SOURCE: “The Henry IV Plays,” in Henry the Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays, edited by David Bevington, Garland Publishing, 1986, 387-422.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1984, Watson proposes that the Henry IV plays, in addition to being morality plays, also allow Shakespeare to present an analysis of ambition in the private and public arenas.]

At the end of Richard II, Shakespeare's ambitious figures become versions of primal criminals such as Oedipus and Cronus, whose myths associate father/son rivalry with political rebellion. The Henry IV plays use this association to study the evolution of filial identity, the individual's imperative and dangerous growth toward sovereignty. Here, even more elaborately than in The Tempest, Shakespeare offers a sort of morality play about an individual's moral and psychological development; but while it may be helpful to make that allegory explicit in a systematic, Freudian way, it is crucial to remember that the playwright uses it as a merely subliminal resonance to his analysis of ambition. Shakespeare exploits his deterministic power over his play-world to simulate a divinely determined world in which ambition is limited by the constitution of the individual as well as the universe. The psychoanalytic allegory which seems to arise naturally from the narrative events is one more way in which Shakespeare makes us feel that there are deep moral imperatives, not only in the universe but also in its human microcosm, for ambition's rise and fall. A coherent pattern attaches to ambition, which may be experienced in similar ways by an individual psyche at one phase in its development, and by English society at a crisis in its historical evolution. In the Henry IV plays, the private and public experiences of ambition are not only congruent, they are simultaneous, and mutually causal.

The rebels in the Henry IV plays suffer their own versions of the ambitious syndrome when they try to replace the reigning king. In 1 Henry IV, Hotspur and Worcester discuss in suggestive terms the news that Northumberland will not appear for the battle. Hotspur argues that his father will therefore provide

A rendezvous, a home to fly unto,
If that the devil and mischance look big
Upon the maidenhead of our affairs.
Worcester. But yet I would your father
had been here.
The quality and hair of our attempt
Brooks no division.

(4.1.57-62)

Worcester's fear makes practical sense, but it also reminds us that Northumberland's absence constitutes the sort of bodily division that generally disables Shakespeare's rebels: It is “a very limb lopp’d off” (4.1.43), as Hotspur momentarily admits. When Hotspur subsequently boasts that “our joints are whole,” and Douglas rejoins, “As heart can think,” the statement is as self-contradictory as Douglas's restatement of the idea: “There is not such a word / Spoke of in Scotland as this term of fear” (4.1.83-85). The Scot has just spoken the word, and the notion of joints as whole as heart can think suggests an unhealthy jumbling of limbs, breast, and brains. The threat to this rebellion's birth is all the greater because Northumberland is figuratively the father of rebellion in these plays, and literally the father of Hotspur, who embodies the rebellious spirit. Without the father's presence at “the maiden-head,” the insurrection seems doomed to a sinister, unnatural sort of birth.

In 2 Henry IV, the implication that rebellion is born only through a dangerous distortion of the procreative process becomes more explicit. Lord Bardolph worries that unless Northumberland's forces arrive, the rebellion will resemble a man's “part-created” construction that must be left “A naked subject to the weeping clouds” of “churlish winter's tyranny.” Though the analogy is to the building of an over-ambitious house, the lines immediately following encourage us to recognize the suggestion, on a secondary level, of an infant exposed to the winter by a paternal tyrant, as Oedipus was by Laius, or Perdita by Leontes. Hastings answers:

Grant that our hopes (yet likely of fair birth)
Should be still-born, and that we now possess’d
The utmost man of expectation,
I think we are so a body strong enough,
Even as we are, to equal with the King.

(1.3.60-67)

In the same speech, Lord Bardolph also worries about the empty naming and the vegetative death that often accompany rebellion: an insurrection that uses “the names of men in stead of men,” he argues,

Lives so in hope, as in an early spring
We see th’ appearing buds, which to prove fruit
Hope gives not so much warrant, as despair
That frosts will bite them.

(1.3.57, 38-41)

The abnormal and premature birth of this uprising generates a nemesis consisting of stillbirth, paternal vengeance, diseased nature, disconnected names, and discordant bodies.

In 1 Henry IV Gendower portrays his birth as another archetypal perversion of procreation. The archetype here is not a bodily rivalry with the father that must end in stillbirth or infant exposure, but rather the self-induced Caesarean birth by which the father may be overcome. Such a birth—though, significantly, it is merely a boast in Glendower's case—sometimes signals a classical or Renaissance hero's determination to conquer his natural limitations, to surpass his hereditary constraints. When Glendower claims that various disturbances of nature “mark’d me extraordinary” and above “the common roll of men” at his birth, Hotspur replies with a sarcastic, degraded version of Glendower's personal myth:

Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinch’d and vex’d
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb, which, for enlargement striving,
Shakes the old beldame earth, and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth
Our grandam earth, having this distemp’rature,
In passion shook.

(3.1.26-34)

Hotspur has twisted Glendower's analogy between his mother's labor and the world's eruptions, which carries with it an implicit claim to autochthonic birth, into its least appealing form—a form which also allows Hotspur to dismiss Glendower's boast, by metaphor as well as tone, as merely hot air, of a particularly unattractive sort.

Figures in English Renaissance literature whose ambitions compel them to claim autogenous or autochthonic status often claim this sort of birth: they carve their own way out of mother-earth in an eruption of air, and in doing so they topple down the old towers or trees of paternal sexual authority. Such births, or rebirths, are in both senses Caesarean.¹ Tamburlaine makes a new self by martial assertion, disdaining his “parentage” in order to command a thunderous army who “make the mountains quake, / Even as when windy exhalations, / Fighting for passage, tilt within the earth.”² Spenser's autochthonic giant Orgoglio, the embodiment of pride and partner of the sexually sinister Duessa, performs a figuratively Oedipal attack to permit his own Caesarean rebirth:

The greatest Earth his uncouth mother was,
And blustring Aeolus his boasted sire,
Who with his breath, which through the world doth pas,
Her hollow womb did secretly inspire,
And fild her hidden caves with stormie yre,
That she conceiv’d.

This derivation makes it all the more suggestive that “all the earth for terrour seemd to shake, / And trees did tremble” when Orgoglio advances on Redcrosse. The giant tears “a snaggy Oke … Out of his mothers bowelles,” and swings it so hard that he could strike down “a stony towre”; the wind from that “thundring” swing, clearly analogous to the force that originally conceived him, strikes down his rival for Duessa (I.vii.7-14)³ When “his dreadful club” reaches his mother-earth, he seems to be planting himself to reenact his birth by his own power:

The idle stroke, enforcing furious way,
.....So deepely dinted in the driven clay,
That three yardes deepe a furrow up did throw:
The sad earth wounded with so sore assay,
Did grone full grievous underneath the blow,
And trembling with strange feare, did like an
earthquake show.

(I.viii.8)

The next stanza compares this blow to Jove's lightning—an impregnating force in myth—which “making way, / Both loftie towres and highest trees hath rent, / And all that might his angrie passage stay, / And shooting in the earth, casts up a mound of clay.” But Orgoglio's club becomes stuck there, permitting Redcrosse to cut off the arm of the giant, whose resulting howls suggest sexual suffering (I.viii.10-11). Toppled towers and severed arms are still towers and arms in the poem, of course, as cigars in dreams may represent cigars. But the close coincidence of these Oedipal and Caesarean motifs strikes me as significant, particularly because it occurs so consistently in the context of ambitious quests for heroic rebirth.

Milton's Satan is evidence that this archetype survives through Shakespeare's lifetime, and again the creature boasting of rebirth is a creature determined to claim that his own energies have conquered the derivativeness, and hence the fatedness, that limited his aspirations. By his incestuous conspiracy with the parthenogenetic Sin, and with their son Death who so resembles his father, Satan has made an open highway in the windy space beneath the earth, where he himself

Toil’d out my uncouth passage, forc’t to ride
Th’ untractable Abyss, plung’d in the womb
Of unoriginal Night and Chaos wild,
That jealous of thir secrets fiercely oppos’d
My journey strange, with clamorous uproar
Protesting Fate supreme.

