SOURCE: Ryan, Kiernan. “The Future of History in Henry IV.” In Henry IV, Parts One and Two, edited by Nigel Wood, pp. 92-125. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Ryan analyzes Henry IV in terms of Frederic Jameson's Marxist theory of literature, finding that Shakespeare's plays demystify the hierarchical assumptions and teleological confusions associated with historical drama even as they portray standard ideologies.]

I

As history plays engaged in dramatizing the fate of Crown and nation across a period two centuries before the time of Shakespeare and his audience, 1 and 2 Henry IV pose fundamental questions for the literary theory and critical practice of the present. What is the relationship between the reality of history and its creative representation, between the world of the past and the work's account of it? What is the political role of the work in its own world: to shore up or shake the foundations of power? Can the literature of the past only speak of the past, or has it secrets to reveal to the present and appointments to keep with the future?

No attempt to answer these questions in recent years has been more ambitious or compelling than Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1981). Although the subtitle, Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, and the devotion of chapters to Balzac, Gissing and Conrad suggest a narrower relevance to the novel, the book as a whole seeks to construct nothing short of a new Marxist hermeneutics, a comprehensive political theory of interpretation. The essential arguments of The Political Unconscious are developed in Chapter 1, ‘On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act’, and Chapter 6, ‘Conclusion: The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology’. It is from these chapters that I will draw the ideas that strike me as most illuminating for the study of Henry IV; but I will also refer to Jameson's closely related essay ‘Marxism and Historicism’ (1979, in Jameson 1988), which tackles some of the thorny issues subsequently explored at length in The Political Unconscious.

I hope to show that the fresh perspectives supplied by Jameson's theory of interpretation make possible a more searching account of the Henry IV plays than the most influential readings to date have delivered. But the pursuit of that account should also establish the power of these plays to expose the limits of Jameson's methodology through their superior imaginative grasp of the complex problems his theory addresses.

Let us begin with the claims of the literature of the past on the critical practice of the present. What is at stake in the encounter between the late sixteenth-century scripts of 1 and 2 Henry IV and their late twentieth-century students? Contemporary criticism offers two main strategies for dealing with a work that confronts us from the temporally remote and culturally estranged past which first housed it. One is the retrospective route followed by both the traditional and the newer kinds of historicist response: the restoration of the work to some apposite original context, in which its meaning may be more authentically and so more securely moored. The other path leads in the opposite direction, towards the colonization of the past by modernity: the collapsing of historical distance, and hence the erasure of difference, by an act of appropriation which makes the author of the text our contemporary. At the extremes, the work is either embedded in a past world which excludes modern consequence, or absorbed into current categories from which historicity has been drained.

Jameson's answer to ‘the question of the claims of monuments from distant and even archaic moments of the cultural past on a culturally different present’ is to reject ‘this unacceptable option, or ideological double bind, between antiquarianism and modernising “relevance” or projection’. Interpretation can be released from this disabling impasse only by implementing a view of history ‘capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day’ (Jameson 1981: 18).

Jameson is confident that a Marxist philosophy of history alone

can give us an adequate account of the essential mystery of the cultural past, which, like Tiresias drinking the blood, is momentarily returned to life and warmth and allowed once more to speak, and to deliver its long-forgotten message in surroundings utterly alien to it.

(Jameson 1981: 19; emphasis in original)

For this revival of the past through the magic of the cultural documents it has bequeathed us cannot be accomplished except by a vision of history which grasps both past and present moments ‘as vital episodes in a single vast unfinished plot’ (Jameson 1981: 20): the epic tale of humanity's collective struggle to transform its enslavement to necessity into a shared freedom from the coercions of nature and history alike. By severing the ties binding then to now, critics engrossed in the past or constrained by the present have conspired, in effect, to obscure literature's involvement in the telling of that tale. Hence the most urgent task of the new hermeneutics Jameson proposes lies ‘in detecting the traces of that uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history’ (1981: 20), which constitutes the ‘political unconscious’ of the literary work.

This should not mean, however, merely a revamped, politicized historicism, which continues to submit texts to the superior gaze of belated comprehension. The ideal relationship is one of genuine dialogue rather than the simulated exchange contrived between a dummy version of the past and the modern critical ventriloquist. ‘We must try to accustom ourselves’, Jameson stresses, ‘to a perspective in which every act of reading, every local interpretive practice, is grasped as the privileged vehicle through which two distinct modes of production confront and interrogate each other’ (Jameson 1988: 175). For if we can do this,

We will no longer tend to see the past as some inert and dead object which we are called upon to resurrect, or to preserve, or to sustain, in our own living freedom; rather, the past will itself become an active agent in this process and will begin to come before us as a radically different form of life which rises up to call our own form of life into question and to pass judgement on us and through us on the social formation in which we exist. At that point the very dynamics of the historical tribunal are unexpectedly and dialectically reversed: it is not we who sit in judgement on the past, but rather the past, the radical difference of other modes of production (and even of the immediate past of our own mode of production), which judges us, imposing the painful knowledge of what we are not, what we are no longer, what we are not yet.

