[In the following essay, Trafton argues that Shakespeare intended to portray Henry IV as a calculating and impious usurper who, lacking "the creative qualities of a founder," fails to create a legitimate monarchy within his own lifetime.]

Between the richly colored and dramatically imposing figures of Richard II and Henry V—at the very center, as it were, of Shakespeare's second tetralogy of plays about English history—stands the sober, curiously drab figure of Henry Bolingbroke. A mere outline of his career suggests a portrait that might have been composed almost entirely of highlights, both lurid and brilliant. Having seized the throne and murdered his cousin the king, Henry holds his prize against all comers, destroys his enemies at last, and bequeaths his conquests intact to his son. What this outline suggests, however, Shakespeare's art avoids. Throughout three plays notably filled with characters who dominate the stage, Shakespeare withholds from Henry the vividness that his story seems to warrant. Unlike other Shakespearean characters who commit outstanding crimes in the pursuit of thrones—Richard III, Macbeth, or Claudius—Henry has not been granted the moments of high dramatic intensity, the triumphs and the agonies, that make a hero. His is a study in grey. Moreover, as the tetralogy progresses from Richard II to the plays that bear his name, Henry literally recedes from view. A progressive diminishment of his presence on the stage occurs. In Richard II he is on stage about half the time; in the first of the plays named for him, however, his role is reduced by half, and in the second a further reduction leaves him with only three scenes, which amount to less than one sixth of the work. One might conclude that Henry's character simply never engaged Shakespeare's full interest, but such a conclusion would miss the point. The sobriety of tone befits the special intention of Henry's portrait. That intention is neither tragic nor heroic, but essentially political. In the curiously muted presentation of Henry can be discovered one of Shakespeare's most searching political portraits—his most extended and also his profoundest political investigation of (to use the language of Machiavelli) a new prince in a new principality.¹ Other Shakespearean characters present the type in greater psychological and moral depth, and with greater dramatic power; none displays with such clarity and thoroughness the political implications of regicide and usurpation. Ultimately, moreover, the lusterless tones in which Henry is drawn point to Shakespeare's judgment upon the first Lancastrian king. As we shall see, the tetralogy's analysis of Henry's politics leads to a revelation of his essential deficiency.

According to Shakespeare, Henry's usurpation represents more than a simple change of dynasty. In defying, deposing, and eventually murdering Richard, Henry subverts not only the rule of a particular king, but also a fundamental principle of the realm. He violates, and thus undermines, the sanctity of monarchy itself, the belief that kings are God's deputies and that rebellion is a sin. Through the figures of Gaunt, Carlisle, York, and Richard himself, Shakespeare articulates this principle in all its religious dignity, and identifies it as an essential source of order in the traditional regime that exists at the beginning of the tetralogy. When the Duchess of Gloucester seeks revenge upon Richard for the murder of her husband, Gaunt sternly refuses to take action against "God's substitute, / His deputy anointed in His sight."² When Henry is on the point of taking the crown itself from "plume-pluck'd Richard," Carlisle steps forward to deplore "so heinous, black, obscene a deed." If "the figure of God's majesty" is deposed, Carlisle warns,

The blood of English shall manure the
. ground, And future ages groan for this foul act.

(IV.i.137-138)

Henry must be presumed as familiar with the weighty significance of these views as are his father and Carlisle; yet neither the memory of the former nor the eloquence of the latter turns him from an act of profound impiety against the regime. Noting the ambiguities and contradictions in his statements, and the fact that he is not depicted clearly as a villain, most critics have concluded that Shakespeare intended to present Henry as a rebel who drifts into his radical course without quite knowing, or quite admitting to himself, what he is doing.³ At heart, these critics argue, Henry is more of an opportunist than a schemer; his maneuvers finally leave him no choice except to make himself king, but he is not the kind of man to have reflected much along the way. That Henry's statements are often ambiguous and that he is an opportunist cannot be denied. However, to conclude that he drifts into rebellion, that he has not reflected upon the implications of his deeds is to credit him too much or too little. In fact he is more thoroughly a rebel in thought than in action. He does not blink his own impiety; on the contrary, he guides his career consistently by a view of the world that is totally opposed to the one on which the traditional politics of the realm are grounded. Only when the extent of Henry's intellectual rebellion has come to light can the nature and cause of his deficiency as a new prince be perceived.