(Book X, 475-80)⁴

The birth of the rebel Glendower, which Shakespeare revises from Holinshed's account toward this archetype, associates him with a tradition of windy, ambitious, and self-induced rebirths; the efforts of Richard III, Henry IV, Macbeth, and Coriolanus to carve out their own passages to glory may be associated with, and moralized by, the same sexually fraught tradition.

Other symptoms of the ambitious ailment afflict these rebels. When he hears of his son's death in the failed insurrection, Northumberland himself becomes a furious rebel, calling for an end to natural order, individual identity, and family harmony, in a world that has become merely a stage (2 Henry IV, 1.1.153-59). His allies urge him to eradicate rather than exaggerate those characteristic ailments of their cause. If he will join forces with the Archbishop of York, the instinct against rebellion that rendered his son's troops divided creatures and lifeless shadows can be reversed:

Morton.
My lord your son had only but the corpse,
But shadows and the shows of men, to fight;
For that same word, rebellion, did divide
The action of their bodies from their souls.

(1.1.192-95)

The archbishop would prefer to blame the ambitious syndrome—the disruption of time's normal order and humanity's normal form—on Henry's bad fatherhood. In repressing his subjects' pleas, Henry has bred a multiheaded and sleepless son in their place:

The time misord’red doth, in common sense,
Crowd us and crush us to this monstrous form
To hold our safety up. I sent your Grace
The parcels and particulars of our grief,
The which hath been with scorn shov’d from the court,
Whereon his Hydra son of war is born,
Whose dangerous eyes may well be charm’d asleep
With grant of our most just and right desires.

(4.2.32-40)

Unless the bad son Henry becomes the good father Henry by such concessions, Hastings adds, this unnatural procreation of Hydras through death will permanently replace England's lifegiving process of generational succession: “And so success of mischief shall be born, / And heir from heir shall hold his quarrel up / Whiles England shall have generation” (4.2.47-49). Inheritance thus becomes a blight on birth, a doubling and redoubling of miscarriages.

The rebels revealingly describe Henry's violation of his own heritage and Richard's as an archetypal parricide, with themselves in the role of abused parent rather than abusive child:

Worcester.
… being fed by us you us’d us so
As that ungentle gull, the cuckoo's bird,
Useth the sparrow; did oppress our nest,
Grew by our feeding to so great a bulk
That even our love durst not come near your sight
For fear of swallowing.

(1 Henry IV, 5.1.59-64)

The simile uses Henry's warlike approach to confirm his identity as an unlineal child, and even implies that he acts this way precisely because he knows he is not a natural heir. Worcester concludes by telling Henry that he and his fellow-rebels “stand opposed by such means / As you yourself have forg’d against yourself,” and when Henry compares himself to a father-bee murdered by the child (Prince Hal) he has fed to strength, we recognize that Worcester was speaking more wisely than he was aware of.

Henry answers by dismissing these accusations as merely “the garment of rebellion” and the “water-colors” that “impaint” their excuse for insurrection; he thus locates the rebellion in the realms of costuming and painting that so often characterize ambitious identity in Shakespeare. This accusation, too, rebounds on Henry, without losing its validity as an accusation, when the king becomes a thing of costumes and colors at Shrewsbury:

Hotspur.
A gallant knight he was, his name was Blunt,
Semblably furnish’d like the King himself.
Douglas.
A fool go with thy soul, whither it goes!
A borrowed title hast thou bought too dear.
Why didst thou tell me that thou wert a king?
Hotspur.
The King hath many marching in his coats.
Douglas.
Now, by my sword, I will kill all his coats;
I’ll murder all his wardrop, piece by piece,
Until I meet the King.

(5.3.20-28)

Douglas's remarks carry several unpleasant implications for Henry: first, that his own “borrowed title” of king may prove as costly an acquisition as it was for Blunt, and second, that the kingship may itself be only a wardrobe, clothes with no emperor, since his own act of usurpation has made the royal identity so easy to transfer and divide. When Douglas finally discovers King Henry beneath the colors that have become a disguise rather than a proclamation of identity, he finds him only by a process of elimination that is easily mistaken for a process of multiplication:

Douglas.
Another king? they grow like Hydra's heads.
I am the Douglas, fatal to all those
That wear those colors on them. What art thou
That counterfeit’st the person of a king?
King.
The King himself, who, Douglas, grieves at heart
So many of his shadows thou hast met
And not the very King.

(5.4.25-31)

Again Douglas raises troubling questions for King Henry. Is there actually any “very King” to be met, in the aftermath of a usurpation, or is there merely an assemblage of borrowed robes, painted colors, and two-dimensional shadows? Is “The King himself” yet one more ordinary mortal “That counterfeit’st the person of a king,” as Henry's answer can be taken to imply?

Douglas alludes to Hydra merely to express his exasperation at the fact that each time he beheads a king, two new kings seem to appear. But this allusion may also serve to remind us that Henry has pitted himself against the same sort of unbeatable foe. By causing the assassination of the one rightful king, he has created two heads (as the factions are often called) that are vying for the throne; if the kingship has Hydra's heads, it is because Henry has initiated a splitting of identity that his counterfeits at Shrewsbury nicely symbolize. The myth of Hydra, at least in the Henry IV plays, seems to be a cautionary myth about inheritance: Hydra resembles a gruesome family tree, and the monster that must be quelled is the fraternal strife that would arise over the division of property each time a person died, were there no system of legacies. Civilization successfully represses this monster until Richard and Henry unleash it by violating that system, leaving each legacy open to deadly contention. Shakespeare reveals an England resembling the primal societies described in Freud's Totem and Taboo and Girard's Violence and the Sacred, societies whose rituals are essential to prevent an endless competition for patrimonies and an endless reciprocity of violence.⁵ Some seventy lines before the archbishop blames Henry's misdeeds for generating “this Hydra son of war,” Shakespeare prepares us to understand the allusion's larger implications by having the archbishop argue that Henry will not dare to execute the rebels after a negotiated peace, “For he hath found to end one doubt by death / Revives two greater in the heirs of life” (4.1.197-98). As Henry's “buried fear … Richard of Burdeaux” (Richard II, 5.6.31-33) produces the warring heads of Henry and Mortimer, and as Henry's death is expected to produce a war between Hal and some rival, so will the heirs of the archbishop's rebels second their fathers' rebellion, and their heirs will second the seconding, and so on through eternity (4.2.45-49). That is precisely what we see in Shakespeare's version of the War of the Roses, until Richmond cauterizes the wound in God's order (as Hercules cauterized Hydra's severed neck), and thus turns the two heads—the two Houses—miraculously into one.

Henry V's succession provides an interim solution by setting legacies back on a lineal track. That may help explain why Shakespeare has Canterbury describe the miraculous transmigration of Henry IV's solemn virtue into his son, concurrent with the transfer of the royal body politic, as a glorious conquest of “Hydra-headed willfulness” (Henry V, 1.1.24-37). Until his glorious transformation, though, Hal is the unnatural “Hydra son” who threatens to become simultaneously the royal heir and the enemy of royal heritage at his father's death. Hal vacillates repeatedly between his disobedient Eastcheap identity and a noble filial identity. When Hal inherits the unlineal crown, he faces the Herculean task of uniting those conflicting identities, as good and bad son, and as subject and monarch, into a single natural successor. Two crucial scenes, in which Henry's conflict with Hal parallels Hal's conflict with himself, prepare us to recognize the ethical imperatives of that task.

Act three, scene two, of 1 Henry IV begins with Henry's interpreting Hal's misbehavior as a divine punishment for his own misdeeds. Though Henry, as usual, pretends to be slightly uncertain what his own crime might have been, a son's rebellious refusal to rise to the level of his royal blood would be an entirely appropriate rebuke to his father's rebellious insistence on rising to claim that royal heritage. The psychoanalytic maxim that the bad son has bad sons, and the physical maxim that what goes up must come down, both work to subvert Henry's hopes for a royal heir:

I know not whether God will have it so
For some displeasing service I have done,
That in his secret doom, out of my blood,
He’ll breed revengement and a scourge for me;
But thou dost in thy passages of life
Make me believe that thou art only mark’d
For the hot vengeance, and the rod of heaven,
To punish my mistreadings. Tell me else,
Could such inordinate and low desires,
Such poor, such bare, such lewd, such mean attempts,
Such barren pleasures, rude society,
As thou art match’d withal and grafted to,
Accompany the greatness of thy blood,
And hold their level with thy princely heart?

