[In the following essay, Bowers details the thematic structure of Henry IV, Part 1, noting that a central concern of the play is the triumph of the centralized royal power over the feudal system—concepts dramatically personified in the figures of Hal and Hotspur, respectively.]

The popular history play of Elizabeth's reign was likely to be a chronicle history. The name is applied not just because the history in the play was taken from the chronicles, but because it was dramatized in the chronicle manner. History is not an Elizabethan literary form. Some few examples of relatively coherent history exist, as in Sir Thomas More's account of Richard III or Bacon's of Henry VII, but these are exceptional. A coherent history is written from a point of view; it concerns itself as much with the why of an action as with its how. It delves into causes and carefully traces their effects. It looks to men and to the influence of their characters on action. It relates the event to the whole. It sets the details of its narrative in proportion against one another so that motivation and causality are apparent. In short, true historical writing shapes events to a higher purpose of ultimate truth than simple factual narrative that has not been analyzed to show the underlying purposes of affairs.

On the contrary, the favorite Elizabethan form was the chronicle history, which has something to say about each year of a reign, seldom in any pattern of coherence, and often attempts little more than a report of what seem to be the important events of that year, whether the birth of a five-legged calf, the rise of a civil war, the fall of hailstones in July, the onslaught of the plague, or the death of kings. Any notable even from a vast miscellany of choices is grist for its mill.

When Shakespeare first attempted the history, as in the Henry VI plays, one may watch him struggling to free himself from the dramatization of the chronicle—what happens next, what happens next. He was not immediately successful. Some attempts at a focus of events in the person of a single man may be seen in Talbot, of Part i, for example; but the efforts never succeed in making out of historical fact what can be described as a plotted play. The focusing of events in one person reached its limit in Richard III, but this elementary though successful technique could not be indefinitely repeated in all circumstances because the central factors of plot were missing. That is, an all-purpose plot requires conflict between two relative equals, action and counteraction of like weight, leading to a crucial decision put into action, and then its working out in inevitable terms to the final untying of the knot. This is how Elizabethan plays were ordered if they were true dramas, not dramatic representations.

However, sophisticated technique in plotting is useless unless the action is shaped to form something larger than itself in total effect. Literature cannot be literature if the dance is not of greater import than the dancer. Significance is a word viewed with a certain distrust today largely because of the simplistic view that it can be inserted on demand, as if Milton had written Paradise Lost and then put in the theology. Meaning may be a little better, although it is more neutral. Any writer except a hack must feel that the cumulative connections established between a series of events builds into a design that gives them a meaning they would not have without this correlation. At what may often be a relatively high level of sophistication in drama, this sense of a pattern placed on the chaotic raw material of life may be enough, if it is so understood and so imaginatively presented by the playwright that it is transmitted as what seems to be true experience to his audience. Critics have not notably succeeded in finding much more than this in Hamlet.

But in literature of another order, what we may call a “theme” that shapes events may prove useful. Themes are not confined to less sophisticated forms of literature than Hamlet, of course. The theme may be so powerful and universal as to soar above any possible limitations that might else have been placed on the imagination, as may be seen in Paradise Lost, and with more art, in Samson Agonistes. Or what appears to be a theme may prove to be only the gateway to an experience that transcends the ostensible theme, as occurs in King Lear.

In his history plays, however, Shakespeare was to learn that the unifying force of a single central character was not adaptable enough to constitute a substitute for true plot. In the somewhat experimental play King John he found that too powerful a force, like the Bastard, could disrupt a play if he were not the central character of if he were not integrated into the plot. In its conventional definition, plot did not make a real history play (barring the case of Richard III) out of the chronicles until Richard II. Richard II brought the intractable material of history closer to the powerful shaping of a fictive imagination even though it was not an entire success in the meaningful presentation of action and counteraction generalized to what Galsworthy called “a spire of meaning.”

Shakespeare's most perfect English history play, King Henry the Fourth, Part i, succeeds magnificently, where Richard II had partly failed, in the examination in dramatic terms of kingship, which is to say of power and its control. The title of a history play by convention is assigned to the name of the king in whose reign the events took place. But the king may or may not be the protagonist, even though the play is called after him. In a chronicle sense, the subject of the first part, and perhaps even more of the second part, is King Henry's suppression of a rebellion, thus ending the threat to the establishment of the Lancastrian dynasty to be carried on by his son. In any other sense, this is also what the play is really about. Richard II had let power slip from his careless hands; in contrast, Henry uses whatever means are suited to the situation to nurse his power; and he succeeds in imposing his will by breaking the back of a strong opposition to the extension of royal authority. On his death, his son can inherit an uncontested throne. Of all the history plays this one is most clearly and directly concerned with a theme close to Tudor hearts: the triumph of order through the imposition of centralized royal power as against the disorder of the fragmented rule of the nobles under the feudal system.

In that it is Henry who accepts the first challenge in this conflict, who is the sole and vigorous leader of his part, who orders and fights the war, the play may be said to be about him. The main plot is certainly structured on this central action, and in it Henry is the protagonist. Who, then, is the antagonist? The easy answer would be Hotspur, but this is wrong. Important as Hotspur is to the action, it is not he who initiates the conspiracy against Henry, gathers together the aid of Mortimer and Glendower, and in the end precipitates the Battle of Shrewsbury. The true antagonist is Worcester, as Westmoreland in the first scene shrewdly declares: “This is his uncle's teaching, this is Worcester, / Malevolent to you in all aspects” (I.i.96-97). Both at the start and at the end Hotspur is his uncle's factor (as unwittingly he becomes Hal's), almost his pawn.¹ Henry could have dealt with Hotspur, but not with Worcester, whom he recognizes as his true opposite in the parley before Shrewsbury.²

The rise and fall of the rebellion, then, is a contest essentially between Henry and Worcester. This is certainly the framework of the play's action; but no audience would agree that it comprises more than the background for the central interest, which rests without question on the opposition of Hotspur and Hal. The result is a sophisticated plotting in which the two elderly men who hold the reins of power associate with their action and counteraction two strong young men to whom, in personal terms, the audience gives its main attention. Shakespeare had tentatively tried something like this in King John but had failed to unify the plot interest and the true issues involved in the action. The Bastard has no more future than Talbot of Henry VI, Part i, except as the supporter of a king. The more independently he acts, the more in a sense he usurps the king's power without being able to supply a permanent solution to the troubles of the realm. But a firm unity is imposed in Henry IV, Part i, for Hal is himself the future and the solution. As the next king he will inherit Henry's power and continue the struggle against the divisive forces that endanger royal authority. Thus he thoroughly typifies the royal side of the struggle, and indeed represents it better than his father. He is the wave of the future, not the last struggle of the past. He is to be the hero king, Henry V, who united England and conquered France.

