SOURCE: Mackenzie, Clayton G. “The Third Face of the Elizabethan Mars: The Fallacy of Heroism in 1 Henry IV.” Neohelicon 22, no. 2 (1995): 185-203.

[In the following essay, Mackenzie examines the mythological allusions in Henry IV, Part 1, and finds that the play lacks a truly heroic protagonist and presents a vision of England as both “tragic and unheroic.”]

The apparent paucity of significant mythological allusion in 1 Henry IV is puzzling. There is, as James Hoyle has shown, a profusion of emblematic imagery, but such imagery is dominantly proverbial in character.¹ Danse macabre, Paradise and Fall, and Neptune themes, which are all powerfully evoked in the first play of the Lancastrian tetralogy, Richard II, are here absent or, at most, greatly diminished in prominence.² The differences between the two works in this regard may be instructive and it is possible to conjecture that Shakespeare sought different mythological objectives in 1 Henry IV. While Richard II may reveal complex schemes of mythological imagery, it conspicuously lacks a myth hero—largely because the historical source materials used by the dramatist made such a presentation untenable. Richard was styled as weak and ineffective, though righteous; Bolingbroke as strong and ambitious, but a usurper. It was not the stuff of heroism and Shakespeare's treatment of the material in Richard II does not strike heroic strains.

With two young and active military protagonists, very different in character but attractive enough to stand as genuine competitors, 1 Henry IV would seem to harbour considerably greater potential for the emergence of a true English hero. Indeed, G. M. Pinciss has synopsised a long tradition of critical thought that sees the dramatic opposition of the two men as “Central to any reading of 1 Henry IV”.³ There are, in fact, numerous heroic contenders who present themselves in one way or another: Hotspur and Hal, of course, but also Glendower and Douglas—even Falstaff. Received critical wisdom has it that Hal emerges as the true hero of the play, blossoming into manhood after a few youthful reversals, and symbolically confirming his supremacy through the defeat of Hotspur.⁴

There is, of course, something to be admired in Hal's character, just as there is in that of Hotspur. Whether any of this actually constitutes heroism or establishes a hero is a moot point. This paper will argue that Shakespeare locates 1 Henry IV within a mythological landscape that inhibits possibilities for heroic action and that he pointedly disavows the possibility of a current English hero, mythic or otherwise, within that landscape. It is suggested that the key to this conundrum lies in the identification of the nature and implications of the Martian nuances that provide the play with its mythological backdrop. Such a backdrop establishes a vision of England which is both tragic and unheroic, and one which foreshadows the disquieting nuances of questionable patriotism, long-observed by critics in relation to the disintegrating heroic vision of Henry V.

Elizabethan literati had good cause to celebrate the place of Mars in their mythopaeic encomium. They had it on the authority of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Britonum that, looking upon the shores of Britain, Julius Caesar himself had declared: “Hercle ex eadem prosapia nos Romani et Britones orti sumus, quia ex Trojana gente processimus. Nobis Aeneas post destructionem Trojae primus pater fuit: illis vero Brutus, quem Silvius Ascanii filii Aeneae filius progenuit.”⁵ The link with classical Rome was important for, in the triumphs of that remarkable civilization, the Elizabethan age saw the exemplar and seed for the cultivation of its own era of greatness. Since Mars was the patron of Rome and the esteemed father of Romulus, the ancient founder of that great city, it was perfectly natural for the Elizabethans to take a strong interest in his mythography—more so since the god was the sometime defender of Troy and the notion of London as the “New Troy” had been espoused at least since the thirteenth century and reiterated frequently, most authoritatively perhaps in Caxton's Chronycles of Englande.⁶

As the logical sequitur to a historical mythography of inheritance, pre-Elizabethan cosmography sought further to decipher the English temperament in Martian terms. Richard Argol, for example, describes the planet Mars as the controller of war-like England, and as the determinant of the English military disposition: “For this our clime being subiect to Mars, although I know some iudg the moone chiefely to haue dominatio ouer vs, the people naturally must yeeld such effects, as that mighty planet imprinteth in these inferiour bodies his subiects. For as the heauens haue ruled old the earth, an vnmoueable masse, with their beneficiall effects: so in this our region, the fire of honour mounting by martiall prowes, the chiefe aduancer of gentry, must of force so long last in this nation, as matter minstred from aboue maintaineth it.”⁷

Shakespeare's second tetralogy shows itself willing to deploy the Mars myth at an early stage. The god appears centrally in John of Gaunt's English panegyric in the second act of Richard II:

This royal throne of kings, this scept'red isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war

(II. i. 40-4)⁸

There is nothing unusual about the allusion. It draws on a well documented Elizabethan conception of Mars as England's deific ruler (“this seat of Mars”) and, implicitly, the protector of the English “demi paradise”. This seems to be a somewhat different Mars to that conjured up by the Chorus in the opening prologue of Henry V:

O for a Muse of fire …
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash'd in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire
Crouch for employment.

