, Cicero explains, we have an individual nature that is ours alone, and the decorum of temperance demands that we be true to the second as well as the first. We must choose a character and calling suited to our talents: "Shall a player have regard to this in choosing his role upon the stage, and a wise man fail to do so in selecting his part in life?"³⁸ Yet this is the most difficult problem in the world, according to Cicero, since it must be decided in youth when our judgment is immature. Moreover, fortune sometimes imposes yet a third role: Cicero instances among others noble birth or royal power. Then there is the example of our fathers, which we may imitate, improve, or wholly reject. Only to Hercules, the son of Jove, was it given to make a clear-cut choice between Virtue or Pleasure.³⁹ But this Herculean choice is Hal's. In deciding what role to adopt, which calling to obey, he must choose whether to imitate his real or his surrogate father, the King or the highwayman. There is a restlessness in the young man, an edge in his jests to Falstaff, that betray a sense that his initial choice has been mistaken. When we choose the wrong way of life at first, Cicero counsels, we should change it by degrees, as we gradually dissolve a friendship that is no longer pleasing to us.⁴⁰ So it will be with Hal and Falstaff.

Shakespeare thus externalizes the conflict within the Prince, dramatizing it through his changing relations to others, to Falstaff, Hotspur, and the King. They reflect aspects of his own nature; in fact, they correspond to the Platonic parts of the soul, the appetitive, the spirited, and the rational. It is in terms of these faculties, we recall, that Plato in the Republic works out his definition of the cardinal virtues. The Republic is perhaps the first and certainly the greatest of treatises on the education of kings, and like Henry IV it turns on the analogy between the individual and the state, the three parts of the soul and the classes of society: the philosopher kings, the military "guardians," and the productive workers—farmers, merchants, artisans.⁴¹ It takes only a moment's thought to correlate Plato's commonwealth with that of Henry IV, but England is a state disordered: the rebels' tripartite map of the kingdom suggests the division within the orders of society and the faculties they represent. The King should stand for reason, but Henry meets Hotspur's choler with equal and reflexive wrath, while his reluctance to pay what he clearly owes reminds us of the greedy Falstaff. Himself a usurper, a "cutpurse of the empire," he gives the sanction of royal example to both the rebel and the highwayman. The warrior Percies, standing for the spirited part of society and the soul, should guard the kingdom against foes from without and disorder from within. Instead, they ally themselves with England's enemies in a revolt against its king. Falstaff and his plebeian followers do no productive work: instead of farmers and merchants, they are tapsters and thieves; instead of nourishing the body politic, they prey on it and gratify its sensual appetites. England is thus divided against itself, and its mirror is Prince Hal. For the future ruler of this divided kingdom is likewise at war with himself, engaged in the "civil strife" described by Plato, where all the impulses of the soul are at odds and some one part rises in revolt, claiming the supremacy that should belong to reason alone.⁴² The defeat of the political revolt depends, literally and symbolically, on the defeat of the inner and moral one: the rebels are conquered only when Hal achieves mastery over himself. The virtue he must learn is temperance. For Plato, this is not, like courage or wisdom, the function of a single faculty. Like justice, which it resembles, temperance is an inclusive virtue: Plato defines it as the agreement of all three parts of the soul to the rule of reason. To attain it, Hal must master not only appetite but also choler.⁴³ As Guyon overcomes both Cymochles and Pyrochles, so Hal must banish the Falstaff and slay the Hotspur in himself. This does not mean repressing or destroying the faculties they represent. For Plato, appetite and spirit represent legitimate powers of the soul. But only under the rule of reason can they enjoy their true and proper satisfaction. The Prince assimilates the energies of Falstaff and Hotspur to himself, overgoing one in wit and revelry as he outdoes the other in battle. Only the just and temperate man who has thus harmonized all three parts of the soul, making peace with himself and becoming "one man instead of many," writes Plato, will be ready to go about whatever he is called to do.⁴⁴

The Prince's movement from Eastcheap to Shrewsbury thus marks an inner evolution, a progressive and hierarchic integration of the self. The faculties of the soul are projected in setting as well as character: tavern, battlefield, and palace are, as it were, the belly, heart, and head of the body politic. These correspond to different versions of the state: the anarchic democracy of the travern where the Prince revels with tapsters and all appetites are freely and equally indulged; the martial timocracy of camp and battlefield where aristocrats like Percy and Douglas vie for honor; the royal palace where monarchic reason rules—or ought to rule. For not until Part II does reason come into its own. There the dying King gives wisdom to his son: "Come hither, Harry, sit thou by my bed / And hear, I think, the very latest counsel / That ever I shall breathe" (iv.v.182-84). In the parallel scene of reconciliation in Part 1, the King moves rather than instructs, appealing not to reason but to emotions proper to the spirited part of the soul: shame, anger, rivalry, the desire of praise. His strategy is Platonic, for Plato emphasizes that spirit can and should be the ally of reason in subduing appetite. So it is Hal's fierce ambition to excel Hotspur that moves him to abandon Falstaff s life of pleasure. But it is not enough for the Prince to "play Percy," to mimic his rival's humor in Hotspur's own exaggerated, self-indulgent way. The traditional emblems of Temperantia are the bridle and the cup, and Hotspur's steed is as much a symbol of excess as Falstaff s bottle. His thirst for his enemy's blood proves as intoxicating as Falstaff s unquenchable appetite for wine; and the horse that bears him "like a thunderbolt" to his death suggests an unbridled and irrational energy that must at last destroy itself. In contrast to Hotspur's growing frenzy is Hal's increased control, marked by the "noble horsemanship" which bridles even a "fiery Pegasus" in the pursuit of noble deeds.⁴⁵ The Prince learns to "turn and wind" the energies of the spirit to selfless ends. Thus though he challenges Hotspur to single combat, he does so to save blood rather than to shed it; yet more significantly, to "save the blood on either side." He is fighting not for his own honor but for the common good, for England. It is no accident that here for the first time Hal calls himself the Prince of Wales.

The play, like its hero, moves from Eastcheap to Shrewsbury. The first two acts, mainly concerned with Fal staffs comic revelry, balance the last two, devoted mainly to Hotspur's tragic war. The action turns precisely on the central scene of the central act, where the King summons his son from the tavern to the battle-field. Symmetrically flanking this central scene on either side are parallel episodes concerning Hotspur and Falstaff. The same triadic structure is finally staged before our eyes as Hal stands upright between the prostrate bodies of the other two. This speaking picture has long been recognized as an icon of true courage, the Aristotelian mean between the defect of Falstaff s cowardice and the excess of Hotspur's rashness: "For the man who flies from and fears everything . . . becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger becomes rash.. . ,"⁴⁶ Thus Falstaff runs away at Gadshill and Hotspur rushes to meet danger at Shrewsbury. But this pattern of mean and extremes, which shapes the general structure of the play as well as its climactic icon, is itself an emblem of temperance, as in the House of Medina in The Faerie Queene. And it is striking that Aristotle first introduces and explains the concept of the mean in terms of both the thematic virtues of 1 Henry IV. The familiar passage on rashness and cowardice I have just quoted goes on: ". . . similarly the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible; temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and defect." The association of the two virtues is not random. For Aristotle, the whole concern of ethics and political science is with pleasure and pain, since pleasure makes us do base things and pain keeps us from doing noble ones. But temperance teaches us to abstain from pleasure, while courage is shown in facing and enduring pain, specifically the pain of wounds and death in battle.⁴⁷ Falstaff s love of pleasure clearly marks him as the excess of self-indulgence, but the defect of boorish indifference to pleasure is for Aristotle a largely theoretic figure: "... such insensibility is not human,"⁴⁸ Yet in Hotspur, who denounces "mincing poetry," who would rather hear a dog howl than a lady sing, who flees from his wife to his horse, does not Shakespeare draw us such a man? Hotspur is more than indifferent to pleasure; he is in love with pain: "Love? I love thee not. . . . We must have bloody noses and cracked crowns!"

