[In the following essay, originally published in 1965, Bradbrook offers an overview of Henry IV, Parts I and II,contending that they are political plays that address contemporary political issues.]

There was once a summer school at the other Stratford where, in two successive hours, a first speaker said that anyone who doubted the unity of the great continuous ten-act play was disqualified to understand Shakespeare; while a second said that anyone who thought 2 Henry IV more than a feeble ‘encore’ must be illiterate. The link that I would see is that of adaptability, the imaginative ability to create a part and to play it. In Part 1, this playful, heroic, or sometimes merely crafty capacity distinguishes each of the main characters. In Part 2, the role-taking (to use familiar jargon) is subtle, Machiavellian and by no means subjected to plain ethical judgments of right and wrong. In dismissing Falstaff, Henry V appears both kingly and treacherous—because his two roles can no longer be played by the same man; the King cannot be true to the reveller of Eastcheap. In the play as a whole, the width of reference and ambiguity of response shows Shakespeare's full maturity. ‘The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem’, said the philosopher Wittgenstein; and Machiavelli's contribution to political thought consisted in dropping theories of political government and observing the facts of behaviour, in all their awkward complexity. ‘We are much beholden to Machiavel’, said Bacon, ‘who openly and unfeignedly declares … what men do, and not what they ought to do’. A famous book on princely education, Elyot's Book of the Governor, had aimed in the early sixteenth century at producing a traditionally good, well-equipped and high-principled ruler. Machiavelli perceived the emergence of secular sovereignty; and the rest of the world was horrified at what he saw. It had already arrived when Warwick the Kingmaker, in Henry VI's reign, putting pressure on the Vatican to back his policy, manoeuvred in a way any modern student of politics would readily define; but the next century still had no words for it. Behaviour was ahead of statement; for it is the artist that first catches the implications of behaviour. 2 Henry IV came out shortly after the first edition of Bacon's essays; these men, however different their minds, were observing the same phenomenon. Shakespeare gave it imaginative form, Bacon gave it definition.

As an actor, Shakespeare was gifted with a special insight into the quick-change aspects of political life; Protean variety, which was the outstanding quality of Elizabethan acting, elicits exactly what the new politics demanded of the ruler. Many have noted that Richard III is a natural actor in his wooing of Anne, his scenes with Clarence, with Edward. However, he is drawn as conventionally wicked; for ‘men should be what they seem’. In Henry IV Shakespeare is questioning the popular frame of assumptions more radically; yet he had to avoid shocking his audience.

The uncertainties, the troubles, the doubtful roles, the lack of any suitable heir—these issues were calculated to touch powerfully the feelings and engage the interest of any audience in the late 1590s. And the glorious resolution of all doubts in the triumphant coronation of Henry V was exactly what the country was momentarily to feel when James I peaceably succeeded in 1603. Alas! James was no Plantagenet—but instead of leading his people to war against France, he at least united them with Scotland.

Shakespeare was not writing a political treatise or constructing an allegory, but he was playing variations on a live political issue; in these plays the whole of society enters into the conflict. The colourless citizens of Richard III, the symbolic gardeners, Welsh tribesmen, the groom of the stable who appear in Richard II play minor roles. But here the life of London, and Gloucestershire, and the north is fully drawn into the play; while Shakespeare presents, in ever varying forms, a generous and yet sceptical questioning of that traditional principle which his earlier plays assume. This is political drama in a far profounder way than its dynastic interests would suggest, for the psychology of political life is here developed; the most successful man is he who can adapt himself most flexibly while retaining a clear sense of direction and purpose. This was exactly what the apparently changeable but really determined Elizabeth had done. Unlike her successor, she did not theorize; but she was a superb practitioner.

The Queen was the government; so throughout her reign the question of what would happen if she died untimely had troubled her subjects. A disputed succession meant the possibility of civil war—the ultimate worst thing for the sixteenth century (as perhaps it still is). This was a topic which no writer would dare directly to treat on the stage, for the consequences would have been extremely serious; but in the mirror of history it had been reflected ever since the young lawyers in 1561 put on Gorboduc—a play written by one of the Queen's gravest counsellors. This play enjoyed a great and continuing success; it is about the wickedness of dividing a kingdom—as Hotspur and the conspirators propose to do. Other plays dealt with similar subjects—Horestes, Locrine, The Misfortunes of Arthur. These are now little more than names in a textbook; but then they were the means by which the warnings and counsels of her subjects might be tendered to the Queen herself. They were played before her; when later still in 1601 Essex and his friends wanted to raise the city of London, they put on the old play of Richard II.¹ We see this use of history today in such plays as Brecht's Galileo, Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Sartre's Lucifer and the Lord.

