SOURCE: “Uneasy Lies: Language and History in Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy,” in Henry the Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays, edited by David Bevington, Garland Publishing, 1986, 359-85.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1984, Macdonald traces the development and use of language in Shakespeare's history plays, focusing on Henry IV, Parts I and II,and examines the linguistic conventions that sustain and govern the vision of kingship as portrayed in these plays.]

There has always been uncertainty about what we call Shakespeare's “histories.” The genre (if it is a genre) seems inherently unstable under critical scrutiny, always threatening to become something else, to slide over into other generic modes about which there is firmer agreement, to become simply tragedy (Richard II) or comedy (1 Henry IV), or dramatic satire (2 Henry IV). Yet, with the possible exception of early work like The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare seems never to have been willing to accept the traditional genres quite as he found them, and the evidence of impurity, even in the lighthearted romantic comedies, is well known. We will never find in the Shakespearean canon the kind of generic purity that a more strictly classical temperament would consider indispensable.

Yet something does distinguish Shakespeare's histories, particularly the mature work of the second tetralogy here to be considered. I hope I will not be accused of tautology in saying that the “something” is a scrupulous concern for history, for by “history” I do not mean a narrative of events, the “story” of the past, but a concern with processes and the inner necessities of historical change, the mechanisms of transition, the deep and nearly invisible shifts in thinking and assumptions that form the basis of what we call in retrospect, and partly for interpretive convenience, “epochs.” History in this sense was, for Shakespeare, not a compilation of events (set down in the chronicles in apple-pie order), on which he could hang a series of brilliantly conceived (if fundamentally ahistorical) dramatic characters. It was, rather, an extra-personal—if not quite impersonal—phenomenon, playing itself out in different registers in the huge cast of characters that peoples the tetralogy. I am aware that it is not usual to credit Shakespeare with this kind of sophisticated historical understanding; indeed, it is only in our century that it has become usual to credit him with sophistication at all.¹ Yet I do so, for once we have abandoned the “native wood-notes wild” hypothesis, rich and complex vistas are open to us. Protests about over-reading often mask a nostalgia for a simple and “natural” Shakespeare, whose small Latin and less Greek are part of his charm. I believe that no reading which makes sense can fairly be called an over-reading.

Because I have said roughly what I mean by history, and because I will refer to “myths” in what follows, I had better say roughly what I mean by myths. I mean neither those colorful tales of gods and goddesses in ancient times, nor “archetypal” patterns in the plays themselves, but, quite simply, the stories men tell one another to achieve political order and consensus. Let me begin by proposing a theory, itself perhaps a myth of origins, which suggests why it is that men speak of kings as “anointed,” as deputies elected by the Lord, and what they hope to accomplish by speaking in this by no means inevitable fashion.

Say that the language of sacred kingship arises in response to a fundamental contradiction in the feudal system as Shakespeare understood it. That contradiction may be brought to the surface by wondering why a feudal system should have a king at all, for feudal society is marked by the formation of many centers of power, independent families with bands of retainers, each internally bound together by blood ties and comitatus loyalty. To speak of a centralized monarchy in a situation which yields, in effect, a number of private armies verges on paradox. I make no attempt to explain (for I really do not know) why it is that monarchies arise in the first place. Perhaps the explanation implicit in 1 Samuel.viii, that the presence of a common enemy leads a pluralistic tribal society to seek centralized leadership, is as good as any. My subject is not, in any case, the origin of monarchy, but the linguistic conventions that sustain it, the conventions that attempt to manage certain fundamental contradictions which threaten disruption.

It seems clear that in a feudal system the language of sacred kingship does not begin by naming those powers and perquisites that are naturally present in the person of the king and in the monarchic institution, but by naming precisely those that are not naturally present. The king is not called “God's anointed,” one does not speak of the divinity that hedges a king because the king really is supreme and untouchable, but because he is patently vulnerable, because in many ways his position is the shakiest one in the pluralistic feudal world. If there is something shrilly hysterical about Richard's manic swing from the extreme position that sees the king as inviolate and inviolable, to the equally extreme position that sees him as the quintessential victim (kings may be deposed, slain in war, poisoned by their wives, killed as they sleep—“all murthered,” says Richard), there is yet the force of insight in his extremity. And we remember that the phrase about the divinity that hedges a king comes from the fratricidal Claudius of Denmark, the most unanointed, so to speak, of Shakespearean monarchs. We may admire (some may even envy) the cool arrogance it must take for one in his position to use the phrase, but we will scarcely accept it from him without protest.

The vocabulary is thus deployed in an attempt to patch up a contradiction, to redress an imbalance, to achieve political consensus. As long as the achieved consensus remains virtually unanimous, as long as it is taught early on to the young, like the very language on which it depends for transmission, it can continue to masquerade, however uneasily, as a description of the nature of things. Thanks to an apparently incorrigible tendency of the human mind to confound culture and nature,² it will be understood not as a collective fabrication of the social order with discernible historical origins, but as a part of the metaphysical order handed down from on high at the creation.

But such consensuses are notoriously fragile. Any essentially secular and social construct, which has managed to get itself promoted to the status of the nature of things, so that it is viewed as the original creation of God and an expression of His will, is liable to be asked for its credentials, to prove that its origin lies in the mind of God, and not, as it seems to do as a matter of fact, in the minds of men. The initiative may well come from a child, who has as yet to master the language of the social order to the point where it is part of his unconscious stock-in-trade. In fact, as we shall see, it is more accurate to say that such a child has not yet allowed that language to master him. “The emperor has no clothes,” the candid child observes in Andersen's tale. He has not yet come under the sway of the bizarre notion that the emperor's word is as good as the fact; and, not being subject to this mastering assumption, he will not be surprised to learn that the insane project of appearing in public stark naked originated with an unscrupulous tailor in possession of a bright idea. In what follows, we will encounter the emperor in the slender person of King Richard II, the child in the more robust person of Henry Bullingbrook, and the tailor in the huge bulk of Jack Falstaff.