We observe a nice intricacy in the double pattern of temperance and fortitude: Falstaff and Hotspur each represent the defect of one virtue and the excess of the other. But this even-handed balance does not rule out the possibility of moral and dramatic progression. Aristotle explains that sometimes excess and sometimes defect is more opposed to the mean of virtue: rashness and insensibility are closer to courage and temperance than are cowardice and self-indulgence. He who aims at the mean must first depart from the extreme most contrary to it: so Hal turns from Falstaff to Hotspur.⁴⁹ But finally he transcends them both. In adjacent scenes at Shrewsbury, the Prince hurls Falstaff s bottle from him—Guyon's very gesture with the wine cup of Excesse⁵⁰—and refuses to leave the field despite his wound. He has learned to refuse pleasure and suffer pain, tests to which Plato would subject future rulers of the commonwealth.⁵¹ Shrewsbury for Hal not just a physical struggle: it is a psychomachia, a conflict of forces in the soul as well as factions in the kingdom. As he stands at last upright between the prostrate bodies of his rivals, those alternate and extreme possibilities of the self, he is also an emblem of triumphant virtue with its opposed vices fallen at its feet.⁵²

III

Part I, like its King, instructs by moving. In contrast to Falstaff and Hotspur, Hal has no speech about honor; he defines virtue by enacting it. This impassioned action wins from us an assent to the rule of reason that is itself unreasoning: hero and audience attain at the end a temperate poise that is more of the emotions than the mind. This is appropriate to a play about temperance and fortitude, virtues that concern the appetites and passions. A different method is required in Part II, which deals with wisdom and justice, the virtues of mind and will. Wisdom means many things to the Renaissance: among the rest it is the knowledge of good and bad, false and true.⁵³ But such pat distinctions are not easy in a play dominated from the first by Rumor, where good news may prove false (as with Northumberland), or produce an ill effect (as with the King), or deceive even though true (as with Falstaff). Indeed, ought we to call the tidings of Hotspur's victory or the Archbishop's execution or Henry's death good news or bad? We are forced to think twice, and this is characteristic of Part II, where—in contrast to the clear structural pattern and direct emotional sweep of Part I—all is fragmented, problematic, and ambiguous, demanding a more arduous exercise of intellect and will. It is, in fact, a deliberately difficult play, imposing a similar burden of understanding on its hero and on us. The appeal is to our judgment—a convenient term, since it connotes both wisdom and justice and suggests the connection between them. For good and bad are here conceived as that which is sought or shunned, objects of will as well as intellect, so that knowledge leads to choice.⁵⁴ "Will you tell me, Master Shallow, how to choose a man?" demands Flastaff, and the central scene in which he both willfully and ignorantly misjudges his recruits prepares for the graver human choices that confront the Prince and audience later on. The judgments that conclude the play thus bring together both its themes. It is, of course, Prince Hal whom we must finally judge, and this task—which has produced such various verdicts, false and true—depends on his judgment of others, specifically Falstaff and the Chief Justice. And these judgments in turn derive from the experience of judgment Hal himself has undergone.

Plato's future rulers, having resisted the temptations of pleasure and borne the tests of pain, must still be tried in many forms of study, pursuing the highest forms of knowledge.⁵⁵ So it is with Prince Hal in Part II. But Shakespeare's idea of wisdom is not Plato's, and Hal's education differs widely from that of the philosopher king or the scarcely less ambitious programs laid down in some humanistic institutions of the prince. The goal of such education was a ruler prepared for peace or war, "Well fitted in arts, glorious in arms."⁵⁶ Thus King Henry numbers himself among fathers who have trained their sons in "arts and martial exercises." Even Falstaff acknowledges this conventional ideal of arts and arms—though as we might expect, his pedagogic method is his own. The first "humane principle" Falstaff would teach his sons is addiction to sack, for without that, learning and "skill in the weapon" are equally vain: it is sack that stirs the heart to valor and fires the brain with wit. The famous praise of "sherris" is in fact a theory of education, and it suggests Falstaff s symbolic role. For though training his successor was an important duty for the king, his primary responsibility was selecting the prince's tutor, who actually supervised his education and so became a kind of second parent, the father of his mind. And in Falstaff, whom Hal terms the "tutor" of his riots, we recognize a deliberate and comic inversion of the ideal mentor described by Erasmus and others.⁵⁷ Yet even Falstaff, while admitting that Hal has become very hot and valiant in Part I, fails to realize that in Part II he is also becoming wise.

There is a mystery here that puzzles wiser heads than Falstaff s. In arts as well as arms, Hal seems to have the trick of "learning instantly": the truant to chivalry puts on the armor of fortitude and proves another Alexander; the prodigal assumes the robes of kingly wisdom and delivers judgment like a Solomon.⁵⁸ The pattern of his development combines progression and reversal, classical education and Christian conversion. The Archbishop of Canterbury marvels at the new King's reformation and even more at his sudden scholarship: his equal mastery of war and policy, his knowledge both of "divinity" and "commonwealth affairs"—the scientia rerum divinarum et humanarum which is another Ciceronian definition of wisdom.⁵⁹ How can this be in one never noted for studious retirement, whose companions have been rude, shallow, and unlettered? Certainly Hal hardly resembles the learned prince celebrated in some institutions. But it is possible—as other institutions warn and Prospero discovers—for a prince to be too learned. However bookish in method, humanist educators sought to fit their pupils for the practical life of civic responsibility. They echoed Cicero's insistence that the whole glory of virtue is in action, and that withdrawal from active life to retired study is contrary to moral duty. The working mind that never rests, as Cicero points out, pursues knowledge without our conscious effort.⁶⁰ So Hal imbibes the elements of wit and policy along with Falstaff s sack. It is indeed a "liberal" education: the society with whom he consorts at the Boarshead is worse than "unlettered"—these drunkards, whores, thieves, and parasites are exactly the sort of dangerous company forbidden future rulers by every educator from Plato to Shakespeare's own day. But precisely because they represent that in humanity which is most recalcitrant to rule, they are essential to the education of Shakespeare's Prince. The learning Hal needs is humanistic in the most literal sense, for it is a knowledge of good and evil gained not from books but from the observation of men: "The Prince but studies his companions...." It is significant that this educational rationale for Hal's behavior is advanced only in Part II, with its theme of wisdom, and that it is the King's wise counsellor, Warwick, who advances it. He likens Hal's companions to a "strange tongue," a comparison that reflects the central role of languages in humanistic education. Thus while such a model princely scholar as Pantagruel is busy acquiring Hebrew or Arabic, Hal is learning to drink with a tinker in his own tongue. For speech is the mark of reason, the mirror of the soul. To master Hotspur's verse or Falstaff s prose, the Prince must understand the instincts and values these styles express—and the aspiration or appetites that correspond to these in his own nature. So by means no institution would approve, he attains two kinds of wisdom institutions frequently prescribe: he comes to know his people and himself.

This understanding is comprehensive but not indiscriminate. Henry V, who at Agincourt rouses his nobles by his lofty eloquence and talks to common soldiers with such level earnestness about their fears and duties, has learned to distinguish middle, high, or low in speech and men. His knowledge includes what to avoid as well as what to imitate: the recognition that Falstaff does not speak like a king finally demands that the King no longer speak like Falstaff. Do we really wish Henry on the fields of France to compare the Dauphin to a bull's pizzle or himself to a shotten herring? Gross terms like those which shock Katherine of France in her first English lesson are learned—so Warwick argues—only to be hated. And their human counterparts serve at best to "mete" the lives of other men. The image of measurement, recalling Justice with her line and square, reminds us what is the primary office of a king.⁶¹ The wisdom for which Solomon prays, and which Erasmus would have other rulers emulate, is an understanding heart, discerning between good and bad, to judge his people.⁶² But the reward and punishment of others requires a prior judgment of what is good and evil, false or true, within. The reformation of England waits on the reformation of its future king: if Hal is to banish Falstaff, he must first turn away his "former self."

