[In the following essay, originally published in 1983, Blanpied contrasts the two parts of Henry IV, finding an “organic unity” in Part I that doesn't exist in Part II.]

Open your ears, for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks?

So Rumor opens 2 Henry IV, implying that the audience (“my household”), even in consenting to hear the play, thereby consents as well to aid him in his business of spreading “continual slanders,” “false reports.” Like Richard III in his opening monologue, he engages the audience on the premise that the play itself is an act of deception, and as in Richard III this premise eventually fulfills itself upon its maker. What we are party to is a process of confusions—false promises, forfeited claims, betrayals, and “strained passions”—for which Rumor asserts responsibility: “who but only I, / Make fearful musters and prepared defense / … And no such matter?” And indeed he sets the play in motion precisely as a mischievous playwright: “The posts come tiring on, / And not a man of them brings other news / Than they have learned of me.” But the very train of frustration and false promise begun by Rumor thrusts forward Henry V at the end of the play “to mock the expectation of the world, / To frustrate prophecies and to raze out / Rotten opinion” (5.2.126-28). The frustrator frustrated, the mocker mocked,—the false playwright routed. The “dream” from which Henry, repelling Falstaff, so chastely wakes in the final scene is not just his profligate youth, but also this entire play full of fearful musters and mocked expectations: in other words, 2 Henry IV itself. Hal's awakening is the ultimate mockery, the delivery of the “true” play from the deceptive stuff of dreams. To be Henry V means to assume the role of the true playwright, he through whom play-language becomes real.

Such at any rate is the play's posture at the end. The new king hears out the Chief Justice, appoints him priestly guarantor of the royal word (5.2.119), and forbids Falstaff his characteristic mode of speech, the “fool-born jest.” But only the most resolutely moralistic readers and playgoers would find this posture altogether credible. Our own responses to the complex events of this play, though initially engaged by Rumor, are not likely to be so neatly comprehended as he is, nor so happily narrowed at the end to the scope of Hal's admiring subjects. Hal gravely commands the tongues that Rumor had capriciously loosened. But the process by which he actually comes to assume that role is notoriously troublesome: strained, unfocused, indirect to the point of evasiveness. Compared with the forthright exuberance of Part 1—with which it everywhere invites comparison—Part 2 seems deliberately effortful, even self-destructive. For it is not only the characters' expectations that are mocked, but repeatedly our own as well. As Sigurd Burckhardt puts it, “2 Henry IV is littered with the rejections of dramatic opportunities, or rather of dramatic obligations, incurred partly by the structure of the play itself, partly by what we will (and are carefully reminded to) expect from 1 Henry IV, and partly by what we expect from the established legend.” So if Part 2 postures or “plays” the emergence of the true playwright, then what we have is a parody of the playwright's most immediate dramatic interests. The very displacements from our expectations, in other words, serve to enforce our attention upon the play's anxious concern with its own creative processes.

The central action of 1 Henry IV concerns Hal's emergence as “true” king—not, however, as glory-craving vanquisher of Hotspur, or even as image-mongering politician, but as king suitable both to the fictive world of his realm and to the complex dramatic experience he must bring into focus and carry across to us as the play. The dissociations between his asserted role and the field of dramatic material that should be symbolized in that role are muted, left chiefly implicit. But Falstaff stands as the play's refusal to be subdued to Hal's trim design. He exposes the prince's bias toward a facile formalism, a capacity for self-deceit, and a desire (for all his manipulation) to be the passive recipient of the crown—to wake up from a play, or dream, and find himself king. Falstaff's presence at the end of the play thus announces: you have not yet emerged as “sun” from the “mists”; what you thought you controlled controls you. Play out the play; you have yet to take the crown and be the playwright of your own play.

Thus the genius of one play, Falstaff, creates the need for a new one, in which the shadows that dog the triumphs of the first become the substance of the second. The crucial silence of Part 1 on the distinction between Hal's emergence as prince and his ascension as king (the distinction between son and sun) is displaced into an entire play. Part 2 repeats the central action of Part 1, the making of a king, and finds the original successes that had seemed so “natural” too easily come by, indeed fabricated. As “counter-song” (or “under-song”) 2 Henry IV parodies not only the scenes and situations of 1 Henry IV—the rebellion, the “trapping” of Falstaff, the encounter of father and son—but also the very source of the play's vitality, the ease with which vigorous self-conscious speech is spent into, and consumed by, gratifying forms of action. In Part 1 Hotspur's verbal manner is sufficient to generate, sustain, and exhaust a complete course of action; in Part 2 the rebels, bereft of his antic heat, strenuously mouth causes and cautions, “translat[ing] … insurrection to religion,” but between them and their objective their language grows rigid, their cause stifles, and they fall to Prince John by a verbal trick. In Part 1 Hal's “detached” verbal mode drives his masterplot: for all its reductiveness the show of effectual action is nowhere balked. But in Part 2 Hal is twice shown reproving his own idleness and half-hearted preference for “small beer” while his father and the realm sicken; on the second occasion he speeds from the Boarshead as he had in Part 1, in the high resolute style that had served him so well then. But it comes to nothing now. Not for two acts does he reappear, and then only after the “tempest of commotion” has settled and his father, as he thinks, is dead.