What follows also falls into three parts, corresponding roughly to the dialectical moments of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The first part ends with Richard, whose thesis has collided with the antithetical Bullingbrook and his fellow conspirators, including Hotspur. The second ends with Hotspur, who has now become the antithesis of an antithesis in that he is engaged in conspiracy against the very Lancastrian throne he has previously helped to establish. His veering about expresses what will happen to Bullingbrook as Henry IV, and it is on the complex figure of the new king, traversed by contradiction, yet attempting a reluctant and uneasy synthesis, that the third part comes to rest. The triadic structure of my argument thus seeks to reveal some unsuspected similarities among three heterogeneous and apparently ill-sorted figures, and to plot those figures as three points converging.

I

Briefly, what the emperor learns from the child and what Richard learns from Bullingbrook is that you don’t need any water at all (let alone all the water in the rough, rude sea) to wash the balm off an anointed king. The usurpation brings to awareness the essentially secular, fabricated character of the political order. The awareness arrives with the force of Platonic anamnesis, the unforgetting of what we knew all along; in contemporary terms it effects what Freud called the return of the repressed. Amidst the wreckage of the institution of sacred kingship, Richard must learn, somewhat in the manner of Molière's bourgeois gentleman, that he has actually been speaking prose all his life. His words have no privileged efficacy, certainly not the magical force that the old consensus seemed to confer upon them. Perhaps even more important, his power to silence others depends solely on their acquiescing in being silenced. Here is Thomas Mowbray responding to Richard's sentence of banishment:

A heavy sentence, my most sovereign liege,
And all unlook’d for from your Highness' mouth.
A dearer merit, not so deep a maim
As to be cast forth in the common air,
Have I deserved at your Highness' hands.
The language I have learnt these forty years,
My native English, now I must forgo,
And now my tongue's use is to me no more
Than an unstringed viol or a harp,
.....Within my mouth you have enjail’d my tongue,
Doubly portcullis’d with my teeth and lips, …

(I.iii.154-62, 166-67)³

These are the words of an old loyalist, assenting to the underlying assumption that the king's speech (his sentence in a number of senses) has force. But even in this apparently unproblematic, ritualistic tribute to the king's verbal efficacy, there lurk certain troubling hints of what has been repressed, and now fairly clamors for expression. For in saying that he deserves a better fate at Richard's hands, Mowbray must allude, whether he intends to or not, to his loyal silence concerning Richard's conniving in the murder of Thomas of Woodstock, a very real silence that precedes any ritualistic sentence of banishment and the merely metaphorical silence attendant upon it. Richard has “enjail’d” Mowbray's tongue in the perfectly ordinary sense that he has gotten him to promise to keep quiet about the murder of Woodstock. That Mowbray now abides by this promise is not the result of some mysterious power inhering in the words of the king, but the result of his loyalty and sense of personal honor. And it is precisely on this prior silence, the product of the give and take of political conspiracy, that such power as Richard has very materially rests.

It is remarkable that Shakespeare nowhere passes moral judgment on the murder of Woodstock. It may, indeed, and for all we are told, have been the smartest thing to do in the circumstances. Perhaps it has been Richard's only means of consolidating his power, hard won from the Lords Appellant in the previous decade. But what really interested Shakespeare was that the move, whatever its merits, was truly political, a matter of agreements, trade-offs, the give and take of bargains. Whatever the circumstances of Woodstock's death, and whoever is implicated, Richard has not brought it about by a magical decree. But in banishing Mowbray, Richard attempts to take refuge in the notion of the king's magical and ritual power. In so doing he becomes embroiled in enormous difficulty, for he attempts to solve a real problem by imaginary means.

This is not to deny, of course, that there will be plenty of occasions when it will be expedient and shrewd for the king to speak as if he had not only magical powers, but a virtual monopoly of divine vengeance. Henry IV will do this repeatedly, usually with an eye for contingencies, and very much alive to the possibility that no one will believe him. But this is still to speak politically, to use the vocabulary of sacred kingship as a special language aimed at bringing about secular solutions. It is not to embrace as truths those things the special language enables you to say.

But Richard does not use the language of sacred kingship: he allows it to use him. In surrendering himself entirely to the assumptions inherent in the system, he represses the altogether pertinent fact that the divinity that hedges a king is an ambiguous concept. If there really is such a divinity, it hedges a king in two senses: it hedges him in, and it hedges him off; it at once protects him, and sets real limits to his power. It is surely the second meaning that Richard has forgotten in his attempt to cover political action with ritualistic and magical means, to deny the palpable contradiction of a divinely anointed king engaging in political maneuvering.

This is perhaps Richard's real abdication, that in insisting on his role as rex, he forgets he must also be dux,⁴ and the scene later on (IV.i), where he actually gives Bullingbrook the crown, is but the seal and capstone to it. Richard's attempt to deny the historical and political character of his world is no more successful than most attempts at repression, though it is only in the heightened vision of drama that the repressed returns with the signal clarity with which Henry Bullingbrook returns to England. But there is much that is deeply and humanly moving about Richard's failure, and it is certainly a mistake to read his tragedy simply as a tragedy of character, the collapse of a shrill and rather precious neurotic in a situation that could have been successfully managed by a different personality. Shakespeare certainly differentiated Richard's personality profoundly, he certainly succeeded in creating a compelling and complex dramatic person, but this should not obscure the fact that it is Richard's distinct and unenviable role to enact and clarify certain paradoxes that do not stem from his idiosyncrasies, but are latent in the political order.⁵ He must live those paradoxes for all to see, and not the least of these is the fact that the more he insists on his power as the anointed king, the less real power he wields.