Unlike Faulconbridge, who had no true opponent, Hal's proper antagonist is Hotspur, who typifies the virtues of the feudal nobility as Hal typifies the virtues of the centralized monarchy. The elders are essentially schemers; the younger are men of action. The contrast of Hal and Percy comes to be central in the play as the power of each side swells to the conflict and to the meeting at Shrewsbury. It is an indication of the importance of these men to the central action that in a very real sense the battle is won and the rebellion broken by one episode alone, the single combat between Hal and Hotspur to which the whole play moves. Hal and Percy, then, are the true principals in the resolution of the play, its denouement. In it past does not meet past; but future, future. It is no accident that both Hal and Percy are carefully kept apart from that action of the past whose consequences are being worked out in this play. Henry's seizure of the throne from Richard was aided by Northumberland and Worcester. Hotspur, indeed, has to be told of the events before he knows their details. The antagonisms of the past, then, center on Henry and Worcester. In their development these antagonisms bring in two active young men who had no part in the original episode. The rights and wrongs of this episode are so ambiguous, and moreover are so further obscured by the present scheming of the elders, that no clear issue can be drawn from a conflict of Henry and Worcester. Right and wrong dissolve into expediencies. But with the younger men the case is different, for they are dissociated from this coil of the past. When, after Vernon's praise of Hal and a prophecy of the future greatness of England if he survives the battle,³ Hotspur's sole reaction is the promise to kill the Prince,⁴ something is being said that transcends past wrongs and battles long ago. Correspondingly, when Hal challenges Percy on the battlefield—“Why then I see / A very valiant rebel of the name” (V.iv.61-62)—an issue is being drawn that has little relation to whether Worcester and Northumberland were suitably rewarded and whether Henry broke his promise to them.

Both Henry and Worcester are too tainted, we may say, to be fit representatives for what becomes the central issue of the play—the shape and meaning that arise from the action—for which the rights and wrongs of Henry's claim to the throne have no true relevance. On the contrary, Hal and Hotspur can represent this issue. They have not met in the web of the dark past. They alone crystallize in their purest form the opposing principles of the power struggle in English history that was not to meet its resolution, according to the Tudor myth, until the crowning of Henry VII. In the turbulence of English history as Shakespeare, at least, saw it, the theme was the endlessly repeated struggle between what came to be the modern Tudor principle of national patriotism resting on centralized royal authority, and the old system of diffused authority and personal loyalties represented by the feudal nobility.

Nowhere is this struggle more clearly pointed as a theme that illuminates the real significance of events than in King Henry IV, where it controls the major structure of the plot and dictates the characterization. When on the field of Shrewsbury Hal challenges Hotspur,

I am the Prince of Wales; and think not, Percy,
To share with me in glory any more.
Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere,
Nor can one England brook a double reign
Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales.

[V.iv.63-67]

the issue is clearly joined. In Shakespeare's best dramatic manner, history has been concentrated in terms of men.

This principle behind the struggle for power between nobles and throne is what the history in the play is about. Like any good Elizabethan, Shakespeare saw the Tudor concept of kingship as allied with law and order; the challenge to this authority stems from fear and incipient chaos. It is no accident that though the rebels are brought together initially in the name of Mortimer, the least of their concerns is to put him on the throne of England. The country is marked up into three parts, and Mortimer is fortunate to secure a third. If the rebels were to triumph, before long Wales and Hotspur's new kingdom would be at war. The chaos of Gorboduc, of King Lear, would be repeated, and France would gobble up the weakened and divided realm. Shakespeare emphasizes the contrasts between the two parties. The King's party are united in a common cause under their lawful sovereign. Their councils are in agreement, no personal differences ruffle the accord. Shirley, Stafford, Blunt bravely sacrifice their lives to keep their king from danger. In contrast, the rebels bicker even in the meeting at which they seal their compact. The father Northumberland sacrifices his son by a diplomatic illness. Glendower is overruled by prophecies and breaks the compact, the powerless Mortimer with him. Hotspur and Douglas warily disguise the antagonism of Englishman and of Scot under effusive compliment, though the ancient enmity breaks out in Vernon. The council before the battle is angrily at odds, and indeed the battle is joined only because of a lie: every indication exists that Hotspur would have accepted Henry's composition if it had been truly reported. The bad cause corrupts the men. Vernon, who had protested to the Douglas that “If well-respected honour bid me on, / I hold as little counsel with weak fear” (IV.iii.10-11), swallows his honor and agrees to support Worcester's false report of the King's offers: “Deliver what you will, I'll say 'tis so” (V.ii.26).

This lack of conscience about the effect on others as long as their own nests are lined is characteristic of the rebels. Worcester brings on the holocaust because he fears that Hotspur will be forgiven, but he and Northumberland will suffer if peace is made; and Vernon has no thought of the men who will die to protect Worcester's personal welfare. Not so the King. It is one of his most royal characteristics that he holds himself responsible for the lives under him. His chief accusation directed at Mortimer's defection is that Mortimer deliberately engaged in a battle he intended to lose in order to be captured, and thus was the cause of the death of many English subjects. Before Shrewsbury, Hal's offer of a single combat is generously intended to prevent the slaughter. In condemning Worcester and Vernon to death, Henry in effect calls them murderers. Just as an evil king proverbially could not rule well, so an evil cause cannot produce good actions, and Worcester is a child of the times.

This is the significance of the history, and it is a sound one. But ideas must be incorporated into men. Henry and Worcester—though technically the principals—cannot embody the ideas of this play, and instead history comes to rest in the persons of Hal and of Hotspur, who represent the great opposing forces with which the drama is essentially concerned. This contrast is sharpened by making Hotspur of Hal's exact age, although in reality he was a contemporary of the King. The opposition of the two young men is handled with skill and suspense. Hotspur is early won to the conspiracy, and the action assigned him is devoted exclusively to this main line of the plot. Hal is brought over late: his official entrance into the main plot does not take place before the climax of the play. In fact, his joining his father to put down the revolt becomes his first action in opposing Hotspur, and since it is made the turningpoint of the drama, it is thereby given major significance. The terms of this decision are such as to narrow the future action and to lead it inevitably to the single combat on the field of Shrewsbury, another of Shakespeare's inventions to emphasize the concentration of the play on these two figures, like the reduction in Hotspur's age. (History does not record how Percy died.)

