[In the following essay, Meyers contends that Shakespeare's Hal is a developing, subtle, and complex character who assumes many roles in the Henriad.]

The first problem is what to call him—Hal, Harry, Henry? And the question of his names echoes about the reality of this somehow puzzling character. No critic denies that in discussing Hamlet, say, we face a mystery, but with Hal, the debate continues whether this character, on whom Shakespeare lavished so much attention through three plays, is better understood by reference to Machiavelli or to Cecil B. de Mille. Is Hal a poster hero, a George Washington, with Shakespeare prefiguring Parson Weems, or is he more complicated, a Richard III playing Hamlet's part? Hal is indeed a mirror, one in which each critic is likely to see reflected his own conception of a king.

Those critics who praise Hal furnish a lesson: we find that it is hard to admire both the character of Hal and the dramatic skill of Shakespeare. There seems to be an inverse relationship between admiration for Hal as a man and for Henry V as a drama. Let D. A. Stauffer serve as an example of Hal's party: “For one of the few times in his career, [Shakespeare] is not writing a drama. He is composing a patriotic hymn.”¹ Moreover, received opinion maintains that there is no consistent development of Hal's character in the three plays in which he appears, but only a startling and questionable reversal occurring in the rejection of Falstaff at the end of 2 Henry IV.² I want to suggest the contrary: that Hal shows a consistency of action throughout the three plays, but that his character is complex, not superficial, and that it develops in a clear direction through the plays to its fitting conclusion in Henry V.

First, Hal's world is a world of mirrors. I mean his world as created by Shakespeare in the plays, not the world of Hall or Holinshed or Erasmus, those rich mines of Elizabethan commonplaces. Shakespeare's world is one of image and reflection as he parallels plot and subplot through three plays, commenting ironically on the affairs of state through the actions of the Eastcheap gang. In 1 Henry IV, for example, the very first scene tells us of Hotspur's success against the Scots, and of King Henry's desire to take Hotspur's prisoners from him. In the next scene, of course, the Boar's Head Taverners plan a holdup at Gadshill, after which Poins and Hal will rob the robbers, just as the Prince's father plans to rob the robbers Percy. Scene Two looks ahead as well: the Prince is afraid the robbers may be too many for him and Poins, but he is reassured: “Well, for two of them, I know them to be as true-bred cowards as ever turn'd back; and for the third, if he fight longer than he sees reason, I'll forswear arms.”³ When the play comes to its end at Shrewsbury, Mortimer (who has already been accused of cowardice by Henry IV) is not there, and Northumberland proves to be a coward as well. The third is Douglas, who fights no longer than he sees reason.

We find the same mirroring, the subplot reflecting the plot, in 2 Henry IV: in the third act, Henry IV, Warwick, and Surrey reminisce about Richard II's deposition—the good old days—“It is but eight years since / This Percy was the man nearest my soul” (i.60-61). And in the next scene, Falstaff, Shallow, and Silence grow misty-eyed about the days that they have seen. Again, in that same first scene of the third act, Warwick assures King Henry that the rebellion will be quelled: “The powers that you already have sent forth / Shall bring this prize in very easily” (100-01). We meet some of that power in the subsequent scene: Feeble, Wart, and Shadow.

How are we to understand these low-life mirrorings of the great and powerful if not as ironic comparison of vanity and riot both small and great? To argue otherwise implies that Shakespeare did not know what he was doing when he had the Chorus say, before Act Two in Henry V,

Now all the youth of England are on fire,
And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies;
Now thrive the armorers, and honor's thought
Reigns solely in the breast of every man.

(1-4)

And in the first scene, in walk Nym and Bardolph.

Consider one last example of this reflection, remembering that, while Falstaff may not always speak what Shakespeare believes, he only speaks when Shakespeare allows. In Act Three, Scene Three, the pivot of 1 Henry IV, Hal rouses himself to action in his father's cause:

PRINCE.
Bardolph!
BARD.
My lord?
PRINCE.
Go bear this letter to Lord John of Lancaster, to my brother John; this to my Lord of Westmerland. Go, Peto, to horse, to horse, for thou and I have thirty miles to ride yet ere dinner-time. Jack, meet me to-morrow in the Temple Hall at two [a'] clock in the afternoon

(193-200).