(Prologue 1, 5-8)

The bellicose Mars of Henry V, with the grim agents of destruction leashed at his heels, is an altogether more intimidating deity than his precursor who presides majestically over a peaceful English fortress. This is a savage and brutal Mars, entirely committed to the hand of war.

The contrast between the two Mars figures draws on what appars to be a peculiarly native dichotomy in English letters. By the time Shakespeare had started writing for the London stage, some of his precursors and contemporaries had developed the notion of an “anglicised” Mars in which the roles of aggressor and protector cohabited conveniently. The destructive, warlike Mars was the English Mars abroad and the invocation of his name stood as an acceptable metaphor or simile when applied to conquest on foreign soil. For example, in The Mirror for Magistrates, Thomas, Duke of Gloucester, recalls with evident pride how “Lyke Mars God of warre enflamed with yre, / I forced the Frenchmen to abandon theyr bowers”.⁹ The English Mars at home is an altogether more peaceable individual, typically guided by the wise counsel of the Roman goddess Minerva (the Greek goddess Pallas). Gerard Leigh in 1583 writes of the war-god as Pallas' knight, “an armed Mars, A champion pollitique in fielde to fight, or at home to defende”.¹⁰ William Wyrley, in The Trve Vse of Armorie, quotes a great English soldier as declaring:

For highly was my knightly seruice deemd,
As well for Mars as prudent Pallas grace.(11)

The position is summarised admirably by Henry Peacham in Minerva Britanna:

Though Mars defendes the kingdome with his might,
And braues abroad his foe, in glorious armes,
Yet wiser Pallas guides his arme aright,
And best at home preuentes all future harmes(12)

The precept guiding the cult of Mars was clear enough: on foreign soil, Mars fought savagely against foreigners on behalf of England; at home, Mars, guided by prudent Pallas, protected England from the hand of civil war. In effect, these two aspects constituted the two faces of the Anglicised Mars.

For the Elizabethans there was an obvious familial example for this dual Mars figure. In the Warburg Institute, London, a late fifteenth century English print entitled “Adoration of the Magi” presents Edward III and Edward the Black Prince as two of the Magi. Caxton relates at length the foreign heroisms of Edward III and his son, the Black Prince. So magnificent was Edward III's foreign conquest, Leigh tells us, that “at one voyage, his souldiers were so laden with pray of arme as they esteemed nothing but golde, siluer and Estrich-fethers”.¹³The Mirror for Magistrates speaks of the age of Edward III as a time when “A more royall race was not vnder heauen, / … Princes all pereles in eche condicion / Namely syr Edward called the blacke prince, / Whan had Englande the lyke before eyther since?”¹⁴ Sir Walter Raleigh, in The Historie of the World, cites the Black Prince as an example of the supremacy of the English soldier in foreign battle.¹⁵ John Rastell in The Pastyme of the People. The Chronycles of dyuers realmys and most specyally of the realme of England eulogises Edward III as a great foreign conqueror abroad but also as a noble law maker at home.¹⁶ Matthew Sutcliffe celebrates Edward III as a glorious example of military success in France.¹⁷ William Wyrley, in The Trve Vse of Armorie, writes of the “Princely Edward mirror of Cheualrie”.¹⁸

It comes as little surprise, then, that Shakespeare links the Mars and Edward III / Black Prince mythologies in Richard II, when York recalls:

… the Black Prince, that young Mars of men …

(II. iii. 101)

Yet, while illustrations of the English Mars as foreign conqueror were easily mustered, the Elizabethans, and those before them, knew well enough that the model of an English Mars as guardian of a peaceful domestic paradise was rather more of a hopeful ideal than a practical reality. In the centuries preceding the reign of Elizabeth I, the fortress built by Nature against the hand of war had been all but torn apart by civil conflict.