In technical terms of the plot, the significance of this climax is profound. The implication is that the King alone may not be able to conquer the rebels; and indeed this doubt is emphasized when but for Hal the Douglas would have killed Henry in the battle and won the day. The entrance of the Prince into the main action, therefore, is the decisive factor that tips the scales. If the opposition had begun early—if, say, Hal had moved to counter Hotspur the moment the rebellion was formed—the peculiar effect of this climax intervention would have been lost. As it is, the structure of the plot identifies Hal as the most powerful person in the play, on whose decision in the climax—the interview with his father—the form of the catastrophe, that is to say, the outcome of the play, will depend.

The dramatic effect of Hal's late coming to the main action emphasizes the strength of the future Henry V and, technically, adds a new interest to the events between climax and denouement. The new interest depends in some part on the audience now having a clear-cut choice between two figures—Hal and Percy—within the same action. This is a little different from the choice that was latent previously, between an active Hotspur and an inactive Prince, each in a different plot. Before the climactic interview with his father, Hal existed as a potential force, only. After the climax-interview, Shakespeare rapidly builds the young Henry V to-be toward his fulfillment at Shrewsbury. This process is managed with considerable economy, for rather more lines are assigned to Hotspur's side, but it is perhaps the more effective because of the economy. In the interval the audience must detach its natural sympathy with Hotspur and transfer it to Hal. Shakespeare orders this process brilliantly. The more faulty the management of the rebels' cause and the brighter the prospects of the King's party from the union of son with father, the more impossible it becomes to accept any justice in the rebellion when contrasted with Hal's right to the throne and his acceptance of the engagement to defend it. Any sentimental leaning to the ideology of rebellion is now impossible; but as this sympathy is detached, Shakespeare carefully replaces it by building up the more admirable side of Hotspur's personal character. The frenetic choler, the inability to control his tongue, the abrasive effect of his pride on his companions exist no longer; and for the first time we glimpse the careful general, conscious of the relation of his words and actions to the morale of his soldiers, and so cautious of defeat that he would probably have composed with Henry if he had not been fatally deceived by Worcester. Thus as Hotspur's cause dwindles in its rectitude, until it reaches the nadir of Worcester's false report, Hotspur the man rises. By this means there is pity and justice in Hal's summation, first, “Why, then I see / A very valiant rebel of the name” (V.iv.61-62), and after the combat,

Adieu, and take thy praise with thee to heaven!
Thy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave,
But not rememb'red in thy epitaph!

[V.iv.99-101]

It was a pity that for one especial weakness a brave young man had been so misled as to seek the destruction of his country. The forces of law and order must strike him down when he threatens the public safety and will not be reconciled. The audience is brought into the right attitude of the lachrimae rerum, the pity of things in this mixed human condition of right and wrong. But the personal sympathy one may feel for Hotspur is detached from the ideological. One may admire his bravery, but he must not be allowed to kill the future Henry V to whom the divine right of rule will descend.

On the other hand, the delay in the association of Hal with the main plot presents some technical problems. If Hal were not to be introduced until the climax, or shortly before, the audience would be unacquainted with him, and a transfer of interest from a powerful Hotspur to the newcomer would be difficult to effect. Clearly, Hal must be a part of the play from the beginning; but if he cannot join the main action until the middle of the third act, Shakespeare must provide some other action for him and motivate it in a manner that will hold the audience's interest. This he does by emphasizing Hal in his potential aspect only, and by rationalizing the old stories of Hal's wild youth—the Bear's Son archetype traditional for a hero. The action representing Hal's wild youth, on quite another plane from the crudities of the old play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, leads to the invention of Falstaff. The emphasis on Hal's potential is then rationalized by his relations first with Falstaff, then with his father, and finally with Hotspur. In the process of realizing his potential the progression moves Hal from his initial planned idleness with Falstaff to the climax of his decision to join the King, and on to the single combat with Percy at Shrewsbury. This is the shape of the action. But all three relationships are present from the start and are integral in Shakespeare's justification of Hal's idleness. We may summarize this rationalization by saying that Shakespeare puts tension into the tavern scenes when he transforms Hal's withdrawal from the responsibility of his position as Prince to make it, instead, a waiting period of preparation for his future greatness. This preparation takes the form of tests which Hal applies to each of the three ways of life he is under pressure to adopt. In the end, he chooses neither one nor the other—neither Falstaff's hedonism, Henry's political manipulation, nor Hotspur's crude ideals of honor—but rises superior to each by combining the best of all three to form a new synthesis of conduct that will guide the higher royalty of the Henry V to come.

Tests is too conventional a word to apply, perhaps. Three ways of life do indeed present themselves to Hal, dramatized in the persons of Falstaff, the King, and Percy, and what each one stands for. I suggest that there is a rising scale of difficulty here—it is hard to avoid the use of the word temptation, but its implications cast a false light on the picture. Attraction is perhaps better—a rising scale of attraction. I do not mean to imply that the attractiveness of any one of these ways is increased in the course of the action. I mean only that given the kind of man Hal is, the high place designed for him by his birth, and the higher by his ambitions, the attractiveness of certain elements in what Hotspur stands for is greater than what Falstaff stands for as a way of life.

All progression must be from lesser to greater, and thus it is appropriate to consider Falstaff first. Despite the fact that he is the least of the magnets that might pull the Prince from the fixed course of his future, the action devoted to his relations to Hal takes up more space than the others. This imbalance was forced on Shakespeare because the action involving the Prince and the King could not appear until the climax of the play, in the middle of the third act, and Falstaff must occupy Hal for roughly a half of the play. Hence Shakespeare forms of Hal and Falstaff the underplot, a device that involves a structural paradox, because Hal, who is to become the true protagonist of the play (in that the spire of meaning rises from him), transfers from the under- to the main plot to create the climax. At this point the underplot loses its structural identity; and though its characters continue in the action, they are now—from Hal to Bardolph—merged in the central action, the suppression of the rebellion.

The action of the underplot is exclusively concerned with the Gadshill robbery and its aftermath. This action has no independent ideological significance in itself, but in Shakespeare's usual manner it is brought into the larger unity as a form of parody of the main plot. In the mimic world of the underplot an action is initiated against royal law and order, in earnest on the part of Falstaff but in jest on the part of the Prince. That the Prince is in but not of the Gadshill plot means that he can guide it, soften its impact, and ultimately, by the restitution of the stolen money, heal the wound given to the commonwealth. The conclusion of this jest coincides with the father's summons to Hal; thereafter no further action arises from the underplot, and its persons are absorbed into the main plot—Hal to take a pre-eminent part in its denouement, Falstaff to continue the function of parody begun in the Gadshill affair.