At the end of Part I the Prince who seemed so sure of his own purposes, so confident in his judgment of others—"I know you all"—has more to learn about both. Staring across Hotspur's mutilated and dishonored corpse at the "old acquaintance" who has just revealed another side to his surprising character, Hal realizes he does not know Falstaff: "This is the strangest fellow, brother John!" Yet his own conduct after Shrewsbury proves almost as surprising. The test of battle vindicates Hal's claim to the title that signifies his calling. But though he has chosen his role, he does not fully understand himself: he is temperate but not yet wise. Thus in Part II the problem of identity deepens from the mere choice of vocation to that knowledge of the self which is the beginning of wisdom.⁶³ The Prince is brought to a confrontation, painful though never quite complete, with impulses he has refused to recognize or acknowledge: "O God, they did me too much injury / That ever said I heark'ned for your death!" When Hal says that near the end of Part 1, he thinks he has made his choice between the true and the false fathers, has proved by the unambiguous test of action his love and loyalty to the King. Why then at the beginning of Part II does he shun his dying father? How does he find his way back to the Boarshead and to Falstaff? Hai himself has no clear answer to such questions.

Once more inner conflict is projected in outer relations: if the Prince studies his companions, he is at the same time exploring his own instincts and loyalties. It is significant that his ostensible motive for returning to Eastcheap is the wish to know Falstaff as he really is, to see him "in his true colors." In the event, the old pretender's claims to wisdom are exposed just as his boasts of valor were exposed in the parallel scene of Part I. Appropriately, it is by his own misjudgment of the Prince and Poins—"the weight of a hair will turn the scales between their avoirdupois"—that Falstaff himself is weighed in the balance and (for once) found wanting. "Love talks with better knowledge," as another of Shakespeare's princes warns another comic slanderer, "and knowledge with dearer love."⁶⁴ Falstaff s excuse is deliberately and lamely anticlimactic: he who escaped the Prince and Poins so wittily in Part I now becomes the occasion of wit in those he scorns. And Shakespeare surrounds him with other characters who, pretending to various kinds of wisdom, also turn out fools: the politic Northumberland, the pious and scholarly Archbishop, the busy, self-important country Justice whose name and title link the major themes of the play.

These characters Prince Hal never meets: it is left to us to work out their relation to each other and to the themes of the play. The motif of folly pretending to wisdom suggests a different ethical pattern from the extremes and mean of Part I. That kind of contrast still persists: the very social structure of Part II encourages us to see its characters in terms of excess or defect.⁶⁵ The princes and peers who struggle to control the realm turn prudence to cunning, justice to harsh severity or a pretended zeal for public good. Over against the excessive justice and wisdom of these aristocrats is the sleazy underworld of vice and folly whose only rule is the "law of nature" by which knaves prey on fools, where prudence is that wisdom of the flesh whose end is death.⁶⁶ As in Part I, the comic subplot echoes the political action: Falstaff s broken promises to Mistress Quickly suggest the faithless Northumberland, while his gulling of Shallow under the guise of friendship finds sanction and precedent in Prince John's behavior to the Archbishop. Such parallels in Part I pointed the contrast between Hotspur and Falstaff, but in Part II the resemblances between high and low are greater than the differences: those seeming opposites, Falstaff and Lancaster, are more alike than either of them realizes. For Falstaff is not simply foolish in Part II as he was cowardly and gluttonous in Part I. "Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit?" asks Solomon. "There is more hope of a fool than of him."⁶⁷ So Falstaff, who made a joke of his claims to valor, seriously believes in his own "judgment and understanding" and prides himself on seeing to the bottom of such as Master Shallow and that "good shallow young fellow," Prince Hal. Lancaster too is wise in his own conceit and contemptuous of his dupes: "Most shallowly did you these arms commence," he tells the rebels, "Fondly brought here and foolishly sent hence." We are dealing here with analogy rather than contrast, as becomes plain in the next scene where Coleville gives himself away gratis, trusting to Sir John's good name as the Archbishop trusts the other John's "princely word"—and with the same result. Thus while Falstaff s fearfulness was the antithesis of Hotspur's rashness, his fleshly wisdom is near allied to Lancaster's politic craft: both are perverted likenesses of wisdom itself. In De Inventione Cicero explains that besides vices directly opposed to goodness, there are others that seem akin and close to virtue but are really far removed from it. Cicero is recalling the Aristotelian principle that one extreme is closer to the virtuous mean than the other, but the emphasis has shifted from achieving moderation to distinguishing between appearance and reality.⁶⁸ This stress on false resemblance seems as appropriate to a play about wisdom as are excess and defect to a play about temperance. Cicero's examples in De Inventione do not include wisdom or justice, but in De Officiis he speaks repeatedly of the craft and cunning which seek to pass for wisdom but are really totally unlike it. Nothing more pernicious can be found in life, he says, than guile masquerading as intelligence.⁶⁹

A similar scheme applies to justice. In Part I, Falstaff was a highwayman who frankly broke the law and hid from its officers. In Part II, he is himself the King's representative, who administers the "laws of this land service" with bland corruption and boldly claims their protection against the Chief Justice himself. He classes himself with "men of merit" and at Gaultree clamors for his due: "Therefore let me have right, and let desert mount!" Of all injustice, declares Cicero, "none is more flagrant than that of the hypocrite who, at the very moment when he is most false, makes it his business to appear virtuous."⁷⁰ But does this not precisely describe the sanctimonious Prince John, who as he sends his victims off to execution observes, "God and not we hath safely fought today"? Extreme justice is the worst of injuries: summa ius, summa iniuria. Yet it is not so much the harshness of the sentence that disturbs us: justice gives each his due, and the death that befalls the Archbishop and his accomplices is, as Lancaster points out, "the due / Meet for rebellion." What offends us here is the pretense of justice, the legal trickery by which Prince John accomplishes his ends. It is precisely this kind of chicanery, this sly insistence on the letter of a law or treaty, that Cicero understands by the summa ius which is summa iniuria: he instances the Spartan king who, after making a truce for thirty days, attacks his enemies by night.⁷¹

Prince John's injustice, like his guile, is less a matter of excess than of deceptive likeness. His betrayal of the Archbishop exhibits a counterfeit of both the play's thematic virtues, and the event proves it as unwise as it is unjust. For wisdom, as Warwick tells the King, foresees the "main chance" of future things from "times deceased." The Archbishop's revival of Hotspur's quarrel should warn Westmoreland and Lancaster that his own death will not end the rebellion. But Prince John has not learned the lessons of history. He rebukes Hastings in words that echo elsewhere in the play: "You are too shallow, Hastings, much too shallow, / To sound the bottom of the after-times." In fact, the doomed rebel is a prophet: the heirs of Scroop, Norfolk, and Hastings will conspire and rebel till Lancaster's house is overthrown. It is Prince John who is "shallow," but we must look before and after to detect the folly of his seeming wisdom. By such means, by such broad historical perspectives and nice discriminations of truth and seeming, Shakespeare seeks to make us wise.

Prudentia, then, includes Providentia: "A prudent man is one who sees as it were from afar, for his sight is keen and he foresees the event of uncertainties."⁷² Hence the wise man is never surprised, never has to say "I did not think that this would come to pass!"⁷³ But which of the characters in Part II can make that claim? Most of them are old, since prudence comes with experience: it is virtually impossible, as Aristotle and many after him insist, for a young man to be wise.⁷⁴ Yet the foresight of these old men is as faulty as their memories: the play is full of defeated expectations. Prince Hal is, of course, the central enigma. His father and his friends misjudge him; even Warwick, who comes closest to guessing the Prince's riddle, is unprepared for the "noble change" he purposes. Warwick's wisdom, which foretells the future from the past, depends on constancy of character: Northumberland betrays Henry as he betrayed Richard, fails the Archbishop as he failed his son. But the Prince's change is a symbolic death and rebirth for which he himself is unprepared.