Interpretation of Henry's character is complicated by his evident prudence. Observation and his own admission inform us that he is an extremely politic man, constantly concerned with manipulating others and cultivating a public image:

And then I stole all courtesy from heaven,
And dress'd myself in such humility
That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts.

(1 Henry IV, III.ii.50-52)

Unlike Richard, who makes a parade of his thoughts and feelings, Henry is a man of masks. Yet masks, too, reveal—especially when they are recognized as masks; and we shall see that Shakespeare has designed Henry's so that they point to the reality they partly hide. In one scene, moreover, near the end of Henry's life, Shakespeare allows us to see him momentarily divested of his disguises, and speaking with shocking openness. Act III, scene i, of Henry IV, part 2, which contains Henry's only soliloquy, represents a spiritual crisis brought on by illness and the burden of a troubled reign. To his closest adviser, Warwick, Henry seems at times unbalanced during this scene, but his words provide an unusually clear insight into a mind that has discarded orthodox political ideals and has not flinched from deposing and murdering "the figure of God's majesty."

At the beginning of the scene Henry waits for Warwick and Surrey, whom he has just summoned to an impromptu midnight council, and soliloquizes on his insomnia. He wonders why he should suffer while the poor who lie in "smoky cribs" and the sailor on "the high and giddy mast" sleep soundly. "O sleep, O gentle sleep, / Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?" (5-6), Henry asks, but finds no cause in himself. Sleep is simply a "dull god" and "partial"; it is the general lot of kings to suffer. What is striking here is that Henry does not impute his troubles to his own deeds.

A more traditional mind might have invoked Carlisle's prophecy at this point, but Henry has turned away from that vision. For him there is no moral or religious significance in events: the god that governs sleep manifests no rational pattern of cause and effect. As the scene progresses, moreover, Henry's unorthodoxy becomes clearer. Warwick and Surrey arrive, but instead of attending immediately to the business at hand, Henry interrupts their advice with a long discourse upon the nature of things:

Oh God, that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times.

(45-46)

He begins by calling on God, but the account of "the revolution of the times" that he goes on to give leaves God out entirely. Periodic cataclysms level mountains and dissolve coasts; the oceans themselves at times withdraw; and Henry sees in such events not the providential hand of God, but rather "how chance's mocks / And changes fill the cup of alteration" (51-52). To Henry, obviously, his father's and Carlisle's views of kingship are nothing more than pious myths. If the world is ruled by "chance's mocks," traditional religious restraints possess no more force than credulous minds are willing to give them.

In his present mood, however, Henry's view of the world seems more cause for despair than confidence. He has avoided one dread—the dread of sin—to discover another—the dread of meaninglessness as one drains "the cup of alteration." "O, if this were seen," he laments,

The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book and sit him down and die.

(53-56)

What motive to great actions can there be in a world subject to patternless change? As Henry rouses himself from depression one idea emerges as predominant in his mind—the idea of necessity. Turning from universal disorder to the infidelity of friends, he recalls Richard's accusation of Northumberland as the "ladder by the which / My cousin Bolingbroke ascends my throne," and interjects an apology—the 'Only one he ever offers—for his usurpation: "necessity so bow'd the state / That I and greatness were compell'd to kiss" (70-74). And when Warwick seizes upon the idea, urging Henry to recognize the "necessary form" in his present difficulties, he responds with vigor:

Are these things then necessities?
Then let us meet them like necessities;

And that same word even now cries out on us.

(92-94)

For Henry, there is a necessity that compels in spite of "chance's mocks." To learn exactly what necessity means to him and how it operates in the world he envisions we must examine his earlier career.⁴

The earliest clear indication of the necessity that Henry recognizes occurs in the first act of Richard II, in Henry's response to his father's efforts to persuade him to accept his banishment patiently. On the surface, Gaunt argues simply that a wise man makes the best of everything. Beneath his stoicism, however, lies his belief in the sanctity of kingship. From Gaunt's point of view, a kind of necessity obliges Henry to submit to Richard's sentance; not to submit would be a sin:

Teach thy necessity to reason thus—There is no virtue like necessity.