(3.2.4-17)

This insistence on blood finding its own level may be Henry's effort to bluster away the fact that “his blood was poor” until he stepped “a little higher than his vow” and usurped Richard's throne (4.3.75-76). Hal's “affections” may indeed “hold a wing / Quite from the flight of all thy ancestors,” making him “almost an alien to the hearts / Of all the court and princes of my blood” (3.2.29-35), but Henry is also on an errant flight from his hereditary place. The system rights itself from within: in the very act of being a punitively bad son to Henry, Hal is said to resemble Richard, to stand “in that very line” of the man whose right it was to place his likeness on the throne (3.2.85-94).⁶

As Henry becomes caught up in the excitement of scolding his son, his language reveals a recognition that this throne is actually founded on such externalities as costume rather than such internalities as blood. He boasts of clothing himself in the simulation of an inward virtue, and of maintaining his person as if it were a borrowed garment: he won the people's affection when he “dress’d myself in such humility / That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts,” yet retained their respect by keeping “my person fresh and new, / My presence like a robe pontifical …” (3.2.51-56).⁷ Marvell's warning to Cromwell in the “Horatian Ode” that “The same arts that did gain / A power must it maintain” (lines 119-20) seems applicable to Henry here: he discovers that the kingship gained by replacing a natural identity with an artificial one, replacing a person with a garment, can only be maintained by his remaining a polished costume rather than an authentic human being.

The redefinition of kingship implicit in Henry's usurpation is inextricably linked to a redefinition of identity, and one result is that not only Hal, but Sir Walter Blunt, and even Jack Falstaff, can play the role of King Henry IV with some success (2.4, 5.3). If Hal is what his father here calls him abusively, “the shadow of succession,” there is good reason for it (3.2.99). Even Hal's promise that he “shall hereafter … / Be more myself” (3.2.93) has ironic overtones as a response to his father's criticisms, since Henry has just finished arguing that he won the throne by retaining an artificial self, or at least an artificial distance from himself. Whether it is Hal's irony or Shakespeare's, Henry's effort to define a true heir is trapped in a contradiction of his own making.

Finally the king manages to express his ultimate fear, the fear that uncivil disobedience (such as defying a banishment) will become outright murderous rebellion (such as killing a king). The way Henry expresses this fear suggests that he is projecting his own guilty deeds onto Hal, and thus conflating the roles of bad son and bad subject:

But wherefore do I tell these news to thee?
Why, Harry, do I tell thee of my foes,
Which art my nearest and dearest enemy?
Thou that art like enough, through vassal fear,
Base inclination, and the start of spleen,
To fight against me under Percy's pay,
To dog his heels and curtsy at his frowns,
To show how much thou art degenerate.

(3.2.121-28)

One of the psychoanalytic tenets about this play is that “Hotspur's rebellion represents also Prince Hal's unconscious parricidal impulses. Hotspur is the Prince's double.”⁸ If this is so, then Hal's denial of his father's accusation represents a classic Freudian compensation-mechanism: the son's avowed wish to protect the father is really a response to his forbidden desire to destroy that father.⁹ But whether events at Shrewsbury simply demonstrate Hal's filial loyalty, or whether they allegorically anatomize the psychological struggle that precedes and permits such loyalty, the crucial fact is that Hal re-establishes his identity as a true son by defeating Hotspur. He does so, on the figurative level, by retreating with that patricidal alter ego to an earlier developmental phase. There they both struggle for Caesarean rebirth with their swords, both seeking glory, but seeking opposite sorts of glory. Separated from his father, rebelling, “this Hotspur, Mars in swathling clothes, / This infant warrior” (3.2.112-13), is doomed to stillbirth in his own blood with his noble name revoked. Hal, in contrast, reverses the usual dangerous pattern of Caesarean rebirth, since his rebirth entails reclaiming, not evading, his lineage:

I will redeem all this on Percy's head,
And in the closing of some glorious day
Be bold to tell you that I am your son,
When I will wear a garment all of blood,
And stain my favors in a bloody mask,
Which wash’d away shall scour my shame with it.

(3.2.132-37)

The king is right to take this as a complete answer to the indictment at hand. Hal has discovered a way to prove his royal merit while reconciling blood with garments, and the hereditary self with the adopted self. By drawing the battle back to that quasi-infantile stage, Hal can undo his status as an inferior changeling for “this same child of honor and renown, / This gallant Hotspur” (3.2.139-40). Now it is Hotspur who is abandoned by his father, and Hal who has recovered a healthy lineal identity. The son who was, in several senses, “degenerate,” is now, in the same senses, regenerate.

The same pair of intermingled confrontations—Henry against Hal, and Hal's loyalty against a representation of his rebelliousness—appears again in 2 Henry IV, during the crown-stealing sequence (4.5). Shakespeare's willingness to resurrect the doubts that were apparently put to rest by the end of Part One, and to retain so many elements of the first confrontation, suggests that he considered the psycho-symbolic situation very fruitful for exploring his theme. Again the Oedipal threat arises to punish Henry's usurpation, and again the suppression of that threat, by re-enlisting Hal in a healthy filial role, prepares for the martial victory that will affirm the new royal family's place on the throne.

Through most of Part Two, Hal's filial identity is badly in doubt. He is right, both on a personal and a symbolic level, to break Falstaff's head “for liking his father to a singing-man of Windsor” (2.1.89-90): the comparison implies that Henry is a eunuch,¹⁰ his procreative powers ruined like those of Shakespeare's other usurpers, and that Hal therefore cannot be his authentic son or a legitimate successor. In the next scene Hal is reminded that the world still thinks his ambitions and rebelliousness preclude his mourning his father's illness (2.2.39-57). This observation grows out of banter about the ways “kindreds are mightily strengthen’d” by illegitimate births, and leads into two discussions about the ambitious ways people distort their kinship. First, Poins mocks people who seize every conceivable occasion to mention some distant consanguinity with the royal family (2.2.110-18); then Hal mocks Poins for his rumored plan to marry Hal to Poins's sister (2.2.127-41). These ambitious claims to royal kinship are recognizable versions, and hence recognizably symptoms, of Henry's unlineal usurpation and the national disease it caused. Hal, in Eastcheap, is trying to cure that disease by actions precisely opposite to the ambitious claims: he evades his close kinship with Henry, and avoids close contact with the seat of royal power. Naturally his father is unable to recognize the corrective character of this conduct, and the misunderstanding over this paradox sets the stage for the crown-stealing confrontation.

As the scene begins, Henry's visage reveals the ambitious man's emptiness and mutability: “His eye is hollow, and he changes much” (4.5.6). Hal is greeted with the information that “The King your father is dispos’d to sleep,” but he soon reminds his father that sleep is forbidden to the ambitious, and reminds us why it is forbidden. Slumber in an unnaturally elevated position—whether literally, as a boy on a masthead (3.1.18-20; cf. Richard III, 3.4.99), or figuratively, as a man wrongfully on a throne—is both difficult and dangerous. As soon as Henry lets go, yields to that natural urge to relax, he also implicitly yields to his natural self, and the crown is taken from him. Hal describes the crown as “so troublesome a bedfellow” (4.5.22), as if it were a restless spouse in the king's bed, then steals that spouse from the king's pillow where it was supposed to remain until death did them part. Again the Oedipal overtones are clear, and again they serve a broader purpose than providing a fragmentary psychoanalysis of a character. The fact that Hal must steal his father's “bedfellow” in order to create his royal new self is the most incisive condemnation of his self-promoting impulse.¹¹

Henry's response when he awakens sharpens our awareness of an Oedipal pattern, adding to the hint of mother-son incest a clear accusation of patricidal impulses (4.5.63-79) and the suggestion that these impulses have been abetted by a subconsciously chosen error of recognition: “Is he so hasty that he doth suppose / My sleep my death?” (4.5.60-61). The patricidal implications would doubtless have been strengthened for much of the audience by the precedent of The Famous Victories of Henry V, in which Hal comes to the brink of actually murdering his father for the crown. Henry's first words to his returning son verify that the mechanisms described in Freud's theories about errors and about the Oedipal impulse are both at work here:

Hal.
I never thought to hear you speak again.
Henry.
Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought:
I stay too long by thee, I weary thee.
Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair
That thou wilt needs invest thee with my honors
Before thy hour be ripe? O foolish youth,
Thou seek’st the greatness that will overwhelm thee.