Within Henry IV, each character plays several roles, and the leading characters often substitute for each other. Falstaff is the father of Hal's wit, the King father of his chivalry; Harry Monmouth is the son of Henry's loins, but Harry Hotspur the son of his wishes.²

Falstaff plays any and every part. His imagination devises ever-fresh fancies for himself and his followers, which are taken up and discarded as fast as they are conceived. He describes Hal and himself as thieves, in gorgeously poetic terms; he next promotes himself to judge—but is ready to turn hangman; he then becomes melancholy and repents. In the heat of exploit Falstaff is a ‘young man’ that ‘must live’, and the victim of Hal's love charm; in the next scene he is ‘poor old Jack’. Having justified himself for robbery on the grounds of a vocation for it, he raises a tempest of rage when his pocket is picked, and takes the opportunity to repudiate all his debts. Playing the knight of chivalry, he asks Hal to bestride him if he is down, and boasts that his deeds surpass Turk Gregory's. He rises in fact from his mummer's sham death to claim the spoils of victory.

Against Falstaff's instinctive mobility, Hal's role-taking looks deliberate. He early casts himself for the role of Percy, playing it in a mixture of admiration and irony; in his revels, he plays the part of Prodigal Prince, with Falstaff as his father; and then, assuming the King, deposes and banishes Falstaff as later he will do in earnest. But he can play the potboy in a leather apron, equally well. The fantasy life of Eastcheap (even the robbery is a jest), playing at capital crime, at exhortation, at soldiering, is sharply dismissed by the Prince, even while he enjoys it. It is Idleness—according to Puritan opponents, the capital sin of all players. Idleness and Vanity are keywords in Part 1; both were favourite terms of abuse for the players, but Shakespeare draws their sting. It is in the comedy of Gadshill, sweeping along through the first two acts, that the grand genial theme of Robbery is stated. Thief … hangman … gallows … : the sinister possibilities are suggested only to be brushed aside, for the thieves are in company with ‘nobility and tranquility, burgomasters and great oneyers’. In the older plays, it is the King's own money which is taken. Later the note is graver; the rebels carve up the commonwealth and use her as their booty; the King himself is confessedly one who stole the diadem and put it in his pocket; the tussle with Hotspur over the prisoners is an attempt at Gadshill measures. According to Holinshed, Hotspur said of Mortimer, ‘Behold the heir of the realm is robbed of his right, and yet the robber with his own will not redeem him.’

Falstaff of Gadshill is succeeded by Captain Falstaff, robbing under royal warrant by his misuse of the King's press. At Shrewsbury the Prince robs Hotspur of all his honours, and finally, most shameless of all, Falstaff robs the Prince of the glory of killing Percy, and staggers off, a porter of the ‘luggage’ that once was the fiery Hotspur. The Prince, with an indifference more telling than contempt, offers to ‘gild’ what he at the same time labels as a ‘lie’.

Falstaff's chief weapon is neither his sword nor his bottle of sack, but his jests; his power to defend the indefensible springs partly from nimble wits and partly from that innocent and unstudied shamelessness which breeds lies gross, open and palpable as the fantasies of childhood. Somewhere in Falstaff lurks the small boy who boasts that he has just killed a lion. Only by degrees does he penetrate from his Castle of Misrule, the Boar's Head Tavern, to the world of heroic action in which Percy moves; only in Part 2 to the world of judgment, organization, political theory which surrounds the King. He is an Actor, not in the calculating fashion of Richard III, but with the instinctive, ductile mobility of a jester who takes up any position you throw him, and holds it.

Henry IV, as in the play of Richard II, stands for the life of judgment against that of the fantasy and imagination; it is his superior skill in deploying his forces that defeats the dash and fire of Hotspur.

Percy's scornful mimicry of the popinjay lord reveals that he, like Hal and Falstaff, lives in the life of the imagination. To think of a plot is enough for him; he can feed on his motto Esperance; mappery and closet-war are quite alien to him. Yet when he meets the more primitive imagination of Glendower with its cressets and fiery shapes, its prophecies out of the common lore, Hotspur baits Glendower mercilessly. Glendower is Hotspur's Falstaff.