Here was a problem. While the Anglicised “two-faced” Mars was useful to one seeking to convey the ideal state of England and its ideal reference to the world beyond its shores, the writer seeking to develop the image of Mars in the actual context of English civil war needed a different kind of Mars—a third face of Mars, as it were. Shakespeare, confronted with the task of presenting a section of history that contested the idealised English Mars images, sought to create a tension between Mars mythologies: a tension between, on the one hand, the mythology of Mars as an anglicised deity (foreign conqueror; home defender) and, on the other, the mythology of Mars as an un-English classical god.

The second tetralogy offers several overt and striking allusions to the god Mars in a context of civil strife. Here, Hotspur applauds the imminent arrival of his fellow-English foes:

They come like sacrifices in their trim,
And to the fire-ey'd maid of smoky war
All hot and bleeding will we offer them.
The mailed Mars shall on his altar sit
Up to the ears in blood.

(1 Henry IV, IV. i. 113-7)

This is certainly not Gaunt's English Mars presiding benignly and majestically over the Eden of England, over the island fortress built “Against infection and the hand of war”. Hotspur's gory-aspected Mars is one familiarly associated with the Roman Mars Ultor, “the Avenger”. In The Fovntaine of Ancient Fiction (1599), a truncated translation of Vincenzo Cartari's Le imagini de i dei gli antichi (1556), Richard Linche describes the figure of Death in the palace of Mars: “wherevpon a stately altar, he was offering sacrifices in goblets made with the skuls of men, and filled vp euen to the brim with humane bloud; which oblation was consecrated to god Mars, with coales of fire (which set on flame the sacrifice) fetcht from many Citties, Townes and Holds, burnt and ruinated by tyrannie of the Warres”.¹⁹ If Hotspur sees himself as some kind of “Death” figure, he is in no way related to the English Death-soldier of King John whose purpose it was to lay low the enemies of England. Civil war is a very different matter. That Hotspur should appeal to the Roman deity is not entirely suprising. A warrior-archetype whose uncompromising courage and inflexible diction are somewhat out of place amidst the dithering caution of his allies, young Percy invokes the mythic exemplar whose personal qualities, he would seem to believe, most closely approximate his own.

Yet, Hotspur promises oblation not to Mars but to “the fire-ey'd maid of smoky war” (emphasis added). Thomas Cooper (1584) records that, in classical legend, Minerva, goddess of war and wisdom, was thought “to haue obserued perpetual virginitie”.²⁰ A similar remark is made by Abraham Fraunce in The Third part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch (1592) where the author insists that Minerva must be “A Virgin; for, wantonnes and wisedome can neuer agree”.²¹ And R. K. Root has intimated that Hotspur's reference is probably to Minerva, noting that “Chapman calls her ‘war's triumphant maid’ in II. 7, and the epithet ‘fire-ey'd’ corresponds to Homer's epithet ‘glaukopis’”.²²

Root's case for Minerva is persuasive but must be qualified on two counts. In the first place, “fire-ey'd” could relate to the tradition, recited by Cartari, that Bellona was most commonly depictured with a flaming firebrand in her hand.²³ Secondly, while European continental writers sometimes equated Minerva and Bellona, as in Boccaccio's Genealogie,²⁴ the Elizabethans were rather more fastidious in this matter. They drew a careful distinction between the measured caution of Minerva and the bloody zeal of Bellona. Lynche explains that “By Minerua was vnderstood and intended the wise councels and aduised prudencie of Captaines and Officers, in managing their military affaires: and by Bellona were meant all bloudie stratagems, massacres, surprises, executions, and fatall meetings of the enemie whatsoeuer”.²⁵ And Fraunce notes that writers distinguish between the two, “making Pallas to note policie in wars; and Bellona, blood, slaughter, murder and destruction”.²⁶

If we accept that the equation of the “fire-ey'd” maid with Bellona is persuasive, we may then identify an alternative Martian mythology, a mythology antithetical to the benign Anglicised Mars mythology. Now Mars is tutored, not by the peaceful wisdom of Pallas, but by the indiscriminate barbarity of Bellona—a familiar pairing of classical mythologies. No more the patron of English greatness at home and abroad, he is Samuel Daniel's “Muse-foe Mars” who should “abroade farre fostred be”.²⁷ And Geoffrey Whitney's grim lord of fiery terror:

When ciuill sworde is drawen out of the sheathe,
          And bluddie broiles, at home are set a broache,
Then furious Mars with sworde doth rage beneathe,
And to the Toppe, deuowring flames incroache,
          None helpes to quenche, but rather blowes the flame,
          And oile doe adde, and powder to the same(28)

This image of an untamable, flame-devouring Mars contrasts quite starkly with the disciplined Mars of Henry V at whose heels, “Leash'd in like hounds”, crouch “famine, sword, and fire” (Prologue 7-8). It is also at odds with Gaunt's controlled Mars of Richard II, and with the consistent repudiation of violence on English soil in the first four acts of that play (I. i. 152-3; I. iii. 123-139; II. i. 40-44; II. i. 182-3; II. iii. 76-80; III. iii. 91-100; IV. i. 136-144).