2 Henry IV is a play about thwarted effort. The seemingly organic unity in Part 1 of fertile speech and kinetic design has suffered a breakdown. We find on one hand a series of stillborn actions—a “design” of painfully frustrated intentions—and on the other a proliferation of verbal goblins like those “unfathered heirs and loathly births of nature” (4.4.122) that are said to mark the king's decline. Rumor, indeed, figures forth this dissociation. Gratuitously personified, he literally balks the “natural” continuity of speech and act by interposing “smooth comforts false, worse than true wrongs.” He deploys his agents: “And not a man of them brings other news / Than they have learned of me.” The news “should” issue into action: “What news, Lord Bardolph?” cries Northumberland, awaiting word of Hotspur's fate at Shrewsbury. “Every minute now / Should be the father of some stratagem” (1.1.7-8). But “the times are wild” and the minutes breed only repeated occasions of language gone amuck: Northumberland's “strained passion” after the wildy unreliable reports from Shrewsbury; the archbishop's tendentious “translation” of himself “out of the speech of peace that bears such grace, / Into the harsh and boisterous tongue of war” (4.1.48); the king's apocalyptic deathbed vision (4.5).

To some extent even Falstaff, gone slack in dissociation from Hal, grows fat in speech, running to garrulous monologues. Though he is still capable of amazing feats of bouyancy, a note of strain creeps unmistakably into his performances now, as he sweats out his verbal inflations. Whereas the archbishop turns “insurrection to religion,” Falstaff will turn “diseases to commodity.” And like the language of effortful transformation itself, stand-ins and surrogates seem to multiply. Until the rejection scene Hal and Falstaff meet only once, in the Boar's Head, in a sad recapitulation of the counterpart scene of the earlier play. Otherwise they meet through surrogates—the page, Falstaff's letter, Poins, the Chief Justice. In general, the proliferated cast of comic characters extends the ways in which language seems everywhere banked into forms of perverse independence: Pistol's demented theatrics, Mistress Quickly's malapropisms, Shallow's dribbling repetitions, and so on. Some of this is hilarious; some of it is comic in the Bergsonian sense of mechanical habits upset by organic processes; some of it is distinctly grotesque and oddly moving, like Doll Tearsheet's nervous fits of obscure rage:

He a captain! … God's light, these villains will make the word as odious as the word “occupy,” which was an excellent good word before it was ill sorted. Therefore captains had need look to't.

(2.4.131-36)

In the aggregate, however, these mannerisms make us aware of the crucial changes dramatic speech has undergone since Part 1. Verbal self-consciousness has become a kind of Frankenstein's monster, obscurely potent, like Tearsheet's “captain” or the word “swagger,” which so frightens Mistress Quickly (2.4.67-100). Now far from talking themselves into being, the characters seem to regard their own language in a hardened corporeal form. Like Falstaff's interposition between himself and the Chief Justice of the “disease of not listening, the malady of not marking” (1.2.115-16), a hyperbolic sensitivity to the presence of language continually intercedes between the characters and their intentions, thus preempting the expected course of action and so thrusting forward those “loathly births” themselves, those perversely palpable creatures of speech, as the real “action” of Part 2.

2 Henry IV is a parody of 1 Henry IV, but we should not therefore assume a merely parasitical relationship. Shakespearean parody is a slippery and potent technique, tending to work in both directions. This is especially true if the parody acquires some distinctive, robust life of its own, as Shakespeare's always does. Even if we imagine him setting out in Part 2 intending only to shadow his triumph in Part 1, we know he could never hold his new play to a mere parodic pattern. It is far likelier, in any case, that he undertook Part 2 because of unfinished business in Part 1. In one sense the nature of that business is obvious: Falstaff must be silenced, Hal must be crowned. In a deeper sense Shakespeare has yet to bring the unfinished business, swelling the play with its mysterious “other grief,” to light.

Part 2 repeats, mocks, and “wastes” Part 1, recasting it in a terminal mode. The aesthetic objective is not simply to destroy, but, as happens so often in Shakespeare, to uncover the sources of his own creations: a pursuit particularly appropriate to the historical sequence. The process of self-destruction in Part 2 is vigorous enough—though in its own mode. More important, the parodic process turns up a surprisingly original kind of life in the new material.

Any good production should show how the play moves beyond its predecessor into its own tough, distinctive reality. In the Stratford, Ontario, production of 1979, for example, Martha Henry's appearance as Doll Tearsheet brought an audible gasp from the audience. What we saw was great sensual beauty gone grotesquely to disease, its legacy not only sores and semibaldness but a fierce derangement that was funny, ghastly, dangerous, and deeply unsettling. The audience I am sure had never expected to be moved by this slummy creature with the tag name, let alone moved by a bizarre mixture of the fearful, the attractive, and the repellent. The comic pathos of her crying, quarreling, and nuzzling with the aging Falstaff was built upon that initial shock; the comedy could temporarily mask, but never really transcend this revelation of the uncanny within the conventional stage-type. The point is that Doll came across as vivid, compelling, and unique—beyond precedent. She may indeed have grown out of 1 Henry IV, the natural product of a closer second look at the Boar's Head milieu. But once materialized, Doll in no way depends for her dramatic life upon the mother play. If anything, she helps make it seem, in retrospect, surprisingly lightweight, somewhat naive, like vanished youth.

