[In the following essay, Sanders contends that Prince Hal associates with outlaws such as Falstaff in order to dissociate himself from his own father's illegitimate rule and, ultimately, to "create " his own form of kingly "Justice. "]

Much of Shakespeare's drama is centrally concerned with men's need to make choices in life and the necessity for taking full responsibility for the actions which result from these choices. One of the dramatic techniques he often uses to explore this aspect of the human condition is an interchange of roles between characters who are in some way parallel, owing to a similarity in situation, personality, action, or attitude. Thus Edgar can 'Represent' Cordelia during the storm scenes in King Lear, so that she becomes, in a sense, the philosopher on the heath from whom her father learns life's awful lessons. In a similar way, the lines of action open to Hamlet, but not followed by him, can be explored with their consequences in the persons of the other revenging sons, Laertes and Fortinbras. And the same device lies behind the handling of such different characters as Portia and Jessica, Viola and Sebastian, the twin Antipholi, Perdita and Hermione, and the pairs of lovers in As You Like It.

However, in no play does Shakespeare use this technique quite so deliberately in both verbal and dramatic forms as in the Henry IV plays. Further, the almost self-conscious consistency shown in its employment is clearly related to the conception of the character of Prince Hal; and consequently may throw light on the divergent attitudes that critics have taken to him.

Throughout the two plays, Shakespeare frequently lifts Hal out of his own person or transfers to another character some aspect of his identity. The most obvious verbal example of this is King Henry's desire, in the opening scene of Part 1, to have Hotspur for a son instead of Hal:

O that it could be prov'd
That some night-tripping fairy had exchang'd
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call'd mine Percy, his Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.

(1 Hen. IV, I, i, 85-9)¹

The implications of these lines are clear. The king is seen as choosing for himself a more symbolically appropriate son than the one he has; for Hotspur, who is soon to be a rebel against the crown, is a proper heir to the man who sneaked home like a poor unminded outlaw and

In short time after he depos'd the King,
Soon after that depriv'd him of his life,
And in the neck of that task'd the whole state.

(7 Hen. IV, IV, iii, 90-2)

It is, of course, ironical that the act that provokes such a longing as this in the king is Hal's abandonment of court and family, which constitutes in practice exactly the severing of paternity that Henry so desires.

Another verbal transference of identity, rather more complex because it is a double one, takes place in the interview between father and son in III, ii of the first play. Here the king uses words which effectively detach Hal from his lineage:

Yet let me wonder, Harry,
At thy affections, which do hold a wing
Quite from the flight of all thy ancestors.

(7 Hen. IV, III, ii, 29-31)

He then reinforces this observation by vividly placing Hal in parallel with Richard II. First, he depicts himself as the model of retiring success:

Had I so lavish of my presence been,
So common-hackney'd in the eyes of men,
So stale and cheap to vulgar company,
Opinion, that did help me to the crown,
Had still kept loyal to possession,
And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark nor likelihood.
By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wonder'd at,
That men would tell their children, 'This is he!'
Others would say, 'Where, which is Bolingbroke?'
And then I stole all courtesy from heaven,
And dress'd myself in such humility
That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts,
Loud shouts and salutations from their mouths,
Even in the presence of the crownéd King.

(ll. 39-54)

This is the ideal that the father-usurper-king sets up for his erring son: one which, by his own testimony, is at odds with loyal possession of the crown. It is a picture of a man who 'stole courtesy from heaven', who 'plucks allegiance from men's hearts'. Against this tarnished figure is offered an equally vivid portrait of the legitimate monarch:

The skipping King, he ambled up and down,
With shallow jesters, and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burnt, carded his state,
Mingled his royalty with cap'Ring fools,
Had his great name profanéd with their scorns,
And gave his countenance against his name
To laugh at gibing boys, and stand the push
Of every beardless vain comparative.

(11. 60-7)

Both Henry and Shakespeare place Hal 'in that very line'—that is as heir to Richard; while the king is transformed into an earlier Hotspur:

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

(11. 93-6)

While Hal, the legal heir, is 'the shadow of succession', Hotspur 'hath more worthy interest to the state' that Henry stole. With such alternatives open to him, Hal can promise to fight Percy; but personally he can only vow

I shall hereafter, my thrice gracious lord,
Be more myself.

(11. 92-3)

It is in dramatic rather than poetic terms that an even more complex and significant transference takes place in the tavern's comic counterpart of the serious court interview. In answer to Falstaff's plea to Hal to rehearse his excuses to his father, two playlets are arranged. In the first of them, Falstaff (the King of Misrule with no moral right to reprimand personal disorder) will play King Henry (also a king of misrule, by virtue of his act of usurpation, who has no moral right to lament national disorder). Hal will play himself in his twin roles as legitimate son to his father and apparent spiritual son to his surrogate tavern father, Falstaff.

Falstaff's admonishment, as it winds its euphuistic way, actually makes in comic form some of the points repeated by the king to his son two scenes later. First, it questions the reality of the father-son relationship:

That thou art my son I have partly thy mother's word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me. If then thou be son to me, here lies the point . . . why, being son to me, art thou so pointed at?