Since the underplot—although complete in itself—parodies the main action of the rebellion in its war on law and order, it is not conducted without reference to the larger issues that are still in suspense. The parody of Hal's forthcoming interview with his father serves to bring the whole of the jest to a focus, and indeed its conclusion, or denouement, marks the moment of Hal's decision to forsake the way of life that Falstaff represents. We shall come to this presently. In the interval a less clear-cut incident in the underplot needs analysis, for it contains the equivalent parody of the part that Hotspur represents.⁵

As Falstaff owes his invention to a technical necessity of the action, so this scene—as important in its purpose as the mock father-son interview—has its origin in the need to bridge Falstaff's roaring exit from Gadshill and his entrance into the tavern where the Prince and Poins are prepared to round off the jest by his humiliation. To while away the time the Prince and Poins agree to bewilder poor Francis, the drawer, and they succeed so thoroughly that he becomes as transfixed as a rabbit. Poins dimly sees that this jest—which sentimental critics have rebuked for its assumed cruelty—must have some ulterior purpose, but his inquiry is riddlingly put aside by the Prince with the indirect answer that it was his humor, or whim. But when Francis returns, still in a daze, and runs off to answer what is only the echo of a summons in his ears, the truth comes out. If the actor of Hal has correctly played his part up to this point, he will have displayed no merriment in the conduct of the jest, but rather boredom and impatience, a bitter-tinged irony directed against himself, as in his satiric comment to Poins after his description of the drinking with the apprentices, “I tell thee, Ned, thou hast lost much honour that thou wert not with me in this action” (II.iv.22-24).⁶ Now the disgust breaks out in a speech that has the privacy (and also the dramatic illumination) of a soliloquy. He begins—“That ever this fellow should have fewer words than a parrot, and yet the son of a woman! His industry is upstairs and downstairs, his eloquence the parcel of a reckoning” (II.iv.110-13). There is a bitter comment under the joke that the son of a woman, a sex noted for its loquaciousness, should yield to a parrot in the scope of his vocabulary. What Hal is remarking is the fact that Francis's training and occupation get nowhere and result in no more useful purpose than, say, an animal serving on a treadmill. The human activity that Francis's divine spark motivates is expressed in upstairs and down, the height (or depth) of futility for an “action.” His speech, by which his godlike reason (next to the angels') should be exhibited, is lower than that of a mimic bird. This is what happens to the son of a woman—that is, a human being—when his activity is not rationally motivated and his occupation becomes a soulless one.

Hal then makes an important connection, when he continues:

I am not yet of Percy's mind, the Hotspur of the North; he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, “Fie upon this quiet life! I want work.” “O my sweet Harry,” says she, “how many hast thou kill'd to-day?” “Give my roan horse a drench,” says he, and answers “Some fourteen,” an hour after, “a trifle, a trifle.” I prithee call in Falstaff. I'll play Percy, and that damn'd brawn shall play Dame Mortimer his wife. “Rivo!” says the drunkard. Call in ribs, call in tallow.

[II.iv.114-25]

We are not here dealing with a humor, or whim, either, but with a coherent continuation of Hal's line of thought about the “action” of the drinking bout and the subhuman activity of Francis as an expression of the depths to which rational man can sink when governed only by his animal nature. “I am not yet of Percy's mind.” This ironic “not yet” divorces Hal from Hotspur's way of life in two respects. In the first, Hal is not yet prepared to win his reputation merely in the slaughter of the battlefield. The numerical listing of Percy's victims by which Hotspur has gained his fame as England's first soldier is then linked by this “not yet” to the commentary on Francis. Francis was the son of a woman: he belonged to the human race. But the up-and-downstairs activity of his trade is certainly no better than that of a beast. And his speech, instrument of his rationally guided judgment, is inferior to the mimic sounds of a bird. Withal, Francis is so stupid that he never thinks of breaking his indentures and running away to a better life: his “mind” is content with his trade.

When Hal rejects this concept of life as one without the operation of human reason, he simultaneously rejects Hotspur's “mind,” which is—given only the difference in the plane of activity—identical with Francis's. Hotspur's slaughter of the Scots in private pursuit of the mere word honor, which as Falstaff remarks is only air, is fundamentally no more a rational, or noble, occupation than Francis's treading the staircase in his endless rounds. Since the Elizabethans measured intelligence, or wit, by speech, and esteemed eloquence as the mark of wisdom, so Hotspur's inarticulate responses to his wife's breakfast-table chitchat compare no more favorably as evidence for the operation in him of a human reason than Francis's “Anon, anon, sir.” If we laugh at Francis, we must laugh at Hotspur. His “mind,” or inclination, or ideals, is not that of the balanced and rational man whom Hal can respect as a full equal. Percy has been placed in his right perspective beside Francis, whose industry was “upstairs and downstairs” and “his eloquence the parcel of a [tavern] reckoning,” no different from the itemizing of a parcel of some fourteen dead Scots. Hal is “not yet of Percy's mind,” nor will he ever be.

The tavern parody of the King's interview with Hal is more obvious and thus less in need of discussion. What it does do, however, is to provide clear evidence that we do not need to wait for the famed rejection scene that ends Part 2 on Hal's return from his coronation. He rejects Falstaff here in the tavern, and all he stands for, no less decisively—and Falstaff knows it. Before this scene Hal's concentration of interest has been on Falstaff, but after it he turns to Percy, and Falstaff—though still entertaining him—is on the periphery of his real concerns.

This is not the place to discuss the complex relations of Falstaff to Hal except to remark that the conventional picture of an ancient Vice tempting an innocent young man is wide of the mark. Although we should not underestimate Falstaff's delight in Hal's wit—for his own followers are lamentably deficient in stimulating him to anything but abuse—the chief attraction of the young Prince is his position. Underneath the combats of wit, Falstaff is earnestly working to make himself so indispensable to the Prince that he will be protected and raised to high position when Hal inherits the throne. “When thou art king” comes to be something of a refrain, and the suggestion is more than casual that Falstaff has his eye on the office of Lord Chief Justice. For Hal the attraction is also the wit, which does not flower on his side of the fence either. This wit is more than the breaking of a few puns. On the one hand it is related to eloquence in its mastery of rhetorical devices and its comic inversion of logical modes of thought; on the other it is related to wisdom in the realistic view it takes of human imperfection, and in its satiric unmasking of inflated pretensions, as in the private joke about the Douglas and his marksmanship, all the more wise because its termination foreshadows the aftermath of Shrewsbury.

