SOURCE: “Hal and the ‘Play Extempore’ in I Henry IV,” in Henry the Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays, edited by David Bevington, Garland Publishing, 1986, 337-48.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1974, Gottschalk presents an analysis of Prince Hal's character by examining the tavern scene in Henry IV, Part I, noting that this scene is crucial to Hal's development as a hero.]

The great tavern scene of I Henry IV (II.iv) is the longest of the play and the most elaborate, ranging over five hundred lines from the gulling of Francis and the attempted showing-up of Falstaff to the Sheriff's sudden entry and Hal's imminent departure for court. Understandably, the scene has attracted a number of critical studies relating its parts to one another or to the play as a whole,¹ and certainly its richness and complexity warrant any attempt to clarify the aesthetic unity that lies beneath. Yet for all this complexity, the scene progresses smoothly enough, looking back toward Gadshill in its first half and forward to the royal palace in the second, back toward Hal's disgrace and forward to his redemption. This shift coincides with what, in view of the impending confrontation of Hal with his father, is clearly the crisis of the scene: the staging of the “play extempore,” in which first Falstaff and then Hal assumes the role of King Henry lecturing his truant son. The importance of this episode has already been underlined in Richard L. McGuire's “The Play-within-the-Play in I Henry IV” (Shakespeare Quarterly, 18 [1967], 47-52), where it is treated, indeed, as the crisis in Hal's development as hero. Dealing with the play extempore as an example of the Elizabethan play within a play, McGuire states that Hal attains “discovery of self through pretense” (p. 52), that, in acting out his role of King, he comes to realize it is time for the change he had predicted in his soliloquy of I.ii and thus time at last to reject Falstaff. In response to Falstaff's mock plea against banishment, Hal's final words in the episode—“I do, I will”—are spoken “as Prince and King” (p. 50). “This short reply after much rhetoric and repetition,” says McGuire, “underlines the change in character and the finality of the renunciation” (p. 50).

Despite its humor, then, the play episode is highly serious drama, and McGuire's study is important in showing how this may be so. Yet this study is itself somewhat distortive. The play episode is not technically a play within a play at all; for that reason, we shall see, it cannot lead to “discovery of self through pretense” and thus is not crucial in the way that McGuire suggests.² Both the nature of the play episode as play and its function as Hal's crisis need to be reexamined.

Indeed, the very notion of Hal's crisis in this play is problematic. McGuire's interpretation becomes puzzling the moment we apply the principle that change of character onstage can be indicated only by change in the personage's avowed attitude, by change in his actions, or by comments from other characters. The last we do not find until the King's praise of Hal in Act III and Vernon's in Act IV. As to change in attitude, Hal's “I will” is no more than a summary of his soliloquy at the end of I.ii, in which he first reveals his intention to renounce Falstaff and his companions. Finally, if Hal's words “I do” promise a present change in his actions, as at first they seem to do, the promise remains unfulfilled. When, moments later, the Sheriff enters seeking Falstaff, Hal lies to protect his friend.³ As soon as his interview with his father is over, Hal returns to the tavern, and his exploits there merely perpetuate the humor of earlier scenes. And when at the end of the play Falstaff claims credit for killing Hotspur, Hal acquiesces in the deceit:

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

(V.iv.161-162)⁴

Hal has not renounced Falstaff in the play episode. Falstaff continues to woo Hal, Hal to contemn Falstaff (as he did in his first lines of the play) but also to sport with him and, when the chips are down, to help him. In short, nothing has happened—and nothing does happen subsequently in the play that would not have occurred had the play scene never taken place. The play episode is not a “discovery of self through pretense,” because Hal has discovered nothing that he did not already know in I.ii. It is not a crisis in character because his character shows no change.