(I.iii.277-278)

Henry replies with a string of revealing rhetorical questions:

O, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
Or cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast?
Or wallow naked in December snow
By thinking on fantastic summer's heat?
O no, the apprehension of the good
Gives but the greater feeling to the worse.

(I.iii.294-301)

No moral dimension complicates the three examples of simple physical pain that Henry employs; in each, the only conceivable "good" consists in alleviating the pain rather than in patiently bearing it. By implying that being banished is analogous to holding fire in one's hand or suffering from hunger or wallowing naked in snow, Henry makes it clear that the only good he apprehends is the end of banishment. He reduces what his father regards as a moral issue, involving a necessity imposed by divine law, to a matter of avoiding personal pain. Gaunt's advice violates nature as Henry understands it. Gaunt assumes a world informed by divine purpose, but Henry takes his bearings by the body. Just as physical necessity compels men to avoid fire, hunger, and cold, so the psychological pain of banishment will compel Henry to end it. A great deal has been written about the motive of Henry's actual return to England, but critics have failed to perceive the importance of this speech. To those who pay attention, Henry's words are a warning that he has already determined to come home as soon as he can. His later claim "I come but for mine own" (III.iii.196) must be considered a politic lie; Northumberland's revelations immediately after the death of Gaunt (II.i.277-298) inform us that Henry has set out from Brittany even before the confiscation of his estate. Of course he wants his inheritance, but land is not what pricks him on. Not acquisitiveness but spirited self-assertion—an impulse that is strictly personal, and as compelling as the most powerful physical drive—impels Henry to violate the doctrine of kingship in which he does not believe, and to brave the mockery of chance in which he does. In a world bereft of the divine, the only necessity that obtains for a man derives either from his body's needs or from individual inclination; what but the sheer assertion of individuality leads one man to make himself king and another to "shut the book and sit him down and die"?

Obviously other possibilities exist—possibilities that lie somewhere between the violent course of usurpation and passive withdrawal from all effort—but they do not occur to Henry. Partly, of course, they do not occur to Henry because they do not occur for him. His condition precludes moderate courses. Given the necessity that brings him back illegally from banishment, he has no choice except to destroy Richard or be destroyed by him. Having defied the king, Henry can never be safe in England until he sits upon the throne himself, and until the old king lies dead. In a personal sense, at least, Henry's assertion that he and greatness "were compell'd to kiss" is true. At the same time, Shakespeare makes it clear that Henry considers the violent necessities of his own life to be not merely personal but also consistent with the design of nature as a whole. Indeed, Henry seems convinced that usurpation and regicide accord with "the revolution of the times." Logically, of course, there is no reason why "chance's mocks / And changes" should foster usurpation and murder any more than loyalty; under fortune, nature is promiscuous, but procreative as well as abortive, constructive as well as destructive. As we have seen, however, Henry's meditation on the nature of things focuses on destruction and disorder—on the vast calamities that alter the very face of the earth. In the minds of those who hold the world to be empty of God and governed by chance or fortune, the violent and destructive side of things tends to become ascendant. Lucretius reveals this subtly, Machiavelli emphatically. Henry conforms to the pattern.⁵

At Flint Castle, for example, Henry envisions his meeting with Richard in images of elemental struggle:

Methinks King Richard and myself should meet
With no less terror than the elements
Of fire and water, when the thund'Ring shock
At meeting tears the cloudy cheeks of heaven.

(III.iii.54-57)

Here the violence upon which Henry bases his own career appears to reflect a universal disorder. Although he goes on to claim that in the coming confrontation he will be "the yielding water," the fact remains that Henry would not even have come to Flint Castle if he identified himself with the yielding elements. Earlier, indeed, he presented himself more frankly as a kind of natural force that might create a rain of blood:

I'll use the advantage of my power
And lay the summer's dust with showers of blood
Rain'd from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen.

