SOURCE: “Reforming Prince Hal: The Sovereign Inheritor in 2 Henry IV,” in Renaissance Drama, Vol. 21, 1990, pp. 225-42.

[In the following essay, Crewe disputes critical thinking that denies substantive reformation in Prince Hal's character. Instead, Crewe proposes, the subject of reform is continuously revisited in both parts of Henry IV, making it difficult to define successful reformation in the political context of the plays.]

The “matter of Hal's redemption,” as A. R. Humphreys, the Arden editor of 2 Henry IV, calls it, may now seem too stale or tainted for further consideration.¹ It has certainly been discussed at length, and to go on talking about it now is to risk the charge of reviving the ideological discourse of the centered, sovereign, masculine subject. Resisting this possibility is in fact one imperative of a developing critique in Shakespeare studies, the stakes of which are declared to be high.² This risk aside, the notion of Hal's reform may still seem question-begging. The most influential current arguments deny that there is any substantive reform of Prince Hal's character. These are the arguments, associated mainly with Stephen Greenblatt, which insist on Hal's role-playing, and hence on the theatricality of his madcap character and of the metamorphosis he effects in 1 Henry IV.³

Instead of confronting these arguments directly, I shall simply point out that, for better or worse, their privileged text is 1, not 2, Henry IV.⁴ The definitiveness of this theatrical reading of Prince Hal, based on 1 Henry IV, is implicitly challenged by 2 Henry IV, and then again by Henry V. In each of these plays the matter of Prince Hal's reform is reinvestigated, while the reform itself is reattempted, either by Hal in his own person or—interpretively—by others on his behalf.⁵ Yet the repetition of the reform-attempt begins to call for its own accounting. Its apparent compulsiveness (or sociopolitical compulsoriness) implies that a good deal is invested in it, not just by Hal, but by those in the plays who expect it of him—and then also by Shakespeare, by subsequent interpreters, and perhaps by a political imperative of “reform” that Shakespeare receives and transmits. At the same time, the sheer fact of repetition makes it increasingly difficult to imagine in what successful reform would consist.

In fact, 2 Henry IV confronts us with just those issues. As already noted by the Arden editor, the play proceeds as if the reformation effected (or enacted) by Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV had never happened. In his own eyes, in his father's eyes, and evidently in the eyes of the world, Prince Hal is still the unreformed scapegrace prince.⁶ This seemingly burdened prince keeps anticipating—or is it desperately resisting?—his own reform right up to the moment of his father's death:

O, let me in my present wildness die,
And never live to show th’incredulous world
The noble change that I have purposed!

(4.5.152-54)

What is implied by such deferral, resistance or incapacity? What is at stake in reform? What is to be understood by the noble change Hal claims to purpose—and with which he is credited by his father at the moment in which the crown changes hands?⁷

These questions will lead on to further questions if, as I believe, 2 Henry IV reveals a deepening Shakespearean preoccupation with mechanisms of “legitimate” change and succession, not just in the historical narrative of the Henry plays, but at every level including that of his own textual composition.⁸ What I suggest, in effect, is that the fluid, somewhat facile, theatrical and/or metamorphic dynamics of reform invoked in 1 Henry IV, enabling Hal as “Renaissance prince” to effect his own spectacular transformation at Shrewsbury, come into question in 2 Henry IV. On one hand, mysterious resistances to reform surface in the latter play, while on the other hand the ever-questionable attainment of reform is staged in such a way as to pose more fundamentally than in 1 Henry IV the question of Hal's legitimizing transformation: in what does it consist, or how, faute de mieux, is it managed? While no simple counter-model to that of spectacular metamorphosis necessarily emerges, 2 Henry IV reopens the question of change-as-reformation; in doing so, it calls upon us to discover new interpretive resources or at least adapt existing ones to deal with the important as well as time-honored question of this reform.