Hotspur's appeal to Mars is an appeal to a Roman Mars Ultor, not an appeal to an English “dual” Martian deity. In effect, it asserts the presence of a rival anti-mythology, one totally unwholesome to the acceptable mythography of the English realm. We may, indeed, think that it is entirely appropriate that Hotspur should announce this mythology. After all, is he not the perfect emissary of the anti-mythology? As the god whose blood “is easily set on fire & enflamed with anger, furie, and desire of warre”,²⁹ Vincenzo Cartari's savage Mars would have approved of the fiery images linked to Hotspur in 1 Henry IV:

Come, come, Lord Mortimer; you are as slow
As hot Lord Percy is on fire to go.

(III. i. 263-4)

The land is burning; Percy stands on high

(III. iii. 202)

                                                                                … I am on fire
To hear this rich reprisal is so nigh
And yet not ours.

(IV. i. 117-9)

The link between Hotspur and Mars is made explicit in III. ii when the king talks of “this Hotspur, Mars in swathling clothes” (line 112). In at least one way, the ambiguity of this “Mars” reference is fitting for it tends to summarise the competing senses of heroic Englishness and classical savagery that the character of Hotspur arouses within us.

In the course of 1 Henry IV, Shakespeare is at pains to present the need for a potential English hero, someone who can assume the mantle of past greatness—a Black Prince greatness, as it were. The king's metaphor “Mars in swathling clothes”, in its suggestion of infancy, would seem to serve well the notion of a developing mythic identity. Percy is the potential Mars that King Henry wishes some night-tripping fairy had made his own (I. i. 86-9), and that “spirit Percy” (II. iv. 358) who ought to make Prince Hal “horribly afraid” (II. iv. 359). Certainly, he is advertised as an aspiring myth-hero from the early stages of the play and up to the battle of Shrewsbury stands as the play's most impressive man of action. Further, there are persistent innuendoes à propos an equation between Mars and Hotspur: the linkage of fire imagery; the instances of Martian impetuosity; the accentuation of soldierly prowess; the evidence of a certain Martian rashness and zeal.

There are two problems here. Firstly, the equation with Mars is never one Hotspur actually claims for himself. The evidence of the play reveals a man who is less a god, and more a fragile human being—a man narrowed rather than aggrandised by the limitations of his mortality. A play later Hotspur's wife is left to lament his death at the hands of that same awful god.

… And him—O wondrous him!
O miracle of men!—him did you leave—
Second to none, unseconded by you—
To look upon the hideous god of war
In disadvantage, to abide a field
Where nothing but the sound of Hotspur's name
Did seem defensible. So you left him.

(2 Henry IV, II. iii. 32-8)

James Black has suggested that in these lines, and in those preceding and following them, Lady Percy “apotheosizes him [Hotspur] as the model of valour and conduct”.³⁰ The passage cited immediately above seems to move in a different direction. The emphasis lies in Hotspur's marvellous but brittle manhood at Shrewsbury, not in his deification. A miracle of men he may have been, but still only a man. And the would-be classical warrior who had once sworn faith and obeisance to Mars, now becomes the human prey of what is now the “hideous god of war”. No longer the eager soldier, he is the forsaken victim, the fragile mortal forced to “abide” the nightmare of Shrewsbury. The Martian mythology has not been abandoned, it has simply been re-defined by Lady Percy to accommodate the reality of Hotspur's defeat. In making excuses for him, Lady Percy implicitly de-mythologises her hero, implicitly rejects the label that the king had once attached to the young man: “this Hotspur, Mars in swathling clothes” (1 Henry IV, III. ii. 112). The Martian mythology, to which Hotspur so exuberantly pledged himself, was not a framework for heroes but for victims, not a template for life but for death.