Breaking into verse, he exits imperially and Shakespeareally, ending the scene with a ringing couplet:

There shalt thou know thy charge, and there receive
Money and order for their furniture.
The land is burning, Percy stands on high,
And either we or they must lower lie.

(201-04)

But it is not the end of the scene. Shakespeare gives Falstaff the last comment: “Rare words! brave world! Hostess, my breakfast, come! / O, I could wish this tavern were my drum!”

The instances of mirroring in the plays far outnumber these few examples; suppose we accept the contention that Shakespeare used both plot and subplot in the trilogy to tell the story of disorderly houses. What then does the mirroring tell us about Hal himself? To begin with, the Chorus calls Hal “the mirror of all Christian kings” (Henry V, prologue to II.vi), an often-quoted phrase interpreted with surprising regularity by the critics. G. B. Harrison, for example, glosses mirror in this line as “perfect pattern,”⁴ and even Robert Ornstein, no admirer of Hal, reads the line in this way.⁵ But it should seem strange to us that as common a word as mirror needs defining, and perhaps we should look a little closer at the legitimacy of this usage, even if we accept the Chorus as a reliable judge of character.

The “perfect pattern” meaning of the word was extant in Shakespeare's time: the fifth definition of mirror in the OED [Oxford English Dictionary], is “That which exhibits something to be imitated; a pattern; and exemplar.” The first citation for this sense, from Cursor Mundi, patently escapes this definition, leaving three examples before Shakespeare to illustrate the usage. But sense 5b, “of persons: a model of excellence; a paragon” is illustrated by only one quotation prior to Shakespeare, and that illustration is from Chaucer. If we do not stop reading at this point, we see that 5c was also extant and appropriate: “That which reflects something to be avoided; a warning.” Put 5b and 5c together, and they give us the definition of mirror as “that which reflects something,” with the moral evaluation dependent on the situation. If we look for popular Elizabethan uses of mirror, we will find, for example, A Mirror for Magistrates; one of the authors of that work, speaking to “the nobility and all other in office,” defines the aim of the book:

For here as in a looking glass you shall see, if any vice be in you, how the like hath been punished in other heretofore; whereby admonished I trust it will be a good occasion to move you to the sooner amendment. This is the chiefest end why this book is set forth, which God grant it may attain.⁶

But by far the best definition of mirror would be Shakespeare's own. If we do not quite have a formal statement, at least we have his description of what a mirror does:

the purpose of playing, … both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

(Ham., III.ii.20-24)

Applied to the Henriad, Shakespeare's metaphor becomes an equivalence: not only is an actor a mirror, but someone who is a mirror is equally an actor.

For Hal is an actor: he plays more roles than any other character of Shakespeare. Through the three plays he becomes wrapped tighter and tighter in his assumed identities, until, at the end of Henry V, we may wonder if his essential self has not been irrevocably lost, if he has become no more than the sum of his parts.

The first time we see him, we have Hal's word that his appearance is not his reality: “I know you all,” he says to the backs of his departing friends,

                                                                                          and will a while uphold
The unyok'd humor of your idleness,
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wond'red at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.
.....So when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes,
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt'ring o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend, to make offense a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

(1 H 4, I.ii.195-217)

This speech is a great stumbling-block for admirers of Hal. Robert B. Pierce maintains that “only someone determined to believe in Hal's spotless virtue (or his priggishness) could accept at face value the argument that a king gains his people's loyalty from having been a youthful sinner. No doubt Hal plans to reform, but he has not undertaken his sins in order to abandon them with a spectacular public gesture.”⁷ Pierce continues, praising Doctor Johnson's reading of the soliloquy as “a natural picture of a great mind offering excuses to itself and palliating those follies which it can neither justify nor forsake.”⁸ For my part, I do not think it salvages Hal's reputation to consider him a hypocrite rather than a prig, but either way we have to assume that Hal is deceiving both the audience and himself in a setting and on an occasion when he has no reason to. Moreover, Hal's description of his own deviousness is entirely in keeping with his character through the three plays, as we shall see. And it is certainly a mistake to attribute his statement to either priggishness or to a misguided innocence. Hal may be presumptuous (in the moral sense)⁹ and he may be calculating, but innocent or priggish he is not. His brother monarch, the Dauphin in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, knew that a reformed pirate beats a converted heathen any day for swelling the collection.