To begin with a sidelong glance at some interpretive leads that I shall not pursue, it could be argued that the inconclusive repetition of Hal's reform in 2 Henry IV skeptically exposes the emptiness or unthinkability of the historical reform-scripts Shakespeare inherits, or even of the Prince Hal character he inherits from earlier texts. Enough Pyrrhonism is in the air Shakespeare breathes—and in the Rumor prologue to 2 Henry IV—for this to be entirely possible. Shakespeare's apparent derealization of reform in 2 Henry IV could also be an effect of its displacement. The failure of “reform” to materialize where one is looking for it, for example in the life of Prince Hal, does not mean that it simply fails to materialize. Indeed, Greenblatt implies that a displacement of reform is effected in the Henry plays. Prince Hal's onstage reform may be empty in the sense of being merely played, yet “reforming” Prince Hal also becomes the one who, occupying the inside/outside position of the master-anthropologist in relation to the realm, will learn all its languages before substantively re-forming it as Henry V.⁹ The reform, in other words, will not be the interior one that Prince Hal undergoes as a character, but the one he effectively imposes as a centralizing, homogenizing, and nationalizing ruler, appropriating and transmuting all the wild, polyglot diversity of an unreformed Britain. Yet this critical displacement of reform, which is also a strong, conservative reclamation of it, again relies primarily on 1 Henry IV, and confirms the tendency in Shakespeare criticism to read 2 Henry IV as a straightforward narrative and logical extension (if not a diminished repetition) of 1 Henry IV. The surprising annulment, however, of the previous play's reform action in 2 Henry IV constitutes a virtual starting over. Implicit in this curious new beginning is the suggestion that the reform-mechanisms of 1 Henry IV, which Prince Hal has exploited with a certain opportunistic brilliance, are no longer effectual—or were so only in appearance. These seemingly discounted mechanisms of “reform” will include theatrical metamorphosis, in which Hal has certainly been adept, but also various equivalent forms of facile change or exchange troped in 1 Henry IV and consciously manipulated by Hal. It is he, after all, who appropriates and reverses his father's thesis that he is a misbegotten changeling while Hotspur is the real princely son. It is he who thinks that characters can be “reformed” by positional changes since they are not real in the first place. It is he, finally, who thinks that the commodity-form of character enables one to be exchanged for another (Harry Percy for Harry Monmouth), or enables a good composite character to be acquired through the appropriation of others' desirable properties, including, as Hotspur complains, their “stolen” youth. Yet if none of this has really worked, we may have to conclude that reform doesn’t mean change or exchange, nor does it mean the staged appearance of change. What then, to repeat the question, does or could it mean in 2 Henry IV? How are we to construe it?

Let us briefly recall some of the data concerning the young Henry V that Shakespeare incorporates and revises. Various chronicle accounts of the young Henry V, including near-contemporary ones, mention not just that the unconstrained prince was a reveller, but that he gathered a formidable popular following which included gentry and commoners. Most Tudor accounts of Henry V, including those in Elyot's Boke of the Gouernor (1531), Redmayne's Vita Henrici Quinti (1540), Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), and Stow's Annales (1592) mention Henry's having given the Chief Justice a box on the ear, but also mention punishments that include the young Henry's imprisonment and dismissal from the Privy Council (Humphreys xxix-xlii). The assault on the Chief Justice was, in other words, taken seriously as the political gesture of a popular usurper-manqué threatening to repeat his father's history. In The Famous Victories the young Henry behaves, as Humphreys puts it, like a hooligan, though this so-called hooliganism can also be read as a legitimate popular politics of festive (and theatrical) revolt. Recognizing here a difficulty of critical description, but perhaps also of dramatic characterization, we might say that Shakespeare produces a disconcertingly censored and/or agreeably refined version of the young Henry V of folklore, chronicle, and The Famous Victories of Henry V. At all events the Arden editor describes Hal's alleged madcap revelling in 1 Henry IV as harmless, and as essentially nonexistent in 2 Henry IV (Humphreys xli). This is a marked departure from the sources on Shakespeare's part—or, to put it differently, it is a conspicuous rewriting of the young Henry. Insofar as Shakespeare renders the wild prince surprisingly tame or inactive—and apparently less political—he may appear self-defeatingly to void the dramatic action of reform by removing in advance any real need or occasion for it.

Despite this apparent voiding, a persistent “need” for reform as well as an action supposedly effecting it continues to be inscribed in 2 Henry IV. As external or objective conditions giving rise to this need vanish, however, the need itself may increasingly seem to belong to an order of shared psychic compulsion rather than political or moral obligation. Indeed, the tame, passive, and increasingly ironized Prince Hal who finds himself subject to the widespread demand that he reform begins to resemble his chronological near-twin in the Shakespearean canon, namely Prince Hamlet, an “inward” protagonist oppressed and divided by a troublesome demand.