The crown—that "best" and "worst" of gold—is the crucial trial of Hal's wisdom: his knowledge of what to desire or shun, his understanding of himself. The Prince believes himself ready to rule, thinks his education complete; in a profoundly equivocal gesture, he crowns himself. And indeed, as he takes the crown, he speaks the very language of wisdom and justice, recognizing the burden of rule, yet claiming it as his due. But it is not his yet. He too is deceived in his expectation and forced to confess, non putaram:⁷⁵ "I never thought to hear you speak again." The devasting reply—"Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought"—is surely unjust, yet also surely justified; false, yet at some deep level true. The crime of which Hal stands accused is only superficially vanity or revolt: its real name is parricide. And Hal's action has betrayed the secret wish his words and tears deny. In the intellectual action of Shakespeare's play, he has no need of the dagger carried by the wild Prince of The Famous Victories. The physical weapon is here refined to an image, the symbol of the Prince's "thoughts," a dagger of the mind. And in this ultimate trial of intent, Hal's innocence consists less in freedom from the unconscious desire for his father's death than in his anguished repudiation of it. His is not the "rebel" or "vain" spirit of a Hotspur or a Falstaff: he is not swollen with the love of pleasure or infected with the ambition for honor, the lesser goods desired by the appetitive and spirited man. But the fulfillment of his nature is to rule: for Hal to be himself means to become king. And that cannot be so long as his father lives. Hal has seen the crown as a burden, but a burden that is his own. Now he sees it as his enemy and his father's murderer: it is the desire for this highest fulfillment of the self—"most fine, most honored, most renowned"—that has devoured the old King and now threatens the integrity of his son. For the good which the true king seeks is not his own. But in surrendering the crown, Hal proves his right to it: a tradition going back to Plato warns that only those deserve power who do not desire it.⁷⁶ Hal's account of his earlier speech is a falsehood that becomes true as he utters it. Once more he turns past evils to advantages and makes offense a skill: God put it in his mind to take the crown, the King concludes, "That thou mightst win the more thy father's love, / Pleading so wisely in excuse of it."

Wisdom's emblem is the mirror. And in the dying King who shares his name, Hal sees reflected his own divided nature and the end to which it tends. Like his father, he has "snatched" at the crown "with boisterous hand"; like his father, he is now brought to confession and repentance, to what Renaissance theologians called "mortification." There is a reversal of roles, a fusion of identities: the usurper in Prince Hal dies with his father; what is royal in Henry is renewed in his son. The Prince has put off the old man who is his "former self," and it is this experience that gives him the moral authority, as well as the emotional motive, to speak to Falstaff as his father spoke to him: "like a death's head." For Falstaff suffers from the disease of not listening, the malady of not marking. Even when wisdom in the person of the Chief Justice cries out in the street, Falstaff regards it not: he lacks docility, that willingness to be taught which is one of the major divisions of prudence.⁷⁷ But this failure to heed advice is even more unwise in a ruler, and at the beginning of the play, Falstaff s deafness is shared by the King: the Archbishop can gain no hearing for his grievances. But the King learns to hear the words of wisdom—"I will take your counsel," he tells Warwick—while Falstaff refuses them, even from Doll. It is thus left to the new King to make Falstaff remember his latter end. The justice that befalls him is not without mercy: Falstaff will be "very well provided for" and even the dram of imprisonment the Chief Justice administers is the cure he has earlier prescribed for Falstaff s deafness. And it is needed still: to the very end Falstaff pretends not to have heard the words of judgment and mortality by which Hal seeks to bring him to that self-knowledge and repentance he has himself so painfully attained.⁷⁸

The rejection of Falstaff should never be discussed apart from the vindication of the Chief Justice, its thematic counterpart. The twin episodes round out the play's two themes, for as the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice shows the new King's justice, so the choice of "sage counsellors" and the rejection of flatterers reveals his wisdom.⁷⁹ It is no accident that the dying King makes this choice the test and measure of his son's love, for both Falstaff and the Chief Justice have in their different ways presented Hal with an image of the King, the person of his father "in a second body." In rejecting the tutor of his riot, the flatterer whom all have thought his friend, and accepting as his advisor the severe judge whom all have thought his enemy, the new King proves his ability to discriminate between the true and false appearances of good or evil.⁸⁰ "You shall be a father to my youth," he tells the Chief Justice; "My voice shall sound as you do prompt mine ear, / And I will stoop and humble mine intents / To your well practised wise directions." This docility is well and comely in so young a king, and it is fitting that the final integration of the body politic should emphasize such "limbs of noble counsel" as the Chief Justice. Yet the king must be the head of that body, and as Hal promises to be a father to his brothers, we realize that here is indeed the puer senex whose two-fold education has added the wisdom of age to the valor of youth, "That war, or peace, or both at once, may be / As things acquainted and familiar to us."⁸¹

IV

The pattern I have traced bears on two recurrent controversies about Henry IV: the character of the Prince and the relation of the first part to its sequel. I cannot believe that Shakespeare trained his student prince in all the cardinal virtues in order to make him out a prig, a hypocrite, or dehumanized by his kingly role: it is no sin, as even Falstaff concedes, for a man to labor in his vocation. And surely no author ever followed a play about temperance and fortitude with another play about wisdom and justice as an "unpremeditated addition": the general pattern of both parts, though not necessarily their detailed execution, must have belonged to Shakespeare's original plan.

That plan culminates in Henry V. Here, surely, we have Shakespeare's final statement on the themes of blood and virtue. I have argued that Henry combines both claims. That this is Shakespeare's intention is shown by his handling of the Cambridge plot: whereas historically the Earl of Cambridge conspired in behalf of Mortimer, Shakespeare treats him simply as a traitor. For the purposes of this play, he deliberately represses—and the psychological term seems apposite—all memory of Mortimer and his claim. No one ever challenges Henry's lineal right to the throne—which is not to say that this is his most important or his only right. It is significant that the only English nobles to die at Agincourt are York and Suffolk. These are names ominous for the future of Henry's line, but here they become types of sacrifice, fellowship, and devotion. That York should die for Lancaster at Agincourt is a tribute not to Henry's pedigree but to the heroic virtue that unites all England under him.⁸² Conversely, the King's most dangerous antagonists are not the Dauphin and his butterfly nobility but Pistol and his crew, the corrupted "humors" in the English character and state which no royal example can change or redeem, which must be purged for the welfare of the whole.⁸³ Virtue, it seems, is not a national trait. Those who are won by the force of Henry's example finally include not only the soldiers of his polyglot army but also those who thought themselves his enemies: the last of Henry's adoptive fathers is the King of France. The pattern of this compelling and exemplary virtue is familiar; it is systematically defined in the first four appearances of the King. These exhibit in reverse order the virtues he has mastered: wisdom in taking counsel, justice in judging the conspirators, fortitude in assaulting Harfleur, and temperance in sparing its inhabitants.

Agincourt, the climax of this sequence, is—like Bosworth—the judgment on a dynasty. The genealogy Henry sends to the French king which shows him "evenly derived" from Edward III is not ironic. It traces a lineage of the spirit. Henry proves himself the true inheritor of Edward and the Black Prince by reviving their virtues, by repeating and surpassing their heroic deeds. That, it seems, is genealogy enough. Henry's right to France—and by implication England—is finally vindicated by a higher power than the Archbishop of Canterbury. The night before Agincourt, Henry confesses the fault his father made in compassing the crown, and just before the fight begins, he places the outcome in God's hand: "Now, soldiers, march away / And how thou pleasest, God, dispose the day!" The battle that follows is the last of the trials by combat that run throughout the whole tetralogy, beginning with the abortive duel between Mowbray and Bolingbroke. Here, as there, the appeal is to God's justice, but now, in the almost miraculous outcome, the divine verdict is clear. The kingliness of virtue is affirmed, a virtue that has now come to include religion as well as the cardinal and secular four, rounding out with fine numerical decorum the five royal virtues listed by Elizabeth.