In the play scene, nothing really happens. Indeed, we might ask ourselves, what could happen? Hal has already made his crucial commitment to regality in Act I; he carries it out in Act V and again in Act V of Part 2. Between the moment of decision and the moment of action, what is there to dramatize? Shakespeare was to work again at that problem in Hamlet, but Hal is not like Hamlet. If we analyze dramatic character into potential to perform a given action and probability of performing it, we see that in Hamlet the discrepancy between these two is enormous. The horizons of Hamlet's character are so vast, his potential for a wide variety of actions so broad, that the probability of his committing any one action is proportionately nebulous. In Hal, however, potential and probability are virtually identical. While Hamlet's character doesn’t organize around his task, Hal's does. His time, too, is out of joint, but on the whole he seems quite pleased that he was born to set it right.

Therefore, I Henry IV is a play without a normal climax.⁵ Shrewsbury is at once its moment of crisis and its moment of resolution. Hal's royal identity and his merely provisional relationship with Falstaff are announced in the soliloquy of I.ii, not as a grasping towards identity, as in Hamlet's soliloquies, but as a moral fait accompli. But this identity is latent. Throughout almost all of both parts of Henry IV it remains in solution, invisible to Hal's companions, but not manifest until, first at Shrewsbury and then in the final rejection of Falstaff, it crystallizes openly and irrevocably.

Shakespeare's strategy in the play is to hide the inevitable fulfillment of Hal's character from Hal's contemporaries while revealing it to us. It is the same technique he had used shortly before in Richard III. Richard, however, must overcome a long series of obstacles on his way to success, while Hal faces only one crucial act in each part of Henry IV: the battle with Hotspur and the rejection of Falstaff. So although the basic problem of plot is much the same in Richard III, Henry IV, and Hamlet, the solutions differ, for Hal's character is simpler than Hamlet's and his goal closer than Richard's. Shakespeare's solution in I Henry IV is to provide Hal with three analogous episodes of promise, episodes that seem to build toward the ultimate fulfillment of Shrewsbury while in fact doing little or nothing to bring it about. Each episode is followed by an apparent moral relapse to further maintain the suspense. First comes Hal's promise to himself in the soliloquy of I.ii, followed by the robbery at Gadshill; then the play episode, a promise to Falstaff, followed by Hal's protecting Falstaff from the Sheriff; and finally the throne room scene, in which Hal promises allegiance to his father—and then procures Falstaff his commission in the royal army.

To further the illusion of progress, these episodes are climactically arranged. The soliloquy is mere statement, completely hidden from all other characters in the play, and represents Hal's potential at its most latent. In the play episode Hal's regality becomes more overt, but only in the apparent context of play and only in the world of the tavern. In the throne room scene, however, the early promise of the soliloquy becomes a solemn oath to the King: it is both overt and totally serious. Finally, at Shrewsbury, the promise is fulfilled in action. When, therefore, McGuire says, “we never again see Falstaff and Hal together as they were before the play-within-the-play” (p. 50), he is right, but the stress must be laid on the “we never see”: although the relationship of Hal and Falstaff is consistent throughout, the point of view from which it is shown us systematically shifts.⁶ Thus, these promissory episodes do not simply mark time until Shrewsbury. If they are not crises, they are moments of heightened definition in the developing portrait of the young man who will be King.