(III.iii.42-44)

And the image of a bloody rain recurs at the end of the play in a context that makes clear Henry's sense that one must live in accord with a violence that is essentially natural. Speaking of Richard's murder to the assembled court, Henry protests, "my soul is full of woe / That blood should sprinkle me to make me grow" (V.vi.45-46). Whether Henry really feels sorrow or not, and if so how much, remains a matter of doubt; what cannot be doubted is that no scruple of conscience ever prevents him from pursuing the harsh course that his personal needs dictate. When he imagines himself a plant sprinkled with Richard's blood, Henry implies that Richard's murder must be seen as a necessary part of a natural process: just as a plant naturally requires rain, so Henry in the nature of things required the blood of the king whom he deposed.

In Henry IV, part 1, nothing illustrates Henry's view of life more clearly than his praise of Hotspur. Commenting on Hotspur's victory over the Scots at Holmedon, Henry describes him as "amongst a grove the very straightest plant" and "sweet Fortune's minion and her pride" (I.i.81-82). The best man, it seems, the man most likely to prosper in Fortune's capricious eyes, is the best soldier. Like Henry himself, Hotspur lives by the needs of his own aggressive nature; and it is fully consistent with Henry's deepest convictions that his admiration increases when Hotspur's self-assertion aims at the throne. Having summoned Hal to the palace in order to rebuke him for his neglect of harsh necessity, Henry holds up the rebel Hotspur as an example of princely virtue:

Now, by my sceptre, and my soul to boot,
He hath more worthy interest to the state
Than thou the shadow of succession;
For of no right, nor colour like to right,
He doth fill fields with harness in the realm.

(III.ii.97-101)

According to Henry, who swears by his sceptre before his soul, the measure of Hotspur's worthiness for rule consists in his will and ability to take by force what he wants. In one contemptuous line, Henry dismisses the standards of legal and moral "right"; the only right he recognizes is the right established by might. "[E]ven as I was then is Percy now," he remarks, recalling his rebellion against Richard. No doubt Henry sees his own and Hotspur's careers as responsive to the same basic necessity—the need to assert oneself violently in a violent world, to use violence against others lest it be used against oneself.⁶

After Henry becomes king, of course, his admiration for men of similar virtue is necessarily restricted: his personal interests and the interests of the kingdom coincide. As exiled Henry Bolingbroke, he was fully prepared to "lay the summer's dust with showers of blood / Rain'd from the wounds of slaughtered Englishmen"; as King Henry IV, he abhors civil strife and seeks to bring order to the land. Nevertheless, the opening speech of Henry IV, part I, reveals that the same views that confirmed him in rebellion now inform his scheme for restoring order. Henry comes on stage "shaken" and "wan with care," but expressing optimism. Insurrection has plagued his reign from the outset, but he perceives at last an opportunity to transform domestic enmity into a foreign war. An expedition to the Holy Land will serve Henry's turn. Ostensibly the expedition is to be a crusade. Henry describes himself as a soldier of Christ and alludes to his original intention of journeying to the Holy Land in atonement for the murder of Richard. However, close attention to Henry's words reveals the wholly political motives that lie behind his religious professions:

No more the thirsty entrance of this soil
Shall daub her lips with her own children's blood,
No more shall trenching war channel her fields,
Nor bruise her flow'rets with the armed hoofs
Of hostile paces; those opposed eyes,
Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven,
All of one nature, of one substance bred,
Did lately meet in the intestine shock
And furious close of civil butchery,
Shall now, in mutual well-beseeming ranks,
March all one way, and be no more opposed
Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies.
The edge of war, like an ill-sheathed knife,
No more shall cut his master.