Sensitive production can bring forth the play's own difficult vision of life and therefore its complex structure. The “tiredness,” the preoccupation with disease and stifled springs of action, come through not as the static imitation of a more robust original, but as a peculiar kind of vigor—artificially induced and desperately sustained, but vigor nonetheless. Scene after scene, image after image, presents us with the spectacle of dramatic power subsiding toward stillness. The power may take the form of boisterous farce, Pistolian dementia, inflated oration, and a dozen other kinds of “fearful musters and prepared defense.” But until the end of the play, we are not given to understand the stillness itself as anything other than chill and empty death. Repeatedly we are arrested, drawn into the dramatic life of the play, only to find ourselves distinguishing, as if with ever-fresh recognition, the ubiquitous death's-head behind the playing. With almost manic inventiveness, the play generates variations on this experience. Allusions to disease, literal and figurative, pervade every level of action, but are orchestrated with great deftness. Through modulated phases the play takes us from a thickly felt sense of its fictive life to a stark awareness of its heavy cost.

Falstaff most of all embodies this process. It is commonplace to observe his “change of mode.” But we are not simply presented with a diminished Falstaff—or a Falstaff of diminished antic energy. We are made painfully to experience the changing of this supposedly changeless creature. For despite his preoccupation now with morbidity and deliquescence, despite his turning into a Bergsonian comic figure, looking to survive in a world everywhere lapsing toward death, Falstaff manages after all to stay afloat, for most of the play, through versions of his old ebullient form. He now excites a wilder mixture of responses from us—including, sometimes simultaneously, both sympathy and revulsion. But he is coming apart, losing his once uncanny control of his humorous effects and losing his vital knowingness. As he softens, he also vaporizes. His former capacity for recycling worldly realities through energetic play, redeeming the world from death by the comedy of his own indestructability, wears down before our eyes. He subsides into the relentlessly realistic context of the playworld. But his presence there lards it, thickens its reality with his own.

The compelling density of the play's presentational life, set against the persistent reminders of the futility of action and perversity of structure, makes this a dramatic experience more perplexing and “modern” than anything that has gone before. In its power to disconcert us, simultaneously seducing us by realism and upsetting us by form, 2 Henry IV anticipates the so-called problem plays, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Troilus and Cressida. It is most like Measure for Measure in that our expectations are continually thwarted, but at the same time nourished. Hal's promise to make “all this” good in the end never drops utterly out of mind. And yet, as James L. Calderwood suggests, we may begin to lose our faith that such a pattern of disorder and frustration as the play presents can ever be truly “redeemed.” But that is exactly what Hal presumes to do when he steps forth at last to mock expectations that have already been mocked so many times over. By inverting the play's entire pattern of frustrations, banishing Rumor as playwright, he presumes nothing less than the freeing of language from its caked forms, its loathly births of nature, that it may destroy itself through lively utterance. This is a noble action, worthy of the real playwright: true father of fair heirs.

And it is a task that Hal might rightly shrink from undertaking and that we might rightly doubt his capacity to master, just because, by the end of the play, there is so much more to be redeemed than he and the audience and probably even Shakespeare could ever have imagined when the promise was made. By way of the parodic “wasting” of old form, the unfolding of 2 Henry IV has revealed a surprising new depth of experience that now becomes part of the load which Hal must bear. In other words, our experience of this difficult play becomes part of the field that Hal, as playwright-king, must address himself to as “redeemer.”

No wonder that he does, in fact, shrink from assuming this role (in contrast to his confident self-assertion in the last play). For of course he does not stand passively by, watching the play breed its monsters and death's-heads without cause. He actively holds back from that moment of choice that in Part 1 came to him so easily, at so little cost. In his very reluctance to assume his destined role, the strange intransigence of 2 Henry IV is played out: its dreamlike sense of being everywhere out of phase, everywhere hurt by an unarticulated “other grief,” all the while intent on “fearful musters and prepared defense.” The gathering sickness, the desperate fear of the passing of time, the built-up resistance to any sort of gratifying action—all this is focused in the issue of Hal's succession to his role as deliverer. For if he is playwright-to-be, he is also his own “despised dream,” to be delivered into wakefulness. There is no such thing as unmoved mover, manipulating king of shadows. Mocking the mocker, false playwright Rumor, means for Hal, far more truly than for Richard II, turning himself inside-out and sacrificing himself to his play.