(Jameson 1988: 175)

It is in the sense implied in that last phrase that Jameson believes the past ‘speaks to us about our own virtual and unrealised “human potentialities”’ (Jameson 1988: 175). The attempt to initiate an authentic dialogue between history and modernity through literature is indivisible from the quest to restore to the process of aesthetic interpretation the dimension of futurity: ‘the hermeneutic contact between past and present outlined here cannot fully be described without the articulation within it of what Ernst Bloch has called the Utopian impulse’ (1988: 176). What distinguishes the Marxist vision for Jameson is its combination of a critique of previous and contemporary social formations with ‘the anticipatory expression of a future society’, with a ‘partisan commitment to that future or Utopian mode of production which seeks to emerge from the hegemonic mode of production of our own present’ (1988: 176). Thus the Marxist practice of literary interpretation he envisages should involve ‘a hermeneutic relationship to the past which is able to grasp its own present as history only on condition it manages to keep the idea of the future, and of radical and utopian transformation, alive’ (1988: 177).

Jameson proposes an equally invaluable revision of the ways in which the relationship between the world and the work, between literature and history, is commonly perceived. His reappraisal of this relationship makes it possible to break yet another basic critical deadlock, wrought once again by the antagonism of two powerful but lopsided positions. For to take the line toed by old-fashioned practical critic and daredevil deconstructionist alike, and treat the work as a largely autonomous textual event, whose point owes few debts to biographical and social fact, is plainly unsatisfactory. But to espouse the sort of approach that reduces the work to dancing attendance on a prior historical reality, which thus provides the gauge of the text's significance and worth, is scarcely less problematic. For the poem, play or novel dwindles into a mere symptom or suffix of its age, a more or less recognizable restatement in literary form of the primal, empirical narrative established by historians.

Jameson's thesis endeavours to do justice both to our sense of the text's aesthetic integrity, its seeming independence of history, and to our recognition of its power to animate through language and form a version of that lived world in which it is rooted, but to which it cannot be reduced. For Jameson the literary text, far from being a passive imprint of historical reality, ‘always entertains some active relationship with the Real’. This allows it to ‘draw the Real into its own texture’, to select and incorporate its own indispensable contexts, and thus ‘carry the Real within itself as its own intrinsic or immanent subtext’ (Jameson 1981: 81). To the extent that literature may be viewed as a form of symbolic action, ‘a way of doing something to the world’,

to that degree what we are calling ‘world’ must inhere within it, as the content it has to take up into itself in order to submit it to the transformations of form. The symbolic act therefore begins by generating and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it steps back from it, taking its measure with a view toward its own projects of transformation. The whole paradox of what we have here called the subtext may be summed up in this, that the literary work or cultural object, as though for the first time, brings into being that very situation to which it is also, at one and the same time, a reaction. It articulates its own situation and textualizes it, thereby encouraging and perpetuating the illusion that the situation itself did not exist before it, that there is nothing but a text, that there never was any extra- or con-textual reality before the text itself generated it in the form of a mirage.

(Jameson 1981: 81-2)

If Jameson is right about the way significant literature internalizes and transports whatever circumstances it requires to make sense to its readers, then the kind of historical criticism which labours to ‘restore’ text to context by excavating and reconstituting the world to which it refers is labouring to little purpose. For those who still regard literature as a special, privileged enterprise, not to be confused with or subordinated to history, there is no point turning the text into a pretext for exhuming and expanding backgrounds from which the work itself has already looted all it needs, or which it has ruled out in advance as irrelevant to its purpose. Indeed, the current drive to dissolve literary into cultural and historical studies might strike the cynic as the convenient resort of those who have failed to recognize the literature of the past as an imaginative historiography in its own right. Be that as it may, this part of Jameson's argument can be recruited to tighten the focus on ‘the transformations of form’ to which the work submits whatever materials it has chosen to translate from the discourse of history into the language of literature. For the vital task is surely to interpret the way the work portrays and persuades us to view its subject, rather than to trace that subject superfluously back to its roots in the conditions from which it sprang. The changing meaning and value of classic literature is more profitably sought in how it handles its material than in where it found it in the first place.

The trouble is that Jameson's lack of faith in literature's powers of vision and resistance scuppers the positive potential of his argument at the outset. No sooner has the work been sprung from its incarceration in mere subsequence than it is thrown back into the airless slammer of ideology with slim prospects of reprieve. What might have blossomed into a genuine hermeneutics of hope withers into the familiar hermeneutics of suspicion routinely practised by more disenchanted political critics. Thus Jameson allows literature the agency to submit reality to the transformations of form, but purely in the interests of the ruling account of that reality: ‘the aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to be seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable social contradictions’ (Jameson 1981: 79).