(I.i.5-18)

That Henry considers war abroad a proper preventive for war at home illustrates his conviction that violent courses conform to nature and are more likely to win the favors of Fortune. His imagery suggests that bloodshed is inevitable. The very earth thirsts for her children's blood, and if "this soil"—England—is to be denied what it longs for, the result will be an abundance for the soil of foreign lands. Men resemble meteors, conventional symbols of cosmic disorder; "all of one nature, of one substance bred," they nevertheless—or therefore—butcher each other. Civil war is an "ill-sheathed knife," but the obvious remedy of sheathing the knife correctly never arises; the only possible course, it seems, is to draw the knife completely and employ it on others. Later, Henry claims that his subjects "were moulded in their mothers' womb / To chase those pagans in those holy fields" (I.i.23-24). Men were born to fight; they carry from the womb an impulse to destroy. Just as Henry does not try to restrain that impulse in himself, his political program aims not at restraining his subjects but rather at channeling their violence outward towards foreigners. Peace is not his goal but rather a "well-beseeming" foreign war which will remove the destruction from England, and from Henry himself.

This political reading of the motives behind Henry's crusade is confirmed in Henry IV, part 2, during the king's final interview with Hal. There Henry analyzes his difficulties with the unruly noblemen of the realm who first helped him and now oppose him, and explains the policy by which he sought to check them:

I cut them off, and had a purpose now
To lead out many to the Holy Land,
Lest rest and lying still might make them look
Too near unto my state.

(IV.v.209-212)

According to Henry, Hal too must find a way "to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels." Of all Henry's references to a crusade, this one stands out as providing the most trustworthy account of his aims. Whereas earlier—in the presence of the court both at the end of Richard II and at the beginning of Henry IV, part 1—public consideration precluded frankness, nothing inhibits him here. He knows that he is on his deathbed, and he has no object beyond offering his political wisdom to his heir. The lesson that he conveys has nothing to do with religious atonement or any other sacred duty. He wants to teach Hal how to save his throne, not his soul. Although Henry mentions the "indirect crook'd ways" by which he obtained the crown (2 Henry IV, IV.v.183-185), and concludes with a nod toward the traditional doctrine of kingship—"How I came by the crown, O God forgive" (IV.v.218)—the rest of his long speech expresses no guilt. On the contrary, most of what Henry says amounts to a recommendation of his "indirect crook'd ways," and makes clear his opinion that success in politics depends upon them. One must grasp the potential for violence in things and wield it to one's own advantage. Even one's "friends" have "stings and teeth" (IV.v.204-205).

Occasionally, as in these last words of counsel to Hal, Henry's religious expressions seem merely perfunctory or ironic; characteristically, however, as in his proclamations of a crusade, he appeals to religion for obvious political reasons.⁷ Having established his rule by force, Henry apparently hopes to render it more secure by arrogating to himself the religious awe of a traditional monarchy like Richard's. The crusade is the main device by which Henry attempts to throw a veil of piety over his deeds, but he is careful to identify his kingship with convention from the very moment of his accession. In order to maintain the illusion of an unbroken succession, he does his best to present Richard's deposition as an abdication; and when York arrives to announce that Richard has agreed to step down, Henry promptly announces, "In God's name, I'Ll ascend the regal throne" (Richard II, IV.i.113). Carlisle revolts at this brazenness and rebukes it; most of the court, however, seems prepared to accept, at least initially, Henry's assumption of divine favor along with the crown. York makes an extravagant show of loyalty in denouncing his own son's plot against Henry; and after Henry, yielding to the Duchess of York's pleas, pardons Aumerle, the Duchess thanks him with a phrase that seems to acknowledge his legitimacy in traditional terms: "A god on earth thou art" (V.iii.134).

Even before the end of Richard II, however, it becomes clear that Henry's efforts to make himself a sacred king in the old style cannot succeed. In spite of his follies and delusions, Richard's claim to be a kind of "god on earth" commands the loyalty of respectable men like Gaunt and Carlisle; Henry will never enjoy such dignity. The kingdom he has seized rises in arms against itself:

the latest news we hear,
Is that the rebels have consum'd with fire
Our town of Ciceter in Gloucestershire.