Hal is no wild-seed-sowing youth, but an actor who plays roles with everyone, and plays them very cruelly. In Act Two, Scene Four of 1 Henry IV, Hal, having condescended to spend some time with waiters at the Boar's Head, boasts of his skill to Poins: “I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour, that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life” (17-20). The waiters proclaim him “king of courtesy,” and he so charms the sixteen-year-old apprentice Francis—who gives the Prince a pennyworth of sugar as a token of his love—that he “would it had been two.” In thanks for this drawer's mite, Hal engages Poins to join him in a shabby joke on Francis that even Poins fails to understand.¹⁰

Later Falstaff enters, and we have a play-within-a-play as he and Hal take turns rehearsing the parts of Hal's forthcoming scolding by his father. Whatever Falstaff “stands for” in this play, be it vanity or riot or anything else, he embodies that element of joy, even glee, without which playing is simply hypocrisy. As he (impersonating the King) warns Hal at the end of the scene, “banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.” Chillingly, Hal answers, “I do, I will.”

Hal continues to toy with people in 2 Henry IV; he acts the loving son with his dying father. Believing the old king is dead, Hal takes the crown and puts it on his own head:

My due from thee is this imperial crown,
Which as immediate from thy place and blood,
Derives itself to me. Lo where it sits,
Which God shall guard; and put the world's whole strength
Into one giant arm, it shall not force
This lineal honor from me.

(41-46)

He then leaves the room. When the king awakens, he rebukes Hal, who lies to him: the crown that had been his “due” when he thought his father dead he now calls his “enemy.” He had put it on, he says, “To try with it, as with an enemy” (166). But having heard his former speech, we know it was an enemy that he had asked God to guard, an enemy that he had promised to defend against the whole world.

Hal seems to have as many fathers as faces. Besides the dying king, there is his father in spirit, Falstaff. His rejection of the old knight has drawn voluminous commentary, and I will not add to it here. But there is a third, the Chief Justice, and we should note that Hal toys with this new father as cruelly as he had with both his old. For the Lord Chief Justice stands in real fear and dismay upon Henry IV's death; having sent Hal to prison for striking him during a judgment, he braces himself as the new Henry V enters. Hal will eventually praise the Chief Justice for his impartial administration, but he will have a little fun first:

How might a prince of my great hopes forget
So great indignities you laid upon me?
What, rate, rebuke, and roughly send to prison
Th' immediate heir of England! Was this easy?
May this be wash'd in Lethe and forgotten?

(V.ii.68-72)

That these words are not banter is shown by the Chief Justice's immediate defense of his action, and Hal lets him struggle through thirty lines before easing his fears.

Henry V details the portrait that 2 Henry IV had continued. Act I shows the flimsy pretexts for the invasion of France, its real purpose being to divert Henry's attention from a confiscation of Church property. Yet Henry willingly grasps at the substitute spoils, as willingly as his counterparts in Cheapside, who, more outspoken in their aims, leave for France “like horse-leeches, my boys, / To suck, to suck, the very blood to suck!” (II.iii.55-56)

Before the departure, though, Henry takes another opportunity to play cat-and-mouse. Welcoming the lords Scroop, Cambridge, and Grey while holding proof of their treason in his hand, he stages the release of a drunk who had reviled him. The more the lords urge him to be severe, the more he argues for mercy, leading them on. Finally he hands them the condemning papers, having apparently directed the whole scene for no other purpose than to see their faces at this moment.