This mode of characterization, by which the behavior of the hero typifies some abstract value like prudence or fortitude, differs radically from Shakespeare's normal method. The difference supplies a clue to his generic intent. For it is in epic—or at least in the Renaissance reading of epic—that we find Achilles typifying valor and Ulysses prudence, or Aeneas uniting in himself the virtues of the good governor and the good man. The "Henriad"—the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V—is thus indeed an epic. Its hero is not England, as Tillyard and others have supposed, but England's king. Under the dubious reign of Henry IV, formal epic would be out of place. Not until Prince Hal becomes king does England become a heroic people: qualis princeps, talis populus. Nevertheless the three plays are unified by a heroic theme: they are an epic of education like the Cyropaedia of Xenophon, which Sidney considered an "absolute heroicall poem" because under the name of Cyrus it presents "ejfigiem iusti imperii, " the model of a righteous governor.⁸⁴ Xenophon's institution of the prince, like Shakespeare's, takes the form of fictionalized history, and his story of a young prince who masters the five virtues, invades a great kingdom, wins it in a battle against overwhelming odds, and marries a princess reveals many likenesses to the career of Shakespeare's hero.⁸⁵ Cyrus is contrasted to his uncle Cyaxares, the weak though legitimate heir to a kingdom, much as Henry V is constantly though implicitly contrasted to Richard II. Cyrus, like Henry, is of royal blood, but character, not lineage, makes him a ruler: men of all nations instinctively follow and obey him who is . . . one formed by nature to be king.⁸⁶

Xenophon's title—"The Education of Cyrus"—thus takes on a double meaning. Cyrus seeks to make himself a "perfect model of virtue,"⁸⁷ and the virtues he himself learns in the first book, he teaches to his followers and his new subjects in the remaining seven. Like Prince Hal, he masters a double spirit of teaching and of learning, and his students include the readers of his story as well as the other characters in it. For the aim of such heroic narrative is to "form the mind to heroic virtue by example": the maker of a Cyrus, Sidney argues, can make many Cyruses.⁸⁸ Here poetry and politics coincide, for the purpose of Sidney's poet—"the winning of the minde from wickednesse to vertue"—is identical with the function which James I in the Basilikon Doron ascribes to the ruler.⁸⁹ Both work by example, the "mirror" of virtue which lesser men behold in the imagined hero or the historic king. For the king, as James declares in another traditional image, "is as one set on a stage, whose smallest gestures, all the people gazinglie do behold."⁹⁰ Thus Henry V, who is both king and hero, acts to a double audience, on stage and in the theater—and beyond it. By his example, both his subjects in Shakespeare's play and all who see or read it are moved to imitation: his education is also ours. We too must learn to distinguish true and false honor, to choose justice and reject vanity. For the cardinal virtues of the king are likewise traditionally the virtues of everyman, and it is by imaginative participation in Hal's gradual mastery of them that his heroism could be renewed in the age of Elizabeth—or in our own.

Notes

This essay expands a talk given at the Shakespeare Association of America's first annual meeting in Spring 1973 and outlines the argument of a full-length study of "Henriad" now nearing completion. Since my notes are lengthy, I have not attempted to specify my debts to previous Shakespeare scholarship. They are obvious and gratefully acknowledged.

¹A Kingdom for a Stage (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), p. 18. But Ornstein's summary of the Tudor myth (p. 15) is incomplete, omitting Tillyard's stress on the crimes of the House of York and their punishment: cf. Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1946), pp. 60-61.

²The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, N. J., 1957), ch. 6.

³ Ben Jonson, "Prologue" to Every Man in His Humour (1616), 11. 10-11, in C. H. Herford and Percy Simpson, Ben Jonson, III (Oxford, 1927), 303. In quoting early texts I have normalized i/j and u/v and omitted random italics.

⁴ For "true inheritor," see 2 Henry IV IV.V.168. Shakespeare is quoted from The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore, 1969), though I have sometimes repunctuated for dramatic emphasis. Since the plays discussed are so familiar, I have ventured to omit further citations except when—as here—the source is not clear from the context.

⁵ Cicero, De Officiis, trans. Walter Miller (Cambridge, Mass., 1913), II, 13. Herodotus' account is considerably less idealized: see The Histories I, 96-98. Compare Aristotle, Politics 1285b, 1286b, 1310b.

⁶The Education of a Christian Prince, trans. Lester K. Born (New York, 1936), pp. 139-40; cf. The "Adages" of Erasmus, trans. Margaret M. Phillips (Cambridge, Eng., 1964), p. 220. The comparison between elective and hereditary monarchy forms a standard chapter in institutions of the prince. Though hereditary succession is usually preferred, the arguments concern not theories of legal or natural right but considerations of public concord and the moral character of the ruler. Jaques Hurault, in his Politicke, Moral, and Martial Discourses, trans. Arthur Golding (1595), concludes dispassionately that some men prefer hereditary succession and some elective; in both "there be divers inconveniences, and reasons enow both to commend them, and to discommend them" (p. 30).

⁷The King and the Education of a King (Toledo, 1599), trans. G. A. Moore (Chevy Chase, Md., 1948), p. 121.

⁸Six Books of the Commonwealth, abridged and trans. M. J. Tooley (New York, 1955), pp. 60-66. Note, however, that Bodin distinguishes princely from private virtue and quotes approvingly the proverb that "a bad man makes a good king." His example of a good man who makes a bad king is Charles the Simple; it might well be Henry VI. But the private virtues he cites, like credulity and simplicity, would not be virtues even of a private man for Aristotle and the tradition; conversely, the virtues discussed in this paper are all exhibited by Bodin's true king. Note also that the insistence that virtue, not lineage, marks true kingship need entail no revolutionary results. Erasmus believes tyrants should be resisted, but Bodin, who regards kings as responsible only to God, does not.

⁹Politics 131 la. I quote Benjamin Jowett's translation in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941). The association of kingship with justice is, of course, scriptural as well as classical: see e.g. 2 Sam. 8.15, 1 Kings 10.9.

¹⁰De Natura II, viii, quoted in S. B. Chrimes, English Constitutional Ideas in the Fifteenth Century (Cambridge, Eng., 1936), p. 14. See also Fortescue's Governance of England, ed. Charles Plummer (Oxford, 1885), p. 116.

¹¹ Quoted in Chrimes, p. 15, n. 1; I have translated Bracton's Latin. For the tradition, see Kantorowicz's important essay, "On Transformations of Apolline Ethics," in Selected Studies (Locust Valley, N.Y., 1966), esp. pp. 404-06. For a sixteenth-century statement, complete with reference to Justinian, see Guillaume de la Perrière's Mirrour of Policie, trans. anon. (1599), sig. [CIV]. Compare the emblem of a king bearing a book and sword with the motto "Legibus et Armis" from George Wither's Collection of Emblems, reproduced in Kantorowicz, plate 40.

¹²Politics 1281a.

¹³ Bodin, p. 192.

¹⁴The Basilikon Doron of King James VI, ed. James Craigie, 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1944), I, 29.

¹⁵ The form of the aphorism in Cicero is ".. . qualis in re publica principes essent, talis reliquos solere esse cives" (Ad Fam. I, 9, 12).

¹⁶ Chelidonius Tigurinus, A Most Excellent Hystorie, Of the Institution . . . of Christian Princes, trans. J. Chillester (1571), p. 15.

¹⁷The Castle, or Picture of Pollicy (1581), sig. [9V].

¹⁸Somers Tracts I, 235; for "judgement" and "magnanimitie" as wisdom and fortitude see OED. In a schoolboy essay, Edward VI argues that a king should cultivate the cardinal virtues precisely so as to instill these in his subjects, who follow their ruler like sheep. See Literary Remains of King Edward the Sixth, ed. J. G. Nichols, 2 vols. (London, 1857), I, 21. For James I on the cardinal virtues, see below.

¹⁹ Most of this evidence is gathered in Josephine Waters Bennett, The Evolution of "The Faerie Queene" (Chicago, 1942), ch. 17, and William O. Harris, Skelton 's Magnyfycence and the Cardinal Virtue Tradition (Chapel Hill, N. C, 1965), pp. 145-53. Neither scholar associates the tradition with Shakespeare's histories. Perhaps the literary evidence deserves more particular note. For Sidney, see The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (1590), II, 6: King Euarchus, famous for his "rightly royall vertues," shows not only justice in peace and magnanimity in war but also all the cardinal four: ".. . as he was most wise to see what was best, and most just in the perfourming what he saw, & temperate in abstaining from anything any way contrary; so .. . no thought can imagine a greater harte to see and contemne daunger . . ." (pp. 126-[126v]). These are the qualities Castiglione's courtier seeks to cultivate in his prince: see The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, The Tudor Translations 23 (New York, 1967), pp. 309-10, 314. When Panurge runs into debt as Warden of Salmagundia, he argues that his conduct conforms to all four virtues: see The Histories of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Bk. III, ch. 2. And while Don Quixote, in advising Sancho Panza how to behave as Governor of Barataría, covers only three of the four virtues—understandably omitting fortitude—Sancho actually exhibits them all, though his temperance and valor are enforced: see The Adventures of Don Quixote, Bk. II, chs. 43-53.