The second problem is rather more daunting. True, Hotspur appeals to the classical Mars Ultor for assistance, invoking a most un-English Martian deific scheme. It is a travesty of the English scheme of things, a most unheroic petition aimed at the destruction of the precious English demi-paradise. But he is not the first character in the play to offer such ominous and un-patriotic sentiments. A full act before his “mailed Mars” speech, another character invokes an English landscape committed to gory Martian images. Here is Prince Hal after his father has chastised his waywardness at length.

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

(III. ii. 132-137)

This is the third face of the Elizabethan Mars—the Roman Mars Ultor, “the Avenger”. It has much in common with Hotspur's sacrificial Mars “up to his ears in blood”; with Lady Percy's “hideous god of war”. It closely resembles Geoffrey Whitney's merciless Mars of “bluddie broiles”; and Richard Linche's beastly lord of goblet skulls and “humane bloud”. This is the Mars of English civil war, the unheroic Mars, the undesirable Mars, the Mars swathed in a tunic of English gore. When, a few lines later, his father praises Hal's steely resolve, marvelling that “A hundred thousand rebels die in this” (III. ii. 160), the king's perception of soldierly worth could not be further removed from the English Martian ideal.

For the Elizabethans, heroism was not simply a matter of superlative military action. It was, importantly, a question of context. The prospect of civil war on English soil was a spectre that haunted Tudor historical thought and literature like no other.³¹ It is this concept that defines the context of the play. There are no heroes in 1 Henry IV because there is no mythological landscape fit for heroism. A world where Englishmen slew Englishmen ran quite contrary to the heroic Martian perception of English conquest abroad and peace at home. The words and actions of Hotspur and Hal serve only to invigorate the very processes the Elizabethans abhorred so much.

This said, a number of critics have sought not only to view the play in heroic terms but to deify one or other of the leading characters. Derek Cohen,³² for instance, has argued for the “apotheosis of Hotspur” in the final act because “it is Hotspur's death alone that can heal the world” (p. 84). But the world is not healed. King Henry's final actions in the play are to sentence two Englishmen to death and to resolve to march westwards to engage the rebel forces of Glendower and the Earl of March.

In fact, the significance of Hotspur's death is deliberately played down by Shakespeare. When, in the penultimate scene of the play, Falstaff hoists Hotspur's body onto his shoulders it is not to lift him up gloriously to the lap of the gods but rather to dump him unceremoniously at the feet of Hal and Prince John, and claim his reward. In this way, Hotspur experiences a metamorphosis of a kind, but it is the metamorphosis of dehumanisation rather than apotheosis. His mutilated body becomes a bargaining chip, a commodity of sorts, to be traded for material aggrandizement in a new world of self-destruction where Englishmen seek their reputation through killing each other, not through conquering foreigners on foreign soil. It is a world where the greatness of the English Mars has been subsumed by the antithetical Martian cosmology of recurring classical savageries.

Shakespeare underscores the absence of a suitable mythological framework for English heroism by presenting a series of bogus mythologisations. Falstaff's self-comparison in Act Two to Hercules, the conqueror of the multiplying heads of the Hydra of Lerna, is a case in point. His account of battle against the multiplying foes in the Gadshill escapade culminates in his brag “thou knowest I am as valiant as Hercules” (II. iv. 263-4). The falseness of the claim is comically transparent. Glendower and Douglas, too, are allowed to make claims for themselves which pointedly fail to find fulfilment in reality.

So too, in the first scene of Act Four, Hotspur is presented to us as a bogus mythologiser, his heroic self-statement methodically and ironically dismantled by his own words. At first daunted by the news of his father's unavailability (line 17), Hotspur has, within a few lines, persuaded himself that all is well (lines 36-7) and, by the end of the scene, transformed himself into a classical warrior battling heroically and victoriously in the shadow of his patron god. Even before he reaches Shrewsbury, he has imaginatively killed Hal and vanquished the king's army; he “will” offer his foes in sacrifice; Mars “shall” on his altar sit; the rich reprisal “is” nigh (IV. i. 113-7). The preconceived mythology is absolute, the diction inflexible. The “gods are immortall”, Abraham Fraunce reminds us, “and cannot dye”³³ but Hotspur's life is as transient and fragile as that of any man on Shrewsbury field. Unwilling or unable to distinguish between actuality and fantasy, it is a measure of young Percy's tragedy that when he lies beaten and dying, his self-made mythology shattered, only he seems genuinely surprised. At the end he can offer us no dazzling insights, no immortal longings, no hint that he is the more-than-earthly being that he, and perhaps we, had imagined.