FALSTAFF.
Well, that rascal hath good metal in him; he will not run.
PRINCE.
Why, what a rascal art thou then, to praise him so for running!
FALSTAFF.
A-horseback, ye cuckoo! but afoot he will not budge a foot.
PRINCE.
Yes, Jack, upon instinct.

[II.iv.383-89]

In defeat the Douglas's instinct is to flee. Instead of running “a-horse-back up a hill perpendicular” as in the joke, he

                                                                                                    fled with the rest;
And falling from a hill, he was so bruis'd
That the pursuers took him.

[V.v.20-22]

The equation is most apt.

In Hal's hands this wit is to become constructive, a sign of his superior intelligence applied to the welfare of his kingdom. In Falstaff's hands, however, it is essentially destructive since it serves chiefly to disguise self-seeking as in his determined efforts to bind Hal to him for his own profit. What happens to the kingdom is of no concern. It may be funny to accept bribes to relieve able men from military service and to cull out such dregs of the countryside as provoke Westmoreland's protest, “Ay, but, Sir John, methinks they are exceeding poor and bare—too beggarly” (IV.ii.74-75)—or to wear a bottle of wine into battle instead of a pistol. The one could lose a battle, and the other could kill Hal in his need. This abuse of wit therefore by a levity in dealing with serious situations—its failure indeed in an almost existential manner to recognize any action or human motive as necessarily serious even in emergency conditions—this distortion inherent in Falstaff's way of life under its surface charm is the very reverse of wisdom. In plain terms, Falstaff is as much an internal danger to law and order in the kingdom as Percy is an external danger. Neither can be permitted. As long as Falstaff can be controlled under suitable conditions, as when Hal is prince, Hal will tolerate him and will pretend to be deceived about Falstaff's true intentions, though all the time defending himself by the exercise of his superior wit against the imposition of Falstaff's will. When Hal is king, the danger to the commonwealth by association with an incorrigible force for internal dissension cannot be tolerated.⁷

Throughout the first acts Hal defends himself from “when thou art king,” and in the mock interview his warning is fairly given and fairly understood. Pretending to be Henry speaking to his dissolute son, represented by Falstaff, Hal turns Falstaff's self-praise into a diatribe on “That villanous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan” (II.iv.508-9). Falstaff defends his hedonism and ends with the plea to banish all companions but himself, for “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world!” (II.iv.526-27). To this the Prince responds, “I do, I will.” Properly acted this can send a shiver through the audience as its significance is recognized. Falstaff's “banish all the world” would instantly, in context, recall the constant association of the world with vanity, that is, with an excessive regard for the pleasures and rewards of mundane life. Hal's response is to that proposition as much as to Falstaff. He is forsaking the life of the taverns—in which he had sought refuge, as well as pleasure, according to the terms of the important “I know you all” soliloquy (I.ii.219-41)⁸—and is taking up the life of duty required by his birth. One must realize that when the fatal words sound, “I do, I will,” Hal is only in small part playing the role of his father. He speaks in his own person directly to Falstaff, who knows it.⁹

As a final comment, it is proper to note that though Hal forsakes the taverns, he does not turn his back on what had been of value there, the pleasure-loving principle divorced from vanity. He is not a puritan like Hotspur. The well-rounded Renaissance ideal man should be deficient in no side of experience or appreciation so long as it was carefully kept under the control of reason. Falstaff's devotion to pleasure was so extreme that in any position of real authority he would have endangered the kingdom. To that extent he is irrational and governed by his passions. On the contrary, Hal—appreciating pleasure but in control of its excesses—is a supremely rational Renaissance man. His wooing of Katherine of France shows how he had learned his lesson in London.

The actual interview with the King offers a problem. Henry is as intent on forcing a code of conduct upon his son as Falstaff had been. It is a legitimate inference that Hal's unwillingness to live by his father's code had been a primary factor in his flight from the court to the taverns, where he could be his own man in private life until the opportunity came to be his own man in public life. He is not Henry's image in temperament or in conviction. If he had lived as Prince of Wales, he could not have influenced his father's policy and thus would have been tarred with the same brush. It was easier to make a fresh start in imposing his own image on the kingdom by removing the false picture of himself as a ne'er-do-well than the false picture of himself as the Machiavellian son of a Machiavellian father.

Henry's mistake is a natural one. He rules, and most successfully, too, according to the terms of his own temperament. What he does not realize is that his formula does not fit all kings, and that Hal must rule according to the terms of his temperament and also the conditions he will encounter, which differ from those with which Henry must deal. On the evidence of Part 2 possibly Henry would have seen the distinction, since he recognizes that Hal will inherit a peaceful kingdom in contrast to the civil wars that beset him. But in Part 1 he is obsessed with his fear that Hal is another Richard II and will be overthrown by another Bolingbroke. Point by point, almost, his lecture to Hal has been refuted in the “I know you all” soliloquy, which has provided a blueprint to the audience for the plan of Hal's future actions. The son must listen, but he cannot agree that Henry's course is right for him.

At the end of the tavern scene that concluded the Gadshill jest, Hal had recognized the altered part he must play now that Percy had made his move against the throne: “I'll to the court in the morning. We must all to the wars …” (II.iv.595-96). Henry may think that he is pleading with a hostile son to join his party, but the decision has already been made. If it is the union of son and father that spells the failure of the rebellion, and if after this scene Hal joins the main plot as the great opposite to Percy, the spearhead of the menace to his kingdom, the decision made in this scene must form the climax or turning point of the action. A few years ago I analyzed the scene from this point of view and argued that it was a climax that was not a climax. Indeed, that Shakespeare had constructed it so in order to make a dramatic point to the audience not easily contrived by another means. That is, Henry thought that by his last calculated insult he had won over an enemy son to his side; and thus he had every right to be pleased with the successful outcome of the highly calculated speech that had done the job. But the audience knew that Henry was deceived, that Hal had been won over all the time, and that the moment had come, in Hal's view, to thrust aside the dark obscuring clouds and reveal the sun of his royalty. That Hal throughout the play was in perfect control of every situation, that he was thoroughly his own man, and that this was the point of the play, I suggested, was demonstrated by the nonclimax. A true victory for his father would have implied a malleable son, and a conversion. But Hal had never needed conversion, as shown by the “I know you all” soliloquy. All he needed, as he there recognized, was the arrival at some future time of the proper conditions in which he could step forward as himself.¹⁰