In one sense Part 2 is the “other grief” that Part 1 is swollen with—its dream life. By the dramatic logic of Hal's own scenario, only a moment lapses between the endings of the two plays. It is the moment in which Hal makes the simple transition from sunlit prince to princely sun. What postpones the succession by thus protracting the playing is Falstaff's resurrection. Indeed, looking back from Part 2's final scene, Hal safely transformed to Henry V and Falstaff at last expunged, we may say that the resurrection had pried open the moment of transition, requiring that in the act of his transformation Hal undergo a strangely clotted “dream” journey through the suppressed implications of that “natural” process. Thus in Part 2, with its repetitions, distortions, and mockeries of Part 1, Hal confronts the stifled specters of his determined self-idealization and of the play he has devised in order to realize himself in that role. The real “logic” here is that which is repeatedly brought home in Shakespeare: art is a sacrificial activity, and no action, howsoever disguised as passive acceptance of the Given, is undertaken without costing the actor something of himself.

Avoiding both battlefield and court, Hal is conspicuously evasive of the play's overt action. In the only two appearances he does make before meeting his father, he is illuminated in curiously effortful, self-abasing postures, while much preoccupied with thoughts of his father's death.

Well, thus we play the fools with the time, and the
spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us.

(2.2.131-32)

By heaven, Poins, I feel me much to blame,
So idly to profane the precious time.

(2.4.337-38)

In Part 1 the “reconciliation” scene, however fraught with unresolved filial issues, did nevertheless forward the play's public business. Here, however, the meeting occurs only after the diversionary public action of the play has been exhausted. And so Hal's odd reluctance, and even dread, finally force the encounter, when it does inevitably occur, into a radical expression of the play's real action. What Hal would evade by, in effect, “playing dead,” he kindles into a full-blown, vividly materialized scene.

Therefore, though Part 2 as a whole can be said to dramatize the ghosts of Part 1, the climax certainly occurs in that long-delayed confrontation of father and son. Despite its obvious and ironic correspondence to the “reconciliation” scene in Part 1, its true counterpart in that play is the scene of ritual rescue-and-recognition at Shrewsbury (5.4). There Hal's ostentatious rescue of his father from Douglas neatly plays out the “rescue fantasy” familiar to modern psychoanalysis—the process whereby parricidal wishes are self-defensively inverted. But whereas Part 1 allows the realization of these energies in action (as well as in quickening play with Falstaff) it is just this fulfillment that Part 2 denies with its dreamlike and cynical self-knowledge. No credible cause presents itself, and no credible Pretender (unless it is Prince John, the all-too-fit hero this chilled time around). And even Falstaff's powers of self-creative play have waned (and in any case Hal largely keeps away from him as well). Thus, opportunities for just the kinds of “acting-out” that fire Part 1 are everywhere suppressed in Part 2; “action” moves, as it were, underground: like Hamlet's, Hal's passivity becomes his only defense against the father-killing drives (and fears of self-nullification) that swarm within the “fated” and impersonal role awaiting him as Successor.

So the confrontation, which is a life-and-death struggle undertaken verbally, must itself substitute for the efficacious action of the “rescue fantasy” of Part 1, forcing the emotional components—hostility, guilt, yearning, fear—into monstrous verbal forms. But also, just as the Shrewsbury scene symbolically enacts Hal's drama of the true son's emergence, so the sickbed confrontation symbolically enacts the actual moment of succession—that nightmarishly protracted moment in which the son replaces (or becomes) the father. The scene, in other words, plays out the “other grief” of the play—discovers it and delivers it into drama.

Only dream logic, it seems, can account for the depths of hostility and fear that have opened between father and son since their “reconciliation” in Part 1. The breach has materialized out of no new business except for Hal's absence, which is to say that it rises out of the repressed past and thwarted selves that shadow the compromises reached in the interview and at Shrewsbury in Part 1. Through the very restraints of controlled language and purpose, this “other” now dangerously asserts itself in the careful haste with which Hal seizes the crown and in the torrential vision of ruin it undams in the king. Language itself, so responsive an instrument in Part 1, seems a minefield now. In Henry's language the familiar mixture of self-knowledge and deceit, guilt and stifled desire, is grotesquely magnified, as when he wakes to find his crown—and Hal—missing:

How quickly nature falls into revolt
When gold becomes her object!
For this the foolish overcareful fathers
Have broke their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care,
Their bones with industry.
For this they have engrossed and pilèd up
The cankered heaps of strange-achievèd gold;
For this they have been thoughtful to invest
Their sons with arts and martial exercises.
When, like the bee, tolling from every flower
The virtuous sweets,
Our thighs packed with wax, our mouths with honey,
We bring it to the hive, and, like the bees,
Are murdered for our pains.

(4.5.65-78)

In his crafty rhetorical conventions, in his bitter self-pity, Henry seeks to focus and use an uprising of anarchic passion that threatens to overwhelm him; hence the terrible concentration of his own dissociations upon his son. Of course, the outburst is self-indicting. Hal, after all, has only retired with the crown to the next room, thinking his father dead, “Washing with kindly tears his gentle cheeks” (l. 83). Nevertheless, in his paranoiac rage Henry strikes past appearances to a deeper truth. The king's son would murder him—indeed is actively murdering him: “This part of his conjoins with my disease / And helps to end me” (ll. 63-64).