Richard is abetted in contradiction by his friends quite as much as by his enemies. There is much talk of flatterers and flattery in Richard II, and the Lancastrian faction is fond of conjuring the bogey of hypocritical and ill-intentioned friends, who are leading the king astray for self-serving reasons. But a careful search of the play will fail to turn up any clear-cut examples of such friends. It is as if the Lancastrians, in speaking of evil flatterers, were trying to evoke the world of the first tetralogy with its stage villains and quasi-devils, as well as its saviors. Such talk has ultimately the effect of reminding us of the altogether different world we have entered with the second tetralogy. That world is too stubbornly concrete to yield to the simple moral patterns that men try to impose on it.

Evidence of this concreteness is partly furnished by the inadequacy of the existing idiom to manage the complexities of the actual, historical situation. Those critical of Richard are, willy-nilly, his flatterers quite as much as those who remain loyally silent. Here is Gaunt, for instance, advising Richard from his deathbed:

Now He that made me knows I see thee ill,
Ill in myself to see, and in thee, seeing ill.
Thy death-bed is no lesser than thy land,
Wherein thou liest in reputation sick,
And thou, too careless patient as thou art,
Commit’st thy anointed body to the cure
Of those physicians that first wounded thee.
A thousand flatterers sit within thy crown,
Whose compass is no bigger than thy head,
And yet, [incaged] in so small a verge,
The waste is no whit lesser than thy land.

(II.i.93-103)

In the very act of denouncing flatterers, Gaunt is constrained to use the language of sacred kingship, to speak of the king's anointed body, and to suggest the analogy between the health of that body and the health of the land as a whole. It is not that Gaunt wishes to flatter Richard (quite the opposite), but that the only language available to him contains and supports the contradictions and confusions in the system of sacred kingship that are emerging with the return of Bullingbrook. Gaunt's deathbed speech is in reality a tissue of proverbs and homilies, all a good deal too neat to manage the concrete complexities of the historical moment:

Methinks I am a prophet new inspir’d,
And thus expiring do foretell of him:
His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small show’rs last long, but sudden storms are short;
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder;
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.

(II.i.31-39)

It is not that Gaunt's string of proverbs does not contain some truth, but that it is not prophetic in any useful sense. His speech becomes, with its iterations and heavy emphases, an attempt to conjure an England which, if it ever existed at all, is now certainly dying along with Gaunt himself:

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings.
.....This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leas’d out—I die pronouncing it—
Like to a tenement or pelting farm.
England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of wat’ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds;
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
How happy then were my ensuing death!

(II.i.50-51, 57-68)

We will meet this relatively flat-footed repetitiveness in the discourse of others: it is always an indication that the speaker is in the presence of a concrete circumstance he has no real power to control. Gaunt's concluding wish that his death might be a sacrifice to relieve England of scandal contains the residue of magical thinking. If there is a way out of difficulty, it lies not in magical expiation, but in facing language and the ambiguities it generates, perhaps in working through those “inky blots and rotten parchment bonds” that Gaunt simply wishes away in contempt.

The homiletic idiom is bankrupt in the world of Richard II, for it has no power to govern the ways in which men really behave. Bullingbrook significantly ignores it. Not for him the consolations of philosophy:

Teach thy necessity to reason thus:
There is no virtue like necessity.
Think not the King did banish thee,
But thou the King. Woe doth the heavier sit
Where it perceives it is but faintly borne.
Go, say I sent thee forth to purchase honor,
And not the King exil’d thee.

(I.iii.277-83)

This begins to anticipate Polonius, and it has about the same success in restraining Bullingbrook as Polonius' wise saws have in restraining Laertes. Bullingbrook will not pretend that he has banished the king: he will, indeed, banish him. My point is simply that Richard is not the only one in the play who unreflectingly allows the established idiom to speak in him, rather than using that idiom in all self-consciousness as a means to a political end. Richard's volatile personality drives him to extreme positions, to be sure, but those positions do have the merit of exposing the contradictions inherent in the established idiom that everyone else is willing to leave unexamined. Thus to Aumerle's and Carlisle's gentle promptings to action, Richard characteristically responds with a metaphor that he does not quite recognize as a metaphor:

So when this thief, this traitor Bullingbrook,
Who all this while hath revell’d in the night,
Whilst we were wand’ring with the antipodes,
Shall see us rising in our throne, the east,
His treasons will sit blushing in his face,
Not able to endure the sight of day,
But self-affrighted tremble at his sin.

(III.ii.47-53)

Richard takes the extreme position that, if what the language of sacred kingship seems to be saying is really true, if he really is God's anointed, then he should not have to lift a finger to retain his kingdom. Battles are, of course, not won with glorious angels in heavenly pay, but Richard's uncompromising stand, by taking the established idiom at its word, at least tests that idiom, ultimately finding it inadequate to the real and historical facts of the matter. Having wrung from the idiom a confession of its real inadequacy, Richard will go on to remake a poetic language which, if impotent, is still in touch with a tangible world:

In winter's tedious nights sit by the fire
With good old folks and let them tell [thee] tales
Of woeful ages long ago betid;
And ere thou bid good night, to quite their griefs,
Tell thou the lamentable tale of me,
And send the hearers weeping to their beds.
For why, the senseless brands will sympathize
The heavy accent of thy moving tongue,
And in compassion weep the fire out,
And some will mourn in ashes, some coal-black,
For the deposing of a rightful king.