While in France, he shows clearly that having used someone for his purpose, he can discard people as easily as vizards with no thought of former friendship. We hear that Bardolph has been condemned to hang for stealing a sacred vessel. Henry had started the war that stole the “naked, poor, and mangled Peace” from France; he had threatened to steal the better half of Church property in England, and as it was, gathered in “a greater sum / Than ever at one time the clergy yet / Did to his predecessors part withal” (I.i.79-81). The common soldier Michael Williams would have understood the irony that allows a king to steal a peace but hangs a commoner for stealing a pax. And we remember that it had been on Bardolph's behalf that Hal had struck the Lord Chief Justice.¹¹

Even the day after the battle of Agincourt, Henry finds time to bait one of the soldiers who have conquered so unexpectedly for him. Disguised the night before as a common soldier, his quarrel with Michael Williams has led to an exchange of gloves as tokens to resolve the argument with blows should they survive the battle. Henry cannot simply reveal himself to Williams—not yet anyway; he must first have some sport, and dangerous sport at that. He gives Williams' glove to Fluellen, telling him, “If any man challenge this, he is a friend to Alanson, and an enemy to our person” (IV.vii.156-57). Not long passes before Fluellen returns with Williams in tow. Now, having brought anxiety to Williams and a blow on the head to Fluellen, Henry threatens this member of his band of brothers: “thou hast given me most bitter terms” (42); “How canst thou make me satisfaction?” (45); “It was ourself thou didst abuse” (50). Finally, believing perhaps that a man will endure anything for a crown, he tells his uncle,

                    fill this glove with crowns,
And give it to this fellow. Keep it, fellow,
And wear it for an honor in thy cap
Till I do challenge it. Give him the crowns.

(57-60)

Fluellen adds his shilling; but while Williams can hardly refuse the king, the Welsh captain is of his own class. What then are we to think Shakespeare's response to the offer is when he has Williams answer Fluellen, “I will none of your money”? (67)

Williams has seen Henry in only one disguise, but our princely actor seems to be forever changing his costumes. Surely no king ever spent so much time in disguise. Although he claims to be imitating the sun, in 1 Henry IV, he masks himself to join the robbery at Gadshill, and remasks to rob the thieves. In 2 Henry IV, he masquerades as a drawer to spy on Falstaff's fondling of Doll. The night before Agincourt in Henry V, he takes a cloak to better sound out his soldiers. Even in his wooing of Katharine (Herschel Baker calls his efforts “ursine”¹²) he is in a disguise of the spirit if not of the body. But we should not be surprised at his multitude of costumes: Falstaff remarked long before that “the hangman hath no lean wardrobe” (1 H 4, I.ii.72). And in his disguises Hal is only being the son of his father, who had dressed a set of imitation kings in his clothes, sending them to different parts of the battlefield to confuse (and be killed by) the rebels.

But we must finally turn to Hal's own words to seek his understanding of friendship, of kingship, of royalty, and of his own identity. From the first time we see him, he proclaims himself one of the moon's men, who “ebb and flow like the sea” (1 H 4, I.ii.32). He is as changeable in garment as in nature, but at least at this early time he is only following the suggestion of Poins in adopting the disguise of clothing that gives form and pressure to his disguised behavior. From the counterfeit soldiers in Falstaff's company and counterfeit rings in Falstaff's pocket to the counterfeit kings his father sends forth, Hal only follows the example of his elders. But already there is a hint that the real is being swallowed up by the sham, and that the king himself may be only a suit of clothes. Douglas thinks the day has been won at Shrewsbury after killing the disguised Stafford and the disguised Blunt; but Hotspur tells him, “The King hath many marching in his coats,” to which Douglas replies, “Now by my sword, I will kill all his coats; / I'll murder all his wardrop, piece by piece, / Until I meet the King” (V.iii.25-28).

In 2 Henry IV, Poins again supplies the waiters' clothing for their camouflage, but this time it is Hal who suggests their spying: “Shall we steal upon them, Ned, at supper?” (II.ii.158) In this play, the crown itself pre-eminently symbolizes kingship, as it should, for the characters that squabble over it through seven history plays (except for Richard II) treat being a king not as something that resides within themselves but as something that can be torn from another and worn. Clothes are becoming personified: in the deathbed scene, the crown had been put on as “an enemy / That had before my face murdered my father” (IV.v.166-67). Hal must indeed put it on: he can become a king only by costuming himself in the robes of his most desired role. In his first speech after his father's death, his first words as King Henry V, he says, “This new and gorgeous garment, majesty, / Sits not so easy on me as you think” (V.ii.44-45).

In Henry V, though, he has grown accustomed to it, even lost himself within it. When he removes his majesty the night before Agincourt, he removes his identity, and this character of so many names—Hal, Harry, Henry—can only answer Williams' question, “Who goes there?” with the nameless “A friend.”