Before Shakespeare wrote, Hotspur was already a potent name in such common lore. Every member of the audience would have known that old ballad of Douglas and Percy by which Sir Philip Sidney had confessed himself stirred more than with the sound of the trumpet. Hotspur's contempt for balladmongers is ill-deserved; for they were to keep his fame alive. In The Battle of Otterburn a single combat, such as the Prince offers at Shrewsbury, is offered by Douglas to Percy, and the conqueror salutes his gallant foe, as the Prince, laying his royal favours on the mangled face, salutes the dead Hotspur. In the ballad, it is Percy himself who

                                        leaned on his brand
And saw the Douglas dee:
He took the dead man by the hand,
Saying, Woe is me for thee;
To have saved thy life, I would have parted with
My lands for years three;
For a better man, of heart, nor of hand
Was not in all the north country.

The resurrection of Douglas to join the conspirators in this play adds greatly to their potency. Hotspur could so easily have won at Shrewsbury; the battle against odds is a true foretaste of Agincourt—the little troop with its Welsh and Scots contingent, led by one man's courage. Harry learns his role at Agincourt from Hotspur's at Shrewsbury.

Harry Monmouth, the changeling prince, born in the enchanted west, publicly takes up the role of chivalrous knight in Vernon's splendid description of his mounting his horse; and Hotspur cries:

Come, let me taste my horse,
Who is to bear me like a thunderbolt
Against the bosom of the Prince of Wales.

(IV.i. 119-21)

The essence of chivalry is the mounted charge: knights must have horses—and rivals to encounter. The images are cosmic, grand. As Harry says ‘Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere’. The image of the rising sun dispelling clouds, which the Prince uses in his opening soliloquy, is inevitably parodied by Falstaff: ‘Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher and eat blackberries? a question not to be ask’d. Shall the son of England prove a thief and take purses? a question to be ask’d’ (II. iv. 394-7).

Harry of Monmouth and Hal of Eastcheap are different roles for the same young man, who had learnt manysidedness among the pots of ale, where Hotspur contemptuously places him. The opening soliloquy shows the Prince as a passionless manipulator of events, whereas Hotspur is carried away by rage, ardour or mockery. In his presence, calculation fails; his uncle Worcester, the supreme Machiavel, gives up schooling him and at the last dupes him. (In his source, Shakespeare could have found that Worcester had in fact been tutor to Hal; a suitable appointment, had he cared to develop it.)

Hal's many parts, however, do not cohere as naturally as do Falstaff's. In Falstaff the contradictions spring from a great natural vitality; they are the fruit of abundance; in his presence, jests alone are plotted. The Prince is nimbly versatile, witty in a biting style and noble in a restrained one; irony and control are his modes, as lustiness and shamelessness are Falstaff's. In wit they are evenly matched; but Hal dispenses patronage, and a follower can never be quite a friend. The mixture of apparent intimacy and real insecurity which Falstaff develops at the Boar's Head is like that attained by players with such noble patrons as Southampton or Pembroke; and the real Boar's Head Tavern was one of the players' winter houses. Falstaff harps constantly on Hal's position as heir apparent, and though he may dare to call him ‘cuckoo’ and ask, ‘Help me to my horse, good king's son’, there is behind the Prince's retort, ‘What, shall I be your ostler?’ something of the sting that appears in ‘I know you all’, with its later, more dramatic sequel, ‘I know thee not, old man’.

Falstaff's gross body, his constant and clamorous needs, for sack, for wenches, for a hand to his horse (the Prince can vault into the saddle), makes him helpless at times with the helplessness of the flesh and of old age, which raises its voice in the shrill reproaches of the long-suffering Mistress Quickly. Falstaff needs his wits to live; Hal needs his only to jest, and is an extraordinarily ascetic Rioter. In the old plays of the Prodigal Son, an addiction to harlots always characterized the Rioter. In Part 1 Falstaff represents misrule and good cheer rather than riotous life. Dover Wilson noted the many images of food which are applied to him—the most frequent is ‘butter’; he ‘lards the earth’ and is ‘as vigilant as a cat to take cream’. Though gross, these images are rich, nourishing, festive.

It is because he inhabits such a mountain of flesh that his wit ‘strikes fiery off’. He uses his bulk as a shield to turn reproaches into a jest, and in his extraordinary union of the child, the animal and the criminal, never pursues any single aim, so that all his disabilities serve only to illustrate his freedom. The dexterity with which he extricates himself from danger is a quick and natural response; when he hacks his sword or attempts to cozen, he is always exposed. His confidence in himself is deep, animal, instinctive; in this, he resembles Hotspur. They represent the nobility of instinct, a feckless, unthrifty splendour of living which is unknown to the prudent court. Coarseness and violence, the stench of the battlefield and the smell of the stable, cling to Hotspur, who would have his Kate swear like a mosstrooper, and leave modest oaths to citizens' wives. The praise of instinct which Falstaff bestows on himself has some truth in it. He swears commonly and most properly by himself, for out of himself a whole world of living roles is created for himself and others to play.