The play episode begins its contribution to this portrait by bringing the immediately antecedent action into new focus, just as the soliloquy of I.ii refocuses the action of that scene. There, however, the effect is quite clear: Hal simply detaches himself morally from his companions (“I know you all …”). But here Hal must ultimately detach himself not only from Falstaff, the embodiment of amoral irresponsibility, but also from Francis and Hotspur, each in his own way an embodiment of loyalty so blind that it becomes irresponsibility too, of a different sort from Falstaff's but no less dangerous.⁷ Yet, as in the earlier scene, Hal at first seems to be moving further and further away from commitment as the scene progresses, as he transposes the many-faceted world of I Henry IV into play. First, he plays at being a tapster, a Francis. Then, as Francis's single-minded simplicity reminds him of Hotspur's, he prepares to play that worthy: “I prithee call in Falstaff. I’ll play Percy, and that damn’d brawn shall play Dame Mortimer his wife” (II.iv.122-124). There follows the attempted trapping of Falstaff, in which the reality of thievery becomes play (Falstaff's disguise of valor, complete with costume: the bloodied garments and hacked swords) within play (Poins and Hal having robbed the robbers—and with their own costumes of buckram) within play (“By the Lord, I knew ye as well as he that made ye”), the momentary butt of which is Hal himself, ironically most out of touch with the hopes of the theater audience just when Falstaff claims to have recognized the true Prince by instinct. The playfulness of the scene culminates in Falstaff's proposal, “What, shall we be merry? Shall we have a play extempore?” There is a momentary jockeying for position as Hal answers, “Content—and the argument shall be thy running away,” and Falstaff retorts, “Ah, no more of that, Hal, an thou lovest me!” (ll. 308-313). We scarcely have time to ponder Falstaff's conditional before the Hostess bursts in to announce that a nobleman has just arrived from the court. Falstaff is sent out to speak with him, returns with word that Hal is to go to court in the morning, and begs Hal to “practise an answer” for the King (l. 412). Hal's reply seems to revive the momentarily interrupted atmosphere of play and, finally, to bring into it the two chief remaining figures from the world of Henry IV: Hal as Prince, and the King himself. “Do thou stand for my father,” Hal tells Falstaff, “and examine me upon the particulars of my life” (ll. 413-414). A skit of some sort has been in the offing throughout the entire scene—first one on Hotspur and Lady Percy, then on Falstaff's running away, now on an event that has yet to occur: the confrontation of Henry IV and Prince Hal.

What makes this skit unusual among Elizabethan and Jacobean plays within plays is precisely that it is a “play extempore”: both characters create their own roles as they go along. What is more, we see with increasing clarity that what the roles—and role-playing itself—mean to each is quite different.

For the chief temptation that Falstaff poses as a vice-figure is to reduce all things to play. The humor of the “men in buckram” episode stems from the very havoc that Falstaff's narration plays with reality as he creates a world where honor, valor, and mathematical identity itself are mere shadows, a world that denies the earnestness, practicality, and logic that are the forte of the two Henrys. Now in the play extempore Falstaff, sensing impending danger, begins to move the King himself into this unreal world; he makes Henry speak “in King Cambyses' vein,” and in Euphues's as well.⁸ McGuire suggests that the style is Falstaff's conception of kingly speech, that he is trying to be realistic,⁹ but Falstaff has a very precise, self-conscious awareness of the rhetorical figure he is cutting: he is not imitating kingly speech, he is parodying it, reducing kingship to literary convention, making reality a fiction. Thus, King Henry's agony over Hal's truancy becomes, in Falstaff's hands, a ludicrous exercise in euphuism. And that is precisely Falstaff's point. Falstaff's rhetoric picks up some dignity only when he turns to his own praises, and then changes again as he breaks off and addresses Hal more directly: “And tell me now, thou naughty varlet, tell me where hast thou been this month?” (ll. 473-475). The shift is deliberate and effective. Its friendly, teasing informality places Hal's offense precisely in the light in which Falstaff wants it to be considered.

Finally, Falstaff's reaction when Hal “deposes” him takes his dangerous lack of earnestness a step further. If, as McGuire suggests (p. 50), his chief concern is to maintain his position by having Hal “practise an answer,” he might reasonably be concerned that Hal has not done so. But his reaction to the “deposition” indicates that that is not what is on his mind at all: “Depose me? If thou dost it half so gravely, so majestically, both in word and matter, hang me up by the heels for a rabbit-sucker or a poulter's hare” (ll. 478-481). His concern is for the pure virtuosity with which he has played his role. He does not even embrace the opportunity to show Hal how the Prince should speak to the King but here again, as with the men in buckram, abdicates prudence and gives himself to the jest of the moment: Hal as king speaks of grievous complaints against the Prince, and “‘Sblood, my lord,” replies Falstaff indecorously, “they are false! Nay, I’ll tickle ye for a young prince, i’ faith” (ll. 488-489). Role-play becomes his world, its practical implications forgotten. The game, to borrow from Dr. Johnson, is the Cleopatra for which he loses the world and is content to lose it. If Falstaff's hope lies in maintaining the verisimilitude of the play, he has undermined his hope. But if his hope—and the chief temptation he presents to the Prince—is to reduce the serious to play, the real to unreal, we see him here in a moment of triumph, and the Prince, if he does not counteract this temptation, in a moment of extreme moral danger.