Such an interior shift, in which psychic (in)action is “substituted” for physical and/or overtly political action, is by no means unusual in Shakespeare. Yet it is not necessarily a shift from the political to the psychological. Rather, it is a move in which, characteristically, the psychic interior is politicized while the political exterior is correspondingly psychologized—that is, subjected to psychic “laws.”¹⁰ This crossing isn’t one in which the differentiated and prima facie opposed realms of the political and the psychological are simply deconstructed, but rather one in which a certain reciprocal reconstruction is effected between these orders without the difference between them ever being effaced. A proposal simply to shift from political to psychoanalytic reading of 2 Henry IV would accordingly be misplaced; what is required, I believe, is a reading that takes account of this putative crossover. Whether we want to speak in the final analysis of a psychologized politics or a politicized psychology, it is in such hybrid terms that the reform action of 2 Henry IV takes on whatever degree of intelligibility can be claimed for it. That, at least, is the proposition according to which I shall now proceed.¹¹

Whatever initial effect of unintelligibility may be produced by the reform-action(s) of the Henry plays does not arise from any shortage of models and contexts, historical and otherwise, for Prince Hal's reform. Well-recognized models, which are neither fully discrete nor fully successive, include those of a New Testament theology of the “new man,” of medieval psychomachia, of disciplinary humanist pedagogy, and even of ego-psychology. Coercive vectors of reform include those of Renaissance subject-formation, of censorship and “courtly” refinement in the public theater, and—broadly speaking—of what Norbert Elias has called the civilizing process.¹² The dominant model that has been applied to Hal's reform is also, however, one that renders it less rather than more intelligible: this is the model of the prodigal son.¹³ The prodigal-model is a tellingly failed one partly because it is not a narrative of primogeniture—of the scapegrace eldest son who is nevertheless to be the sovereign inheritor—but if anything a narrative somewhat subversive of that rigorously “unjust” principle. It is above all a model that acknowledges no parricidal impulse or dynamic in the process of reform and hence of “legitimate” or “authentic” succession. If anything, once again, that dynamic is forestalled, or displaced into sibling rivalry and reconciliation, in the prodigal son story. This refusal in any sense to license parricide is the condition on which patriarchal law and order properly so called can be maintained.

The action (or inaction) of reform in the Henry plays conspicuously does take account of the parricidal moment in the process of sovereign succession. So, implicitly, do the chronicles in presenting the young Henry as a usurper-manqué who raises his hand against the paternal lawgiver in the person of the Chief Justice. So does The Famous Victories, in which Hal's impatience for his father's death is an explicit motif, assimilated to his general wildness.¹⁴ This parricidal recognition is accompanied in 2 Henry IV by an increased emphasis, rising to the pitch of apocalyptic hysteria in a late speech by Henry IV, on Hal's “wildness” as covert murderous savagery rather than mere youthful excess. In the eyes of Henry, the ailing, threatened father, the son's wildness constitutes an unreformed interior that must always be socially dissimulated. Correspondingly, any innocuous revelling or even show of reform on the part of Prince Hal will be taken as dissimulation, the hidden content of which can be expected to emerge once he has succeeded to the throne. Thus Henry IV prophesies a wild apocalypse brought on by the unreformed, and perhaps unreformable, prince:

Harry the fifth is crown’d! Up, vanity!
Down, royal state! All you sage counsellors, hence!
And to the English court assemble now
From every region, apes of idleness!
Now, neighbour confines, purge you of your scum!
Have you a ruffian that will swear, drink, dance,
Revel the night, rob, murder, and commit
The oldest sins the newest kind of ways?
.....… the fifth Harry from curb’d licence plucks
The muzzle of restraint, and the wild dog
Shall flesh his tooth of every innocent.
.....O, thou wilt be a wilderness again,
Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!

(4.5.119-37)

Despite its prophetic hysteria, Henry's vision isn’t wholly inconsistent with the expanded potentiality given in 2 Henry IV to resistant wildness and the “need” to reform. Nor is it inconsistent with the threatened tragic declension of wildness from relatively harmless masquing and revelling in 1 Henry IV to savagery in 2 Henry IV. In other words, it is not just the issue of parricidal succession, but of a corresponding predatory “wildness” resistant to any transformation—a wildness anterior and interior to civility, to the process of lawful inheritance, and to legitimized political rule—that 2 Henry IV appears to take more seriously than does its predecessor. As this issue surfaces, the historical contingencies of Bolingbroke's “parricidal” usurpation and Hal's wildness may seem increasingly to belong to an order of necessity—in which case Henry IV's prophecy may also begin to sound like hysterical denial.