I think that this view is still substantially correct, but I will offer one modification that should have been presented before. That is, it is true that Hal's decision has been made on the rational, or intellectual, plane before the interview. The audience can be in no doubt that the King does not persuade Hal to join him, for no persuasion is needed. It seems to me now, however, that more emphasis should be placed on the implications of the really decisive part of the interview containing the King's calculated insult: “Why, Harry, do I tell thee of my foes, / Which art my nearest and dearest enemy?” (III.ii.122-23). This reference to Hal as his “enemy” is an obscure one to us, but not to the Elizabethans, who knew the whole story. It is referred to when Hal cries, “God forgive them that so much have sway'd / Your Majesty's good thoughts away from me!” (III.ii.130-31), but again, just as obscurely. We do not, in fact, find the true reference until Hal rescues his father at Shrewsbury from the onslaught of the Douglas, and the King recants:

Thou hast redeem'd thy lost opinion,
And show'd thou mak'st some tender of my life,
In this fair rescue thou hast brought to me.

At this, Hal cries, in reference to the same detractors,

O God! they did me too much injury
That ever said I heark'ned for your death.
If it were so, I might have let alone
The insulting hand of Douglas over you,
Which would have been as speedy in your end
As all the poisonous potions in the world,
And sav'd the treacherous labour of your son.

[V.iv.48-57]

These lines show the depths of the King's insult which—being the man he is—he does not deliver without having planned its effect. Its continuation, that he thinks it probable Hal will join Percy's forces and fight against his father, in fear of Percy's frowns, carries on the implication that thereby Hal will ascend the throne over his father's body, as a vassal of Hotspur. It is this implication, that he has planned to murder his father in the past and may take the opportunity to do so in the present, that fires Hal as much as the insult that he will join Percy's party through fear.

Henry's tactics succeed. Hal flares up:

Do not think so. You shall not find it so.
.....I will redeem all this on Percy's head
And, in the closing of some glorious day,
Be bold to tell you that I am your son,
When I will wear a garment all of blood,
And stain my favours in a bloody mask,
Which, wash'd away, shall scour my shame with it.
.....This in the name of God I promise here.

[III.ii.129-53]

Small wonder that the King, in satisfaction at the success of his stratagem, replies, “A hundred thousand rebels die in this! / Thou shalt have charge and sovereign trust herein” (III.ii.160-61).

Is it possible to reconcile this real flareup on Hal's part, marking the success of his father's plan, with the fact that the King did not need to provoke him since the night before the interview Hal had announced he was joining the wars? Is it possible to make a climax out of this false or nonclimax? I think it is. Let us grant that insofar as the decision to join his father was concerned, Henry's provocation was unnecessary. He may think that he has succeeded in firing his son to come over to his party, but the audience knows otherwise. That the audience has heard Hal's previous decision prevents it from thinking that Hal was so reluctant to leave his wastrel life in the taverns, so little his own man that he had to yield to outside forces and be shaped by them in this crucial decision, instead of moving into his new role of his own volition. Such a feeling would be fatal to Shakespeare's concept of Hal as the future Henry V who rises superior to each way of life that is offered him and in the end combines the best of them all to form a new concept of royalty, far superior to what any one of the pressures put upon him could have conceived.

But since Hal is to join the King and thereafter take his place as the protagonist, as Hotspur's main opponent, between whom the real issue is drawn, the light-hearted and almost casual decision at the end of the tavern scene makes clear his intellectual acceptance but leaves unclear his emotional commitment. The Elizabethans believed that Plato's white and black horses of reason and of passion had to pull the chariot of the soul in tandem. Passion, or emotion, was bad only if it rose to an excess, overpowered reason, and caused the chariot to swerve. Hal's “I know you all” soliloquy has been an eminently rational document. The question in the minds of the audience about the corroborating strength of his passion, or emotion, has not been answered by the tavern action preceding this interview, however, even though some clue has been given in the Francis scene. If Hal is deficient in passion—if he is what we would call overintellectualized or, at worst, the sort of schemer whom Traversi pictures—he is not a truly rounded man. He is not the future Henry V if the strength of his personal conviction does not equal his general intention.

The interview with his father, then, furnishes the dramatic spark missing from the previous action to demonstrate to the audience that Hal's emotional commitment equals his intellectual or rational commitment. What Spenser exhibits in the person of Guyon in The Faerie Queene, following the lead of Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, now inspires Hal. Previously he has shown a satirical skepticism about the legendary deeds of the Douglas and a contempt for the mindless code of honor built on the number of Scots Hotspur can slaughter before breakfast. But what Henry succeeds in doing, thereby justifying the dramatic climax of the interview, is to arouse Hal to what Spenser would have called “honest anger” at the threat of the rebellion to his country. This we have seen only in the partial glimpse offered in his impatience during the jest with Francis the drawer and in the emotional bitterness of his soliloquy before the entrance of Falstaff slides him back into the play acting of his idle tavern nights. Useful as the Francis episode had been to show that Hal is not all intellect and that he balances wit with human emotion under control of his reason, it is not enough to motivate the conviction of his opposition to Hotspur on personal as well as on intellectual grounds. The interview, then, is not a formality but a dramatic and indeed an ideological, or psychological, necessity. But its rationale must not be perverted by the easy belief that somehow the King has “converted” his erring son during its course. Simply, an emotional force has been added to a decision rationally undertaken long before.

This emotional fire so necessary to action having been provided, Hal is now ready to move on to the third test posed by this play—the pressure on him to adopt the code of honor represented by Percy, the universally admired soldier, the man who, in King Henry's words, is “the theme of honour's tongue”; the man who Henry wishes might prove to be a changeling, his own son, replaced by Hal in the cradle.

Shakespeare's art, not just in comprehensive characterization but in understanding the issues which alone give character meaning, is magnificently demonstrated in the mixed nature of Hotspur. A man of action, the greatest soldier of the kingdom, he is yet such a mass of contradictions that his very strengths turn to weaknesses because the ideal that moves his conduct is as outmoded as is a knight's armor against the anachronistic cannon introduced into the account of Holmedon. Shakespeare brings the play to rest on the theme of honor. This touchstone for action has been much in Falstaff's mouth, and is the subject of his famous soliloquy, “Honour pricks me on,” with its pragmatic conclusion, “What is that word honour? Air. … Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. … Therefore I'll none of it” (V.i.136-42). This theme is supported by his later conclusion, “Give me life; which if I can save, so; if not, honour comes unlook'd for, and there's an end” (V.iii.63-65). Henry has tacitly taken up the subject in his account to Hal of how he secured and maintained his throne. Hal has satirically applied the word to the Gadshill action and to his drinking bout with the drawers.