(V.i.40-50)

This is in many ways the discourse we have known all along, and Richard's characteristic extravagance, his narcissism, his tendency to see himself as a character in a story (“For God's sake, let us sit upon the ground / And tell sad stories of the death of kings,” III.ii.155-56) are fully in evidence. But what is in some respects the most extravagant image of his farewell to his queen, the image of the firelogs weeping at his fate, is grounded in observation of the concrete. Anyone who has ever watched a green log burn will know what he is talking about, and anyone who has built a fire with green wood will know that it can “weep” a fire out. This is a fundamentally sounder metaphor (and Richard treats it as a metaphor, and nothing more) than talk of angels in heavenly pay. Green logs are real. Angels must remain a supposition.

It is not, of course, that Richard achieves an idiom adequate to political realities, though he does achieve an authentic idiom. He rises to a self-conscious mastery of language that no one else in this play approaches. Richard perhaps glimpses the fact that language, like magic, must be discounted before it can become effective. The man who invokes divine vengeance and expects a prompt bolt of lightning may have a long wait in store for him. He hasn’t, after all, completed the trick, for though he may well and truly have sawed the lady in half, he hasn’t put her back together again. To insist on what is ultimately fictional power ends up in exposing real weakness. But real weakness, properly managed, may result in real power. It is certainly possible, for instance, to invoke divine vengeance, and all the while be perfectly clear in your mind that divine vengeance has a reputation for unreliability, that it frequently fails to materialize, and, that when it does, it has a notorious tendency to miss its mark. The question here will be the expediency of invoking divine vengeance in the first place. If the truculent and fractious persons with whom you have to deal happen also to be superstitious, you might well murmur something about heavenly retribution. And if something fairly momentous has already happened, a decisive battle, say, the victor may choose to call his victory divine vengeance with relative impunity. He invokes it, in effect, after the fact.

But these are matters for the precocious child and the unscrupulous tailor. The emperor, for all his achievement of an authentic poetic idiom, turns his back on history. Who is to say that he does this out of a neurosis the like of which we will never know? For it is not just that Richard fears history: history really is a fearful thing. It tells us, not only that actions and events are irreversible, but that we initiate those actions and events, and must bear their consequences. We are all of us at times aware of having all too much power, aware that our words really do make a difference, though it is assuredly not by magical means that they do. It may be futile to work magic, but, given the continuous pain of historical consciousness, it may not be altogether inexplicable that one in Richard's position should try.

II

It would be in some ways convenient to say that we have done with the emperor and are now at liberty to concentrate on the child and the tailor. But the dialectical process in which the past is continually reassumed in the present, the veering about which so often accompanies political upheaval, makes it a difficult matter to forget the emperor entirely. The name of Richard becomes a rallying cry for faction in the vigorous world of the two parts of Henry IV, and the memory of the old order, now at enough of a distance that it may be readily sentimentalized, will continue to fascinate even those who have been most materially involved in pulling it down.

To be sure, the discoveries effected by the usurpation are experienced at first as an enormous liberation. So much energy is, in fact, set loose that the man responsible for its liberation, now Henry IV, seems in certain private moments overwhelmed as he contemplates the huge and unruly rabbit he has plucked from what looked like an ordinary-sized hat. He is a man, and in this he is like most of us, not entirely happy about bearing the consequences of his irreversible historical actions. A king who is in the curious position of having denied that the king's words have any privileged efficacy, who has rightly seen that the power of the word lies in its context and not in itself, will be hard pressed to keep his discovery a secret. Certain implications of the usurpation are not lost on John Falstaff, for instance, and he will not fail to point out some embarrassing correspondences in the scheme of the new order. Here he is, trading lines with Prince Hal, admitting quite frankly that he is a thief; in fact, as he says, thievery is his vocation, and “’tis no sin for a man to labor in his vocation” (1 Henry IV, I.ii.104-5). Under other circumstances we would not allow this outrageous extension of the word's reference; we would argue that the criteria in virtue of which we apply the word “vocation” are simply not present in the area of thievery. But if the man now sitting on the throne has, indeed, stolen his crown, has he not in some sense sanctioned the extension of reference that we would otherwise be prone to disallow? If the king resents being called a thief (and he surely does), must he not buy the silence of thieves by allowing them to call their thievery a vocation? Here is Richard's old problem with Mowbray fantastically compounded, for presumably Richard had a choice about entering into conspiracy with Mowbray, though, as we have seen, once in conspiracy he was powerless to get out again. But in a very real sense, Henry, in choosing to steal the crown, has relinquished his freedom to choose his confederates, for he depends on the silence of all who speak English and have the wit to understand the situation he has created. This is perhaps a historical consequence of the usurpation that he has not foreseen.

As Henry enters, willy-nilly, into uneasy alliance with pick-pockets, footpads, and similar unsavory types, he must notice not only the presence of unforeseen consequences, but also the absence of certain institutions of convenience generated by the old order that he has swept away with such apparent ease. Consider, for instance, the oath, that locutionary act by means of which men bind themselves, on pain of personal discomfiture, to carry out specific performances. Here is a sampling of oaths, selected not quite at random from the literally hundreds that stuff the language of 1 Henry IV:

1. By the Lord, and I do not, I am a villain.

(I.ii.96)

2. I’ll make one, an’ I do not, call me villain
and baffle me.

(I.ii.100-101)

3. By God, he shall not have a Scot of them,
                              No, if a Scot would save his soul, he shall not!