Insofar as succession is conceived to be wild in 2 Henry IV, and to be so of necessity, its dynamic may seem to originate or inhere in the male character or specifically male agency, not as a natural fact but as the consequence of what I have already referred to as a politicized psychology or psychologized politics of sovereign succession. It is this agency that is “missing” in 1 Henry IV, and from the reform that would, in effect, make Hal the inheritor in a theater-state. Under the “post-theatrical” regime of 2 Henry IV, the sovereign inheritor will be required to reform in order to legitimize himself, but will also (contradictorily) be required not to reform in order to succeed. Moreover, the paternal demand for reform will seem like an effort to forestall rather than facilitate succession by taming—emasculating—the sovereign inheritor. Under these circumstances, Hal's constant anticipation and deferral of reform become intelligible, as do his curious paralysis and avoidance of his father. Yet it is not through Prince Hal and his father alone that the difficulties or even contradictions of reform are precipitated out in the play. Falstaff is exultantly unreformed and unreformable; he and his cronies, fond recallers of their wild youth, help at least as much as do Prince Hal and his father to unpack reform in the play.

At one level, the Falstaff-Shallow-Silence episodes function as a wickedly satirical exposure of “original” male deficiency rather than wild excess. There is no need to belabor the point that the wild youth of Shallow and Silence is a nostalgically recalled condition, denied by their contemporary, Falstaff. Their wild youth as unreformed students belongs to a commonplace nostalgic script, beloved of the law-abiding elderly. No need either to belabor the point that, insofar as Falstaff has claims to be the real wild man of the play, he is a wild old man. If anything, wildness is more plausibly the social condition of the old man than the young one, and it is more plausibly a function of social denial, marginalization, and conscious impotence than of any supposedly untamed or untamable excess in the “true” male character. In this satirically reductive setting, the name of Fall-staff speaks him no less than do those of Shallow and Silence.

The genuinely funny satirical comedy, as distinct from festive heartiness, of the Falstaff-Shallow-Silence episodes may thus seem to contest the “wild” male character and its ontological violence of agency as well as the process of succession in which it is justifyingly subsumed. Yet the zero-point of final reduction is one at which we never quite arrive. Or, more accurately, the satirical vanishing-point of “wild” maleness turns out to be indistinguishable from its mythic origin, glimpsed in and through Falstaff's alleged recall of the young Shallow:

I do remember him at Clement's Inn, like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring. When a was naked, he was for all the world like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. A was so forlorn, that his dimensions to any thick sight were invisible; a was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey, and the whores called him mandrake.

(3.2.302-09)

What this strange “recall” produces is a subhuman or inhuman grotesque of indeterminable sex, or of no sex at all, like the bare, forked animal Lear thinks he sees on the heath. (The apparition here is fully in keeping with Elizabethan folklore regarding the mandrake root: it can look male, female, or androgynous; human or non-human.) Apparently open to any construction—or to no determinate one—the root-like apparition of the young Shallow may all too literally mock any aspiration to get to the root of the matter of reform in terms of gendered character. What we find at the end of the line is literally a root.

At the critical moment, however, the interposition of a “thick-sighted” observer relativizes and equivocates any ontological determination. Furthermore, while the stark-naked Shallow is seen from the start as a remainder—a cheese-paring—rather than a bodily totality, and while he is always and already subsumed in an order of figurative likeness—he is cheese-like, radish-like—this characterization through deficiency is tantamount to masculine recharacterization in terms of insatiable appetite rather than substance or “matter.” Appropriately, it is Falstaff who effects this particular recharacterization. He assimilates any male sexual deficiency to a psychic and bodily economy of “prior” starvation, while, as characteristically, he recalls Shallow in the guise of an edible vegetable—a garden radish—and thus as an object as well as subject of insatiable appetite. It is left to the whores to translate this garden radish (ironically?) into the exotic and erotically mythologized mandrake root. Exotic sexual desire is thus superinduced upon domestic appetite in a novel etiology of the ontologically violent male character. It is evidently in terms of this prior “deprivation” and consequent appetite that greedy Falstaff not only resists reform, but considers himself entitled (and driven) by “law of nature” (3.2.326) to make a regal mouthful of such dace as Shallow—or Prince Hal as inheritor of the kingdom. If it were to be suggested that Falstaff fails in his more extravagant ambitions because he is captive to a dysfunctional conception of ontological necessity and empowerment, it should be recalled that an intuition of the same drive may inform Henry IV's prophecy that Hal's reign will be one of unbridled appetite: “fleshing the tooth on every innocent.”