Hotspur's code is simply stated. It associates honor exclusively with courage, with reaction to danger regardless of the cause that is involved. A distinct link exists here with the artificial code of the duello well understood by the Elizabethans. That is, as it was stated, a man who inherited natural honor as the son of an honorable father and mother had to maintain, in addition, his acquired, or artificial, honor. Acquired honor was gained and kept only by means of constant wariness against its being impugned. If a single act of cowardice was observed, the whole fabric of acquired honor collapsed and could not be restored. This concept had no relation to the ethical source of action. The Elizabethans debated whether, if a man declined to fight because he was in the wrong, he could be called honorable. The answer was mixed. One side maintained that it was the higher honor to decline combat if one's cause was not just, since if one killed one's opponent defending the wrong, one's soul was inevitably damned. The other, and more powerful because more popular, side maintained that the code of honor required a man who was challenged to fight without regard for his cause, for otherwise who would know he was not a coward and therefore without honor? This is the code to which, in essence, Hotspur subscribed. At its heart was the concept that any one seemingly dishonorable action, no matter how motivated, could destroy the structure of honor painfully built up over years of effort. And once destroyed, acquired honor could never be restored. The Elizabethans noted this concept as pre-eminent among military men. Every action, therefore, must have as its central motive the defense of one's honor against any imputation that a temporizing action was taken from motives of cowardice.¹¹

It is this code, as much as his natural choler, that makes Hotspur so touchy in Wales about the course of the river Trent as the boundary of his lands to-be. It moves him to abuse the lord who failed to join the conspiracy as a frosty-spirited coward: “O, I could divide myself and go to buffets for moving such a dish of skim milk with so honourable an action!” (II.iii.36-38). The lord had only pointed out, quite reasonably, that the “friends you have named [are] uncertain [as indeed they turn out to be], the time itself unsorted, and your whole plot too light for the counterpoise of so great an opposition” (II.iii.13-15). This is an accurate estimate of the conspiracy, but Hotspur's sole reaction is to accuse the lord of cowardice because he was unwilling to test himself against a danger.

The code of danger for its own sake as the sole test of courage, and thus of honor, is concentrated in Percy's reaction to Worcester's calculated warning that the conspiracy is

As full of peril and adventurous spirit
As to o'erwalk a current roaring loud
On the unsteadfast footing of a spear.

[I.iii.191-93]

To this Hotspur cries out, “If he fall in, good night, or sink or swim!” (I.iii.194). That is, the danger justifies the attempt without regard for the outcome so long, he continues, as honor opposes danger. The well-known speech then follows, beginning,

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,

with its conclusion,

And pluck up drowned honour by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence might wear
Without corrival all her dignities.

[I.iii.201-7]

The only means known to Hotspur to maintain his honor is for him to endure no rival. This supremely selfish and personal code exhibits itself in various ways and throughout is carefully motivated as the conduct of a man governed chiefly by his passions. It leads him to a towering pride, for which Worcester reproves him. It also leads to various ungenerous actions, the most significant being his harsh refusal to listen to Vernon's praise of Hal and his bloodcurdling resolve to kill the Prince, just prophesied as his country's hope. Hotspur's narrow code denies his acceptance of any rival, whereas, in contrast, the Prince in the battle scenes is truly chivalric in his praise of Percy, except for one point.

Here we come to the heart of the problem. Hotspur's association of honor exclusively with warfare and danger denies all ethical and humane grounds for action in its exaltation of the single factor of risk. His honor, then, leads him to become a traitor to his country and to its proposed dismemberment as a nation. Self has been placed over country, not for Worcester's venal motives but in the pursuit of a private and artificial code divorced from all question of right and wrong. We cannot even say that his actions are basically motivated by self-aggrandizement, for the prize in the form that he seeks it has been accurately described in Falstaff's word as “air.”

In contrast, Hal's concept of honor is firmly rooted in cause. He is not smirched by the apparent dishonor of his low-life activities, because his mind is not placed there. His actions are just when he enters the battle since he has dedicated himself, in honest anger, to the preservation of his country. He praises his great opponent for all chivalric actions but one—his treachery to his country. His response to Percy's challenge, narrows the issue: “Why, then I see / A very valiant rebel of the name.” He continues:

I am the Prince of Wales; and think not, Percy,
To share with me in glory any more.
Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere,
Nor can one England brook a double reign
Of Harry Percy and the Prince of Wales.

[V.iv.63-67]

These words differ from Hotspur's ungenerous refusal to acknowledge a personal rival: that is, in part, they deny a sharing of true glory with his rebellious leadership that has split the kingdom, spilled English blood, brought in the Scotch enemies, and endangered the country's external security. The reign that is in dispute, and that will be resolved by the single combat, is that of war and chaos and civil disorder as reflected in the passion-ruled Hotspur as against the order and law and national unity and glory as represented by the rationally-motivated Prince. Above all, however, it is an ideological statement about England's destiny and the new concepts that must rule the country. It is the contrast between patriotism and feudalism, between a new code of honor based on right and a discredited, outmoded code based on pride and personal glory.

Thus the honor that Hal wins from this combat cannot be called “air,” because he serves a greater master than himself in the cause of justice. The patriotic fervor of the play Henry V is fully anticipated here. Its association of personal and of national honor in Hal as against their destructive opposition in Hotspur leads to the ultimate definition, transcending Falstaff's materialism, Henry's expediency, and Hotspur's fatal distortion. The education of the future hero king, Henry V, is complete.

Notes

1. Percy is but my factor, good my lord,
   To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf;
   And I will call him to so strict account
   That he shall render every glory up. …

   [III.ii.147-50]

2. How now, my Lord of Worcester? 'Tis not well
   That you and I should meet upon such terms
   As now we meet. …
   .....                                                                      … Will you again unknit
   This churlish knot of all-abhorred war,
   And move in that obedient orb again
   Where you did give a fair and natural light,
   And be no more an exhal'd meteor,
   A prodigy of fear, and a portent
   Of broached mischief to the unborn times?

   [V.i.9-21]

3. One may compare the prophecy of Elizabeth's greatness that ends Henry VIII. Is it not possible that Hotspur's dying “O, I could prophesy, / But that the earthy and cold hand of death / Lies on my tongue” (V.iv.83-85) also refers to Hal's future greatness?