²⁰ Craigie reports that a list—admittedly incomplete—of European treatises on princely education written in the sixteenth century numbers more than a hundred (Basilikon Doron, II, 74). A useful summary of important institutions before Erasmus is given by Lester Born in his introduction to The Education of a Christian Prince. See also Allan H. Gilbert, Machiavelli 's "Prince " and Its Forerunners (Durham, N.., 1938), and Felix Gilbert, "The Humanist Concept of the Prince and The Prince of Machiavelli," JMH, 11 (1939), 449-83.

²¹ Since this sentence was written, Moody Prior in The Drama of Power (Evanston, I11., 1973), ch. 13 and esp. pp. 250-53, has discussed the relation of the princely institutions to Henry IV. He rightly concludes that Hal's education, while unconventional in its means, is traditional in the kingly attributes that are its end. But his account of these follows the usual scheme of valor in Part I and justice in Part II.

²² It was, of course, the orthodox Renaissance objection to Machiavelli that he divided the two. Edward Dacres, his first published English translator, observes that "politicks presuppose Ethiques" (quoted in Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli [London, 1964], p. 99, n. 4; italics mine). Dacres is probably thinking of Aristotle, whose Politics is quite literally the continuation of the Nicomachean Ethics.

²³Basilikon Doron, I, 137.

²⁴The Governaunce of Prynces (1422), in Three Prose Versions of the Secreta Secretorum, ed. Robert Steele, EETS, e.s., 74 (London, 1898), p. 147.

²⁵The Regement of Princes, 11. 4754-55, in Hoccleve 's Works, ed. F.J. Furnivall, EETS, e.s., 72 (London, 1897), III, 171. For the contention that the Regement is organized around the cardinal virtues, see Harris, Skelton 's Magnyfycence, p. 82.

²⁶ For the "parts" of wisdom, see Cicero, De Inventione II, 53. For Prudentia with three faces looking to past, present, and future, see Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1967), pp. 260-61 and plate 91.

²⁷Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, trans. W. H. Stahl (New York, 1952), p. 122.

²⁸ Versions of this commonplace, with attribution to Aristotle and Plato, are the first two entries "Of Kings, Rulers, and Governours, and how they should rule their Subjects," in William Baldwin, A Treatise of Morali Philosophie... Enlarged by Thomas Palfreyman (1620), ed. R. H. Bowers (Gainesville, Fla., 1967), p. [53v].

²⁹ For wisdom and justice as distinctively royal virtues, see the analysis of these virtues in Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, Q. 50, A 1. The tradition is of course much older: Plato and Aristotle regard wisdom (in at least one of its forms) as peculiar to the ruler, while justice is traditionally the primary office of the king.... The two are closely associated in Scripture: Aquinas quotes Jer. 23.5, "A king shall reign and be wise ['prosper' in King James], and shall execute justice and judgment in the earth." See also Prov. 1.1-3, 8.14-15; 1 Kings 3.9-12. For the association of virtues and faculties, see e.g. Hurault, pp. 58-59. Plato's definition of temperance as an inclusive virtue was later modified so that it became the virtue of the appetitive part. For this and for the classical association of temperance with childhood, see Helen North, Sophrosyne: Self-Knowledge and Self-Restraint in Greek Literature (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966). The valor of youth and wisdom of age is an epic and moral formula as old as the Iliad: see p. 340, n.81, below.

³⁰ These locations for the faculties derive from the Timaeus. See e.g. Lodowyk Bryskett, A Discourse of Civili Life (1606), pp. 47-49.

³¹ Eph. 4.13. "Age" is the translation in the Geneva and Bishops' Bibles, "stature" in King James. Both physical and temporal aspects of the growth metaphor are clearly implicit in context: the body of Christ is to grow into a perfect man that henceforth we may be no longer children. The relevance of Ephesians to Henry IV has been explored by J. A. Bryant in Hippolyta's View: Some Christian Aspects of Shakespeare's Plays (Lexington, Ky., 1961), ch. 4, and by D. J. Palmer in "Casting Off the Old Man: History and St. Paul in 'Henry IV,'" CQ, 12 (1970), 267-83. The Pauline theme of conversion represents the other side of Prince Hal's development, fusing the historical tradition of his sudden moral transformation with the dramatic pattern of the moralities and interludes. This aspect of Henry IV is so familiar that I have not discussed it, but a moment's thought suggests how Shakespeare's attempt to combine the classical education of the prince with the Christian theme of conversion complicates both. The richness and subtlety that result from such a synthesis can be appreciated by comparing Henry IV with the Cyropaedia on the one hand and The Famous Victories on the other. But there is strain as well as gain. The critical controversy over Hal's first soliloquy reflects the tension between its first and last lines, between the Prince educating himself in the school of experience ("I know you all") and the prodigal not yet ready to abandon vice and return to his father's house ("Redeeming time"). And we see Falstaff both as the "tutor" from whom Hal has much to learn and the "old man" he must renounce.

³² See Adolph Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art. . . (New York, 1964), p. 55 and figures 33, 34. The fifteenth-century iconography described by Emile Mâle in L 'Art Religieux de la Fin du Moyen Age en France (Paris, 1908), pp. 335-36, which shows Temperance with a clock on her head and a bridle in her mouth, also reflects themes important for 1 Henry IV, and both attributes are not uncommon. See North's comments on the association of tempus and temperantia (Sophrosyne, p. 262).

³³ Dover Wilson adopts "intemperature"; A. R. Humphreys in the Arden edition accepts the Quarto reading but regards "intemperature" as "the better word."

³⁴ Recent editions I have seen identify Achitophel but do not explain the allusion: the parallel, complains G. B. Harrison, "is not particularly apt." The Arden editor quotes 2 Sam. 15.12: "The treason was great." That is Falstaff s point, but not Shakespeare's. The similarity between the preceding scene and 2 Sam. 18.24-33 suggests that the whole story was present to Shakespeare's imagination as he wrote.

³⁵ This is a sweeping generalization, but I think it essentially true. These are, for example, the three authors most cited in the Basilikon Doron. Elyot in The Governour (London, n.d.), p. 47, believes that "those thre bokes be almoste sufficient to make a perfecte and excellent governour." Hence their prominence in these notes. The only authority of comparable (and sometimes competing) influence was Scripture itself: see A Woorke of Joannes Ferrarius Montanus, Touchynge the Good Orderynge of a Common Weale, trans. William Bavande (1559), whose subtitle declares it to be derived not from the vain traditions of philosophers but the sound doctrines and godly institutions of Christianity. With such pious exceptions, the institutions tend to use scriptural citations to support classical themes.

³⁶ For the use of De Officiis as a school text and the detailed methods with which it was studied, both by kings and commoners, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespere's Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana, Ill., 1944). If we may assume Shakespeare's acquaintance with Cicero's long account of temperance (I, 27-42), such passages as the duties of age and youth (I, 34)—which reflects on Worcester and Hotspur as well as Falstaff and Hal—leap into prominence. So do Cicero's passing observations on learning temperance by studying the conduct of others (I, 40) or the impropriety of boasting about oneself—especially falsely—and playing to the derision of one's hearers the miles gloriosus (I, 38).

³⁷Shakespeare 's Festive Comedy (Princeton, N. J., 1959), ch. 8. See De Officiis I, 29, and compare Aristotle, Politics 1937b, Ethics 1176b.

³⁸De Officiis I, 31.

³⁹De Officiis I, 30-34.

⁴⁰De Officiis I, 33.

⁴¹ For a sixteenth-century parallel, see Bodin's adaptation of Plato's class structure to the three estates in France: the clergy, the military, and the "scholars [!], merchants, craftsmen, and peasants," whose virtues are respectively prudence, courage, and temperance. The king represents the transcendent unity from which these derive; he administers the justice which reconciles his subjects to one another and to himself (Six Books, p. 212).