The point to be made here is that the “need” to reform as well as the sources of resistance to it remain curiously undetermined and overdetermined in 2 Henry IV without ceasing to be invoked as crucial to the play's action(s) and outcome(s). I have already suggested that this situation gains a certain intelligibility if it is critically linked to what I have called a psychologized politics or politicized psychology of masculine sovereignty; this linking does not constitute an explanation so much as an attempt to (re)situate the problem where it belongs. At a minimum, the “return” of an ontological violence seemingly displaced from 1 Henry IV is at issue in 2 Henry IV, as it is in Julius Caesar and Hamlet. That this attempt to resituate isn’t wholly misplaced is suggested by the terms in which Hal's “reform” and the royal succession are finally staged—or perhaps, faute de mieux, stage-managed. This event transpires in the complicated bedroom scene between Hal and his father.

Briefly to reprise, Prince Hal's reform in 1 Henry IV, climactically staged on the battlefield of Shrewsbury, may seem, in the extended perspective offered by 2 Henry IV, like a dress rehearsal. There, Prince Hal stages his own spectacular apotheosis for such wondering “choral” onlookers as Vernon, but also kills his rival-twin Hotspur in an act of virtual Brudermord, unbestraft in this case. (Falstaff finishes off the job but also decodes it, as the saying goes, by wounding Hotspur in the groin.) Hal then gives full credit for the deed to Falstaff in a way that conveniently masks the doer from most of those onstage if not from the audience. It is as if Henry IV sees through just this dissimulation of savagery; his deathlike sleep in 2 Henry IV accordingly seems like a device of entrapment designed to make Prince Hal show his murderous hand—as Henry believes Hal has done when he seizes the crown and tries it on.

Furthermore, as Henry IV approaches his end, he increasingly sees Prince Hal not just as the feral harbinger of universal wildness/wilderness (wild-boy as wolf-boy) but, in a totalizing projection of sovereign male appetite and desire, as the original totemic despot reborn: a savage “Amurath” rather than a gentle Harry. (Though this is not what Warwick understands to be happening, his observation that the Shakespearean Prince Hal is studying his companions to “gain the language” [4.4.69]—to engross all language?—is consistent with this dread.)¹⁵ As if confirming this anticipation, toward the end of the play as well as Henry's life, Hal is suddenly everywhere onstage in the guise of sibling-delegates including the notoriously “cold” Prince John; in Henry's view, however, he also threatens to consume those sibling-agents along with everyone else in the kingdom. This feared outcome is what Henry attempts to forestall by belatedly imploring his son Clarence to become Prince Hal's civilizing mediator while sentimentally fabricating a more humane (if still disturbingly “mixed”) character for Prince Hal:

For he is gracious, if he be observ’d,
He hath a tear for pity, and a hand
Open as day for melting charity:
Yet notwithstanding, being incens’d, he’s flint,
As humorous as winter, and as sudden
As flaws congealed in the spring of day.

(4.4.30-35)

These scarcely tractable anxieties, which threaten to bedevil any smooth or consensual transfer of power between a threatened father and a supposedly unreformable son, are, however, mitigated by a certain identification on Henry's part with Prince Hal: identification in the sense both of sympathetic recognition and recognition of likeness. Indeed, Henry's dread is also the projection of an unsatisfied appetite upon Prince Hal: specifically, an appetite for the power that he has desired but conspicuously failed to concentrate in himself during his troubled reign. The differences between himself and Prince Hal on which he keeps harping are thus undercut, even in his own mind, by the perception of likeness:

Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds,
And he, the noble image of my youth,
Is overspread with them.

(4.4.54-56)

This part of his conjoins with my disease,
And helps to end me.

(4.5.63-64)

It is partly Henry's recognition of likeness that allows a political settlement of the parricidal succession to transpire between him and Hal. It allows Henry to be reconciled to his own deep mortification, and to displacement by one who can be a surrogate-success as well as a rival. It allows Hal's reform to be effected in a mode of vertical rather than horizontal exchange, Harry for Harry again. It allows Henry's own putative hunger and wished-for engorgement to be glimpsed, even as it does Hal's putatively corresponding insatiable appetite:

How quickly nature falls into revolt
When gold becomes her object!
.....For this [fathers] have engrossed and pil’d up
The canker’d heaps of strange-achieved gold.