By “murder” we understand that he means self-destruction, identifying Hal with the “headstrong riot … rage and hot blood … lavish manners” (4.4.62-64) that he himself has always, notoriously, suppressed, and so now finds everywhere threatening. For instance, after the declaration that “we will our youth lead on to higher fields / And draw no swords but what are sanctified” (4.4.3-4; italics mine), the second sense of the passage, the yearning to redeem his own wasted age, is shortly brought to the fore: “Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds, / And he, the noble image of my youth, / Is overspread with them” (4.4.54-56). So long as he can imagine Hal in his own wishful image, as his “youth … sanctified,” Henry is able to contemplate death and succession with some equanimity (as for instance in dispensing patriarchal advice to Clarence on how to cope with the touchy new king in 4.27-48). In a self-denying role as ritual Successor Hal would redeem Henry's own self-denial and justify his career of endlessly acting the king he can never truly be until retrospectively legitimized, or “sanctified,” by his son (4.5.197-201). But the Hal who refuses to come forward in that ritual role, but rather “dines in London” among “dead carrion” (4.4.80)—this is, suddenly, another “son” altogether, whose succession means no redemption after all. It means, rather that “my grief / Stretches itself beyond the hour of death” (4.4.56-57): the future as continual parricide. Clearly the king fears Hal as the vengeful uprising of his own repressed and violated self, his internal “riot” that strikes grinning at midnight and on the announcement of “good news” and salutations from the battlefield.

But Hal-sanctified and Hal-riotous are simply conventional images assumed by the king's wishes and fears. His fear of being murdered, for instance, expresses his concern for the decorum of his son's succession. He is outraged not by Hal's personal desire for the crown, but by his premature forcing of the inevitable—his timing:

Thou has stolen that which after some few hours
Were thine without offense,

(4.5.101-2)

Thou hidest a thousand daggers in thy thoughts,
To stab at half an hour of my life.
What! Canst thou not forbear me half an hour?

(4.5.106-9)

Guilty and wasted, the old king wants to be saved by a nobler ceremony than he himself has ever found possible. All too well this Henry Bolingbroke could understand a muddled, self-serving, strategically half-conscious act of usurpation, a simple linear displacement: the argument, as Richard II had put it, of “grim necessity.” But he yearns to be absolved from such a system of causality—to be not merely displaced but reunderstood, comprehended by a consciousness superior to his own. This becomes clear in the steep dislocations of his speech—for instance, the self-pitying plea to be loved and absolved that sounds through his terrible denunciation:

Thy life did manifest thou lovedst me not,
And thou wilt have me die assured of it.
.....Let all the tears that should bedew my hearse
Be drops of balm to sanctify thy head.
Only compound me with forgotten dust;
Give that which gave thee life unto the worms.

(4.5.104-16)

It is Hal, of course, in whom this superior dramatic consciousness would be realized. But Hal not only fears succession as a kind of murder, too; he also shrinks from the office as a kind of self-destruction. In Part 1 it seemed he could exercise consciousness over the dramatic material and still somehow be the Hal who comes most vividly to life in his taut contentions with Falstaff. Now it is clear that to be playwright means to exercise consciousness in the drama, not over it; that to deliver the drama “Hal” must be sacrificed—and with none of the furtive gratifications that Richard II's self-sacrifice entailed. Of course Hal is to be reborn as Henry V—an epic hero, father of his brothers, moralizing mirror of all Christian kings; but as a sentient self, occasional and shadowy indeed. No wonder then that he resists assuming this office, first by his evasions of court and battlefield (despite declared intentions) and then, the encounter inevitable, by devising a ritual play by which to preempt the question of consciousness altogether.

Unbidden, after having so conspicuously avoided his father for so long, Hal appears only after the king has fallen sick and asleep. Precipitously he discovers that the feared and looked-for moment is upon him. Although he had supposedly come as one son among many, to pay respects to his father, the true purpose of his coming—to inherit the crown—is thrust upon him after fewer than ten lines of filial compassion for the ruined old man:

                                        By his gates of breath
There lies a downy feather which stirs not.
Did he suspire, that light and weightless down
Perforce must move.

(4.5.30-33)

This urging of proof by downy feather, like the entire compacted speech itself, is altogether too effortful, too carefully channeled into its rhetorical conventions (“O polished perturbation! Golden care!”) not to betray the urgency of thinly disguised haste behind it. And in itself, the rigid concentration of Hal's entire attention in the crown conceit implies the effort of control. Quickly he reckons accounts: “Thy due from me / Is tears and heavy sorrows of the blood … / My due from thee is this imperial crown” (ll. 36-40). He emphasizes lineality—“This from thee / Will I to mine leave, as 'tis left to me” (ll. 45-46)—and departs, to be found doing his weeping in the antechamber. The entire scene occupies twenty-six lines.