(7 Hen. IV, II, iv, 397-402)

Then Hal's truancy from court is questioned: 'Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove micher, and eat blackberries?' (11. 402-4). Third, the question is raised as to whether Hal can associate with criminals without becoming criminal himself:

There is a thing, Harry, which thou hast often heard of, and it is known to many in our land by the name of pitch. This pitch (as ancient writers do report) doth defile, so doth the company thou keepest.

(11. 406-10)

And finally, there is the extended praise of Falstaff himself.

It is at this point that Hal sets up the second playlet, in which the roles played are very different. The prince takes the part of his own father, and in that role castigates himself and his weaknesses in the person of Falstaff, who can aptly personate those associations to which Hal is committed by his conscious decision to separate himself from the illegality of his father's reign. As this second play proceeds, Hal 'deposes' his father, Falstaff; and then casts out his devil by turning away that element in his necessary truancy represented by the old Vice. Nowhere are Hal's position of aloneness and the isolation he feels in the England of the plays made more clear than when he utters his banishment of Jack Falstaff and 'all the world'.

Both in this scene and that with his father, it is plain that the prince conceives himself to be solely responsible for making his way to the crown in an environment that has nothing of the normal security and aids which an heir might expect to be available to prepare himself for future kingship. His society is sick; established authority is riddled with guilt; the opposition to this authority is doubly guilty; and the only condition which will effectively dissociate him from both parties entails engagement with the usual enemies of social order—idlers, rogues, and thieves. Hal can indeed only promise to be more himself, and accept the charges of coldness and machiavellian calculation that have been levelled at him.

As it has often been noted, the second part of the play, despite the brilliant realism of the scenes in Gloucestershire, moves very close at certain points to the manner of the old morality drama. And whatever one believes about the relationship between the two parts, it is demonstrable that some episodes in the second play do repeat, or make more explicit, or expand effects and events which the first part deals with more suggestively and (in my opinion) more subtly.

It is not surprising, therefore, that we find in two crucial episodes of Part 2 the same technique being used in the management of Hal's character. In the scene between the newly proclaimed Henry V and the Lord Chief Justice (v, ii), Hal once again juggles with his identities; only in this case he does so in a way that is complexly linked to the basic issues of kingship and its position in the social structure of the nation.

The Lord Chief Justice places Hal in the position of being his own father, even as Hal had himself in the tavern play scene:

Question your royal thoughts, make the case yours,
Be now the father, and propose a son,
Hear your own dignity so much profan'd,
See your most dreadful laws so loosely slighted,
Behold yourself so by a son disdain'd:
And then imagine me taking your part,
And in your power soft silencing your son.
After this cold considerance sentence me;
And, as you are a king, speak in your state.

(2 Hen. IV, v, ii, 91-9)

Hal accepts the role and passes judgement on himself:

You are right, Justice, and you weigh this well.
Therefore still bear the balance and the sword;
And I do wish your honours may increase
Till you do live to see a son of mine
Offend you and obey you, as I did.
So shall I live to speak my father's words:
'Happy am I, that have a man so bold
That dares do justice on my proper son;
And not less happy, having such a son
That would deliver up his greatness so
Into the hands of justice.'

(11. 102-12)

But he goes further than ever his own father could; by abstracting the concept of Justice from its particular human representative, he places himself beneath the law in a classic formulation of the Tudor principle concerning the position of royal magistrates:

I do commit into your hand
Th'unstained sword that you have us'd to bear,
With this rememberance—that you use the same
With the like bold, just, and impartial spirit
As you have done 'gainst me. There is my hand.
You shall be as a father to my youth,
My voice shall sound as you do prompt mine ear,
And I will stoop and humble my intents
To your well-practis'd wise directions.

(11. 113-21)

Justice is thus dissociated from the reign of Henry IV and the wildness of Hal's youth and his father's illegal reign are firmly linked in the words used:

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

(11. 122-9)

In richly associative terms, Hal sees his blood, which had flowed in consciously adopted 'vanity' and was deflected from its true path of nobility by the decision forced upon him by his father's guilt, as reassuming its right channel:

The tide of blood in me
Hath proudly flow'd in vanity till now.
Now doth it turn, and ebb back to the sea,
Where it shall mingle with the state of floods,
And flow henceforth in formal majesty.

(11. 129-33)

However one may react to the emotional and human impact of Henry V's final rejection of Falstaff in the last scene of Part 2, its terminology is perfectly consistent with the pattern of dissociation of identity I have tried to trace. Hal's experience has indeed been unreal and like a dream: one in which seeming has been taken for truth, where actual criminality has been necessary to achieve true legality, when the self has had to be split in two and one part of it turned away:

I have long dreamt of such a kind of man, . . .
But being awak'd I do despise my dream. . . .
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn'd away my former self; . . .
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast.