Prince Hal too has had his mythological supporters. The failure of the self-mythologisations of Falstaff, Hotspur, Glendower and Douglas, it is argued, merely prepare the way for the emergence of the real myth hero. Douglas J. Stewart sees Falstaff as the Centaur Chiron grooming his young protégé in ways normally observed by aspiring heroes in Greek myth.³⁴ James Black understands the mock heroics and absurd mythologisations of Falstaff and other low life figures as parodies of true heroic action—parodies that carefully lay the groundwork “for Prince Hal ultimately to assume the stature of England's hero”.³⁵

The evidence is scant. By titling his paper “Falstaff the Centaur”, Stewart supposes a figurative identification that Shakespeare's text does not support. There is, in fact, no equation, merely a parallel. And Stewart himself concedes he does not mean to suggest that “Shakespeare consciously modelled the Hal-Falstaff relationship on this aspect of Greek myth”, but that “he more or less ‘felt’ his way to substantially the same view of how a hero's early years should be spent” (p. 5). This is a considerable concession, no doubt forced by the absence in the text of any obvious allusion to Chiron the Centaur in connection with Falstaff. Black's thesis is persuasive in its demonstration that Falstaff in 2 Henry IV parodies the patterns of action established by Hotspur in 1 Henry IV but, like Stewart, his argument is driven by the implicit assumption that because Shakespeare makes it clear that some people are false myth heroes this must imply that somewhere there is a true myth hero.

The case for identifying Hal as a man in process of heroic metamorphosis may be encapsulated in two sets of imagistic allusions. In the first, Hal vows in Act One that

… 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. ii. 205-208)

Subsequently, in Act Four, Vernon recalls seeing Harry's war party

Glittering in golden coats, like images;
As full of spirit as the month of May
And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer;
Wanton as youthful goats, wild as young bulls.
I saw young Harry with his beaver on,
His cushes on his thighs, gallantly arm'd,
Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury,
And vaulted with such ease into his seat
As if an angel dropp'd down from the clouds
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus,
And witch the world with noble horsemanship.

(IV. i. 100-110)

Clearly there has been a reformation. The glittering bright metal that Hal promised would overshadow his faults here culminates in the glittering golden coats of the Prince and his comrades. The youthful goats and wild young bulls lend a rather alluring Arcadian feel to the passage; and the Mercurial simile nuances a godly equation. But this is not the stuff of myth. Aside from donning some impressive armour and mounting his horse rather stylishly, what has Prince Hal actually done? Not much, in fact. The images of Mercury and Pegasus, here espoused so impressively by Vernon, are neither underpinned by preceding images or actions, nor developed subsequently. They constitute tantalizing innuendo, no more. Shakespeare allows them no substance.

A second set of imagistic allusions relates to Hal's promise, cited earlier, that

I will redeem all this on Percy's head …
… 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

(III. ii. 132, 135-137)

When, in Act Five, he has slain Hotspur he bends down and places his favours over the face of his victim, at once hiding from view the mutilation of Hotspur's face and staining the cloth with the blood of his foe.³⁶

… let my favours hide thy mangled face,
And even in thy behalf, I'll thank myself
For doing these fair rites of tenderness.

(V. iv. 96-8)

Hal's earlier promise that he would “stain my favours in a bloody mask” here finds fulfilment. The mask in question is the mangled face of Hotspur. In Act Three, Hal had promised the bloody domain of the classical war-god Mars, the Avenger. In Act Five he delivers exactly that. The gesture, small as it seems, is a significant reminder that things have not changed. The landscape of the play is still as deeply immersed in the bloody gore of civil carnage, of the Martian anti-mythology, as it ever was. And Hal is a central player in that grim mythology.

Of course, it may be argued that, unlike Hotspur and Douglas and Glendower and Falstaff, Hal has brought his mythology to fruition. But what kind of mythology is it and what prince for bringing it to fruition? Certainly it does not savour of heroism. As we watch the powerful visual emblem of combat and death, Hal's slaying of Hotspur elicits from us neither adulation nor admiration—and this despite a canon of critical commentary claiming that the moment constitutes the consummation of his heroic stature.³⁷ However alluring or pleasing the symmetries of theory may be, on stage this moment simply does not work heroically. The mood is one of pessimism, not glory. Understanding exactly why this should be is no easy matter. But it is at least partly because Percy represents on an individual scale the tragedy of a terrible and unstoppable process. His loss, at once senseless and yet inevitable, is the consequence of a new standard of English conduct. Percy's head, which Hal covers with his favours in what he calls “fair rites of tenderness” (V. iv. 98), is the same head upon which Hal had promised to “redeem” (III. ii. 132) his reputation. As it will be for Falstaff, Hotspur's death becomes for Hal a source of bloody advancement, a valuable trading commodity in a new English vision of self-destructive worth.