When Hal “deposes” Falstaff, the crisis of the scene has arrived: “Dost thou speak like a king? Do thou stand for me, and I’ll play my father” (ll. 476-477). First Falstaff acts the king, and now Hal will. But whose king will he act? If Falstaff's—that is, if he turns kingship into play—then the play world dominates political reality for Hal, and Falstaff wins.

But Shakespeare has already indicated that Hal will mean something radically different when he acts the king. We begin to see the difference at the very moment that the world of the skit first begins to separate itself from the reality of Eastcheap, the moment that real objects become props. “This chair shall be my state, this dagger my sceptre, and this cushion my crown,” proclaims Falstaff. “Thy state,” replies Hal, “is taken for a join’d-stool, thy golden sceptre for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown” (ll. 415-420). Dr. Johnson wished that Hal's reply had been omitted, in that “it contains only a repetition of Falstaff's mock-royalty.”¹⁰ But Hal is repeating the lines with a difference. Falstaff is more interested in the props than in what they symbolize (“This chair … this dagger … this cushion”) while to Hal the props as such are remote and what they represent foremost in his mind: not only does he reverse Falstaff's syntactic order, citing the royal object before its stage symbol, but he refers to the object specifically (“thy state”) and to the symbol indefinitely (“a join’d stool”), while his adjectives build up into an eloquent climax (“Thy state … thy golden sceptre … thy precious rich crown”). Falstaff transforms the crown into a cushion; Hal sees the cushion but thinks of the actual state, scepter, and crown of England.¹¹ In these two apparently similar speeches of Falstaff and Hal, the throne and the Falstaff world are implicitly debating the issue shortly to be raised in greater earnest: the relative reality of each to the other.

The second intimation that Hal will play the king with a difference comes when Falstaff concludes his king speech: “And tell me now, thou naughty varlet, tell me where hast thou been this month?” and Hal makes no answer. Indeed, what sort of an answer might he make? Falstaff presumably hopes for the sort he himself would give, one that would reduce the whole problem to felicitous jest. But Hal does not reply in the role Falstaff has assigned him; he will not mock himself. Instead, deposing Falstaff, he himself becomes king,¹² and his first words indicate in their terseness and sobriety the seriousness of the confrontation that is to occur in III.ii:

Now, Harry, whence come you?
.....The complaints I hear of thee are grievous.

(ll. 484, 486-487)

And when Falstaff breaks his role to heighten the jest—“Nay, I’ll tickle ye for a young prince, i’ faith”—Hal turns the jest back to seriousness: “Swearest thou, ungracious boy? Henceforth ne’er look on me” (ll. 488-491).

In the lines that follow, one could debate whether Hal is speaking as the king or as himself. McGuire observes that Hal's tirade against Falstaff, though it is rant, is what Hal conceives to be kingly rant (p. 49); yet it is also reminiscent of the contempt that Hal has shown for Falstaff earlier in the scene:

Call in ribs, call in tallow.

(l. 125)

These lies are like their father that begets them—gross
as a mountain, open, palpable. Why, thou clay-brain’d guts, thou knotty-pated
fool, thou whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch—

(ll. 249-253)

The tone is darker, but the style remains much the same. The ambiguity is resolved, of course, in the epiphanic moment when Falstaff pleads “banish not him thy Harry's company” and Hal replies, “I do, I will” (ll. 526, 528). McGuire says that here Hal is speaking “as Prince and King,” but, we have seen, Hal as prince never rejects Falstaff. Rather, he is speaking first as player-king and then in his actual role of future king, and we see that the two roles are continuous, that, in fact, Hal hasn’t been acting at all. And that is his response to Falstaff's transformation of the serious into play: he has transformed play back into reality. This reality comes bursting in on them in the form of the Sheriff, and Falstaff, falling asleep behind the curtain, hides from it both in deed and in spirit. Meanwhile, the Prince has the last word on the thievery game—which he cancels by returning the money—and moves on to his encounter with his father, an encounter that will take place as predicted.