(2 Hen. IV, v, v, 49, 51, 57-8, 60-1)

If Shakespeare worked so deliberately and consistently to connect Hal with this pattern of dislocation from self and society, it follows that this means of dramatic portrayal must be connected with the way we are intended to view the prince and his unique difficulties in the situation in which he finds himself. And many other aspects of these plays seem to provide evidence that Shakespeare carefully constructed a world which forced upon Hal self-definition via apparent criminality as the only choice open to him.

First, both plays are loaded with reminders of the immediacy of Henry IV's ever-present guilt about what he did to get the crown, and with vivid recollections of the past by such characters as Hotspur, the Archbishop, and Worcester. These allusions are further reinforced by the cumulative effect of the imagery of sickness, weariness, and sleeplessness associated with Henry's reign, and also by the long shadow that Richard IPs deposition and death throws over the plays. The rebels against this diseased rule are similarly devalued; for throughout both parts they are characterised by division, bickering, distrust, and weakness. In fact, despite the variety offered by such features as the violent and colourful animosity of Hotspur, the calculating illness of Northumberland, the pseudomysticism of Glendower, and the crafty manoeuvrings of Worcester, there is basically little to choose between the moral stances of the two sides. We find at various points in the plays definite interrelationships indicated between the moral deficiencies of both. In Part 2, the Archbishop accurately depicts the dilemma facing the usurper-king:

the King is weary
Of dainty and such picking grievances;
For he hath found, to end one doubt by death
Revives two greater in the heirs of life:
And therefore will he wipe his tables clean,
And keep no tell-tale to his memory
That may repeat and history his loss
To new remembrance. For full well he knows
He cannot so precisely weed this land
As his misdoubts present occasion.
His foes are so enrooted with his friends
That plucking to unfix an enemy
He doth unfasten so and shake a friend.
So that this land, like an offensive wife
That hath enrag'd him on to offer strokes,
As he is striking, holds his infant up,
And hangs resolv'd correction in the arm
That was uprear'd to execution.

(2 Hen. IV, IV, i, 197-214)

The final image of family strife in the last five lines here is a telling one, for Hal's position between opposing forces is similar to that of the infant pictured between father and mother. In the first part of the play, Worcester describes the equally impossible situation in which the rebels find themselves:

It is not possible, it cannot be,
The King should keep his word in loving us;
He will suspect us still, and find a time
To punish this offence in other faults:
Supposition all our lives shall be stuck full of eyes,
For treason is but trusted like the fox,
Who, never so tame, so cherish'd and lock'd up,
Will have a wild trick of his ancestors.
Look how we can, or sad or merrily,
Interpretation will misquote our looks,
And we shall feed like oxen at a stall,
The better cherish'd still the nearer death.

(1 Hen. IV, V, ii, 4-15)

It is this process of rebellion-repentance-recrimination-new rebellion-revenge set in train by Richard II's deposition and murder that Hal must put an end to. He must redeem that temporal pattern which decrees that

heir from heir shall hold this quarrel up
Whiles England shall have generation.

(2 Hen. IV, IV, ii, 48-9)

Given these conditions, how else is Hal to create single-handedly a totally new royal milieu except by complete and apparently criminal dissociation from all the norms that a sick nation offers him? Shakespeare's dramatic solution is to make Hal's defection real to both the court and tavern worlds, while assuring the audience that the prince so offends to make offence a skill. His being, yet not being, a part of Falstaff's corrupt realm is typified by his role in the Gadshill robbery, in which the justice he creates is of his own rather than his society's making. He is for the same reason verbally detached from his father's lineage; even as he can strike his father's Justice, yet submit himself to the same Justice when it is the main prop of his own reign.

Because Hal's possession of the crown must be seen to be 'plain and right', Shakespeare devises a scene, which, although explicable in human terms, also shows Hal symbolically stealing the crown of England from his father rather than receiving it at his hands. In this scene (2 Henry IV, IV, V), Hal draws a careful distinction between the debt he owes his father as a loving son:

Thy due from me
Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood,
Which nature, love, and filial tenderness
Shall, O dear father, pay thee plenteously,

(11. 36-9)

and the right he possesses by virtue of what he has made of himself:

My due from thee is this imperial crown,
Which, as immediate from thy place and blood,
Derives itself to me. [Putting it on his head]

(11. 40-2)

As Henry says, more truly than he knows, 'God put it in thy mind to take it thence. . . . Thou wilt needs invest thee with my honours'; for no one else in his England can rightfully perform the ritual.

The Prince of Wales, in these two plays, faces alone the task of finding, while laden with an awesome duty, a modus operandi in an impossible world; just as the later Prince of Denmark was to undertake a not completely dissimilar task and meet it in a similar way. For Hamlet, the ultimate objective is the discovery of self and true being; whereas for Hal, it is the discovery of public role and right doing—which is to say that one is a tragic hero and the other a political one. As it is necessary for the greater prince to play the fool for wisdom's sake; so, for the lesser, a true prince may and does, for re-creation's sake, prove a false thief.

Notes

¹ Quotations are from the new Arden edition of the plays edited by A. R. Humphreys (1960, 1966).