(4.5.65-71)

Finally, since the “wildness” to be reformed does not constitute a category of absolute difference, or definitively characterize anyone in particular, its putative form and location can be shifted around in the process of settlement.

Briefly, what this situation allows is that wildness in its various aspects as criminality, natural excess, inordinate appetite, and even fulminating disease can consensually be transferred from the scapegrace son to the father as original usurper, on one hand allowing it to be buried with the corpse and on the other permitting the instantly reformed son to become the legitimate heir. Hal can then ostentatiously place himself under the paternal law, embodied in the Chief Justice, and begin laying down the law himself. As soon as Henry “confesses,” the reforming and legitimating bargain is sealed:

For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth. It seem’d in me
But as an honour snatch’d with boist’rous hand.

(4.5.189-91)

The sole acknowledgment of this parricidal “boisterousness” will not only be in the past tense, but will occur in the moment in which the violent hand is being transferred for burial from son to father.

This relatively diplomatic transaction does, however, have a price. It is paid by neither party to the transaction, and the payment exacted is such as to suggest that the dynamics of the play do indeed belong to a psychologized politics or politicized psychology of specifically masculine sovereignty. In the complicated transfer we witness, the Oedipal scenario is conspicuously reconstructed as one of exclusively male agency, empowerment and succession. It is Prince Hal as inheritor who, in a state of sublime innocence or Machiavellian callousness, reads the Oedipal situation as one in which the woman is always and already displaced by the crown as substitute-object, which is to say as object substituted for her, but also as object constituted in her likeness:

Why doth the crown lie there upon his pillow,
Being so troublesome a bedfellow?
O polish’d perturbation! golden care!

(4.5.20-22)

Syntactically, as Hal presumably doesn’t register, it remains undetermined which bedfellow is troublesome to which, yet the woman has been displaced by the crown as the pursued and piously denied object of appetite, while the void figure of the feminine (res nulla) has been appropriated and transmuted into the substantial figure of masculine sovereignty.¹⁶ If this displacement and transmutation of the woman can’t be effected without a remainder of “feminine” meretriciousness or troublesomeness, that remainder can in turn be identified as the cause of any violent disturbance, not just in men but between them. Indeed, it enables the crown to be incriminated as the real parricidal agent, threatening and coming between generations of men, but also, once identified as the source of the trouble, facilitating their diplomatic reconciliation:

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

(4.5.165-68)

“The quarrel of a true inheritor”—the bad yet still seemingly “necessary” parricidal one—is realigned to become the good quarrel of the inheritor with the intermediate parricidal agent/object, while this object can in turn be reclaimed as the sullied/solid currency of a benign transaction between father and son. What is sacrificed to the settlement of parricidal succession is evidently the woman; what is appropriated for it is women's agency. Political Shakespeare with a vengeance.¹⁷

This version of reform as parricidal transfer and place-changing, in which the parricide is also backdated to Henry's usurpation of Richard II, is of course no more absolute or final than the theatrical metamorphosis enacted in 1 Henry IV. It is undone again in Henry V, while the brutal exclusionary reduction of the woman is “liberalized” inasmuch as Henry V's legitimation turns out to depend on the lawfulness of female inclusion in the royal line. Henry V must also eventually confront a French Catherine as potentially troublesome and usurping bedfellow, whose language he is far from having engrossed, and in relation to whom his provincial tongue seems disabled. Moreover, in the process of translation during the courtship, language is punningly “engrossed” again in the sense of being resexualized; this dirty talk isn’t Henry V's forté.¹⁸

Inconclusiveness notwithstanding, what I should like to suggest in conclusion is that our critical tendency to elide or “forget” 2 Henry IV in this tetralogy, at the same time critically and affectively privileging 1 Henry IV, is related to an apparent displacement of ontological violence and corresponding, agreeable theatrical facilitation in 1 Henry IV. This tendency to overlook 2 Henry IV is heightened by a certain critical tradition in which its disillusioning traits, including the waning, sickening, or fading in it of the bright stars of 1 Henry IV, are emphasized, as is the devaluation of the royal currency. Yet in addition to getting down to some Realpolitik glossed over in 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV marks the “return” of an ontological violence neither fully locatable nor fully erasable in the contexts of Shakespeare's production. It is the critique of such violence, which cannot be regarded as fully performed even if it is desired in our own political and professional contexts, that recalling 2 Henry IV facilitates.