Far from giving us enlightened access to the truths of human experience and social relations, the literary text contrives to mask them, or make them vanish through the trapdoor of rhetorical or formal illusion. The most sacred texts in the secular scripture are not those that scorn such duplicity, but those that have proved its most accomplished exponents. For, assuming the individual work to be ‘a symbolic move in an essentially polemic and strategic ideological confrontation between the classes’, then ‘by definition the cultural monuments and masterworks that have survived tend necessarily to perpetuate only a single voice in this class dialogue, the voice of a hegemonic class’ (Jameson 1981: 85). Jameson shares with most devotees of the new historicism and cultural materialism what he himself terms ‘a manipulatory theory of culture’ (1981: 287), a kind of cultural conspiracy theory which compels them to treat the work of literature as a seductive technique of containment, genetically predisposed to buttress the status quo and delay or disguise the advent of liberating change.

But how can such a craven tool of reaction be expected to speak so trenchantly of its time as to rattle the complacency of the present and unfold premonitions of an unfettered future? The answer for Jameson is that it can be made to do so only in spite of itself. Once the text has been lured on to the psychiatrist's couch to deliver an account of its intent, the critical analyst's role is to tease from that account involuntary clues to the undeluded understanding it has distorted and repressed, to coax its political unconscious to the surface. The best a radical modern critic can do with a past masterwork is to read it with hindsight against its conservative grain, forcing its symptomatic slips and silences to betray the secret truths of history it has connived so ingeniously to efface. The utopian aspect of the work can likewise be wrested from its reactionary grasp only by an act of hermeneutic violence determined to construe the ideology of the text as a travesty of that ideal human condition to whose possibility it bears unwitting witness.

At one point Jameson announces encouragingly that Marxist criticism ‘can no longer be content with its demystifying vocation to unmask and to demonstrate the ways in which a cultural artifact fulfills a specific ideological mission, in legitimating a given power structure’ (Jameson 1981: 291). And he proposes instead that ‘a Marxist negative hermeneutic must in the practical work of reading and interpretation be exercised simultaneously with a Marxist positive hermeneutic, or a decipherment of the Utopian impulses of these same still ideological cultural texts’ (1981: 296). That ‘still ideological’ shuts down the opportunities opened earlier in the sentence. Jameson is more alert than most to the ways in which theorists like Bakhtin, Bloch, Adorno, Marcuse and Benjamin ‘hint at a variety of options for articulating a properly Marxian version of meaning beyond the purely ideological’ (1981: 285). But his own ‘positive hermeneutic’ cannot take the hint, and settles instead for ‘the proposition that the effectively ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily Utopian’ (1981: 286).

How can a literary work whose resources are supposedly devoted to legitimizing class society simultaneously express a vision and values antithetical to those sponsoring its ideological vocation? The key to the paradox, according to Jameson, is that ‘all ideology in the strongest sense, including the most exclusive forms of ruling-class consciousness just as much as that of oppositional or oppressed classes … is in its very nature Utopian’ (Jameson 1981: 289). It is utopian inasmuch as it expresses the desired unity of a people, an intimation of realized community:

The achieved collectivity or organic group of whatever kind—oppressors fully as much as oppressed—is Utopian not in itself, but only insofar as all such collectivities are themselves figures for the ultimate concrete collective life of an achieved Utopian or classless society. Now we are in a better position to understand how even hegemonic or ruling-class culture and ideology are Utopian, not in spite of their instrumental function to secure and perpetuate class privilege and power, but rather precisely because that function is also in and of itself the affirmation of collective solidarity.

(Jameson 1981: 291; emphasis in original)

In other words, even the most powerful feats of the literary imagination are condemned to conceal the oppressive divisions and conflicts of their world behind façades of formal harmony and structural unity; but these fantasies of reconciliation and closure cannot help symbolizing the very dispensation whose arrival in reality they were expressly designed to forestall. This might well prove a fruitful way of tackling works plainly transfixed by the legitimating myths of their day. What is questionable is the need to stifle at birth the possibility that literature may not always be so completely beguiled by ideology as Jameson presumes, but may prove intent on exposing the current map of experience to critique from a utopian standpoint irreducible to ideology of any sort.