(4.5.91-97)

The wording of this reproach points to all the symptoms of overreaching in Shakespeare, and as Henry points out, Hal's overhasty seizure of the crown would indeed convert what could be a natural inheritance into another usurpation. Hal would, in taking the bedfellow-crown, be fathering his own wishes into substance; he would therefore, like his father, be a sort of ghost or void while seated in that royal place, as a secondary reading of line 94 suggests. He might eventually have to ask, as Richard III does after battling and seducing his way to the throne, “is the chair empty?” (4.4.469). Hal's acquisition of these honors under such circumstances would be, again like his father's, a mere investiture, an act of costuming; and it would preclude Hal's ever becoming fully “ripe” for the throne, since Shakespeare generally suggests that a life forcibly cut off from its source cannot be given vital growth again (see Othello, 5.2.13-15; King Lear, 4.2.34-36). Whether Shakespeare is merely using Henry's speech to remind us of these hazards, or whether he intends us to believe that Henry is at least subliminally aware and expressive of them, the cluster of suggestive wordings at such a crucial moment in the transfer of identities seems significant.

Hal, for his part, hastens to re-establish his position as a natural successor, combining his answer to the charge of ambition with an answer to the charge of patricidal intentions:

Accusing it, I put it on my head,
To try with it, as with an enemy
That had before my face murdered my father,
The quarrel of a true inheritor.

(4.5.165-68)

Again, a Freudian might argue that the son who imagines avenging his father's murder derives his pleasure from the premise of the fantasy, and adds the vengeance as a compensatory cover. But Henry is well satisfied with this answer, and asserts that Hal, because he is “a true inheritor,” will be spared the unrest and mere theatricality of his father's reign:

                                                  All these bold fears
Thou seest with peril I have answered;
For all my reign hath been but as a scene
Acting that argument. And now my death
Changes the mood, for what in me was purchas’d
Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort;
So thou the garland wear’st successively.

(4.5.195-201)

Even this formulation, of course, depicts kingship as a garment, rather than an immanence, to be inherited; and Hal enjoys only a partial immunity to the ambitious disease as a lineal heir to an unlineal throne. His very first lines as king indicate that, as in Macbeth (5.2.20-22), the giant robes of majesty hang incongruously on a successor of questionable legitimacy: “This new and gorgeous garment, majesty, / Sits not so easy on me as you think” (5.2.44-45). Even his heart and its inmost filial sorrow are tainted by the theatrical world his father's role as player-king created:

                                                                      Yet be sad, good brothers,
For by my faith it very well becomes you.
Sorrow so royally in you appears
That I will deeply put the fashion on
And wear it in my heart.

(5.2.49-53)

The difficulty in discerning what is sincere feeling here and what is acting alerts us to the fact that this world has only been partly redeemed from its artificialities, and that it will be virtually impossible to return it to a Golden Age. The nation's loss of innocence about identity, like the ambitious man's loss of self that often causes it in Shakespeare, is extremely difficult to reverse.

Perhaps the terrible difficulties that critics have in agreeing on who Hal really is provide a good measure of Shakespeare's success in portraying a world where moral distinctions and distinct identities have clouded simultaneously.¹² Is Hal entirely a cynical manipulator of his Eastcheap companions, or does he truly enjoy their kind of life and their version of friendship until the time comes when he must abandon them? Is he a ruthless king, or merely a king who must avoid thinking sentimentally about individuals so that he can be kind to his kingdom as a whole? Significantly, these questions about Hal's personality are intimately connected with questions about his legitimacy as a king (over France as well as England) and as a son (to Falstaff as well as Henry). The problems of kingship and kinship remain as deeply interwoven as they were in Richard III.

One index to the elusiveness of Hal's identity is the number of different names he is given; one indication of his peculiar genius is the way he converts this multiplicity, which shatters Richard II, Henry IV, and Macbeth, into a political advantage.¹³ From his famous first soliloquy onward (1 Henry IV, 1.2.195-217), Hal seems conscious of an opportunity that his father grasps only sporadically. Henry makes use of theatrical identity in wooing the common people (3.2.39-59) and in sending counterfeits into the field at Shrewsbury, but nearly all of Hal's actions are based on the theory that, if identity must be merely role-playing, he should make the most of it. He wins a new set of adherents to his reign by befriending “a leash of drawers” who “take it already upon their salvation, that though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am the king of courtesy, and tell me flatly I am no proud Jack like Falstaff, but a Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy (by the Lord, so they call me!)” (2.4.6-13). By letting them choose his names, he becomes their master. In France, he uses the name Harry le Roy for another strategic incursion into the lower ranks of his subjects.

In his confrontation with Hotspur, Hal's quest for an ideal name becomes deeply interwoven with his quest for a filial identity. Hal fights Hotspur to regain his good name—we may think of Edgar whose “name is lost” until he proves himself a loyal rather than a patricidal son (King Lear, 5.3.121)—and wins “proud titles” by defeating him (5.4.79). But the process of winning back those noble names involves not only a superficial act of loyalty to the father, but also a deep, quasi-allegorical acceptance of the father's role in forming Hal's selfhood. Hal's encounter with Hotspur—like the returning Henry's first encounter with Richard's lieutenants (Richard II, 2.3.69-75)—begins with a dispute over names:

Hotspur.
If I mistake not, thou art Harry Monmouth.
Hal.
Thou speak’st as if I would deny my name.
Hotspur.
My name is Harry Percy.
Hal.
Why then I see
A very valiant rebel of the name.
I am the Prince of Wales.

(5.4.59-63)

There is something archetypal in this combat, where “Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse, / Meet and ne’er part till one drop down a corse” (4.1.122-23): it recalls the symmetrical mythic combats, the desperately serious shadow-boxing between the hero and his Doppelgänger, in which the hero's survival is rewarded with a name.¹⁴ England cannot “brook a double reign,” as Hal here tells Hotspur, and a name cannot brook a double occupant; only one of them can be Harry the Fourth's royal heir. In seeking to win the “name in arms” that Hotspur acknowledges is at stake (5.4.70), Hal is actually trying to recapture the names Harry Monmouth and Prince of Wales—in other words, the identities as his father's son and his king's rightful heir. Both were nearly forfeit to Hotspur, as King Henry warned: Hal's relative dishonor left his political succession uncertain, and made his father wish,

                                                            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.

(1.1.86-90)

Hal's roles as bad prince and bad son, by jeopardizing his name, have nearly dislodged him from his political and familial patrimonies; to retrieve them he must retrieve the name along with his royal father's love, and become the Harry who succeeds a Harry (2 Henry IV, 5.2.48-49).

Shakespeare emphasizes that Hal's victory over Hotspur is essentially an incorporation rather than an obliteration of the vanquished man's identity. Hal promised to “make this northren youth exchange / His glorious deeds for my indignities” (3.2.145-46), and that is what he has done; Hotspur, like Henry IV later, must have “gone wild into his grave” (2 Henry IV, 5.2.123), because all Hal's faults went with him, while his glories revert to Hal. Those glories consist of all the noble public virtues, all the things Hal knows his society and his father admire and expect him to embrace—in Freudian terms, they are the superego. The argument by analogy, especially an anachronistic analogy, is very risky, but in this case it suggests some intriguing possibilities, some deep resonances to Shakespeare's study of a conflict over filial identity. Freud argues that the superego is shaped in the renunciation of the Oedipal desires, and consists essentially of the father's censorious will within the son's psyche; the construction of the superego is at base the son's incorporation of the father.¹⁵ Such a superego triumphs on several complementary levels at once when Hal promises to become the glorious Hotspur of the world and simultaneously vows not to rebel murderously against his father.