Henry IV has only one role to play—that of the King. He has shown courage, and a disregard for conventional restraint and for all the sacred taboos in assuming the crown; as L. C. Knights has observed, he remains the embodiment of the guilt that is inseparable from getting and keeping power. His vision of a united England sets him above his enemies; but against his deep repentance, and that of the Prince in face of his father's ‘dear and deep rebuke’, is set the mock repentance of Falstaff, couched in the canting whine of the sectaries. Falstaff thus protects himself against the uncou’ guid by stealing their thunder.

Interplay of character, exchange of roles, melting of mood into mood, and free range combine to give Part 1 its ‘divine fluidity’. All is lucent, untrammelled in the consequence. The consequences are presented in Part 2.

II

Here the characters are sharper, clearer, more definite; they do not blend but contrast. Instead of lambent interplay, division or fusion of roles is provided, with clear separation of man and office. There is more oration and less action; the action belongs to the common people, while the King utters his great soliloquies and Falstaff talks directly to the audience on the virtues of sherris sack.

The embodiment of some of the leading themes appears in the Prologue Rumour, and I was sorry that this Prologue was cut in your production. Morally, Rumour embodies the Lie; socially, she represents ‘rotten Opinion’ or Seeming; politically, the unstable and troublesome times. The rebels are first shown a false image of victory, then a false peace which is prelude to a new conspiracy, and finally a false show of war, when the true grief lies in the King's death. She addresses the audience as her ‘household’; it is a slightly malicious opening jest.

The last abortive rebellion of Henry IV's reign is led by the two symbolic figures of Mowbray and York; Mowbray, the son of Bolingbroke's first public challenger, and York, the prince of the church who echoes Rumour on the ‘still discordant wavering multitude’:

The commonwealth is sick of their own choice; …
An habitation giddy and unsure
Hath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.

(I. iii. 87,89-90)

A religious rising in the north was the only rebellion of Elizabeth's reign: as a boy of five, Shakespeare might have seen the levies marching up against the Catholic earls, the Nevilles and Percies. Perhaps some of his London audience had marched too.

To his King's anxious calculations of his enemies' strength, Warwick, who is Shakespeare's countryman and speaks always with the voice of Truth, replies:

Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo,
The numbers of the feared.

(III. i. 97-8)

Like voice and echo, opposed rulers of church and state recall the deposition and death of Richard II, the Archbishop dwelling on the treachery of the multitude who then denounced and would now worship him, Henry dwelling on the treachery of Northumberland, once Richard's friend, then his, and now his sworn foe.

The connection between ecclesiastical and temporal rule is debated when the armies meet. Lancaster says the Archbishop is misusing his position as God's deputy to take up arms against God's temporal substitute, the anointed King.

                                        You have ta’en up,
Under the counterfeited zeal of God,
The subjects of his substitute, my father,
And both against the peace of heaven and him
Have here up-swarm’d them.

(IV. ii. 26-30)

But the treachery of John of Lancaster's ruse is hardly excused by his neat explanation that wrongs will be redressed, while traitors will suffer; and a final blasphemy is not lacking:

Strike up our drums, pursue the scatter’d stray:
God, and not we, hath safely fought today.

(IV. ii. 120-1)

Comment is provided in the last scene of this act by Henry himself:

                                        God knows, my son,
By what by-paths, and indirect crook’d ways
I met this crown.

(IV. iv. 184-5)

No one, least of all Bolingbroke, denies the guilt of usurpation or the conflicts it brings. Treachery in the political sphere replaces the mock robberies of Part 1; the presiding Genius is not Valour, but Wit, not Chivalry but Statecraft. God send us His peace, but not the Duke of Lancaster's, the commons might exclaim.