Henry IV provides an ideal opportunity to explore both the strengths and the drawbacks of Jameson's theory when it is put to the test of textual analysis. Both plays are directly engaged with history, politics and ideology. 1 and 2 Henry IV are as preoccupied as Jameson with the relationship of the past to the present, with the implications of converting historical realities into verbal fictions, and with the role of language and representation in preserving and contesting power. To what extent do these history plays not only speak to us of what our world once was, but also challenge us to confront what it remains and what it has yet to become? If Jameson is right to regard writing's relation to reality as one of active formation rather than supplementary expression, then to answer that question we need to examine how the plays' formal strategies act to organize our perception of their version of history. This in turn will enable us to determine to what degree both parts of Henry IV collude in mystifying the power structures they portray, and in what ways they foreshadow the dissolution of hierarchy itself.

II

On the face of it, it might seem hard to imagine a drama more eager to comply with Jameson's expectations of literature than Henry IV. Here, surely, is a perfect instance of art in the frank service of the reigning ideology, dramatizing the central contradictions of society in order to forge their imaginary resolution in a vision of personal and political unity. Why else devote two plays to the triumphant defeat of rebel forces by the incumbent monarch, and the inseparable victory of Prince Hal over the mutinous impulses destroying his credibility as heir to the throne of England? The divisions in the kingdom parallel the divisions in its future king, and their reciprocal suppression allows Part 2 to culminate in the prospect of a renewed nation unified by a transfigured sovereign about to divert the collective aggression of his people upon the French. Jameson's notion of literature imposing a spurious harmony on intractable social conflicts, but projecting through that illusion the true reconciliation anticipated from a classless community, appears to fit Henry IV like a gauntlet. Even without Hal's subsequent consecration as glorious warrior-king in Henry V, I and 2 Henry IV arguably achieve a sense of closure strong enough to invest their history of bloodshed and guilt with the retrospective sanction of providential design.

What binds both plays into this reading is, of course, the myth of the Prodigal Son. The opening scene of Part 1 reveals Hal's sire so ashamed of the ‘riot and dishonour’ visited upon the House of Lancaster by his offspring that he wishes himself the father of Northumberland's boy, Hotspur, instead: ‘a son who is the theme of honour's tongue’ (1 Henry IV, I.i.84, 80). Hal has betrayed his identity as Prince of Wales and heir to the realm by preferring the idle fellowship of thieves, drunkards and whores to the resolute pursuit of his royal vocation. As his father puts it in their taut confrontation in Act III, Hal has, like ‘the skipping King’ Richard, ‘mingled his royalty with cap'ring fools’, diluting his prospective sovereignty in wanton familiarity with his inferiors, whose vision of him is consequently ‘sick and blunted with community’, when it should be awestruck: ‘For thou hast lost thy princely privilege / With vile participation’ (III.ii.60, 63, 77, 86-7). The most scandalous effect of Prince Hal's delinquency is this erasure of the line dividing the ruler from the ruled, the ultimately metaphysical distinction on which not only his own right to rule but also the whole social hierarchy depends.

The conflict between ‘vile participation’ and the enforcing of regal distance is central to Hal's story and the shaping of both plays. It is vitally entwined with the concern to preserve the fragile difference between the regicidal usurper Henry IV and the rebellious lords who helped him seize the throne they now seek to hijack in their turn. It is to defend this discrimination, upon which the legitimacy of the Lancastrian line relies, that the climactic battle at Shrewsbury is fought in Part 1 and Prince John dupes the rebels at Gaultree at the end of Part 2. The twin peaks of Hal's personal battle with his own wayward drives coincide dramatically with these victories over insurgence on the national plane. That the prodigal prince will return to the royal fold seems, however, a cast-iron bet from the start. The soliloquy with which he concludes his first scene with Falstaff notoriously predicts exactly the course his life will follow over both parts of Henry IV. The manipulative ease with which he divorces himself from the alehouse intimates of a moment before, reduces them to terms of unequivocal contempt, and swaps spontaneous banter for the calculated scripting of his public image, proves his father's anxieties unfounded:

Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. …
So when this loose behaviour I throw off
And pay the debt I never promisèd,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt'ring o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.

(1 Henry IV I.ii.185-91, 196-203)

This prince needs no lessons from the king in impressing the singularity and exclusiveness of his identity upon his people.

The dramatic interest is created, therefore, not by a genuine, unpredictable conflict in the ‘sword and buckler Prince of Wales’ (I.iii.229), but by the suspense of his deferral of the inevitable. We are constantly reminded that we are dealing with a strategic postponement rather than a purely feckless refusal of his appointment with history. Hal's sobering assurance at the end of the ‘play extempore’ (II.iv.269-70) that one day he will indeed ‘banish plump Jack, and banish all the world’ (II.iv.461-2) already prefigures the chilling dismissal of Falstaff for real in the final scene of 2 Henry IV: ‘I know thee not old man. Fall to thy prayers’ (V.v.43). Sharply upbraided by the father Hotspur calls ‘this king of smiles’ (1 Henry IV, I.iii.245), Hal responds by reiterating the pledge framed in his earlier monologue and so reinstating the crucial disparity between himself and his future subjects which he has allowed to evaporate:

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, washed away, shall scour my shame with it.