Notes

1. By “matter” Humphreys means primarily the extensive chronicle materials on which Shakespeare draws in the Henry plays (as in the traditional phrase “the matter of Britain”), but the term resonates beyond that denotation (xix). His term “redemption” appropriately invokes the religious and morality-drama context(s) of Hal's putative betterment. My choice of the term “reform” emphasizes secular contexts, including that of a disciplinary, character-forming humanism. Mention of Hal's “reformation” will, however, recall the Protestant epoch in which the play was written. See also Dickinson 33-46.

2. This critique is widely implied in radical new historicism and/or feminism, partly in response to the reading of Prince Hal in Stephen Greenblatt's “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion.” Traditional readings subject to this critique would include all ego-psychological ones as well as C. L. Barber's festive-political reading, in which Prince Hal progressively manifests his “sovereign nature” (192-221).

3. “Invisible Bullets” is the locus classicus for this argument. It does envisage some changes in Prince Hal in 2 Henry IV, but not of the positive kind associated with self-improvement.

4. The theatrical reading depends partly on Hal's self-unmasking in the “I know you all” soliloquy in 1 Henry IV (1.1.192-214). The revisions effected in 2 Henry IV suggest that this speech embodies the young prince's fantasy of masterful knowledge as theatrical knowledge, soon to be dispelled.

5. Interpretively by various interested characters in the Henry plays, including the politic archbishop of Canterbury in Henry V, who finds that, at the moment of Henry IV's death, Hal's “wildness, mortified in him / Seem’d to die too … consideration like an angel came / And whipp’d th’ offending Adam out of him / Leaving his body as a paradise” (1.1.27-31). Quite soon, however, the clerics get down to postlapsarian business, which consists in making a preemptively large contribution to Henry's military budget.

6. This peculiarity is extensively discussed by Humphreys, who properly relates it to the problem of the relationship between 1 and 2 Henry IV. While questionably accepting that “redemptions” do occur in both plays, he concludes that “naturalistically speaking these twin-redemptions are an incoherence, [yet] dramatically and by folktale or morality canons they are acceptable” (xxviii). Humphreys concludes, moreover, that the two versions of Hal's “redemption” are radically incompatible: while the playful version in 1 Henry IV comes from Daniel and The Famous Victories, the serious, father's-deathbed version comes from Holinshed.

7. “Noble change” is a peculiarly resonant phrase. While the change effected in 1 Henry IV hardly merits the description “noble,” the phrase invokes such change in the field of the play's representation but also in contexts such as those of Elizabethan upward mobility, of disciplinary humanism, of ruling-class appropriation of popular culture and theater, and even of self-sacrificial assumption of the burden of kingship. It is understandable, then, that the process of noble change may seem at once bafflingly complex, compulsory, and subject to endless resistance. I shall deal with the question largely in terms of the play's representation rather than of its implied contexts.

8. Jonathan Goldberg's Writing Matter enables us to conceive of this particular displacement of the reform-action. It could be said that the action is displaced to the level of Shakespeare's “reforming” authorship and textual revision, to which considerations similar to those of Hal's reform may apply. Under this assumption, questions regarding Shakespeare's authorial “character” and the notoriously troublesome text of 2 Henry IV take on paramount importance. The process of “theatrical legitimation” that Timothy Murray sees being pursued by Jonson as author and editor is also, mutatis mutandis, pursued by Shakespeare.

9. The republication of Greenblatt's “Invisible Bullets” in Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England brings it under the purview of new categories of displacement, circulation, etc.

10. The apparent phenomenon of the interior shift generally results in a critical shift toward psychological (psychoanalytic) reading of Shakespeare. What can easily be overlooked is the simultaneous shift in the other direction in Shakespeare, such that the represented political world seems increasingly governed by psychological “laws.”

11. I take it that implicit recognition of psychologized politics and/or politicized psychology has been widespread during the past decade, notably in politically conscious Freudian (often feminist) criticism. This is the critical recognition which, without necessarily crystallizing into a fully coherent model, informs my discussion. An essay that importantly embodies this recognition with reference to Shakespeare is Jacqueline Rose, “Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure.”