The point is not that Hal is pitiless, murderous, or greedy for the “golden rigol.” When Henry subsequently charges that “thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought,” he means the thought of his death. But the whole scene of the theft is the form Hal's wishes take—the death and succession as a fait accompli, a necessary process miraculously having taken place by itself. Hal's ritual play, were it successful, would have enabled him to murder his father unconsciously, to act in a design he had no part in devising. But the little play is not allowed to stand. Just as 2 Henry IV forces a reinterpretation of 1 Henry IV, all superficial action thwarted in order to expose what that action would conceal, so Hal is hailed back to Henry's sickbed and made to accept the full role of playwright: to murder his father volitionally, and hence his own independent self as well.

“I never thought to hear you speak again,” says Hal (4.5.91). By speaking, the king destroys Hal's play into a wider, more painful, less artificial one. The first point to be made about Henry's extraordinary outburst of recrimination is that he will not be denied it—will not die peacefully and silently in Hal's wishful drama, nor allow Warwick's assurance of Hal's grief to diminish the force of his great culminating performance. In his projection of the world raving into universal riot through Hal's parricide-wish, Henry will give vent to his paranoia. The second point is that Henry is playing—that his performance, in the very gratuitousness of its passion, constitutes a plea for an answering performance that will dissolve his own, and so redeem his harrowing guilt by an act of love he cannot himself imagine:

What! Canst thou not forbear me half an hour?
Then get thee gone and dig my grave thyself,
And bid the merry bells ring to thine ear
That thou art crownèd, not that I am dead.
Let all the tears that should bedew my hearse
Be drops of balm to sanctify thy head.
Only compound me with forgotten dust;
Give that which gave thee life unto the worms.
Pluck down my officers, break my decrees,
For now a time is come to mock at form.
Harry the Fifth is crowned. Up, vanity!
Down, royal state! All you sage counsellors, hence!

(4.5.109-20)

Hal's response is that of the instinctive dramatist. He backs off, relinquishing self-assertion, in order to gain command of this wider, riskier play that Henry has forced upon him. As in the corresponding scene of Part 1, he is cannily able to divine and oblige his father's wish; he lets him rave, act out his guilty vision and his plea for love and forgiveness; lets him exhaust his performance before thinly answering:

O, pardon me, my liege! But for my tears,
The moist impediments unto my speech,
I had forestalled this dear and deep rebuke
Ere you with grief had spoke and I had heard
The course of it so far.

(4.5.138-42)

Nothing in Hal's reply to the indictment is prima facie convincing except the earnestness of its avowals, and yet it is, as Dover Wilson says, “completely satisfying to his father.” As an answering performance Hal's “pleading so wisely in excuse” satisfies Henry's need merely by not violating the credibility of their mutually created drama.

At the simplest level then, father and son have tacitly agreed on an efficacious stylization of their troubled relationship—a kind of symbolic drama of breach-and-restoration that eases Henry's passage to “Jerusalem” and Hal's to the crown, while it both liberates and controls potentially terrifying psychic energies. But the little drama is too obviously useful to be deeply convincing in its resolution. What both Hal and Henry feared most has not come to pass: it is as if the whole course of King Lear threatened from the breach between father and son, only to be abruptly foreclosed, the possibility denied, the convention of reconciliation reasserted.

Nevertheless, Hal is not allowed to escape responsibility for the drama as a means of staging his father's death. He struggles, indeed, to escape that responsibility, by denying self-consciousness. He claims to have put on the crown “to try with it, as with an enemy / That had before my face murdered my father, / The quarrel of a true inheritor” (ll. 166-68). This image—or rather, this scene that Hal now conjures up—is a means of displacing his own motive. As in his solo bedside performance he projects his most dangerous impulses onto the crown, and thereby controls and, in a measure, evades them. But the deeper dramatic rhythms press through. Hal cannot blindly act out parricidal urges through a displacement, but must himself be the playwright of that action, of that very effort to escape. Henry had grieved, “This part of his conjoins with my disease / And helps to end me.” And when Hal sheepishly confesses, “I never thought to hear you speak again,” Henry shrewdly replies, “Thy wish was father, Harry, to that thought.” As wish-effecting “father,” deviser of this “part,” Hal has, even while seeking to escape it, anticipated the true nature of his role as successor—that is, as the playwright-king ordained to order the future in ways the old father cannot conceive. To be sure, Hal badly bungles the job and turns out something of a “loathly birth” in the process. But even that stillborn drama is turned to account. Henry insists upon Hal's responsibility for the scene of the theft, even if his sense of the marvelous must assume conventional form: “God put it in thy mind to take it hence, / That thou mightst win the more thy father's love, / Pleading so wisely in excuse of it!” (ll. 178-80). Which is to say that Hal, as character, thieved the crown in a purposefully inept play that Hal, as playwright, would destroy into a more comprehensive one; whereby what was “parricide” in the first becomes, in the second, the absorption of the father by the son. This transaction occurs on the spot. Hal assumes his office by exercising it, by making speech out of the dumb, unconscious acts of the past. Thus he quotes himself, as a character in history:

I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: “The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father.
Therefore, thou best of gold art worst of gold.
Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,
Preserving life in medicine potable,
But thou, most fine, most honored, most renowned,
Hast eat thy bearer up.”