The standard psychoanalytic interpretation that makes Hotspur the embodiment of Hal's patricidal impulses therefore needs revision. Until Shrewsbury, only Shakespeare, and not Hal, could create such a displaced self; but the battle allows Hal to alienate his own rebellious spirit by both destroying and incorporating the opponent who is both rebel and noble son. When he retreats to a figuratively infantile level to compete with Hotspur for his filial identity, Hal may be retreating to a point prior to the Oedipal struggle and its shaping of the superego. In taking over Hotspur's glories while defending his father, what Hal really appropriates is a loyal filial posture. The fact that Hal can fully incorporate his father's nominal identity only by seizing Hotspur's glories corresponds strikingly to Freud's suggestion that the acquisition of a superego and the incorporation of the father are inseparable transactions.

In 1 Henry IV Hal must defeat Hotspur for possession of his names and the accompanying hereditary roles; to reclaim his hereditary identity in 2 Henry IV, Hal must similarly overcome his base rebellious impulses in order to reject the names Falstaff offers him. Hal accepts the many playful epithets his Eastcheap companions apply to him in place of his actual name, but only in the way that he accepts their clouding of his royal light in general: temporarily, strategically. A king's name, to twist Richard II's phrase, must not be twenty thousand names, and when Falstaff renews the epithets after the coronation, Hal rejects them and him simultaneously (5.5.41-47).

Several critics have observed that the repudiation of Falstaff is the repudiation of an alternative father.¹⁶ The names that Falstaff bestows on Hal compromise his transformation into Henry's heir. Rejecting them is a forceful and fitting way of rejecting Falstaff's claim to paternity, which was already rendered dubious by procreative powers so badly abused that Falstaff, not Henry, deserves to be slandered as a eunuch. He spends those powers on prostitutes and “begets” only “lies” (1 Henry IV, 2.4.225). Even the children that his pillow-stuffed whore claims to be carrying are mocked or willed to miscarriage from all sides (2 Henry IV, 5.4.7-15). He taints Hal with a degrading patrimony, claiming credit for making Hal somehow no longer consanguineous with his father or his brother, Prince John:

Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me, nor a man cannot make him laugh, but that’s no marvel, he drinks no wine … Hereof comes it that Prince Henry is valiant, for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile, and bare land, manur’d, husbanded, and till’d with excellent endeavor of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be, to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.

(2 Henry IV, 4.3.87-125)

We are invited to recognize that Falstaff does indeed have thousands of such sons, all of whom have belatedly become consanguineous with him. They are what they drink. He is the father of the appetitive id, and those who give themselves over to that force incorporate him and become his more-than-adopted children. With the filial id as with the filial superego, the father is in the son as the son was in the father.

Of course, in claiming that Hotspur and Falstaff correspond suggestively to Freud's superego and id, I do not mean to imply that Shakespeare set out to write a psychoanalytic allegory in the Henry IV plays. Several critics have become understandably testy about the tendency to read literature as if it were secretly a series of morality plays that have lain inert awaiting a Freudian key to the characters.¹⁷ But the history these plays describe was made by complex human minds, and the plays themselves were made by and for such minds. Characters who exist as words on a page do not have a superego and an id, but the historical person they are designed to evoke presumably did, and the reader or listener presumably does too. What would be absurd to attribute to Shakespeare's characters may nonetheless be relevant to the responses of his audience. As we watch Hal struggle with his alter egos, “we are made to experience a kind of psychomachia or internal civil war.”¹⁸

If Falstaff bears a strong resemblance to what we call the id, then we may legitimately ask what deep associations he might have aroused in Shakespeare's mind and might be capable, whether Shakespeare was conscious of it or not, of arousing in ours. Several of the play's eminent critics have flirted with this issue. Jonas Barish argues that “To banish plump Jack is to banish what is free and vital and pleasurable in life, as well as much that is selfish and unruly,” and that there is therefore an “element of self-rejection in the new king's action.”¹⁹ Franz Alexander calls Falstaff a “pleasure-seeking principle” that “the prince must master in himself.”²⁰ W. H. Auden makes it more explicit: “Once upon a time we were all Falstaffs: then we became social beings with superegos.”²¹ Most other readings of Falstaff's allegorical identity are compatible with the idea that he represents the id. E. M. W. Tillyard lists several such readings: Satan's assistant since the Fall, youthful vitality, incorrigibility, the fool, the adventurer, the Vice, the epitome of the Seven Deadly Sins, the lord of misrule, and “a perpetual and accepted human principle” resembling Orwell's “principle of man's perpetual revolt against both his moral self and the official forces of law and order” which we may love but must banish from within ourselves.²² If we accept the contention of J. Dover Wilson and Bernard Spivack that Falstaff is a version of the medieval Vice, we may still inquire what the medieval Vice was supposed to represent, and how it was intended to engage and rebalance the audience's psychic forces.²³ The combination of universality and elusiveness in Falstaff's character invites us to anachronism: we may call him the id if that is the name by which we most effectively understand the force he represents. When some new system for explaining the human psyche emerges, critics will doubtless find another name for Falstaff within it, and another reading of the Henry IV plays arising from it.

The identification of Falstaff with the id provides its most valuable insights at the moment when Hal banishes him, just as the identification of Hotspur with the superego became most valuable at the moment when Hal defeated him. Hal's visible act of loyalty to his father in defeating the rebel Hotspur complements the psychological transaction implicit in that conquest, namely the incorporation of the paternal superego. In the same way, Hal's actual banishment of Falstaff is an act of obedience to, and imitation of, his father, as its precedent in the tavern suggested (1 Henry IV, 2.4.481); simultaneously, on the level of the psychological allegory, Hal is banishing his own id, which urges him to resist the demands of his father and of his social role. The outward and the inward transactions in Hal's moments of crisis are equally real; they are absolutely necessary concomitants to each other under the circumstances. Shakespeare has again shaped a situation where the political and the psycho-symbolic imperatives coincide, giving us the impression of a deep moral truth in a morally resonant universe.

This striking coincidence also encourages us to accept one of the stranger implications in Shakespeare's treatment of ambition: the notion that refashioning one's identity constitutes an Oedipal crime. The theft of Hotspur's honor and the banishment of Falstaff establish Hal as a loyal son and a rightful heir; they represent at the same time his incorporation of the paternal superego and his willingness to suppress his id in accepting the hereditary royal role. The establishment of the superego, according to Freud, is necessary to intercept the Oedipal desires put forward by the boy's id, which might lead to castration or death if they were obeyed.²⁴ The correspondence in Hal between granting the superego power to repress the id, and accepting the hereditary identity, may suggest that an Oedipal desire has been forestalled in both cases, whether it is the literal desire to kill the father and sleep with the mother, or its figurative counterpart in the desire to suppress the self the father made and to let one's deepest wishes conceive a replacement, perhaps in some version of the original womb.

What interests me especially about the banishment of Falstaff, in terms of the psychological allegory, is Hal's use of the Lord Chief Justice as the enforcer of that edict. The notion that this corresponds to the superego's assignment of suppressing the id has been suggested, but its implications have not been fully explored.²⁵ In 1 Henry IV Hal faces the ego's usual problems in dealing with the id and the superego. He must conceal the criminal Falstaff from the sheriff in the tavern, worrying at the same time about the political rebellion taking place in the nation as a whole (2.4.500-45); this recalls Freud's description of the ego as “a poor creature owing service to three masters and consequently menaced by three dangers: from the external world, from the libido of the id, and from the severity of the super-ego.”²⁶ When Hal stands between the dead Hotspur and the supposedly dead Falstaff at Shrewsbury, he has apparently solved that ego's problems. Unfortunately for him, fortunately for admirers of 2 Henry IV, Falstaff simply rises back up from his latency, as the id tends to do, and the superego must be reinvigorated to deal with him. The Lord Chief Justice is essentially a reincarnation of the paternal conscience, and his confrontations with Falstaff early in 2 Henry IV resemble the evasions and encounters of the psyche's mighty opposites. Falstaff declares himself blind and deaf to the Justice's existence, and the Justice replies that Falstaff is indeed insensible or uncomprehending of any moral consideration (1.2.55-69). In their next encounter, the Justice tells Falstaff that “You should have been well on your way to York,” and that he should “Pay [Hostess Quickly] the debt you owe her, and unpay the villainy you have done with her” (2.1.67, 118-20). He tells Falstaff, in other words, to meet his unpleasant social obligations in war, money, and marriage—the standard message of the superego.