If his father was a counterfeit king, Hal has become a counterfeit man. Henry IV revealed his humanity at least once:

Canst thou, O partial sleep, give [then] repose
To the wet [sea-boy] in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

(2 H 4, III.i.26-31)

His son says almost the same thing when he addresses Ceremony on the night before his greatest battle:

’Tis not the balm, the sceptre, and the ball,
The sword, the mace, the crown imperial,
The intertissued robe of gold and pearl,
The farced title running ‘fore the king,
The throne he sits on, nor the tide of pomp
That beats upon the high shore of this world—
No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony,
Not all these, laid in bed majestical,
Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave.

(H 5, IV.i.260-268)

Henry IV contrasts the sleep of the lowly with his sleeplessness; Henry V contrasts that humble rest with the sleeplessness of his clothes. If Hal has himself in mind in this speech (and how can that be denied?), then he thinks of himself no longer as a man but as a ceremonial robe. Thus, he can promise Katharine, “thou shalt wear me, if thou wear me, better and better” (V.ii.231-232).

But it is the Poloniuses of the world who maintain that “the apparel oft proclaims the man”; it is the blustering Mountjoy of Henry V who asserts, “You know me by my habit” (III.vi.114). Hal, in believing that old lie, has lost whatever individuality he began with. He has, in the course of three plays, with an even-handed impartiality angered his father who loved him and the dauphin who scorned him; mocked the low in the person of Francis and the high in the person of the Lord Chief Justice; threatened Harfleur with pillage and rape, and spared the French countryside from looting; released Douglas without ransom and cut the throats of the French prisoners; and he has killed both Scroop, Grey, and Cambridge, who hated him, and Falstaff, who loved him. He is always the moon's man.

The picture of Hal is not superficial propaganda but a masterpiece of subtlety, as if Shakespeare had determined to combine Richard III and the idea that would later be Macbeth into a single character, and to show through that character how red with blood a king can be in a fallen world. If one of the tragedies of Hamlet is that a prince who “knows not seems” is forced to become an actor, then what can we call the story of another prince who chooses to become an actor? If not a tragedy, then certainly a mirror for magistrates.

Shakespeare, I believe, puts his commentary on Hal into the mouth of Fluellen:

GOW.
… the King, most worthily, hath caus'd every soldier to cut his prisoner's throat. O, ’tis a gallant king!
FLU.
Ay, he was porn at Monmouth, Captain Gower. What call you the town's name where Alexander the Pig was born?
GOW.
Alexander the Great.
FLU.
Why, I pray you, is not “pig” great? The pig, or the great, or the mighty, or the huge, or the magnanimous, are all one reckonings, save the phrase is a little variations.

(H 5, V.vii.9-18)

Notes

1. Shakespeare's World of Images: The Development of His Moral Ideas (Bloomington, 1949), p. 100.

2. E.g., E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (New York, 1944), p. 310.

3. I.ii.183-86. All quotations are from the edition of G. Blakemore Evans, The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston, 1974), and will be included in the text.

4. Shakespeare, The Complete Works (New York, 1952), p. 740.

5. A Kingdom for a Stage (Cambridge, 1972), p. 177.

6. Cited in Tillyard, p. 83.

7. Shakespeare's History Plays: The Family and the State (Columbus, Ohio, 1971), pp. 180-81.

8. Cited in Pierce, p. 181.

9. That is, guilty of the sin of presumption: “Let us beware therfore, of such naughtie boldenes to synne, for God whiche hath promised his mercy to them that be truly repentaunt (althoughe it be at the latter ende), hath not promised to the presumptuous synner, eyther that he shall haue long life, or that he shall haue true repentaunce at his last ende. But for that purpose hath he made euery mannes death uncertain, that he should not put hys hope in the ende, and in the meane season (to Gods high despleasur) liue ungodly”: From “A sermon, how daungerous a thyng it is, to decline from God,” in Certain Sermons, or homilies, … (1547).

10. Ornstein, p. 9, answers well Tillyard's desperate attempt to save Hal's reputation in this scene.

11. See the sound assessment of this contrast in Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1951), Phoenix edition, I, 239.

12. In Evans, p. 931.