(4.5.157-64)

The playwright subsumes himself as character, making out of the past the speech that is the present performance, the one by which the “reconciliation” of father and son is enacted. This is a paradigm of the act of the history plays. Hal alters the helpless past to appropriate it for the present. He destroys history, dissolving it into drama in an act of absorbing consciousness, in order to make it live, unfinished after all, and hence—so Henry dumbly hopes—redeemable.

Hal's gift as playwright-king lies in letting his subjects speak—in organizing “history” into theatrical occasions whereby they can act themselves out through him. In his debut as Henry V he fittingly demonstrates the gift, challenging the Chief Justice to explain “how might a prince of my great hopes forget / So great indignities you laid upon me” (5.2.67-68). The Justice's lengthy defense not only affirms his rectitude, it also—not incidentally—locates the power of a true king in the rectitude of his representatives. The true king acts through his agents, or “images,” but he alone has the power to authenticate those very agents: “I then did use the person of your father. / The image of his power lay then in me” (5.2.73-74). Therefore, by upholding the Justice Hal can do what he implicitly promised his father; redeem his despairing dispersal into facsimiles, mere robes and roles, and “sanctify” him retrospectively.

The new king listens, just as he had listened to his father, allowing the (after all)—superfluous speech to complete itself. Only then does Hal forgive the Justice, as if the speech itself had worked his change of heart. In the Justice's speech he allows the memory of the past to “be washed in Lethe, and forgotten” (l. 72). Of course this demonstration of royal grace is one of Hal's gilded lies. But it is also what makes dramatic life possible, and failing to understand that, Hal might have foregone the beneficently deceitful ceremony and forgiven the Justice preemptively. To do so would have been to assert tyrannical and graceless authority, to deny the value of speech as itself a creative activity. Hal is the first of the kings who knows to let his subjects be by acting themselves out through him—so that they may be communally and see themselves festally in their corporate body, one in multiplicity. In that sense, as a “mirror” of free and creative speech, Hal redeems the lost time, the debasement and futility of dramatic language so grimly enacted by the earlier histories.

To some extent the cost of this success is Hal's reduction to a ritual role. Falstaff gone, there is no one to challenge him or the easy grace with which he stages the efficacious illusions of freedom. He will henceforth preside symbolically over a realm full of diverse and energetic speakers, while personally remaining masked, unclarified, unrealized. Yet it would be easy to overstate this proposition—as easy, perhaps, as to overstate its opposite number, that the ending is wholly the “show” of a cynical Machiavellian prince in full control of its effects. The ending of the play seems as delicate and subtly complex in its orchestration of effects—and hence in its invitation to our responses—as we might expect in this climax, not only to Henry IV, but to the whole long troubled sequence of histories.

Were Hal's act of succession complete, then the drama would succeed to myth: a world so perfectly created as to have consumed all signs of the creative act itself. In that case the pain of genesis would be all absorbed, the yearning self fully dispersed into its work. The dramatic impulse itself would be fully gratified by its form, and the playing would be over. But it is never over. Instead, old king and new at once begin plotting “to busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels” (4.5.213-14). In other words, the succession perfected does not purify dramatic character of its human content, however much it might narrow Hal's. To the extent that he can destroy himself—his past—into the present, as in the final scene he claims to have done, Hal has found the “right” way to succeed (to murder) his father. To the extent that he resists his own sacrifice into the playmaking role, he suffers the pain of the parricide. But in the crafted calm of his speech to the Chief Justice, naming him in effect his new father; in the gravity of his address to his brothers, grieving for the old father; and in the icy violence of his judgment upon Falstaff, Hal shows the strain with which he labors to put himself beyond the pain of parricide—to busy his own mind and waste his own memory by construing the reconciliation with his father as a perfection of their identities.

My father is gone wild into his grave,
For in his tomb lie my affections,
And with his spirit sadly I survive.

(5.2.123-25)

Both the coldness and the “grim necessity” of the rejection of Falstaff remind us with what ruthless vengeance 2 Henry IV plays out its self-destruction. The studied reduction of Hal in the play to his role as Successor, of Henry to sacrificial father, and of Falstaff to the Martinmas fool, arriving at the moment of his sacrifice ready for the slaughter, are mutely tragic forms of self-violence. The pain in all of this, the impurities of the masks and motives, the resistance of the dramatic matter itself to the drive toward termination and absolution, constitute our own gathering recognition of the face of history. As Edward Berry reminds us, the ending of the play produces no simple, single effect, nor is there any reason to expect it to be pleasant, the genre being history and not comedy: “The triumphs permitted by history are always equivocal and too perplexing for joy.”