(III.ii.132-7)

At the Battle of Shrewsbury with which Part 1 concludes, where he saves his father's life and defeats his extravagant rival, Hotspur, Hal heroically proves himself a man of his word and a monarch in the making. His lingering, affectionate indulgence of Falstaff on the battlefield nevertheless confirms that the narrative of redemption is still incomplete when the curtain falls on Act V. The story is therefore resumed in Part 2, which recycles the pattern of disaffection and delay finally expiated by the promise fulfilled, only this time with a resounding sense of sublime culmination:

My father is gone wild into his grave,
For in his tomb lie my affections,
And with his spirits sadly I survive
To mock the expectation of the world,
To frustrate prophecies, and to raze out
Rotten opinion, who hath writ me down
After my seeming. The tide of blood in me
Hath proudly flowed in vanity till now;
Now doth it turn, and ebb back to the sea,
Where it shall mingle with the state of floods,
And flow henceforth in formal majesty.

(V.ii.122-32)

This elegant tailoring of history to fit the moral myth of the Prodigal Son, of the sinner's salvation, works powerfully in Henry IV to rationalize hierarchy, glorify royalty, and disguise contingency as destiny, eventuality as providence. From Jameson's point of view, the chief task of the interpreter would be to expose the plays' obfuscation of historical reality by reading them against the drift of their orthodox import, by deciphering the undoctored version of the situation secreted between their lines. Their conformity could then be turned inside out to disclose the prophecy of collective emancipation and true unity concealed in the instrument of divisive misprision. But to return to the texts of Henry IV with this dual objective in mind is to recognize its redundancy in the light of a closer reading. For the straightforward, conventional account of the plays I have given so far can only survive through the systematic neglect of formal techniques, structural implications and dramatic parentheses, whose realized import changes the meaning of the narrative they articulate. By abstracting the double tale of Hal's redemption and the royal victory over rebellion from the syntax of its dramatization, and thus from the way we are induced to perceive and judge it, Henry IV is reduced to the very ideology it is intent on unravelling. A refusal to sunder what the plays say from how they say it restores to us more fascinating texts, which do not need to be read against the grain in order to be saved from themselves.

Jameson is irresistibly right about the need to release past texts into dialogue with the present, enabling them both to undo the governing illusions of their day and to foreshadow more desirable routes history might yet take. But his unargued assumption that the significant literature of former times is invariably in cahoots with the dominant view of things leaves him, ironically, in collusion with traditional historicist criticism, which has always thought literature expresses the prevalent ideas and values of the age. Unlike the latter, of course, Jameson finds this an unfortunate circumstance, which the radical modern critic fortunately stands poised to rectify by pressing the work to confess to knowledge and aspirations it never knew it possessed. But if we entertain the opposite expectation of literature, we may well find that the finest works have already uncovered and incorporated the political unconscious of the governing consciousness, exposing ideology to critique and envisioning its obsolescence through techniques which need no lessons from Jameson's positive or negative hermeneutics.

Consider two of the many scenes and passages in 1 and 2 Henry IV normally skipped over or marginalized in critical accounts, but whose function is to punctuate and inflect what is said and done in ways which not only complicate but also transmute the meaning of the drama. Indeed, we could no more hope to apprehend that complex meaning without them than we would expect to grasp the import of an elaborate sentence by extracting the main clause from the qualifying clauses and parentheses, and ignoring the commas, colons, dashes and brackets which advise us how to combine the components of significance into a complete statement.

In 1 Henry IV, Act II, scene i, there is an intriguing exchange between Gadshill and the chamberlain of the inn near which the robbery involving Hal is to proceed. It is ushered in by the complaints of the two carriers preparing their day's labours. One observes: ‘This house is turned upside-down since Robin ostler died’ (II.i.9-10), suggesting perhaps a plebeian parallel with the state of the kingdom following the death of Richard: the previous scene has witnessed the conspiracy of the rebels. The other echoes his abuse of the flea-pit they have just slept in: ‘there is ne'er a king christen could be better bit than I have been since the first cock’ (II.i.15-17). Fleas observe no distinctions of rank. Gadshill's badinage with the crooked chamberlain amplifies the scene's heightened awareness of the play's key concerns. Chamberlain and pickpurse are interchangeable titles, quips Gadshill, ‘for thou variest no more from picking of purses than giving direction doth from labouring; thou layest the plot how’ (II.i.48-50). The collapsing of distinctions between those who give the orders and those who obey them supplies the logic governing Gadshill's assurance that the participation of the powerful makes their criminal enterprise impregnable:

I am joined with no foot-land-rakers, no long-staff six-penny strikers, none of these mad mustachio purple-hued malt-worms, but with nobility and tranquillity, burgomasters and great oneyers, such as can hold in, such as will strike sooner than speak, and speak sooner than drink, and drink sooner than pray. And yet, zounds, I lie, for they pray continually to their saint, the commonwealth, or rather not pray to her but prey on her, for they ride up and down on her and make her their boots.