4.                                                                                           but let me tell the world,
   If he outlive the envy of this day,
   England did never owe so sweet a hope,
   So much misconstrued in his wantonness.

   To this, Percy replies,

                       be he as he will, yet once ere night
   I will embrace him with a soldier's arm,
   That he shall shrink under my courtesy.

   [V.ii.66-69, 73-75]

5. This account of the Francis incident condenses the larger analysis of it in my “Hal and Francis in King Henry IV, Part 1,” Renaissance Papers 1965, pp. 15-20.

6. Action means, substantially, a battle, an encounter, or some course that would lead to an important conflict. It is in this sense that Hotspur in the preceding scene abuses himself for trying to win to his party a cautious lord, “O, I could divide myself and go to buffets for moving such a dish of skim milk, with so honourable an action” (II.iii.34-36). Hal's words to Poins are intended to repeat Hotspur's phrase as a form of parody. “Action” is also on Falstaff's lips. As he enters at III.iii, he enquires of Bardolph, “Am I not fall'n away vilely since this last action? Do I not bate? Do I not dwindle?” Here in the cant of the highway is another parody of the word, one that demotes its honorable and warlike connotations to the farcical engagement at Gadshill. Falstaff may not be wholly serious (certainly he rolls the word under his tongue), but Hal's use of action (as of honor) is clearly ironic and turned against himself, even though Poins is too stupid to recognize the fact, as Hal well knows. The heir to the throne has put himself into a position where his “action” can be only a drinking bout with the tavern boys. Thus his irony is a form of self-disgust and accusation, which sets the tone for the second “action”—although this is not so named—the individual encounter (single combat?) with Francis.

7. No one can take seriously Falstaff's promise to purge and live cleanly if he is rewarded for the alleged slaying of Percy (V.iv.166-68).

8. “The famous ‘I know you all’ soliloquy, at the very beginning of the play, effectively disposes of any dramatic suspense that might have developed from a genuine inability in the Prince to make up his mind about his future. From the start of the play, therefore, Shakespeare has deliberately cast off the legitimate suspense that might have been generated by a lack of Hal's firm commitment. The soliloquy shows Hal to be plain enough. He is amusing himself for the nonce. When an emergency arises he will break through the clouds like the sun and show himself in his true majesty. He is not in the least deceived by Falstaff, nor does he have more than a partial interest in their tavern life. … It is not a character speech at all, as Kittredge has observed, but a time-saving plot device, rather on the clumsy side, deliberately to remove from the audience any suspense that Hal was actually committed to his low-life surroundings” (Bowers, “Shakespeare's Art: The Point of View,” Literary Views: Critical and Historical Essays, ed. Carroll Camden [Chicago, 1964], p. 56). To this, one may perhaps add the incentive Hal felt to remove himself from court during the critical time before he is to inherit the throne. That Hal amuses himself genuinely in the taverns is clear enough, but that he also chafes under the necessity is indicated in the Francis episode. Finally, Shakespeare goes to extraordinary lengths to keep Hal blameless. Falstaff's sly suggestion of sexual incontinence is promptly rejected (I.ii.53-54), and it is clear that before Gadshill Hal had gone on no highway-robbery expeditions. In short, we hear talk about a dissolute life, but we see none of it except of the most harmless variety.

9. The moment the words are uttered, Bardolph runs in with the announcement of the arrival of the sheriff. Falstaff, who is surely in danger from this approach, is so concerned with answering Hal, also directly, though maintaining the fiction of the play, that he shouts him off. The Hostess then brings the same news. At this point Falstaff gives up the fiction of play-acting and addresses Hal without pretense: “Dost thou hear, Hal? Never call a true piece of gold a counterfeit. Thou art essentially mad without seeming so.” These words can refer only to Hal's abuse of Falstaff in the role of the King, but particularly to the seriousness of “I do, I will,” which Falstaff recognizes. (I must reject Kittredge's preferred alternative that they mean, “Believe what the hostess is telling you.”) I am genuine gold, says Falstaff, not a sham. If you are serious in your proposal to reject me, you are truly insane, even though your surface demeanor would not suggest it. This is followed by Falstaff's direct challenge to Hal to let the sheriff come in and arrest him, the result being his execution as a highwayman. Hal does not accept this challenge (II.iv.540 ff.).

10. “Shakespeare's Art: The Point of View,” pp. 54-58: “In terms of the plot the climax can only be Act III, scene ii, in which, seemingly, King Henry weans Hal from his dissolute life and sets him on the road to Shrewsbury, the conquest of Hotspur, and the acceptance of his duties as Prince of Wales. By himself, it is implied, King Henry cannot subdue the rebels. By himself, Hal can have no national forces to lead. A scene of high drama can be anticipated in which the father pleads with his son to join him against a common danger; and, on the surface, Shakespeare gives us just that. … Every indication points to Henry's having prepared this interview with particular care, as was his way, leaving nothing to chance. … Are we to believe, then, that the King has truly won over his son by this contrivance, has broken down Hal's indifference, detached him from Falstaff and the idle tavern life that was corrupting him, and returned the Prince to the great world of affairs that was to be the training for the hero-king Henry V? If we are to believe so, then we must take it that a real conflict of wills was present and that it was resolved in classic fashion in a turnabout of motive and action, a true peripeteia. The King would have been right, and Hal wrong. Hal would have been convinced of the error of his ways by the force of his father's speech and would have been, in a manner of speaking, converted. Such a scene might well have been an exciting and significant one; but Shakespeare did not write it so. The true point of the climax is that no peripeteia takes place. Hal makes no decision that he had not previously planned. … What kind of a play is it in which the Prince from the start reveals to the audience his whole future course of action and therefore destroys the pleasurable uncertainty the audience would feel in the development of the suspense and its resolution? … What kind of a play is it in which the climax goes through all the motions of a decision, but no decision is actually made, for none is needed? The answer is an obvious one. … Once we learn to read the plot, we see what Shakespeare intends to convey to us through the action. … King Henry may think he has converted his erring son, but Shakespeare tells us the contrary in his plot. That the climax is no climax, in respect to any decision not made before, should alert us to Shakespeare's clear intentions. [Hal] is not influenced in any way by the attempts of others to engage him, because from the start he knows the synthesis that lies ahead for him in the ideals of kingship, chivalry, and the proper use of materialism. This is what Shakespeare tells us through the plot, and we should pay attention to its evidence.”

11. For an examination of the Elizabethan code in this matter, see my “Middleton's A Fair Quarrel and the Duelling Code,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XXXVI (1937), 40-65.