Falstaff expects to be fully indulged when Hal becomes king, and Henry IV fears that Hal's id will know no restraint once he acquires the power to indulge it:

For when his headstrong riot hath no curb,
When rage and hot blood are his counsellors,
When means and lavish manners meet together,
O, with what wings shall his affections fly
Towards fronting peril and oppos’d decay!

(4.4.62-66)

The metaphor portrays Hal as an unruly horse, which is a symbol of the id from Plato's Phaedrus up through Freud himself, and which here associates Hal with Phaethon, the Renaissance archetype of the disastrously disobedient son.²⁷ Falstaff's response, on hearing that Hal has gained such power, is “woe to my Lord Chief Justice” (5.3.138). But Hal refuses to accept either the name or the role of Falstaff's “sweet boy” (5.5.43); he turns instead to the father of the superego, or more accurately, the superego of his father, embodied in the Justice. We may not enjoy watching this choice, but no one says the suppression of instinctual desires is a pleasant, generous act, only that it becomes a necessary one at maturity. When Hal, feigning indignation, asks how the Lord Chief Justice earlier dared arrest and imprison “Th’ immediate heir of England,” the man replies that he dared as the one who gave the heritage:

I then did use the person of your father,
The image of his power lay then in me,
.....Your Highness pleased to forget my place,
The majesty and power of law and justice,
The image of the King whom I presented,
And strook me in the very seat of judgment;
Whereon (as an offender to your father)
I gave bold way to my authority.

(5.2.70-82)

The emphasis on the Oedipal overtones of Hal's deed could hardly be stronger; but the surrogate father against whom he has done violence also offers himself as a surrogate father to whom Hal may submissively return. The Lord Chief Justice warns quite clearly what the consequences might be of not submitting. In this confrontation as in all of Hal's dealings with his actual father, Shakespeare's cautionary pattern looms ominously. The son who disdains his father, the subject who disdains his sovereign, invite similarly violent disobedience from their own sons or subjects:

Be you contented, now you wear the garland,
To have a son set your decrees at nought?
.....Nay more, to spurn at your most royal image,
And mock your workings in a second body?
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 disdained;
And then imagine me taking your part.

(5.2.84-96)

This exchange, it seems to me, looks all the way back to the birth of civilization. This decisive moment in the re-formation of English society involves the same forces and choices that, according to Freud's furthest-reaching speculations, led to the formation of the first human society: we are watching the superego evolve its authority from the compelling need to prevent endless strife. According to Civilization and Its Discontents, the sons in the Primal Horde suffered an ambivalence much like Hal's, and with like consequences. Their hatred yielded guiltily to love, whether or not they actually committed the patricide they fantasized, when they saw their wish fulfilled by their father's death. That love “set up the super-ego by identification with the father; it gave that agency the father's power, as though as a punishment for the deed of aggression they had carried out against him, and it created the restrictions which were intended to prevent a repetition of the deed.”²⁸ The description of this transaction in Totem and Taboo bears an equally suggestive resemblance to Hal's submission to the Lord Chief Justice. As penance for a patricidal impulse, even one that was never acted on, the son bows in worship to the dead father's surrogate: “Totemic religion arose from the filial sense of guilt, in an attempt to allay that feeling and to appease the father by deferred obedience to him. … They revoked their deed by forbidding the killing of the totem, the substitute for their father.”²⁹ The superego originates from this totemic conversion, Freud argues, and always takes the form of a surrogate father,³⁰ as the Lord Chief Justice does here: Hal urges him to “be as a father to my youth,” then calls him simply “father” (5.2.118, 140).

Freud adds that we re-enact such a transaction in each of our lives: we form the superego by incorporating idealized versions of the self that have been lost as external objects—a dead rival, or, especially, a dead father.³¹ Hal announces:

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.

(5.2.123-26)

This is an unnatural sort of succession, more the transmigration of a soul than the procreation of a body; but as at Hotspur's death, Hal becomes ideally filial by absorbing the ideal father in his superego. The opportunistic revival of the appetitive impulses embodied by Falstaff has, as I suggested, compelled a reincarnation of the conscience to cope with those impulses. The best part of Henry lives on in his repressive actions, which the Lord Chief Justice both symbolizes and performs; this new father becomes a part of the royal Hal, becomes the new king's censorious agent against Falstaff's pleas, the id's pleas, for special consideration. “The first requisite of civilization,” Freud writes, “is that of justice—that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of an individual.”³² The laws of England are not at Falstaff's commandment, as he claims (5.3.136-37), because Hal has installed a new father within his own sovereignty. Such a substitution is possible, however, here as in Freud's analysis, only when the threatening real father is dead, and a surrogate, understood as protective rather than repressive, has taken his place by the son's own will. The Lord Chief Justice says he will now protect Hal (5.2.96), rather than restrain him on behalf of the previous royal father; the same shift occurs from the repressive father in the horde to the protective totem-animal that takes his place, a shift on which Freud comments extensively.

This intricate correspondence between Hal's psychological events and his nation's political events helps to justify the notion that both correspond to the events of human society as a whole. The psychomachia allows Hal's struggle to resemble the struggle of every human mind; its political counterpart may therefore allow us to generalize to the struggle of every human society. Freud argues repeatedly that the individual psyche relives metaphorically the experience of the sons in the Primal Horde, as if phylogeny were recapitulating ontogeny in psychological development, as it was once supposed to do in physical development.³³ Societies established throughout history, he also argues, have all experienced their own versions of the Primal Horde's formative trauma.³⁴ Nor is the notion wholly anachronistic. In medieval morality plays, the central figure in psychomachia of the sort Hal clearly undergoes was Humanam Genus; “Mankynde” is the name of an entire species. Shakespeare himself, in the Prologue to Henry V, asks us to “Into a thousand parts divide one man,” and freely to jump

                                                            o’er times,
Turning th’ accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history.

(lines 24, 29-32)

At the end of 2 Henry IV, Shakespeare has already tacitly requested admission as such a Chorus.

What the Lord Chief Justice offers to Hal is precisely what the institutionalization of the superego offered to the liberated sons in Freud's Primal Horde: prophylaxis against an eternal cycle of rebellion. Without a surrender of the id to the totemic father-surrogate, the result in virtually any society would be “an ever-recurring violent succession to the solitary paternal tyrant, by sons whose patricidal hands were so soon again clenched in fratricidal strife.”³⁵ The only solution is a law, embodied in the totemic father-surrogate, that distributes rights fairly among the brothers and becomes internalized by each of them as the superego; both this creation of the surrogate, and its internalization, are clearly outlined in Hal's submission to the Justice who promises to end rebellion by even-handedness. Hal has learned the bitter lesson of his father's usurpation, which loosed “this Hydra son of war” not only by the violent precedent it set, but also by Henry's refusal to share the royal privileges among those who helped him overthrow the previous tyrant (2 Henry IV, 4.2.35-40). The Percies resemble the younger brothers in the Primal Horde, who, having assisted in killing the repressive father, find they have no choice (and no qualms) about attacking the repressive new father-figure as well. The dying Henry IV seems to recognize the problem, urging Hal's favorite brother Thomas to nurture their affection so that “noble offices thou mayst effect / Of mediation, after I am dead, / Between his greatness and thy other brethren,” and thereby provide, as if he were an Anglo-Saxon ring-giver,

A hoop of gold to bind thy brothers in,
That the united vessel of their blood,
Mingled with venom of suggestion
(As, force perforce, the age will pour it in),
Shall never leak.

(4.4.19-47)

Three scenes later, when Hal actually succeeds his father, his first words to his brothers are a defense against this danger: he encourages them to continue in their communal mourning for the dead father, but assures them that “Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds,” that he will not be like the man who murdered all his brothers when he took power (5.2.46-50). Instead, he has taken into himself the protective (and therefore protected) qualities of the totemic father whom the brothers now mourn and reverence unitedly. For England, as (Freud argues) for societies in all times and places, this is the only way to break the violent cycle. Shakespeare has again grounded his English history in the history of all human societies.