CHAMBERLAIN:
What, the commonwealth their boots? Will she hold out water in foul way?
GADSHILL:
She will, she will. Justice hath liquored her. We steal as in a castle, cocksure. We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible.

(II.i.70-84)

The passage conflates the common thieves with their more elevated brethren, whose ransacking of the commonwealth differs only in the legitimacy which renders its criminality ‘invisible’. The prince's role in the robbery creates the occasion for this illuminating identification, which pivots in turn on the more fundamental reflection with which Gadshill bows out of the scene: ‘homo is a common name to all men’ (II.i.92).

Comparable implications can be quarried from otherwise pointless remarks made by Falstaff in Part 2. During his evasive encounter with the Lord Chief Justice in the second scene of the play, Falstaff pleads the malady of deafness as his reason for not responding to the Justice's admonitions, and he attempts to distract the latter by snatching up the topic of the king's ill health: ‘And I hear moreover, his highness is fallen into this same whoreson apoplexy’ (I.ii.85-6). This apoplexy is ‘a kind of lethargy’, Falstaff informs the exasperated magistrate, ‘a kind of sleeping in the blood’; in short, according to Galen, ‘it is a kind of deafness’. ‘I think you are fallen into the disease,’ retorts the Lord Chief Justice, ‘for you hear not what I say to you’ (I.ii.88, 89, 92-5). The full value of these lines, in which the lord of the land and the lord of misrule are subject to the same affliction, bccomes apparent if we turn to Falstaff's meditation on the peculiar affinity between Shallow and his servants:

It is a wonderful thing to see the semblable coherence of his men's spirits and his: they by observing him do bear themselves like foolish justices; he by conversing with them is turned into a justice-like servingman. Their spirits are so married in conjunction, with the participation of society, that they flock together in consent like so many wild geese. If I had a suit to Master Shallow, I would humour his men with the imputation of being near their master; if to his men, I would curry with Master Shallow, that no man could better command his servants. It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught, as men take diseases, one of another.

(V.i.51-61)

The revelation of consanguinity running beneath the threshold of social difference is conveyed this time by an appeal to the democratic impartiality of infection, which holds the privileges of birth and blood in contempt. But here there is a further glimpse of the utopian potential of such benign confoundings of rank through ‘the participation of society’ (what Henry IV in Part 1 denounced in Hal as ‘vile participation’): an idyllic condition in which spirits normally segregated by the antagonistic principle of subordination become ‘so married in conjunction … that they flock together in consent like so many wild geese’.

Such passages supply the keys to decode more sustained enactments of improvised irrelevance, whose liberty from the burden of advancing the historical plot permits them to explore the cost and consequences of that history, reinstating the exclusions and suppressions that made it possible. In Act II of Part 1 Hal confesses wryly to Poins: ‘I have sounded the very bass string of humility. Sirrah, I am sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can call them all by their Christian names, as Tom, Dick, and Francis’ (II.iv.5-8). The witty substitution of the tapster's name for the expected ‘Harry’ invites the equation of the former's plight with the prince's in the practical joke which follows. Francis is torn between the temptation ‘to play the coward with [his] indenture and show it a fair pair of heels’ (II.iv.45-6) and the immediate obligation to answer the call of a customer, which he postpones with ‘Anon, anon, sir’, the parroted watchword of his trade. Simultaneously hailed by vocation and desire, ‘the Drawer stands amazed, not knowing which way to go’ (s.d. 76), the plebeian epitome of the future king's suspension in a limbo of delay. Hal's jest fleetingly lifts the barrier between the destinies of both men and dissolves Hal's narrow aristocratic identity in the broad stream of diverse humanity through the ages: asked by Poins for the upshot of the gulling of Francis, he replies, ‘I am now of all humours that have showed themselves humours since the old days of Goodman Adam to the pupil age of this present twelve o'clock at midnight’ (II.iv.90-3).

The intensity of this compulsion to lose himself in the soul of a subordinate by projection or displacement is confirmed by Part 2's obsessive return to the theme. The price of the prince's elision of difference by deferment is anxiety, guilt and melancholy. ‘Before God, I am exceeding weary’ (II.ii.1), he laments to Poins at the opening of Act II, at once disenchanted with his royalty and ashamed of his abandonment of eminence: ‘But indeed these humble considerations make me out of love with my greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to remember thy name—or to know thy face tomorrow’ (II.ii.10-12). The sense of a character caged in his own myth, stranded in a trance of procrastination until the cue to pace the stage of history breaks the spell, is insistent. But the whole point of forcing open such lacunae, in which history is put on hold, is to create the space to demolish the foundations on which that reading of history is built.