Shakespeare allows Prince Hal another moment of “tenderness” before the play closes. He appeals successfully for the life of “the noble Scot, Lord Douglas” (V. v. 23) on account of his conspicuous gallantry at Shrewsbury. This is a curious about turn, particularly as not much more than a hundred lines earlier Hal had described the man as “vile” and “insulting”. It may seem plausible to read into the action testament of Hal's growing princely stature. Is it not a little surprising, though, that having just slain one bogus mythologiser, Hal arbitrarily chooses to spare another—Douglas, the man who, having sworn that he did not know the meaning of the word “fear” (IV. i. 84-5), had tripped and was captured while running for his life? And therein lies the nub of the irony. While his father, living out the nightmare of civil war, is busy ordering the execution of Vernon and Worcester (who, it is worth noting, speaks with high stoicism in the face of death), Prince Hal magnanimously saves the Scotsman Douglas from a similar fate. Englishmen are slaying Englishmen, and keeping foreigners safe from harm. The Black Prince, that young Mars of men, would have turned in his grave.

Notes

1. James Hoyle, “Some Emblems in Shakespeare's Henry IV Plays”, ELH 38 (1971), pp. 512-527. Hoyle believes that there is “an emblematic and proverbial aspect to the imagery of Shakespeare's Henry IV plays that does not seem to have been adequately recognized” (p. 512).

2. For an account of danse macabre, Paradise and Fall, and Neptune imagery in Richard II, see Clayton G. MacKenzie, “Paradise and Paradise Lost in Richard II”, Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986), pp. 318-339.

3. G. M. Pinciss, “The Old Honour and the New Courtesy: 1 Henry IV”, Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978), p. 85.

4. See, for example, Dennis H. Burden, “Shakespeare's History Plays: 1952-1983”, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), pp. 14-15.

5. Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Britonum, ed. by D. A. Giles (London: D. Nutt, 1844), p. 56 (Bk 4). A translation of the passage is offered by A. Thompson in British History (London: James Bohn, 1842), p. 62: “In truth, we Romans and the Britons have the same origin, since both are descended from the Trojan race. Our first father, after the destruction of Troy, was Aeneas; theirs, Brutus, whose father was Sylvius, the son of Ascanius, the son of Aeneas.”

6. William Caxton, Chronycles of Englande (St. Albans, 1483), b. iiii, p. 4.

7. Argol is here writing in a prefatory address to the reader in Gerard Leigh's (sometimes Legh) The Accedence of Armorie (London: 1562, first publ.: R. Tottel, 1591), sig. A5v.

8. All quotations from Shakespeare's text are taken from William Shakespeare, The Complete Works (London & Glasgow: Collins, 1978).

9. The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (New York: Barnes & Noble Inc., 1960), p. 93.

10. Gerard Leigh, The Accedence of Armorie, fol. 129v.

11. William Wyrley, The Trve Vse of Armorie, Shewed by Historie, and plainly proued by example (London: J. Jackson for Gabriell Cawood, 1592), p. 131.

12. Henry Peacham, Minerva Britanna: Or A Garden of Heroycal Devices (London: W. Dight, 1612), p. 44.

13. Gerard Leigh, The Accedence of Armorie, fol. 132v.

14. The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell, p. 93. The Mirror is believed to have been first published in 1555.

15. Sir Walter Raleigh, Selections from his Writings (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1917), pp. 93-94.

16. John Rastell in The Pastyme of the People. The Chronycles of dyuers realmys and most specyally of the realme of England (London: no publisher indicated, 1529), C5r-D3r.

17. Matthew Sutcliffe, The Practice, Proceedings, And Lawes of armes, described out of the doings of most valiant and expert Captaines, and confirmed both by ancient, and moderne examples, and praecedents (London: Christopher Barker, 1593), B3r.

18. William Wyrley, The Trve Vse of Armorie, p. 81.

19. Richard Linche, The Fovntaine of Ancient Fiction (1599; facsimile rpt. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976), sigs. X1r-X1v.