Hal thus becomes a sort of St. George, or perhaps a sort of Beowulf, defending England against the monster of fratricide that his predecessors have awakened, whether that primal dragon takes the name of Hydra or Amurath or Cain. Bullingbrook first appears before Richard II to avenge the spilt blood of the Duke of Gloucester, “Which blood, like sacrificing Abel's, cries, / Even from the tongueless caverns of the earth, / To me for justice and rough chastisement” (1.1.98-106). The lurking accusation, apparently well founded, is that Richard (through Mowbray) played the role of Cain against his kinsman; this accusation starts in motion the horrible fratricidal struggle that dominates both of Shakespeare's tetralogies. Perhaps the worst thing about this moral ailment is that it is contagious, and that it is paradoxically congenital to any unlineal inheritance of the throne. When Henry completes the promised vengeance by an indirect murder of his own, he desperately tries to displace his primal culpability onto his agent Exton, whom he sends to wander through the dark world “With Cain” (5.6.43). But the circle cannot so easily be broken. Henry must war with Northumberland, his son Hal with Northumberland's son Hotspur, and when the word of Hotspur's death arrives, Northumberland states the danger only too plainly in bitterly endorsing it:

But let one spirit of the first-born Cain
Reign in all bosoms, that each heart being set
On bloody courses, the rude scene may end,
And darkness be the burier of the dead!

(2 Henry IV, 1.1.157-60)³⁶

The crime that “hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,” in the Henry IV plays as in Hamlet (3.3.37), combines patricide, fratricide, and usurpation, in an invitation to endless bloodshed. The same sort of conflation appears in Gorboduc, and in the Elizabethan “Homily against Disobedience and wilful Rebellion,” which warns that insurrection can only lead “the brother to seek and often to work the death of his brother, the son of the father.”³⁷ Half a century after Shakespeare wrote the Henry IV plays, Thomas Hobbes expressed similar fears in terms that anticipate Freud's interpretation of the primal murder.³⁸ So the danger Freud perceived was at least partly visible to Shakespeare's contemporaries, and therefore a plausible subject for Shakespeare's stage.

In forbidding Falstaff (and therefore his own id) from using royal power to gratify his appetites at the expense of others, Hal is reenacting society's first triumph over the force that threatened to destroy it, and renewing English society's will to resist that force. It is natural enough, given the respective occupations of Falstaff and the Lord Chief Justice and the relations between the two men, that accepting one as a surrogate father would entail excluding the other; but that natural situation carries a sharp allegorical import. On a realistic level, Hal's suppression of his own unruly impulses allows him to accept the Lord Chief Justice, and that acceptance leads to the rejection of Falstaff. On the level of the psychomachia, the rejection of Falstaff is merely the acting-out of the suppression of the id that we have seen moments earlier in the acceptance of the Justice. We are on shifting levels of allegory that disguise themselves as chronological sequence, as for example when the Redcrosse Knight's battle with Error is essentially an acting-out of a battle he has already fought in traveling through the Wood of Error with Una to reach that dragon, or when Christian and his companions fall into the net of Flatterer only after being coaxed out of the rightful path by flattery and led some distance, in The Pilgrim's Progress.³⁹ Hal's embrace of the Justice and his casting-out of Falstaff can be viewed as a single psychological moment. Time yields to allegory in that archetypal situation, even as that moment in the history of English society becomes suddenly synchronous with the formative moment of all human societies.

The psychomachia lends metaphorical richness to Hal's comparison of his experience of Falstaff to the experience of a wicked dream, in which the appetites of the id run rampant. The self-transformation Hal claims to have accomplished in the rejection speech becomes a slightly presumptuous exclusion of one side of his human heritage, one half of his divided father-figure. The speech shows clear traces of the self-alienation and the wakefulness that characterize the ambitious syndrome, but this is an alienation only from the id, and an awakening only from the dreams of the id:

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.
.....Reply not to me with a fool-born jest,
Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots.

(5.5.49-62)

The precedents of this announcement are not promising: other Shakespearean characters who use such phrases are unhealthily at war with their own natures and with nature itself. Richard III asks Queen Elizabeth to “Plead what I will be, not what I have been; / Not my deserts, but what I will deserve” (4.4.414-15); Richard II struggles to “forget what I have been! / Or not remember what I must be now!” (3.3.138-39). Hal's proclamation may even anticipate Iago's “I am not what I am” (1.1.65). From these moments through his last plays, Shakespeare persistently asks whether we can leave a degrading but natural part of ourselves behind, kill the heart of its father, without inviting a devastating nemesis. He refuses to adopt the notion, offered by most of his sources, that Hal simply underwent a miraculous transformation at his coronation; the problems of identity are too important and too complex for him to accept such an evasion.⁴⁰ The psychomachia invites us to recognize Hal's self-askesis, his amputation of the facets of his identity that do not fit with his royal role. What I am raising again, from a different perspective, is the vexed question of whether Hal's humanity survives the task of assuming a kingship that is only partly lineal, only partly legitimate in its birth.

If Richard II ends with Henry being brought “Thy buried fear” (5.6.41), 2 Henry IV ends with Hal confronting his buried id; and both cases invite our fear that the triumph may prove Pyrrhic, that the king may have buried an essential part of himself in burying his supposed enemy and assuming the crown. Hal's manipulation of his former companions and his wording of grief for his father seem to lack human grace, and may betoken a lack of human feeling. But this apparent heartlessness, and his bloodless mode of inheritance, unattractive and unhealthy as they may be, represent a plausible way for Hal to fulfill his role as the nemesis generated by Henry's violations, without incurring a similar nemesis of his own. Shakespeare and Hal virtually conspire to find an escape from the vicious cycle of Oedipal justice. Hal's political strategy of imitating the sun by hiding his glory temporarily in Eastcheap corresponds, in timing and symbolic form, to the psychological strategy whereby he merely imitates the rebellious son. He plays the disobedient and potentially patricidal part long enough to punish his father and fulfill the general expectation, meanwhile retaining an identity as a temporarily loyal son to Falstaff, against whom he can later carry out the patricidal violence that Shakespeare's pattern insists he must have inherited. Falstaff, like Richard III, becomes a scapegoat in his dramatic creator's system of poetic justice. Like the Lords of Misrule to whom he is often compared, Falstaff is placed in his exalted role only to allow an outlet for hostilities that would be dangerous to express against the actual sovereign. Then, at Henry's death, Hal reclaims his lineal virtues metempsychotically, with the Lord Chief Justice as the visible father of this immaculately conceived new royal self. Hal proves himself his father's natural son by coming to the royal identity as unnaturally as his father had, without committing his father's crimes against lineage in the process.

But if Hal's genius is his ability to live constantly in the familial and political roles his world demands of him, that is also his torment. The unity of his character must always be its capacity for multiplicity, including an unappealing talent (like his brother John's) for duplicity. His innermost self may be so difficult for critics to locate and define because it is equally elusive for Hal himself. The difference between Hal and other victims of the ambitious pattern is not that he retains a vital inner self—it is not clear that he does—but rather that his theatrical self is hereditary, and that he has the sprezzatura, the art of disguising his artfulness, to make it viable. To inherit his father's role as king, as Henry had warned him (1 Henry IV, 3.2.46-59), he must inherit first his father's theatrical use of his “person,” the arm's-length manipulation of the self. Hal learns this lesson and betters the instruction.

Notes

1. The analogy between births such as Glendower's and Tamburlaine's, and eruptions of trapped air, recalls Lucan's description of Julius Caesar's martial energies: “As lightning by the wind forc’d from a cloud / Breakes through the wounded aire with thunder loud.” James M. Swan, “History, Pastoral, and Desire: A Psychoanalytic Study of English Renaissance Literature and Society” (Ph.D. diss. Stanford University, 1974), pp. 300-302, has interpreted this passage as the source for images of self-induced Caesarean birth in Philemon Holland's Historie of the World (translated from Pliny in 1601) and in Marvell's “The Unfortunate Lover”; he also confirms my longstanding suspicion that the much-debated lines 13-24 of Marvell's “Horatian Ode” allude to a similar action, complete with a pun on Caesar's name. See also C. A. Patrides, “‘Till Prepared for Longer Flight,”’ in Approaches to Marvell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 35.

2. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part One, in The Complete Plays of Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. B. Steane (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1969), 1.2.49-51.

3. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, in Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). For the impregnating power of Jove's lightning, see Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. Thomas North (1579), ed. W. E. Henley (London, 1895), IV, 299, 330-331; here again such a conception generates a suggestively Oedipal hero.

4. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis, Ind.: Odyssey-Bobbs Merrill, 1962); subsequent citations are from this edition.

5. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1950), pp. 142-144. In chapter 6 of his Violence and the Sacred, Girard examines the Hydra-like threat presented by twins or doubles, which raise the danger of fraternal rivalry over legacies and even identity.

6. Norman Sanders, “The True Prince and the False Thief: Prince Hal and the Shift of Identity,” Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977), 30, remarks on the propriety of this resemblance.

7. Ronald Berman, “The Nature of Guilt in the Henry IV Plays,” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965), 27, discusses Henry's use of disguise to gain the throne. See also Righter, Shakespeare and Idea of Play, pp. 126-127.

8. Ernst Kris, “Prince Hal's Conflict,” in Faber, Design Within, p. 395.

9. Dreams of saving the father from an assailant, however one wishes to interpret them, are apparently common among young men. Freud, in Totem and Taboo (p. 72), speculates about a mechanism whereby “the original wish that the loved person may die is replaced by a fear that he may die. So that when the neurosis appears to be so tenderly altruistic, it is merely compensating for an underlying contrary attitude of brutal egoism.”

10. Derek Traversi, Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 125.

11. The parallel is of course imperfect: marrying one's mother does not become appropriate at one's father's death, as inheriting his title might. John W. Blanpied, “‘Unfathered heirs and loathly births of nature’: Bringing History to Crisis in 2 Henry IV,” English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975), 228-229, discusses the displacement of the parricide into the crown; Freud argues that the Oedipal impulse is often displaced into the mother, who is here equated with the crown.

12. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. 33-62, argues eloquently and convincingly that our ambivalence toward Hal is not only permissible, it is essential to understanding Shakespeare's sort of meaning.

13. Warren J. Macisaac, “‘A Commodity of Good Names’ in the Henry IV Plays,” Shakespeare Quarterly 29 (1978), 417-419, comments on the meaningful modulations of Hal's name.

14. George Steiner, in a conversation in 1978, reported finding such stories in many mythologies, stories of a hero battling through the night against a Doppelgänger, and receiving a name from him in the morning.

15. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere, rev. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1962), pp. 21-29; in Totem and Taboo, this incorporation of the father takes the literal form of a ritual meal in which the patricidal sons consume the father or his totem-surrogate as part of a penitential renunciation of their common deed (p. 142). See similarly Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 76. An interesting sidelight here is Jacques Lacan's theory that the Oedipal conflict resides essentially in a boy's relation to the name (nom, with a pun on non) of the father; see Monique David-Menard, “Lacanians Against Lacan,” trans. Brian Massumi, in Social Text (Fall 1982), p. 90.

16. Kris, “Prince Hal,” in Faber, Design Within, p. 399, is an early example; see also Faber, pp. 421-422.

17. Meredith Skura, The Literary Use of the Psychoanalytic Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 16, cites several such objections.

18. Edward Pechter, “Falsifying Men's Hopes: The Ending of 1 Henry IV,” Modern Language Quarterly 41 (1980), 216.

19. Jonas Barish, “The Turning Away of Prince Hal,” Shakespeare Studies 1 (1965), 15 and 10.

20. Franz Alexander, “A Note on Falstaff,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 (1933), 592-606; cited by Barish, Shakespeare Studies 1:16 n. 5.

21. W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (New York: Random House, 1948; rpt. 1962), p. 195.

22. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, pp. 285-291; the quotations are from p. 289. S. C. Sen Gupta, Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 127, calls Falstaff “a symbol of the unrepressed instincts of humanity, which thirst for fulfillment, rebel against repression”; cited by Sidney Shanker, Shakespeare and the Uses of Ideology, Studies in English Literature, vol. 105 (The Hague: Mouton, 1975), p. 65 n. 19. We may add to Tillyard's list the figure of the picaro, cited as an element of Falstaff by H. B. Rothschild Jr., “Falstaff and the Picaresque Tradition,” Modern Language Review 68 (1972), 14-21.

23. J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (New York: Macmillan, 1944), pp. 18-28; Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 87-91.

24. Freud, Ego and Id, p. 26, is one of many statements of this theory.

25. Skura, Literary Use, p. 36, mentions “the obvious psychomachia in the triple world of Henry IV, Part Two, where Hal has to choose between the id (Falstaff) and the superego (the Lord Chief Justice).” Danby, Doctrine of Nature, p. 95, asserts that “In the rejection scene Hal and my Lord Chief Justice stand for Authority; Falstaff is Appetite.” Traversi, Richard II to Henry V, p. 108, sees Hal in 2 Henry IV as “engaged in the more arduous and sober pursuit of self-conquest, externally manifested in his submission to the Lord Chief-Justice”; but on p. 158 he doubts that the Justice is “a sufficient counterpart to the ‘riot’ incarnated in Falstaff.”

26. Freud, Ego and Id, p. 46.

27. Sigmund Freud, “The Anatomy of the Mental Personality,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. W. J. H. Sprott (New York: Norton, 1933), p. 108.

28. Freud, Civilization, p. 79. For the sufficiency of a fantasy patricide, see Totem, p. 160, and “Moses and Monotheism” in the Standard Edition of Freud's Works, trans. James Strachey, XXIII (London: Hogarth, 1964), 87.

29. Freud, Totem, p. 145 and p. 143.

30. Freud, Ego and Id, p. 28 and p. 38.

31. Freud, Ego and Id, pp. 18-21; see also p. 44, and his “Mourning and Melancholia,” passim, in Works, XIV (London: Hogarth, 1957); see also Hans Loewald, Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 270-271.

32. Freud, Civilization, p. 42.

33. Ibid., p. 44: “At this point we cannot fail to be struck by the similarity between the process of civilization and the libidinal development of the individual,” and goes on, pp. 44-45, to suggest “that the development of civilization is a special process, comparable to the normal maturation of the individual.” Further, “The analogy between the process of civilization and the path of individual development may be extended … The super-ego of an epoch of civilization has an origin similar to that of an individual” (p. 88). However, we must also heed Freud's warning, on p. 91, that “we are only dealing with analogies and that it is dangerous, not only with men but also with concepts, to tear them from the sphere in which they have originated and been evolved.”

34. Freud, “The Group and the Primal Horde,” in Works, XVIII (London: Hogarth, 1955) 123.

35. J. J. Atkinson, Primal Law (London, 1903), p. 228; quoted by Freud, Totem, p. 142 n. 1, as the characteristic problem that the totemic law must solve. See also Freud's “Postscript” in Works, XVIII, 135, on the necessity of this fraternal pact as a preventative to civil war.

36. For another perspective on these Cain allusions, see Berman, in Shakespeare Studies 1:20.

37. Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex, Regents Renaissance Drama Series, ed. Irby B. Cauthen, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 2.1.172-75, 5.2.212-14, and passim, shows this combination of crimes plunging the nation out of civilization and into a welter of bloodshed. Intriguingly, these themes are combined here, as they are in Shakespeare, with occasional suggestions of unnatural birth and the dangers of a usurper's sleep: see 4.1.65-75 and 4.2.181-90. The Homily is quoted by Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 70.

38. In Leviathan, part I, chapter 13, Hobbes, discusses the difficulty of holding any sort of sovereign privileges in a world where “the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himself.” This parallels Freud's observation that the brothers, though individually weaker, manage to overthrow the father and seize his privileges by conspiring together. A few paragraphs later Hobbes points out the same danger that Freud saw arising from such a conspiracy. In the absence of the father, or a just totemic law that takes his place, the brothers will inevitably continue to battle each other to their deaths: “Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war, as is of every man, against every man.”

39. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, I.i; John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1965), pp. 172-173.

40. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, p. 305, makes note of this deviation from Walsingham and the Famous Victories of Henry V.