(I.iii.214-15)

4. An’ it be not four by the day, I’ll be hang’d.

(II.i.1-2)

I choose these because they represent a situation, not at all uncommon in the play, where an oath is given and then immediately contravened. The first two, and the clearest examples, are Falstaff's. With the first he swears to reform his wicked ways; with the second, a mere five lines later, he swears to join Hal in stealing a purse. Falstaff makes the outrageous contradiction highly visible by invoking the same penalty (being reduced to the rank of villain) on two incompatible performances. We should be exceedingly wary of believing (as Hal seems to do here) that Falstaff has been caught out, that the contradiction is inadvertent. He displays the contradiction, invites our attention to it, precisely in the way he will later underscore a patent fabrication by multiplying men in buckram suits (II.iv.191 ff.). In that later instance Hal will accuse him with some heat of lying about his exploits. The accusation imprudently overlooks the fact that Falstaff's exaggerations are clearly designed to be seen through. He isn’t lying, he claims implicitly, but spinning a yarn, and to accuse a yarn-spinner of lying is to make yourself look something of a sore-headed spoilsport. One of the weakest kinds of triumph is to think you have caught a man in a lie, and then have him show that he was only trying to entertain you. The stakes are perhaps somewhat lower in the matter of Falstaff's contradictory oaths, but the principles are similar: catch him out, and you become a killjoy; let the contradiction pass unremarked, and you seem to connive in degrading the whole institution of promising. This real dilemma, conjured up with a couple of apparently casual oaths, suggests that Falstaff's verbal skill is of a very high order.

Not so with the next oath in our sample, which belongs to Hotspur. He is denying his Scottish prisoners to King Henry, and doing this with some force; but fifty lines later, when Worcester has broached the conspiracy against the King, he agrees without demur to deliver them up unransomed. He is by no means aware of the contradiction; he has simply forgotten, in his characteristically hare-brained way, that he has promised anything at all.

The shrewd man may very well break a promise: this is the case with our last oath, which belongs to the unnamed carrier in II.i. He swears that it is four o’clock in the morning (if it is not, he will be hanged); he even offers supporting astronomical evidence: “Charles' wain is over the new chimney” (l. 1-2). Yet when the thief Gadshill, about whom the carrier has every reason to be suspicious, asks him the time, he says “I think it be two a’ clock” (l. 33). He is very wisely denying a potential highjacker information about a time when he may expect to find portable property on the road. This is clearly more important in the circumstances than the very remote possibility that anyone will actually offer to hang him for contravening his initial oath. Perhaps the worst that can happen is that Gadshill will glance at Charles's wain over the new chimney and conclude that the carrier is lying. But that risk is certainly worth taking: if it succeeds, the advantage gained is real; if it fails, the consequences are trivial.

But no such careful calculation informs the promises that Hotspur makes and breaks. It may be argued that genuinely to forget a promise is not the same as to break it, and that the forgetful man enjoys a certain moral superiority over the consciously duplicitous one. But there is, for all that, a very high price to be paid for this moral superiority, for you deliver yourself over, body and soul, to those with a deeper understanding of the institution of promising, to those who are more than willing to suffer your old-fashioned talk about honor and justice and right, and then let you pay, for an hour or so of chivalric masquerading at Shrewsbury, with your life. The day belongs, even as it did in Richard's time, to the man who thinks in and through the language he speaks, and not to the man who allows that language to think in him.

The day belongs, in short, at least in the world of 1 Henry IV, to Falstaff. He has fully mastered one of the lessons that Richard has to teach, that weakness, properly managed, may result in real power. Another characteristic locutionary act in the play, one closely related to the oath, is the boast, an assertion of personal power peculiarly vulnerable to deflation:

Gadshill.
We steal as in a castle, cock-sure; we have the receipt of fern-seed,
we walk invisible.
Chamberlain.
Nay, by my faith, I think you are more beholding to the night than to
fern-seed for your walking invisible.

(II.i.85-90)

Glendower.
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
Hotspur.
Why, so can I, or so can any man,
But will they come when you do call for them?

(III.i.52-54)

Falstaff.
But, as the devil would have it, three misbegotten knaves in Kendal
green came at my back and let drive at me, for it was so dark, Hal, that thou
couldest not see thy hand.
Prince.
These lies are like their father that begets them, gross as a mountain,
open, palpable.

(II.iv.221-26)

The difference between Falstaff's boast and those of Gadshill and Glendower is simply that Falstaff offers his in full awareness of the way in which it renders him vulnerable. Indeed, his vulnerability is so obvious that the prudent man will be wary of it, and suspect that it conceals a trap.

In 2 Henry IV, Falstaff will speak of turning “diseases to commodity”: “’Tis no matter if I do halt, I have the wars for my color, and my pension shall seem the more reasonable. A good wit will make use of any thing” (I.ii.245-48). It is a good description of Falstaff's strategy in general, for he is continually presenting himself as weak and vulnerable in order to gain advantage. Asked to impersonate the king in a play ex tempore (and much of Falstaff's behavior elsewhere might be described as a play ex tempore, for he is above all a brilliant improviser), he elects to do the part “in King Cambyses' vein,” that is, in the patently artificial and old-fashioned ranting style of Thomas Preston. Falstaff embraces incompetence (and King Cambyses' vein turns out to sound oddly like the euphuistic prose of John Lyly) in order to play what is in fact a deep and complicated game. For in presenting himself as a clumsy actor, Falstaff manages to insinuate with utter impunity the very disloyal suggestion not only that the real king is a player-king (because he has no lineal title to the office of anointed king which he now fills), but that his monarchical impersonation is transparent and unconvincing. The style of Thomas Preston (or John Lyly) is the appropriate one for the part of King Henry precisely because it is artificial and obvious:

That thou art my son I have partly thy mother's word, partly my own opinion, but chiefly a villainous trick of thine eye, and a foolish hanging of thy nether lip, that doth warrant me. If then thou be son to me, here lies the point: why being son to me, art thou so pointed at? Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher and eat blackberries? a question not to be ask’d. Shall the son of England prove a thief and take purses? a question to be ask’d.

(1 Henry IV, II.iv.403-10)

Falstaff avoids any unseemly explicitness, but the nimble play with the homophones “sun” and “son” is rather dazzling. To the ear, the phrase “son of England” is indistinguishable from “sun of England,” a well-known locution for the reigning monarch. It is a question to be asked, since the present sun of England has, indeed, proved a thief, and not of paltry purses, but of a throne. Falstaff's pretended vulnerability reveals Henry's very real vulnerability at a deeper level.