The Prince of Wales strives stoutly to drive the wedge back between his heritage and the ‘vile company’ (II.ii.37) he blushes to acknowledge, appealing to his script for eventual vindication: ‘Let the end try the man’ (II.ii.35). It requires, however, rather less than the Page's ‘crown'sworth of good interpretation’ (II.ii.70) to see that separatist urge vanquished by the need for communion in the hoax that springs from this scene. The path to the jape is paved by quips haunted by more of the same demarcation disputes. Poins glances at those who ‘never prick their finger but they say: “There's some of the king's blood spilt”’ as a prelude to claiming themselves to be ‘the king's poor cousin’. ‘Nay,’ Hal chimes in, ‘they will be kin to us, or they will fetch it from Japhet’ (II.ii.87-8, 90-1)—Japhet being the son of Noah from whom all gentiles were thought to be descended. The pressure to dilute the prince's blue blood likewise dictates the ironic speculation about Hal's marrying Poins's sister, Nell (II.ii.97-107). And by the end of the scene the frail dyke of convention dividing Hal from the common tide of humanity has been breached by his compliance with Poins's scheme to disguise themselves in the ‘leathern jerkins and aprons’ (II.ii.133) of Francis's calling: ‘From a god to a bull: a heavy descension! It was Jove's case. From a prince to a prentice: a low transformation, that shall be mine’ (II.ii.135-6). The reincarnation of the heir apparent is complete two scenes later, when the prince-prentice answers Falstaff's ‘Some sack, Francis!’ with his surrogate's remorseless ‘Anon, anon, sir’ (II.iv.229-30), directly echoing the corresponding scene in Part 1.

Nor is the razing of hierarchy the only effect sought by such confusions of identity. In the ‘play extempore’ of Part 1, Falstaff plays Henry IV, reproving Hal ‘in King Cambyses' vein’ (II.iv.373-4), then swaps places to play Hal to the prince's own impersonation of his father. The self-conscious theatricality of this parodic performance highlights both the rootlessness of the roles and the staged nature of the historical realities being burlesqued. The majesty of the English throne dwindles to a few tawdry props stripped of mystique: ‘Thy state is taken for a joint-stool, thy golden sceptre for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich crown for a pitiful bald crown’ (II.iv.367-9). Falstaff's caricature of the admonishing monarch deploys an obsolete theatrical rhetoric persuasive enough to captivate his tavern audience: ‘O Jesu, he doth it as like one of these harlotry players as ever I see!’ (II.iv.382-3). But more important for the audience beyond the footlights is the scene's pre-emptive ironizing of the serious clash of royal father and reprobate son in Act III. Their characters and their dialogue are marked out in advance as scripted creations, the impassioned appeals and protestations shadowed by their imputed conformity to recognized postures and patterns of exchange.

The spectators are encouraged to recognize majesty as a rehearsed production and reminded of the gulf between the performed events before their eyes and the remote past realities they presuppose. Henry IV himself activates this awareness by his frank confessions of using theatrical simulation and diversion as instruments of power:

And then I stole all courtesy from heaven,
And dressed myself in such humility
That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts,

(1 Henry IV, III.ii.50-2)

For all my reign hath been but as a scene
Acting that argument …
                                                                                                    … Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels, that action hence borne out
May waste the memory of the former days.

(2 Henry IV, IV.ii.325-6, 340-3)

Indeed, the very battle fought at Shrewsbury to bolster the sovereign's unique authority involves the telling subterfuge of fielding noblemen ‘semblably furnished like the King himself’ (1 Henry IV, V.iii.21). Advised by Hotspur that ‘the King hath many marching in his coats’, Douglas swears: ‘Now, by my sword, I will kill all his coats! / I'll murder all his wardrobe, piece by piece, / Until I meet the King’ (V.iii.25-8). But when he encounters the monarch in person, he remains understandably sceptical:

DOUGLAS:
Another king? They grow like Hydra's heads.
                                                                                                              … What art thou
That counterfeit'st the person of a king?
KING Henry:
The King himself, who, Douglas, grieves at heart
So many of his shadows thou hast met
And not the very King …
DOUGLAS:
I fear thou art another counterfeit;
And yet, in faith, thou bearest thee like a king.

(V.iv.24, 26-30, 34-5)

The action contrived to clinch the exclusive legitimacy of Bullingbrook's claim to the throne breeds a multiplicity of sovereigns, dispersing Henry's singularity and flagrantly insinuating that to bear oneself like a monarch and don the robes of royalty may be all there is to being royal for real—as Sir Walter Blunt discovers to his mortal dismay.