There is not, then, a single play extempore in I Henry IV: there are two, Falstaff's and Hal's, each moving away from the actual present, but one toward the unreal, the other toward the future. This ambivalence is possible precisely because the play is extemporaneous, without script or predetermined action. In genuine plays within plays, as in any regular play, the action is presented as autonomous, the events portrayed as beyond the control of either actor or spectator. A play creates its own world; whatever its relevance to the real world, there can be no question of identity. The actor, as Antonin Artaud puts it, is “entirely penetrated by feelings that do not benefit or even relate to his real condition.”¹³ and so is the actor-analogue of a play within a play. But neither actor in the play within I Henry IV possesses such autonomy. There is no script, no mimetic a priori, and both must shape their roles from whole cloth out of their own characters, their own penchant for involvement in the action that they portray. By its very nature, the play cannot be seen as separate from them.

Falstaff becomes absorbed in the play; as we watch him, the dimension of the actor behind the role sometimes fades away. “Play out the play,” he cries, with the sheriff at the door. “I have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff” (ll. 531-532). And indeed we cannot define Falstaff solely as the shrewd, ambitious parasite that he would appear without the roles that he continually plays. It is the wholeheartedness with which he plays them, the enthusiasm with which he invests his whole personality in the unreal and the impossible, that sets him aside from the other vice characters and eirons that inhabit the world of drama. But in the world of Henry IV he is dangerous precisely because he testifies to the primacy of the play world and thus to the unreality of the political.

Hal, on the other hand, is ultimately not playing at all. The fictional world he creates is, in fact, not fictional. It is separated from actuality not as an object of the imagination but as an object of prediction. The poet, as Sidney observes, does not affirm, but Hal's half of the skit ends on a mimetic affirmation which he immediately extends into the reality of the future: “I do, I will.” It has often been suggested that the play scene parodies the encounter of King and Prince in III.ii,¹⁴ but that, in effect, is merely what Falstaff wants it to do, since the end of parody is to undermine the serious; Falstaff wants the tavern to define the throne room. Hal brings about the precise opposite. The destiny that defines his character transmutes play into sudden prophecy: the duties of the throne define this moment in the tavern. For the second time, and through the very medium that threatens it the most, Hal's latent regality becomes manifest.

If the play episode does not mark a major shift in Hal's character, it does mark a major shift in the point of view of the play itself. The skit begins by showing us Hal's duties under the aspect of Falstaff; it concludes by showing Falstaff under the aspect of royalty. And it is thus that we shall see Falstaff henceforth, for England is not playing his game, and his actions as he carries a bottle of sack into battle, leads his men to slaughter, and stabs the dead Hotspur, justify the Prince's disgust. From now on, and throughout Part 2 as well, Falstaff stands in the shadow of royalty until at last, fulfilling his prophecy of the play extempore, King Henry V banishes him and commits himself, as he knew all along that he must, to an action in which Falstaff can play no part.

Notes

1. See Fredson Bowers, “Hal and Francis in King Henry IV, Part 1,” Renaissance Papers, 1965, publication of Southeastern Renaissance Conference (Durham, N.C., 1966), pp. 15-20; Waldo F. McNeir, “Structure and Theme in the First Tavern Scene of Henry IV, Part One,” Essays on Shakespeare, ed. Gordon Ross Smith (University Park, Pa., 1965), pp. 67-83; and S. P. Zitner, “Anon, Anon: or, a Mirror for a Magistrate,” SQ, 19 (1968), 63-70. An ambiguously entitled essay is F. M. Salter's “The Play within the Play of First Henry IV,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, 3rd ser., vol. 40, sec. 2 (May, 1946), 209-223, which deals with the relation of the comic to the historical plot.