To speak effectively in the new world created by the usurpation requires the exploitation of all the figurative resources of language, of irony, of understatement, of wary hyperbole and deft paronomasia. The days are gone when simple grandiloquence of the “This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land” kind will do. When in the deposition scene of Richard II Bullingbrook asks Richard if he is contented to resign the crown, Richard's riddling reply; “Ay, no, no ay” (IV.i.201), is something more than idle play with the homophones “ay” and “I.” Richard has come to realize that a language that can only speak of either/or, that can generate no discourse governing the in-between, is inadequate to cover the complex of feelings he is now experiencing. His equivocation is the true expression of his inability to answer Bullingbrook's bald question with anything like the clarity Bullingbrook seems to require.

The changes of history demand changes of language, and to survive in the world of the two parts of Henry IV is to learn to speak in ways that are adequate to the occasion. Much of Hal's “education” in the course of the plays, if that is what it is, may be described as his attempt to master new languages, to be able to “drink with any tinker in his own language” (II.iv.19); to be able to speak like Hotspur (“‘Give my roan horse a drench,’ says he, and answers, ‘Some fourteen,’ an hour after; ‘a trifle, a trifle,’” II.iv.106-8); to speak like a king; or to speak like himself:

I know you all, and will a while uphold
The unyok’d humor of your idleness,
Yet herein will I imitate the sun.

(1 Henry IV, I.ii.195-97)

The homophonic play (which at this early stage, when Hal tends to sound a bit smug, may not be fully conscious) suggests “imitate the son.” The real task, in the shifting and ambiguous world created by the usurpation, is to be yourself. This is not a matter of the “naturalness” of manner tirelessly recommended in books of etiquette and treatises on how to succeed. It is a rigorous process of learning the languages of others and inventing a language of your own. When in the first reconciliation scene, Hal replies to his father's long sermon on the proper behavior exemplified by his aristocratic ancestors, his reply is anything but casual: “I shall hereafter, my thrice-gracious lord, / Be more myself” (III.ii.92-93). And we will not be surprised to find him at the very end of Henry V learning yet another language, this time the French of his affianced Kate.

It is those who do not grow in language, who do not submit themselves to its shifting substance and stubborn materiality, who are defeated by history in the world of the Henry IV plays. Hotspur is first in this group, because, for all his eloquence, he has a thoroughly naïve relation to the language he speaks. There is so much in him to remind us of the new order that it is easy to underestimate the extent to which he abandons himself to the aristocratic myths of the old order. Yet his gaze is basically retrospective, and it is in his casualness with language, and particularly in his unreflective relation to the institution of promising, that we can discover his allegiances most clearly. Here is Hotspur in soliloquy, congratulating himself warmly on the excellence of the anti-Lancastrian conspiracy:

By the Lord, our plot is a good plot as ever was laid, our friends true and constant: a good plot, good friends, and full of expectation; an excellent plot, very good friends. … Is there not my father, my uncle, and myself? Lord Edmund Mortimer, my Lord of York, and Owen Glendower? is there not besides the Douglas? have I not all their letters to meet me in arms by the ninth of the next month?

(1 Henry IV, II.iii.15-19, 23-28)

We should be suspicious of Hotspur's way of upping the verbal ante here (“a good plot, good friends. … an excellent plot, very good friends”), for, as the example of Richard made clear, you can’t make a thing so by saying it, nor a friend true by heaping him with honorific adjectives. Wishes are not horses, they are words, and that is why beggars have to walk. Hotspur's touching faith in the written promises of his fellow conspirators, in the letters he has in hand, is rather cruelly rewarded when, of the good friends he mentions here, all but two fail to show up and do battle.

III

I do not want to leave the impression that in Richard's day (or any other) no one broke promises. We have seen that a man's word is never in fact a magical guarantee of anything, and that men keep promises because, for whatever reasons, they choose to keep them. We have been concerned with the institution of promising, a matter of consensus, not a matter of some mysterious power actually present in words. It is doubtful that any society can securely maintain for long the collective fiction that words bind when men choose not to be bound. Too much happens to contradict it: divine vengeance invoked will fail to materialize, men under oath will continue to renege after consulting private interest. But this sensible and hard-headed view should not obscure the fact that there are in every society a few people who believe the myth of verbal magic some of the time, and still others who would like to believe it. There is often a very fine line between wishing something were so and believing you can bring it about by wishing. We are all liable at times to confuse imagination with power, which is one reason why words must be discounted if they are to have any real power at all. Perhaps kings are particularly vulnerable, since they tend to be surrounded by flatterers, by men who see it as their job to support the confusion. If the king does not smell them out, as Lear finally does on the heath, he may come to believe that he really is everything. But we know that this is a lie; the king is not ague-proof.

King Henry, shrewd man of the new order that he is, is yet not immune to this danger. He is certainly capable of wishing, and his wishes are revealing. He wishes, for instance, that his eldest son would behave better, be an old-fashioned gentleman like Northumberland's son Hotspur:

                                                            O that it could be prov’d
That some night-tripping fairy had exchang’d
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And call’d mine Percy, his Plantagenet!

(I Henry IV, I.i.86-89)

Henry is perfectly in possession of himself here, and we shall hardly credit him with a belief in fairies on the basis of these lines. They hint, however, at a genuinely dialectical phenomenon in which a process begins to veer back on itself, in which the man who succeeded in pulling down the old consensus now looks back on its ruins in search of those consolations mere history refuses to provide. In his first reconciliation with Hal, Henry will speak a language which on one level is designed to scold a wayward boy, but which is nonetheless obliquely eloquent of Henry's own longings for order and clarity, for an unambiguous world where good and evil are readily identifiable and rewards and punishments are symmetrically distributed. There is a conundrum implicit in the lines that follow, which turns out to be as pertinent to the relationship between kings and their subjects as it is to the relationship between parents and their children: who will scold the scolder?