The lament of Hotspur's widow is immediately followed by the appearance of Falstaff's whore; it is one of the telling silent strokes. Doll hangs on Falstaff's neck and tells him whether she sees him again there is nobody cares. The life of the play resides in these common parts, the roles of his followers who do not think of Hal as their future governor. He himself plays the prentice's part: this was a shrewd touch to endear him to all the prentices in Shakespeare's original audience—an important playgoing group. The action of Falstaff's own followers is largely parody. Pistol presents a great parody of the imaginative life; he outgoes even Falstaff's soaring inventions, a wild impossible creature who talks in scraps of playspeech, and feeds on his own mad imagination. If the ghost of Hotspur walks in Part 2, he is named Pistol. It has been said that we always fundamentally talk about ourselves, or aspects of ourselves; so, if Falstaff represents something of Shakespeare's own assessment of himself, may not Pistol be a player's nightmare? A parody of Ned Alleyn's rant, perhaps, but also an embodiment of Shakespeare's deepest fear—a wild tatterdemalion spouter of crazy verses, hopelessly mistaken in all he says and does, thrown off even by Falstaff. Pistol embodies the life of dream, of playmaking at its most distorted and absurd. It is fitting that he brings the deceptive good news of Hal's succession to Falstaff. When the King wakens from his dream of Eastcheap mirth, both Falstaff and Pistol are jailed. Pistol roaring his defiant Spanish tag as he is carried off, in cruel parody of Hotspur's motto, Esperance: ‘Si fortuna me tormenta, spero me contenta.’

The great mythological popular scene of the stolen crown is haunted not by an explicit recollection of Richard II, but an echo of his fate, the sad ceremony by which Bolingbroke unkings himself. Giving shape to his imaginary fears, Henry mockingly hails his son by the new title which for all the audience evoked the ‘star of England’, victor of Agincourt.

Harry the Fifth is crown’d! Up, vanity;
Down, royal state! …
O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows.

(IV. iv. 120-1,134)

Behind the dying king, the anxious father peers out, as death bores through his castle wall. The man fenced in by office, the body fretted by care, bequeath themselves to dust. Bolingbroke admits that even his expiatory crusade had not been without its prudential aspect; he had known only a ‘supposed Peace’, but he prays for ‘true peace’ at home in his own son's time. And pat to the catastrophe comes the old prophecy's fulfilment—he is to die in Jerusalem, if not quite the Jerusalem his rather stumbling piety expected.

The transmission of office, the demise of the crown as distinct from the death of Henry Bolingbroke, involves Prince Henry in the last death-pangs of his old self. In his brief appearance before the King's last sickness, the Prince is shown with Poins, who, unlike Falstaff, is bluntly honest. The Prince must mock his own greatness, gird at Poins, but half confide in him. Hal of Eastcheap has no right to weep for a father's sickness, and is well aware of it. He takes up the prentice's part and surveys from this vantage Falstaff's descent ‘from a god to a bull’. The encounter is momentary: there is a revival momentarily of the old manner (‘Why, thou globe of sinful continents’) a recollection of Gadshill; and a carefully casual goodbye, whose finality was beautifully suggested in the playing: ‘Falstaff, good night’. This is the Prince at his most sensitive, subtle and inconsistent. When he finally takes up the poisoned gold of the crown and receives absolution from his natural father, he becomes warmly and simply a tearful son in the closet; but in public, wearing the ‘new and gorgeous garment, majesty’, he stands as father to his brothers, son to the Lord Chief Justice, and to Falstaff an image of the Last Judgment itself (the Exhortation of the York Judgment Play might serve as parallel to the rejection speech).

In his fears Henry Bolingbroke had given a ‘character’ of his son, in which sharp changes of mood and irreversible decisions are the leading traits. A strong personality, when its deeps are broken up by an internal earthquake, shows a new and unrecognizable landscape. The ‘noble change’ so coolly predicted in Part 1 is painfully accomplished in Part 2. The Lord Chief Justice, like the Archbishop a symbol of office, represents the better side of the last reign, all that was true in its ‘supposed Peace’. This is how he justified the jailing of the unreformed Prince:

I then did use the person of your father
The image of his power lay then in me.

(V. ii. 73-4)

He suggests that Henry should imagine a future son of his own spurning his own image; and the King allows the argument as ‘bold, just and impartial’. He is no longer an individual, but a power whose image may by delegation reside in other bodies than his own, such as those of Judge or Prelate. The shadows of past and future kings melt away as the Sun of England mounts with measured confidence an uncontested throne.

Yet he sets himself under the law: ‘You shall be as a father to my youth’. Henry, who had played so many parts, now accepts only one. Complete identification of man and office closes the visor of his golden armour upon him, and he becomes the centre of the group of brothers, an impersonal Lancastrian King. Henceforth he has an uncontrollable tendency to speak like a royal proclamation. However, in one jest dexterously combining religious reproof and a recollection of old times, Falstaff is symbolically buried:

Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.