But I do not think the genre of history governs the mixture of effects in the end. I think that they constitute Shakespeare's rediscovery of what “history” is. Over and over we have witnessed this process of feeling out the nature of increasingly complex, indeed almost overwhelmingly complex material, one of whose signal characteristics is its tendency to disintegrate, or to crystalize, under dramatic pressure. The discovery of “history” seems as much a matter of artistic restraint, a standing-back from judgment, as of active craftsmanship. In the quietness of that restraint Shakespeare finds the form through which we grow as much aware of what is lost in final moments as of what is gained.

The Stratford production saved the final part of Hal's address to his brothers in act 5, scene 2, for the end of the play, making it his coronation speech. Thus it came after the rejection scene and was delivered from the balcony to the world at large—meaning to us. The impulse behind this rearrangement was clear enough. In the play as it stands we are left feeling chilled if not stunned by the rejection, and hardly rewarmed by Prince John's brisk summing-up and glib forecast of new adventures coming up overseas. Not much of a real ending, in other words. Stratford, in elevating, isolating, and illuminating the new king in his rich crimson robes, certainly mirrored our desire for a transcendent conclusion. But it also falsified Shakespeare by giving in to that desire.

Shakespeare's endings have always made major demands upon their audiences, but in 2 Henry IV our role appears to have been focused with greater intensity than ever before. The part we played in Part 1, though highly active, was never so well specified as here. Rumor, of course, begins the process, speaking in the guise of the playwright of “false reports,” and enlisting us as coconspirators and rumor-mongers. He addresses us as an audience as falsely coherent as he is himself, with his many conflicting tongues: each of us encapsulated in our verbal cells, sanctioning the “false reports,” each of us hearing only what we can or will hear, which is to say, suffering from the “disease of not listening, the malady of not marking.” This caricature of the audience is Rumor's projection, of course. But it is also at least half-accurate. We do come to a play as an inchoate, atomized, speciously unified body. Whatever expectations we may have of being translated into something nobler, Rumor begins by translating our fragmentation into a mirror-image of the diseased society assembled upon the stage, itself fragmented for lack of a truly unifying tongue. Both bodies, onstage and off, “expect” the play to heal and unify them.

We are indeed Hal's wider audience for his coronation speech. But we are also the “world” whom he addresses in his real last speech—that in which he repudiates Falstaff. When he halts the coronation train to face his old senex-father-playmate-lover, we are aware that the old threat and promise of “I do, I will” has finally come to term, and with it the doubleness inherent in that haunting formulation. Now Hal's credibility is to be doubly tested, for he must “make good” his promise both to the members of his inner fictive realm, those onstage celebrating his ascension, and to the much more knowing members of the dramatic audience, us. “I will” means I banish Falstaff from my company as king; “I do” means I banish him from the stage altogether. To do the one, Hal risks his standing with his wider audience—and not many of them down through the years have been wholehearted supporters of his action. But he clearly must accept the risk, must not temporize in carrying out his decision to kill off Falstaff. There is no right way to do it, except publicly, vocally, and personally, bearing full responsibility for all consequences of the act. He must do it—and in the doing, hope that we will recognize our need to do it, too, so sanctioning him. The actor of Hal must feel all this and try with full conviction to persuade us of the rightness of his action, though not, I think, of the self-righteousness. To kill off Falstaff is an attempt to unify the realm, and (as the wider realm) the audience. It simply cannot succeed perfectly given the impurities intrinsic to the material. But as Hal addresses us through Falstaff, a clear mutual recognition of the impurities is possible. And that will be our final debt to Falstaff, who has forced the matter to this sad, illuminating crisis. If Hal performs the act with too few regrets or difficulties for our taste, subsiding too easily into the ritual role of Henry V, forgoing our full support, that too is part of the cost that he must be willing to bear. And it is part of our job to see and understand all this clearly.

The fact is, it is not so hard to let Falstaff go. William Empson speculates that the “triumph” of his creation was a major turning point for Shakespeare in that it liberated him from a dependency on aristocratic patrons, “marking a recovery of nerve after a long attempt to be their hangeron.”

The point is not that he was like Falstaff but that, once he could imagine he was, once he could “identify” himself with a scandalous aristocrat, the sufferings of that character could be endured with positive glee. I am sure that is how he came to be liberated into putting such tremendous force into every corner of the picture.

Whether this speculation is as sound as it is ingenious, it speaks to something we cannot help feeling in Falstaff, and that is the prodigious personal passion, free and unprecedented, that has gone into his creation. Somehow it is because of that enormous triumph that Shakespeare is able to abandon him in good dramatic conscience. Falstaff's death proceeds from his deep life. And with his death there comes release from a burden well and honestly borne. It seems that the sheer relief of having imagined so full a creature as Falstaff allows Shakespeare to go past history, at least as the sort of obsession that has dogged him through eight successive plays. Empson thinks that “as a matter of trust from the audience, the triumph of Falstaff made possible the series of major tragedies.” First, of course, Shakespeare must complete the Henriad as (presumably) planned. But now with the burden of the “other grief” lifted he is able to proceed in a newly lightened spirit, in a new vein altogether. Not surprisingly, he begins by addressing us in an ebullient new voice of confident recognition.