⁴²The Republic of Plato, trans. F. M. Cornford (Oxford, 1945), IV, 444.

⁴³ Temperance can be seen as a virtue exclusively concerned with the pleasures of touch and taste (as in Aristotle) or as including the irascible passions as well (as in Plato). Shakespeare has it both ways, I think: the first half of the play deals with temperance in the narrow sense and the second with fortitude, but Hal achieves temperance in the broader sense only at the end of the play. See Hurault's account of temperance as a virtue which governs not only the belly and reins but choler and the tongue (pp. 306-07, 310): thus his discussion includes a chapter warning "That princes must above all things eschue Choler" (Bk. II, ch. 14) and another "Of refraining a mans tongue . . . of liars . . . of flatterers, of mockers, of railers and slaunderers, and of tale-bearers" (ch. 13). The relevance of 1 Henry IV seems obvious. For the political dimension of Hotspur's intemperance, see John Higgins' Preface to Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates (1574), ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge, Eng., 1946). Higgins acknowledges that those in authority need all four cardinal virtues, but stresses the special necessity of temperance to overcome ambition and the "desire of fame, glorie, renowne, and immortalitie" which have led to the fall of so many valiant and victorious personages (pp. 31-32). Compare Cicero's account of fortitude without justice (De Officiis 1, 19).

⁴⁴Republic IV, 443. Like the passage quoted above, this follows the definition of justice, and illustrates the close connection between Platonic justice (which assigns each part of the soul its proper function) and temperance (which produces the agreement of all to the rule of reason). When the proper function of each part consists "of ruling or of being ruled" (loc. cit.) the two virtues become almost indistinguishable.

⁴⁵ The horse imagery, in general, recalls the charioteer of Phaedrus and his steeds, which "becomes for later Platonists, pagan and Christian, the standard symbol for the operation of sophrosyne in the soul" (North, Sophrosyne, p. 179, n. 59; see also pp. 380-81). But Pegasus as the divine steed which, when bridled, enables a young prince to slay the monster Chimaera has more specific relevance. The soul, says Plato, can be imaged as a composite creature like the Chimaera; its appetitive part is a "multifarious and many-headed beast" (Republic IX, 588). So Hal's spirited impulses, properly controlled and directed, help him overcome the bestial impulses of appetite. For Ronsard, Bellerophon represented the "temperate philosopher, well controlled and well exercised in the moral virtues, who was killing, subjugating, and dominating his own affections"; see Frances Yates, The French Academies of the Sixteenth Century (London, 1947), p. 130.

⁴⁶Nicomachean Ethics 1104a, trans. W. D. Ross in The Basic Works.

⁴⁷Nicomachean Ethics 1105a, 1104b, 117a-b, 1115a.

⁴⁸Nicomachean Ethics 1119a.

⁴⁹Nicomachean Ethics 1109a.

⁵⁰Faerie Queene II.xii. 56-57.

⁵¹Republic HI, 414.

⁵² On this iconographic convention, which goes back to the Psychomachia of Prudentius in literature and to the classical motif of victors standing over the vanquished in art, see Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues, p. 14. A pageant of virtues—including Justice and Wisdom—each treading down two vices greeted Elizabeth at her coronation. See Sydney Anglo, Spectacle, Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy (Oxford, 1969), p. 398 and cf. p. 355.

⁵³ Cicero, De Inventione II, 53; De Officiis I, 5-6; II, 5. Definitions and divisions of wisdom multiply from Nicomachean Ethics VI on; for a survey of Renaissance conceptions, see Eugene Rice, The Renaissance Idea of Wisdom (Cambridge, Mass., 1958). The tradition is complex, and Shakespeare's treatment of wisdom in Part II is less systematic than the ambitious synthesis of Aristotelian, Platonic, and Ciceronian conceptions of temperance in Part I. I have restricted my discussion to aspects clearly relevant to the play and have avoided even elementary distinctions between, e.g., sapientia and prudentia. These often overlap in discussions of the cardinal virtue, which in English institutions and handbooks is called "prudence" and "wisdom" indifferently. The Concordance suggests that Shakespeare's term was "wisdom."

⁵⁴De Officiis I, 43. Prudence as the knowledge of what is to be sought or avoided may be moral (the perception of good and bad) or practical (the choice of the best means to an end). The tradition includes both meanings; the second—for which see Nicomachean Ethics VI—emphasizes deliberation and the calculation of future probabilities, which are also important in 2 Henry IV.

⁵⁵Republic VI, 502.

⁵⁶Love's Labor's Lost II.i.45.

⁵⁷ Erasmus, Education, pp. 140ff. For tutors as parentes mentis see W. H. Woodward, Vittorino da Feltre and Other Humanist Educators (Cambridge, Eng., 1921), pp. 201-02.

⁵⁸ These comparisons are not random. Hal's magnanimity in covering the "mangled face" of his fallen enemy with his own "favors" is modelled on the behavior of Alexander to Darius, as recorded in Plutarch. The events of Solomon's accession in 1 Kings—Adonijah's attempt to make himself king before his father's death, David's dying counsel, Solomon's treatment of his father's friends and foes, and the kind of wisdom he attains—are all relevant to Hal's accession in 2 Henry IV.

⁵⁹De Officiis I, 43; II, 2.

⁶⁰ Woodward, pp. 182-84; De Officiis I, 6.

⁶¹ Katzenellenbogen, pp. 55-56.

⁶² 1 Kings 3.9; Erasmus, Education, p. 133.

⁶³ See e.g. Hurault, Discourses, pp. 149ff.; Baldwin, Morali Philosophie, pp. 54-[54v].

⁶⁴Measure for Measure III.ii.141-42.

⁶⁵ Though Aristotle strives to define justice in terms of the mean in the Nicomachean Ethics, what emerges is a ratio, and he does not apply the excess-defect pattern of the moral virtues to the intellectual virtue of wisdom. Nevertheless, the prestige and simplicity of the pattern often caused it to be extended to these virtues. See the Preface to Barnabe Barnes, Foure Bookes of Offices (1606), where, in Barnes's musical metaphor, the "base" of prudence is folly, the "alte" "malicious wiliness and caliditie," as the "base" of justice is indulgence and the "alte" cruelty (sig. [Aiii^v]).

⁶⁶ The irony of Falstaff s reference to the "law of nature" that makes the young dace a bait for the old pike becomes clear if we recall Cicero's constant invocation of natural law, which in De Officiis is a bond of human solidarity which forbids men to injure or defraud their neighbor (III, 5), and from which in De Inventione spring religion, duty to kin and country, gratitude, truth, and reverence for our superiors (II, 22)—all traits in which Falstaff shines. "Wisdom of the flesh," according to Aquinas in the Summa, is a false prudence which deliberates shrewdly but for carnal or worldly ends (II-II, Q. 55). Guillaume de la Perrière's examples are suggestive: "False Prudence is the disposition of thinges that tend to an evill end, as if a man should bend all his study to use the pleasure of the flesh, to steale and to robbe, and to enrich himselfe by fraud, subtletie, craft, and deceit. Of this false Prudence the Apostle . . . saieth: Wisedome of the flesh is death" (The Mirrour of Policie, sigs. Hiii-[Hiiil).

⁶⁷ Prov. 26.12. As might be expected, the "wisdom literature" of the Bible is echoed in 2 Henry IV (see e.g. the preceding verse), and the recurring scriptural contrast of wisdom and folly illuminates both its theme and action. There is a further appropriateness in such allusions to Proverbs, Ecclesiasticus, and Wisdom: they are recommended reading in institutions of the prince, partly because they were believed to be "what the wisest king of all teaches his own son, whom he is preparing to be his successor" (Erasmus, Education, p. 200). Like so many authors of secular institutions, Solomon duly cites the four cardinal virtues, "which are such things, as men can have nothing more profitable in their life" (Wis. 8.7).

⁶⁸De Inventione II, 54.