(V.vi.1-3)

His son and heir defies him. Contemptuous of his father's authority, Hal plays at robbery and beats the king's watch. Upon being informed of the royal "triumphs" to be held at Oxford, he is said to have promised to appear wearing the "favour" of a prostitute. And these are but the portents of worse disorders. As many critics have pointed out, the Henry IV plays anatomize a kingdom split into factions, each seeking its particular ends and lacking the common bond of loyalty that 'shapes a regime: "this house is turned upside down since Robin Ostler died" (1 Henry IV,II.i.9-10), remarks the Second Carrier, unwittingly turning a wretched inn into a symbol for the realm. Falstaff's cynical comment on Justice Shallow—"If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him" (2 Henry IV, III.ii.325-326)—expresses the ethos that, through Henry's example, has contaminated the land. Under the circumstances, even the religious values that Henry tries to appropriate in his rhetoric turn against him. Appealing to "the blood / Of fair King Richard, scrap'd from Pomfret stones," deriving "from heaven his quarrel and his cause," the Archbishop of York "[t]urns insurrection to religion" (2 Henry IV, I.i.201-206). Rebellion engenders rebellion; the awe that protected Richard cannot porteci his murderer.

Henry's effort to usurp the traditional sanctity of the throne along with the throne itself lays bare the fundamental defect of his policy. According to Machiavelli, a new prince in a new regime must make everything new; he must have the wisdom, skill, and courage to introduce an entirely new order that will obliterate even the memory of the old one. Left intact, or only impaired, the old order will return to haunt him. It furnishes a ready pretext and provocation to rebellion.⁸ The truth of this teaching comes home to Henry with a vengeance. By attempting to resurrect in himself the principles of the old regime, by failing to exorcise Richard's ghost, Henry renders his usurpation abortive: he dooms himself to unceasing struggle, and afflicts both his dynasty and his kingdom. He and his direct heirs survive only by repeating his original violence over and over—first in England, then in France, then in England again. Both Henry and Hal spill blood continually and with considerable success; the reign of Henry VI, however, reveals the precariousness of their achievement. When the sword fails, the dynasty falls. As Shakespeare's contemporaries were aware, and as his earlier tetralogy of English history plays had already indicated, peace and stability return to the land only when the founder of a new dynasty—Henry VII, first of the Tudors—is able to revive the claims of traditional legitimacy, and present himself plausibly as God's deputy on earth.⁹

Ironically, it is the revolutionary boldness of Henry's thought that betrays him in the end. Having thrust him on to regicide, his radically new vision of the nature of things fails to provide him with the ground on which to create a new regime. He recognizes that stable political rule cannot be based on force and cunning alone, yet his view of life as essentially egotistical, violent, and governed by chance offers no principle of order that can replace the divine right that surrounded earlier English kings. A doctrine of individualism and violent necessity has no power to bind men together. As a result Henry is forced outside the characteristic range of his mind, and this necessity confounds him. He possesses one part of what is needful in a new prince in a new principality—an understanding of, and ability to use, violence—but he wants an even more important part—the creative qualities of a founder who is both armed and a prophet. The personal sense of necessity that drives him to make himself king finally traps him in the narrowness and harshness of his vision. Henry proves incapable of the extraordinary virtù attributed by Machiavelli to a Moses or a Theseus; we may consider him a type of Cain, but not of Romulus.¹⁰

England and Henry suffer for his sins, but they are not the sins of which Carlisle thought. Shakespeare's dramatization of Henry's career focuses not on the unfolding of God's judgment, but rather on the strictly political consequences of a usurpation only half achieved.¹¹ By the light of Shakespeare's analysis, we perceive that Henry misses the greatness that alone could redeem the heinous crimes of usurpation and regicide. He remains a usurper rather than a founder. It is to this deficiency, above all, that his drabness points.

Notes

¹ Machiavelli defines the kinds of principalities in the first chapter of The Prince: "Principalities are either hereditary, in which case the family of the prince has been ruling for generations, or they are new. And the new ones are either completely new, as was Milan for Francesco Sforza, or they are like members joined to the hereditary state of the prince who acquires them, as is the kingdom of Naples for the King of Spain" (trans. Mark Musa [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964], p. 5).