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?

(1 Henry IV, III.ii.4-17)

This language, on careful examination, proves to be full of odd displacements and skewed emphases. Henry calls his own misdoings “mistreadings”; he speaks vaguely of “some displeasing service” for which God must be angry with him. But these misdoings he so evasively names were once called usurpation and regicide, and still would be if some were empowered to speak freely. Henry's language thus reduces what are (by some standards) enormities to mere misdemeanors, at the same time that it takes Hal's misdemeanors (which amount, after all, to some youthful pranks and a couple of drinks with the boys) and promotes them to enormities—“such poor, such bare, such lewd, such mean attempts.” We recognize in Henry's catalogue the same technique of repetition and adjectival onslaught that we remarked in Gaunt's deathbed speech and in Hotspur's soliloquy. And those features are here, as elsewhere, the surest sign that words are at odds with a reality the speaker has no real power to control.

In the heady days of the usurpation, Henry certainly did not behave like a man who believed that transgression would be punished swiftly by the efficient operation of the cosmic machine. Yet here he speaks of God breeding “revengement and a scourge,” of “hot vengeance, and the rod of heaven,” terms which are, by the way, oddly out of proportion to the kinds of sins one can legitimately call “mistreadings.” The return of the repressed, which no political revolution ever succeeds in doing away with, operates with full force in these lines, for even as Henry struggles to mitigate his sense of sinfulness by calling usurpation and regicide “mistreadings,” his conviction of guilt is bound upon him afresh with the inflated terms he chooses for divine vengeance. It is further remarkable that not once does Henry suggest that God might punish Hal for Hal's misdoings—remarkable because, after all, Hal is the one who incurs blame for his own actions, whether we choose to call them sins or the youthful sowing of wild oats. The reasonable expectation that Henry is warning Hal of divine displeasure is so powerful that it is something of a struggle for us to see what Henry's lines are really saying. Henry speaks of his own punishment, and in so doing betrays a wish for the moral order he has in another sense denied.

It is understandable that a man who begins by discovering an intoxicating freedom—even thrones are there for the taking—should come to long, deep in his soul, for the very sanctions he has daffed aside. Historical consciousness is painful precisely because it cannot generate a stable and symmetrical world. In the new order Henry is nominally the most powerful man in the land, yet he can not even control the behavior of his own flesh and blood. Meanwhile, he has relinquished the consolations of the old order, among them a language that seemed to enable men to speak with authority and conviction about a symmetry of crime and punishment. Henry is perhaps not the only man who would—even at the price of his own punishment—buy back that symmetry if only the balefulness of history would allow.

The tinge of nostalgia in Henry's speech, which becomes much more than a tinge as he sickens throughout the second part of Henry IV, is indicative of a general inertia in language. On account of this inertia, language tends to lag behind the rapid changes of historical movement; it tends to continue to be governed, in the face of massive upheaval, by a previous harmony. This retrograde character of language is particularly in evidence in the second part of Henry IV, where it afflicts even the verbally nimble Falstaff. It puts visible strain on certain words whose meanings are beginning to be placed in doubt by history, words so common that they seem, without question, to designate a readily distinguishable segment of reality. “Gentleman” is such a word, and when the Lord Bardolph arrives at Northumberland's castle with a glowing report of rebel victory, he does not hesitate to guarantee the truth of his report by invoking the breeding of the gentleman from whom he has had it:

I spake with one, my lord, who came from thence,
A gentleman well bred and of good name,
That freely rend’red me these news for true.

(I.i.25-27)

That the good news proves utterly false is an early indication that the word “gentleman” is no longer the powerful guarantee that it once was.

The second part of Henry IV, even more than the first, shows us a world in which the old aristocrat no longer finds himself alone. There is an extremely vital and energetic underclass in the plays, and it makes itself increasingly known to the higher orders. The petit bourgeois merchant, the tradesman, the seller of various commodities (a word very much in the process of changing its meaning in this historical watershed) are all jostling for position and asserting their rights.⁶ This cast of characters is largely invisible, hardly more than a succession of names and occupations cropping up here and there in the speeches of the main characters, yet they are somehow more real than the country folk with label-names (Mouldy, Wart, Shadow, Feeble) who actually appear on stage. There is, for instance, the witty physician who says of Falstaff's urine sample that “the water itself was a good healthy water, but for the party that ow’d it, he might have moe diseases than he knew for” (I.ii.3-5). There is Master Tisick, the deputy, and Master Dumbe, the minister, impressive men in the eyes of the Hostess. There is, above all, Master Dommelton, the independent mercer, who refuses Falstaff credit:

Let him be damn’d like the glutton! Pray God his tongue be hotter! A whoreson Achitophel! a [rascally] yea-forsooth knave, to bear a gentleman in hand, and then stand upon security! The whoreson smoothy-pates do now wear nothing but high shoes, and bunches of keys at their girdles, and if a man is through with them in honest taking up, then they must stand upon security. I had as live they would put ratsbane in my mouth as offer to stop it with security. I look’d ’a should have sent me two and twenty yards of satin (as I am a true knight), and he sends me security!

(I.ii.34-45)

Falstaff encounters here a stubborn reality, which refuses to credit an older language (the words “gentleman” and “true knight”) with the power to guarantee that it once had. Falstaff encounters increasing difficulty, even with the gullible Hostess:

Falstaff.
As I am a gentleman!
Hostess.
Faith, you said so before.
Falstaff.
As I am a gentleman! Come, no more words of it.