⁶⁹De Officiis II, 17; II, 3; III, 32. Aquinas in the Summa adopts Cicero's scheme of opposite and resembling vices. The spurious likenesses of prudence include wisdom of the flesh, craftiness, guile, and fraud (II-II, Q. 53-55). La Primaudaye's synthesis of Aristotelian and Ciceronian patterns shows how the second derives from the first: "unskilfulnes," the defect of prudence that errs through ignorance, is a vice contrary to virtue, while malice or craft, the excess that errs through deceit and subtlety, is the false likeness of virtue, more dangerous because it "seeketh to cover it selfe with hir name." See Pierre de la Primaudaye, The French Academie, trans. T[homas] B[owes?], 3d ed. (1594), pp. 109-10.

⁷⁰De Officiis I, 13.

⁷¹De Officiis I, 10. Cicero insists that one must keep faith even with an enemy, and that in such vows and promises, the sense should be regarded, not the words (I, 13). The famous opposition that follows between force and fraud, the lion and the fox, neatly points the connection and contrast between Hotspur and Lancaster, the differing forms of wrong appropriate to Parts I and II. Both are inhuman, Cicero declares, but fraud is more hateful. Machiavelli's famous chapter on how princes should keep faith is a deliberate rebuttal of De Officiis, adopting Cicero's symbolism but reversing his values. That Shakespeare intends Prince John's faithlessness to be recognized as Machiavellian is doubtful, but it is clear that he intends our judgment of it to be Ciceronian. In fact, the Archbishop and Lancaster seem to echo the exchange between Thyestes and Atreus—"Fregestin fidem? / Neque dedi nequi do infideli cuiquam"—which Cicero quotes in a later discussion of fidelity to oaths (HI, 28).

⁷² Aquinas, quoting Isidore, Summa II - II, Q. 47.

⁷³ Martin of Braga, Formula Vitae Honestae, in Opera Omnia, ed. Claude Barlow (New Haven, Conn., 1950), p. 239. For the importance of this treatise, which was attributed to Seneca, see Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery (Princeton, N.J., 1966), pp. 61-62. Barlow cites several Senecan analogues to the quoted phrase; for a Ciceronian parallel, see n. 75 below.

⁷⁴Nicomachean Ethics 11422. Hence the special importance for a young king of heeding older counsellors: see Erasmus, Education, pp. 143-44, 156.

⁷⁵De Officiis I, 23. The context is a discussion of fortitude without foresight. See also Erasmus, Education, p. 155: "If Africanus spoke the truth when he said, '"I did not think" is not a fit expression for any wise man,' how much more unsuited is it to a prince!"

⁷⁶Republic VII, 520. Citing "divine Plato" and paraphrasing Erasmus (Education, p. 160) La Primaudaye argues that no man is fit to govern unless he does so unwillingly. Anyone who desires a crown must be wicked, seeking to reign for his own pleasure and profit, or a fool, ignorant of the burden he undertakes. "Therefore a wise prince will not thinke himselfe the happier, bicause he succeedeth in a greater Empire and kingdome, but remember rather, that he laieth so much the more care and paine upon his shoulders ... " (p. 617).

⁷⁷ Docility as a "part" of prudence derives from Macrobius; Hurault calls it "Teachablenesse" (p. 157).

⁷⁸ The epilogue shows that Shakespeare had not yet decided on Falstaff s fate. But the description of his death in Henry V is consistent with this interpretation, especially in juxtaposition with the scene in which Henry brings the doomed conspirators to repentance. That Falstaff cries out against sack and women, mutters the 23rd Psalm, and dies calling on God suggests that his "fracted and corroborate" heart is in fact broken and contrite (Ps. 51.17). The spectacle of a penitent Falstaff we could probably neither believe nor accept; the oblique way Shakespeare hints the idea, mingling pathos and bawdy, holy dying with the confusions of ordinary human language and feeling, must be one of the great examples of tact in drama.

⁷⁹ See the opening of Chapter 22 of The Prince: here Machiavelli speaks for the tradition.

⁸⁰ The themes of flattery and friendship, so interwined in 2 Henry IV, are intimately and traditionally connected to wisdom and justice. Friendship is closely associated with justice in De Officiis and the Nicomachean Ethics, while institutions of the prince repeatedly warn that the ruler who would know himself must specially beware of flatterers (see Erasmus, Education, ch. 2). The title of Plutarch's often-cited essay "How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend" nicely states Hal's problem as he seeks to know Falstaff in his true colors. That the flatterer turns out to be a detractor as well makes him doubly dangerous: the work of justice in the Prologue to Justinian's Institutes is "to expel the iniquities of slanderers" (Kantorowicz, Studies, p. 404). On detraction as a vice opposed to wisdom, and detractors disguised as friends and counsellors, see Elyot, pp. 288ff.

⁸¹ Despite its skirmishes and alarums, Part II is essentially about peace as Part I is about war. See Cicero on the victories of peace: the conquests of Tiberius Gracchus and Catiline, like that of the Archbishop, partake of the nature of war but are essentially triumphs of counsel (De Officiis I, 22). The distinction of the virtues that belong to "war, or peace, or both at once" goes back at least to Aristotle (Politics 1334a). But Shakespeare's actual grouping of temperance and fortitude vs. wisdom and justice is not identical with Aristotle's, and seems determined as much by the educational theme of ages and faculties as by the contrast of war and peace. Its dual pattern incorporates both the "arms and laws" of kingly rule and the "arts and arms" of princely education (for the relation between these formulae, see Kantorowicz, Studies). The educational ideal of arts and arms in turn parallels the heroic formula of fortitudo et sapientia. In epic tradition these are the virtues of youth and age, brave Diomedes and wise Nestor, the warrior and the counsellor. Once more poetry and politics coincide, for according to Aristotle these are the two classes who make up the state (Politics 1329a). The warriors who defend the city in the strength of their youth become the counsellors who "advise about the expedient and determine matters of law" when age gives them wisdom. They are, in other words, the rulers of Aristotle's ideal polity, who learn to obey in youth that they may command in age (Politics 1332b-1333a). His account of their training is incomplete, but the discussion that introduces it touches on the major topoi that shape Shakespeare's play: the connections of virtue and happiness, the good for the individual and the state, ethics and politics; the virtues of peace and war, action and leisure; the interplay between the ages of man, classes and functions in the state, and faculties of the soul; the relation of all these to the education of rulers (Bk. VII, chs. 13-15, 1332b-1334b).

⁸² The point becomes especially striking if we realize—and there is no sign Shakespeare did—that the Duke of York who volunteers for the post of greatest danger at Agincourt is Richard II's most loyal supporter, Aumerle.

⁸³ This interpretation of Henry's invasion of France as an epic action which consolidates his subjects by heroic example while dispersing vices and "ill humors" parallels that of Daniel in The Civil Wars, Bk. v, especially stanzas 4-5, 17-23 (for convenience I use the numbering of the 1609 version, the copy text for Laurence Michel's New Haven, Conn., edition of 1958).

⁸⁴An Apologie for Poetrie, in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. G. Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1904), I, 160.

⁸⁵ Almost forgotten today, the Cyropaedia was widely read in the Renaissance and regularly cited in institutions of the prince. This work gives considerable importance to the education of its hero. In Book I, Cyrus is trained with the other Persian youths in temperance and justice; practices fortitude both in hunting—a model of war—and actual battle at his grandfather's court; and finally, in a climactic "Socratic" dialogue, learns piety and wisdom from the King his father just as he is about to become himself a leader of men. These, together with patriotism and affability (which Cyrus also displays), are the virtues of the King in Xenophon's Agesilaus. The canon of five virtues was usual before Plato in the Republic reduced it to four by omitting piety, or rather by identifying it with wisdom (see North, Sophrosyne, chs. 4 and 5).

⁸⁶Cyropaedia, trans. Walter Miller, 2 vols. (London, 1904), v, i, 24.

⁸⁷Cyropaedia VIII, i, 21.

⁸⁸ Dryden, "Dedication of the Aeneis," quoted in Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), p. 329; An Apologie, p. 157.

⁸⁹An Apologie, p. 172.

⁹⁰Basilikon Doron, I, 43.