(V. v. 54-5)

In a metaphor derived perhaps from the parable of the tares, the Archbishop of York had seen the fourth Henry's friends and foes growing so inextricably together that he might not pluck up the one without destroying the other. This is not Henry V's problem in weeding his garden now. Falstaff, and that old father antic the law, Justice Shallow, are swept off to prison by Henry's new father and his colder self, John of Lancaster, who, fresh from the beheading of an Archbishop, can hardly see Falstaff's banishment as anything but a ‘fair proceeding’.³ It is a highly conventional scene, the traditional judgment scene for a bitter or moralist comedy, so that even Doll and Mistress Quickly are swept into the net. Rumour is confounded, Seeming is cast off, and Order restored.

At the height of his second military triumph, the capture of Colville, Falstaff boasts, ‘I have a whole school of tongues in this belly of mine, and not a tongue of them all speaks any word but my name’. This elaborate way of saying that ‘Everyone that sees me, knows me’, by its metaphor suddenly clothes Falstaff in the robe which Rumour had worn in the prologue. Within the play, he is her chief representative; as indeed he admits by implication in a self revealing comment on Shallow: ‘Lord, lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying’.

The delights of the Boar's Head and of Gloucestershire, with their undertones of death and old age sounding through the revelry, like the coming of winter in a harvest play, depict the wide commonwealth, the unthinking multitude of common folk about whom Bolingbroke and the Archbishop have been so loftily eloquent. Among the least of the rout, a little tailor with the ‘only man-sized voice in Gloucestershire’, suddenly echoes one of Prince Harry's proverbs from Shrewsbury: ‘We owe God a death’. Feeble, who outbuys a whole army of Pistols, serves to link the multitude and the throne, as in earlier comical histories such local heroes as George-a-Greene had done.

The audience feels no compulsion to take the side of law and order; indeed the tragic themes predominate in reading, but on the stage this is Falstaff's play. The imaginative life of the action lies less in the sick fancies, the recollections and foreshadowing of Bolingbroke than in the daydreams and old wives' tales of Mistress Quickly and Justice Shallow. Neither Hal nor Falstaff daff the world aside with quite the carelessness they had shown before. More wit and less fun, more dominance and less zest, more shrewdness and less banter belong to these two; humour and gaiety have split off into the life of common men and women. Falstaff's mistaken dream of greatness is shattered and he hears himself reduced to a shadow of the King's imagination; for Henry V stands where his father had stood, for the life of reason and judgment against the life of fantasy.

I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old, and so profane;
But being awak’d, I do despise my dream.

(V. v. 50-3)

This was the formula by which the sovereign arose from a play—‘Think all is but a poet's dream’, as Lyly had urged Elizabeth. But against the voice of reason and judgment may be set a feminine voice, which was to be heard again pronouncing Falstaff's epitaph:

Well, fare thee well. I have known thee these twenty-nine years, come peascod-time; but an honester and truer-hearted man—well, fare thee well.

(II. iv. 369-71)

Truth resides officially with Henry V, yet in spite of his double triumph (honour, that ‘word’, has been snatched from Hotspur as if it were a boxer's belt, and now the lie and opinion are banished), Kate Percy and Mistress Quickly remain unconverted; while the incorrigible Pistol produces a line which is both a theological definition of Truth or Constancy and a parody of the motto of Queen Elizabeth herself: ‘Semper idem: for obsque hoc nihil est’.

Henry sweeps all the nation behind him, except two women and a few fools. Such exceptions, however, are not to be despised in the world of Shakespeare's England. The uncertainty of the public view of Truth has been demonstrated. ‘Thou art a blessed fellow’, says Truth's champion, Prince Hal, to Poins, ‘to think as every man thinks; never a man's thought in the world keeps the roadway better than thine’. There is no need for an unconditional identification with Falstaff; indeed there is no possibility of it; for the virtue of Shakespeare is to present many incompatibles not reconciled, but harmonized.

Notes

1. The deposition scene was left out of the first printed version.

2. ‘Hal’ a more vulgar abbreviation may be used only in Eastcheap: ‘Young Harry’ is the familiar form at court. Compare Falstaff's description of himself, ‘Jack Falstaff with my familiars, John with my brothers and sisters, and Sir John with all Europe’.

3. No one would dream of calling John of Lancaster ‘Jack’.