(II.i.136-38)

It is not a little ironic that Falstaff should find himself using a language that has become partly obsolete, for he has been active in discrediting it. Not only have his escapades put the integrity of knighthood in doubt; his profound playing with language has suggested the very transformations that here inconvenience him. When, as in the first part, “squires of the knight's body” become “squires of the night's body” (I.ii.24), it is not certain whether thieves shall be taken for knights, or knights for thieves. In some sense Falstaff's attempt to give thievery a good name has gone awry in the second part, and succeeded only in giving knighthood a bad one. But what is of real interest is the extent to which Falstaff clings to an idiom whose power has been substantially reduced in the face of historical change. The world of the first part is concerned with a transitional period in between two consolidated orders, a time when the vocabulary of the vanished order still has a certain power, even though the system on which it rested has been virtually dismantled. But such a situation must be inherently unstable. The old appraisive terms are increasingly met with a healthy skepticism on the part of the newly independent underclass, and are in the process of being discarded or redefined. The period when the man skilled in language can seem to rule the world is necessarily short-lived. Language cannot be appropriated permanently, because it is not, finally, property. It is “vulgar” in the literal sense, held in common, and Falstaff's dwindling power in the second part is largely due to the public's decreasing willingness to credit his vocabulary with the power conferred upon it by the vanished order.

We see the tendency to cling to the idiom of the old order nowhere more clearly than in the private moments of Henry IV himself, the very man who has been most practically involved in bringing the old order down. In his first reconciliation with Hal in the first part (III.ii), the fact that he invokes the old standard of aristocratic blood and speaks of Hal's “affections, which hold a wing / Quite from the flight of all thy ancestors” (l. 30-31) is remarkable, but not ultimately surprising. The king's nostalgia for the very order that his actions have so profoundly denied is simply a measure of the historically generated divisions within the man, divisions that are close to the surface in his famous soliloquy in the second part:

How many thousands of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep! O gentle sleep!
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down,
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?
Why rather, sleep, liest thou in smoky cribs,
Upon uneasy pallets stretching thee,
And hush’d with buzzing night-flies to thy slumber,
Than in the perfum’d chambers of the great,
Under the canopies of costly state,
And lull’d with sound of sweetest melody?
O thou dull god, why li’st thou with the vile
In loathsome beds, and leavest the kingly couch
A watch-case or a common ’larum bell?

(III.i.4-17)

We detect here a rather sentimental portrayal of the lower orders, some members of which we have just seen in anything but peaceful repose. The thrust behind Henry's speech is a pastoral longing, and we suspect that his emergent “nostalgia for the bottom” comes not from his sense of the responsibilities attendant upon high station, but from the guilt of having acquired that high station in the first place. Envying the lower orders is a pastoral alibi for the guilt of continuing to possess things got by doubtful means. Pastoral is an aristocratic myth aimed at covering up the real character of a longing for the bottom, and the surest sign of this is that pastoral always wants to have it both ways: it wills a simple life and the perquisites that go with high station. Shakespeare elsewhere pokes a good deal of fun at this willed contradiction in pastoral,⁷ but here Henry's embracing of the contradiction is simply the sign of his divided allegiance. He would like to go on speaking the language of the old order, while enjoying the advantages of the new.

“Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”: this familiar, sententious utterance contains a telling pun, one that we have already seen Falstaff exploiting adeptly at Shrewsbury in part one: “Lord, Lord, how this world is given to lying! I grant you I was down and out of breath, and so was he, but we rose both at an instant and fought a long hour by Shrewsbury clock” (V.iv.145-48). In the world after the usurpation, the head that wears a crown will always lie, however uneasily, for possession of the crown depends upon a fabrication. That this has always been the case is made clear by the example of Richard, but in the old order perhaps the lie of anointed kingship was not always an uneasy one. At least it had the tacit support of a consensus. In sweeping away that consensus, Henry acquires an uneasiness that will hereafter be part of the business of ruling.

Notes

1. At the outset I should like to make clear my debt to Sigurd Burckhardt in much of what follows. His “Swoll’n with Some Other Grief: Shakespeare's Prince Hal Trilogy” in Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 144-205, takes much the same view of history as the one propounded here. Joseph Porter's The Drama of Speech Acts: Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) came to my attention after I had written this article, but I note that we agree about a number of points about speech acts in the Lancastrian plays.

2. Mircea Eliade remarked, “In this total adherence, on the part of archaic man, to archetypes and repetition, modern man would be justified in seeing not only the primitives' amazement at their own first spontaneous and creative free gestures and their veneration, repeated ad infinitum, but also a feeling of guilt on the part of man hardly emerged from the paradise of animality (i.e., from nature), a feeling that urges him to reidentify with nature's eternal repetition the few primordial, creative, and spontaneous gestures that had signalized the appearance of freedom.” See The Myth of the Eternal Return, or Cosmos and History (1949), tr. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series XLVI (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), p. 155.

3. The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). All subsequent quotations from Shakespeare's plays are taken from this edition.

4. For a succinct statement of this duality in monarchy see Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, tr. Frederic William Maitland (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 30-37.

5. One such paradox is the doctrine of the king's two bodies, thoroughly discussed by Ernst Kantorowicz in The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957). See especially chap. 2, “Shakespeare: King Richard II,” pp. 24-41.

6. For an excellent discussion of the shifting meanings of words in history, and specifically of the word “commodity,” see Quentin Skinner, “Language and Social Change” in The State of the Language, ed. Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980), pp. 562-78.

7. C. L. Barber remarked in discussing As You Like It that Touchstone's discussion of the shepherd's life (III.ii.13-22) “mocks the contradictory nature of the desires ideally resolved by pastoral life, to be at once in the court and in the fields, to enjoy both the fat advantages of rank and the spare advantages of the mean and sure estate.” See Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959; rpt. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), p. 227.