2. McGuire is disputing Dieter Mehl's point that plays staged by protagonists and involving “startling shifts of identities” are “a distinctly Jacobean feature” (“Forms and Functions of the Play within a Play,” RenD, 7 [1965], 41-61, at p. 50). But Mehl seems to mean shifts from role-playing to actuality in such a way that one “may sometimes wonder whether the characters are still acting their parts or speaking in person” (Mehl, p. 50), rather than shifts in the character itself. As we shall see, neither situation applies to I Henry IV, though the latter comes close.

3. McGuire takes issue with McNeir (p. 79), who says that “the whole world of Falstaff hangs in the balance” pending Hal's words to the Sheriff, McGuire maintaining that Hal has already in effect made up his mind in the play episode (p. 50 and n.). But that this moment is in fact tense on the stage and that Hal does not resolve the tension by renouncing Falstaff here and now calls precisely into question what he means by “I do, I will.”

4. The word “grace” marks the shift between these lines and Falstaff's final rejection: “Make less thy body, hence, and more thy grace …” (Part 2, V.v.56). Here, as throughout, I follow the argument of G. K. Hunter, “Henry IV and the Elizabethan Two-Part Play,” RES, n.s. 5 (1954), 236-248, that Shakespeare took responsibility for the thematic coherence of the two parts of Henry IV even if he did not originally plan for the second; certainly, Hal's rejection of Falstaff is predicated in Part 1: see Harold Jenkins, The Structural Problem in Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth (London, 1956), reprinted in R. J. Dorius, ed., Discussions of Shakespeare's Histories (Boston, 1964), pp. 41-55.

5. See Fredson Bowers, “Shakespeare's Art: The Point of View,” in Literary Views, ed. Carroll Camden (Chicago, 1964), pp. 45-58.

6. Note that whereas Hal's encounter with his father (III.ii) seems to us to mark a major estrangement of Hal from Falstaff, in fact Falstaff's position is consolidated once the interview is gotten over: “I am good friends with my father, and may do anything. … I have procured thee, Jack, a charge of foot” (III.iii.203-204, 208-209).

7. For a development of this point, see Bowers, “Hal and Francis in King Henry IV, Part 1,” pp. 18-20.

8. See notes in the New Variorum edition of I Henry IV, ed. Samuel Burdett Hemingway (Philadelphia, 1936), pp. 161-164. Arnold Davenport sees an additional parallel in both substance and style to the dialogue on love vs. kingship in II.ii of Lyly's Campaspe, where Hephestion upbraids Alexander for wishing to relinquish his royal station and duties over the love of an unworthy captive girl (“Notes on Lyly's ‘Campaspe’ and Shakespeare,” Notes and Queries, 199 [n.s. 1, 1954], 19-20), while G. B. Harrison sees a parody of the style and repertory of the Admiral's Men (“Shakespeare's Actors,” in A Series of Papers on Shakespeare and the Theater, Shakespeare Association [London, 1927], pp. 62-87, esp. pp. 76-79). All three arguments suggest a reduction—for those in Shakespeare's audience who detect the allusions—of the serious to play.

9. Thus, when the Hostess interrupts, “he must silence her, the symbol of his bawdy-house, tavern-frequenting aspect of character, before he may imitate Henry Bolingbroke and speak to Hal” (p. 49).

10. Cited in Hemingway, ed., New Variorum edition, p. 159.

11. See Richard Farmer's observation (cited in New Variorum, p. 160): “This is an apostrophe of the prince to his absent father, not an answer to Falstaff,” which is a necessary complement to McNeir's comment that “the signs of Falstaff's assumed royalty in throne, sceptre, and crown are reduced by Hal's literal directness to what they are—a joined-stool, a leaden dagger, and a bald crown” (McNeir, p. 77).

12. For the dramatic effectiveness of this visual stage metaphor, see McGuire, p. 49.

13. “The Theater and the Plague,” in The Theater and Its Double, tr. Mary Caroline Richards (New York, 1958), p. 24. Even in such an extreme case as The Spanish Tragedy, this general principle holds true for the play within the play insofar as we see Hieronimo as playing Soliman: the role is analogous to reality and will erupt into reality, but it is not identical to it. If it were, there would be no suspense in the play within The Spanish Tragedy.

14. For an able counterargument to this view, see McGuire, pp. 49-52.