20. Thomas Cooper, Thesavrvs Lingvae Romanae & Britannicae tam accurate congestus, vt nihil pene in eo desyderari possit, quod vel Latine complectatur amplissimus Stephani Thesaurus, vel Anglice, toties aucta Eliotae Bibliotheca (London: 1565, first publ.; John Torkington, 1584), sig. 7H6r.

21. Abraham Fraunce, The Third part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch (1592; facsimile rpt. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976), p. 40r.

22. R. K. Root, Classical Mythology in Shakespeare (1903; reprint. New York: Gordian Press, Inc., 1965), p. 86.

23. Richard Linche, trans., The Fovntaine of Ancient Fiction, sig. S2v.

24. Boccaccio, Genealogie (1531; facsimile reprint. New York—London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1976), fol. 101v.

25. Richard Linche, trans., The Fovntaine of Ancient Fiction, sig. S2v.

26. Abraham Fraunce, The Third part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch, p. 40v.

27. Samuel Daniel, Delia (London: J. Charlwood for Simon Waterson, 1592), sig. G2v.

28. Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblemes (Leyden: Francis Raphelengius, 1586), p. 7.

29. Richard Linche, trans., The Fovntaine of Ancient Fiction, sig. V2v.

30. James Black, “Counterfeits of Soldiership in Henry IV”, Shakespeare Quarterly 24 (1973), p. 374.

31. The major sources of Shakespeare's Lancastrian tetralogy make much of it. For example, Edward Hall, in the opening paragraph of The Vnion of the two noble and illuftre famelies of Lancaftre & Yorke (London: Richard Grafton, 1584), inveighs against the horrors of civil war: “What mifchiefe hath infurged in realmes by inteftine deuision, what depopulacion hath enfued in countries by ciuill difcencio, what deteftable murder hath been comitted in citees by feperate faccions, and what calamitte hath enfued in famous regios by domestical difcord & unnatural controuerfy” (fol. i.). A succession of Elizabethan commentators picked up this cue, bewailing the deformities of civil war, advocating the sanity of peace at home. For example, Samuel Daniel, in “The Epistle Dedicatorie” to The Civile Wares betweene the Howses of Lancaster and Yorke (London, 1595, first publ.; Simon Waterson, 1609), his verse account of the civil war, purposes “to shewe the deformities of ciuile Dissension” (sig. A2v); and Thomas Lodge, in The Wounds of Civil War, ed. Joseph W. Houppert (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), draws, as the Elizabethans were apt to do, on the precedent of Italy. The setting and characters may be Roman, but the lesson on “unnaturalness” is distinctly English:

    Brute beasts nill break the mutual law of love,
    And birds affection will not violate;
    The senseless trees have concord 'mongst themselves,
    And stones agree in links of amity

    (I. i. 260-3).

32. Derek Cohen, “The Rite of Violence in 1 Henry IV”, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), pp. 77-84.

33. Abraham Fraunce, The Third part of the Countesse of Pembrokes Yuychurch, p. 30v.

34. Douglas Stewart, “Falstaff the Centaur”, Shakespeare Quarterly 28 (1977), pp. 5-21.

35. James Black, “Counterfeits of Soldiership in Henry IV”, Shakespeare Quarterly, 24 (1973), p. 372.

36. Derek Cohen, “The Rite of Violence in ‘1 Henry IV’”, notes that Herbert Hartmann has convincingly argued that “Hal disengages his own royal plumes from his helmet to shroud the face of his dead rival” (p. 83). See Herbert Hartmann, “Prince Hal's ‘Shewe of Zeale’”, PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association] 46 (1931), pp. 720-723. A. R. Humphreys, ed., King Henry IV Part I (London: Methuen and Co., 1975), suggests that the “favours” may be material—a scarf or a glove signifying a lady's favour (p. 159).

37. See, for example: Keiji Aoki, ‘Henry IV’ and ‘Henry V’: Hal's Heroic Character and the Sun-Cloud Theme (Kyoto: 1973); Robert N. Watson, “The Henry IV Plays”, in Henry The Fourth Parts I and II: Critical Essays, ed. David Bevington (New York—London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1986), pp. 398-399; Cathrine M. Shaw, “The Tragic Substructure of the ‘Henry IV’ Plays”, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), pp. 62-63; Robert N. Watson, Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 57-58.