²Richard II, I.ii.37-38. Act, scene, and line references are to the Arden editions of Richard II, ed. Peter Ure (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), of The First Part of King Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys (London: Methuen, 1961), and of The Second Part of King Henry IV (London: Methuen, 1966).

³ For expressions of the prevailing view that Henry is basically an opportunist, see John Palmer, Political Characters of Shakespeare (London: Macmillan, 1948), pp. 135-138; Brents Stirling, "Bolingbroke's 'Decision'," Shakespeare Quarterly 2 (1951), 27-34; Ure's Introduction to Richard II, pp. lxxiv-lxxv; A. L. French, "Who Deposed Richard II?" Essays in Criticism 17 (1967), 411-433; and Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 114-116.

⁴ The importance of Henry's idea of necessity has been recognized but never adequately studied: see, for example, Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 162; Humphreys' note on III.i.72-74 in The Second Part of King Henry IV; and John C. Bromley, The Shakespearean Kings (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1971), p. 71. For more general remarks on the theme of necessity in the second tetralogy, see Humphreys' Introduction to The Second Part of King Henry IV, pp. xlv-xlvi and Derek Traversi, Shakespeare: From Richard II to Henry V (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), pp. 135-136.

⁵ On Lucretius, see Leo Strauss, "Notes on Lucretius," in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (New York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 76-139 (esp. pp. 76-85, 133-135). For other examples of Machiavelli's usefulness in analyzing Henry's career, see Irving Ribner, "Bolingbroke, A True Machiavellian," Modern Language Quarterly 9 (1948), 177-184; John F. Danby, Shakespeare's Doctrine of Nature (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), pp. 81-101; and Moody Prior, The Drama of Power (Evanston, I11.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 219-248.

⁶ Near the end of Henry IV, part 1, it is true, Henry upbraids Worcester in terms that suggest a rather different view of man and nature:

Will you again unknit
This churlish knot of all-abhorred war?
And move in that obedient orb again
Where you did give a fair and natural light,
And be no more an exhal'd meteor,
A prodigy of fear, and a portent
Of broached mischief to the unborn times?

(V.i.15-21)

Contrary to Henry's praise of Hotspur, these lines imply that peace and obedience rather than war and rebellion are natural, but we must understand them in the light of the dramatic situation. Talking to Worcester, Henry has an obvious reason to stress the virtue of obedience, but there is no evidence that it is part of his private morality. Although he condemns Worcester for being a "meteor," earlier Henry compared himself complacently to a "comet" (III.ii.46-49).

⁷ Some critics have contended that Henry's expressions of guilt are sincere: see, for example, John Dover Wilson's note on I.i.1-28 in The First Part of the History of Henry IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946); Traversi, Shakespeare: From Richard II to Henry V, pp. 48, 51, 81; and M.M. Reese, The Cease of Majesty (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1961), p. 286. Such a view seems to me incompatible with everything else that Shakespeare shows us about Henry. If Henry's religion is sincere, it never restrains his political actions in any way.

⁸ See The Prince, chapter 6.

⁹ See Shakespeare's presentation of Henry VII throughout the last act of Richard III (especially scenes ii, iii, and v).

¹⁰ See The Prince, chapter 6. Henry's final speech in Richard II suggests the analogy between himself and Cain (V.vi.43-50). He condemns Exton as a kind of Cain, but recognizes his own guilt as well.

¹¹ Cf. Machiavelli's comment on "the present ruin of Italy": "And he [Savonarola] who said that our sins were the cause, said the truth; but they certainly were not the sins he thought, but rather the ones I have just recounted [military and political failures]; and since these were the sins of princes, they have come in turn to suffer the penalty for them" (Trans. Mark Musa, p. 101). That Shakespeare's second tetralogy departs from the moralized religious view of history favored by some of the Tudor chroniclers seems generally accepted by recent critics: see, for example, Alvin B. Kernan, "The Henriad: Shakespeare's Major History Plays," in Modern Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Alvin B. Kernan (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1970), pp. 245-275; and Moody Prior, The Drama of Power, pp. 14-33.