12. The pertinence of courtesy literature and conduct books need hardly be insisted upon. Part of Hal's “reforming” consists in his “fashioning” (self-fashioning?) as a courtier and a gentleman. However, see Elias for the most sweeping contextualization of this process.

13. We have been taught to recognize the sophisticated refinement, allegorization, and economic transcription of the prodigal reform-model during the English sixteenth century by critics, notably including Helgerson and Hutson. Nonetheless, my point stands.

14. I don’t assume that “wildness” is mere code for parricide in the play; rather, parricide appears to inhere in a more diffuse wildness. It is around parricide, nevertheless, that diffuse wildness seems to become centripetally organized toward the end of the reform-action in 2 Henry IV. Harold Jenkins notes that the young Henry V is not just a historic figure but a folkloristic wild-boy, hence some of the “trickiness” of his reform in the Henry plays (Humphreys xxvi-xxvii). A pervasively invoked “wildness” in the Henry plays can sometimes be construed as that of the wild sign in an otherwise stable signifying system, or of the wild card—the joker—in a pack otherwise stably denominated. If Hal is the character most often associated with these forms of wildness, perhaps especially as the changeling-figure in 1 Henry IV, he is by no mean exclusively so. Part of the difficulty in staging any reform-action is the elusive, bound ary-crossing character of this “wildness”; however, the “solution” in 2 Henry IV depends on this mobility.

15. Here it is pertinent to recall that “engrossing” means writing in the sixteenth century—Shakespeare's all-engrossing mastery of the language clearly makes him a threatening figure for the paranoid or even just anxious interpreter.

16. Some of my locutions here are indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. It would appear that the transactions she identifies “between men” can occur vertically between father and son as well as horizontally between sibling-like rivals. See also Berger and Holland.

17. The atrocities ascribed to the Welshwomen at the beginning of 1 Henry IV include mutilation of men's corpses on the battlefield. Sure enough, this “unmanly” power will be appropriated and re-gendered by Falstaff-Hal in the killing of Hotspur. The falling-silent and disappearance of women in the course of the so-called Henriad (the English epic-manqué constructed by modern critics) is conspicuous.

18. Some of the oddity of Prince Hal's character comes from his overt sexual apathy idle Falstaffian talk of his sexual adventures notwithstanding. The repression of an indeterminate sexuality, which will include at least a homosexual component, is inevitably to be suspected. The word “wild” could be applied to homosexuality, though not exclusively to it as a sexual practice, in the sixteenth century (Bray 25-27).

Works Cited

Barber, C. L. “Rule and Misrule in Henry IV.” In his Shakespeare's Festive Comedy A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959. 192-221.

Berger, Harry, Jr. “Psychoanalyzing the Shakespearean Text: The First Three Scenes of the Henriad.” Parker and Hartman 210-29.

Bray, Alan. Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Men's Press, 1982.

Cohen, Walter, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare.” Howard and O’Connor 18-46.

Dickinson, Hugh. “The Reformation of Prince Hal.” Shakespeare Quarterly 12 (1961) 33-46.

Dollimore, Jonathan, and Alan Sinfield, eds. Political Shakespeare: New Essays In Cultural Materialism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Drakakis, John, ed. Alternative Shakespeares. London: Methuen, 1985.

Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: The Development of Manners. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Urizen, 1978.

Faber, M. D., ed. The Design Within: Psychoanalytic Approaches to Shakespeare. New York: Science House, 1970.

Goldberg, Jonathan. Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V.” Dollimore and Sinfield 18-47.

—. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988.

Helgerson, Richard. The Elizabethan Prodigals. Berkeley: U of California P, 1976.

Holland, Norman. “Introduction to Henry IV, Part 2.” Faber 411-28.

Howard, Jean E., and Marion F. O’Connor, eds. Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Humphreys, A. R. “Introduction.” 2 Henry IV. Shakespeare xi-xci.

Hutson, Lorna. Thomas Nashe in Context. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.

Murray, Timothy. Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius in Seventeenth-Century England and France. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Parker, Patricia, and Geoffrey Hartman, eds. Shakespeare and the Question of Theory. New York, Methuen, 1985.

Rose, Jacqueline. “Sexuality in the Reading of Shakespeare: Hamlet and Measure for Measure.” Drakakis 95-118.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Shakespeare, William. The Second Part of King Henry IV. Ed. A. R. Humphreys. The Arden Shakespeare. New York: Vintage, 1967.