Detail and structure collaborate throughout Parts 1 and 2 to dismantle the scaffolding of dominion and unmask the arbitrary status of authorized social distinctions and moral oppositions. The factual coincidence of king and prince sharing their Christian name with the rebel Earl and his son is played up to the full in Shakespeare's phrasing to stimulate our apprehension of their covert equivalence:

                                                                                O that it could be proved
That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged
In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,
And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet!
Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.

(1 Henry IV, I.i.85-9)

Harry to Harry shall, hot horse to horse

(IV.i.123)

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.64-6)

Like Hal and Francis, or Hal and Falstaff when the latter takes the prince's part in the tavern, or ironically appropriates his promise of eventual contrition, the royal and the regicidal turn out to be Siamese twins. Indeed, as John Kerrigan has shown in an illuminating essay (Kerrigan 1990), both plays are obsessed with doubling and replication at every turn: from Falstaff with the dead Hotspur on his back, denying himself to be the ‘double man’ he seems, or Shallow's cryptic query ‘And is old Dooble dead?’ (III.ii.43: the Folio reads ‘Double’), down to the fine grain of speech rhythms, where duplication reigns in the mouths of foolish judge (‘Certain, 'tis certain, very sure, very sure’ (III.ii.29)) and majesty alike: ‘Not Amurath an Amurath succeeds, / But Harry Harry’ (V.ii.48-9). The rhetorical term for this figure of speech is geminatio or ‘twinning’; and, as Kerrigan points out, quoting Thomas Wilson's definition in The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), ‘In Tudor rhetoric, “doublet” translates geminatio: “when we rehearse one and the same word twice together”, as in “Anon, Anon, sir!”’ (Kerrigan 1990: 41).

This constant local instruction in the art of gemination finds its global counterpart in the scenic composition of the plays. The structural principle of switching to and fro between king and conspirators, and from both to the Eastcheap empire of Falstaff, or the rural domain of Shallow and Silence, and back again, begins by obeying a logic of contrast and discrimination; but its cumulative impact transforms our initial acceptance of disparity into a dawning realization of resemblance. The ceaseless commuting between diverse ranks and value systems discloses an urgent appetite for consensus eating away at the ideology of difference and duality. The official scale of social worth, so graphically codified in the descending list of dramatis personae still fronting modern texts, is scrambled by these oscillations of perspective as surely as shuffling a new deck of cards confounds the fastidious decorum of each suit. The kaleidoscopic vision of Henry IV helps forge a prospect of egalitarian community which exposes the national and royal principles of union as frauds.

Nor can the teleological view of history conscripted by those principles survive the repeated sabotaging of inevitability and completion to which Part 2, as the expected resolution of questions left dangling in Part 1, is especially subject. A stubborn refusal of deterministic historiography is declared at the outset in the extraordinary Induction and opening scene of the play. In a direct address to the audience the allegorical personification of Rumour introduces himself as one upon whose tongues ‘continual slanders ride, / The which in every language I pronounce, / Stuffing the ears of men with false reports' (2 Henry IV, Ind. 6-8). His present purpose, as he stands before the castle of Northumberland, is

To noise abroad that Harry Monmouth fell
Under the wrath of noble Hotspur's sword,
And that the king before the Douglas' rage
Stooped his anointed head as low as death.

(Ind. 29-32)

The first scene then thrusts us into the midst of enacted history as Lord Bardolph repeats Rumour's false account to Northumberland as ‘certain news from Shrewsbury’ (I.i.12). Northumberland needs convincing: ‘How is this derived?’ (I.i.23). But the ‘certain news’ is rapidly unseated by Travers's revised report, which Morton's no less breathless arrival confirms: young Harry Percy's spur is cold indeed, and

                                                                                                                        The sum of all
Is that the king hath won, and hath sent out
A speedy power to encounter you, my lord,

(I.i.131-3)

For a moment the closed book of historical fact is reopened and rewritten. The fixity of the past surrenders to the flickering supposition that all might have been otherwise, that the chronicles could quite plausibly have been obliged to tell another tale. We are forewarned that this rival version is unfounded, and the upstart is of course swiftly deposed; but it is entertained and elaborated for long enough to stake its claim to likelihood and thus restore the original fluidity of ostensibly deep-frozen events. History is rewound and replayed with the subjunctive scenes spliced back in. We are called upon to witness the translation of once vital experience into a vulnerable narrative, refracted through this dramatic reconstruction in the lived present of performance: ‘Open your ears; for which of you will stop / The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?’ (Ind. 1-2). History, it is plain, is not simply what happened, but what gets made, misconstrued, disputed and remodelled.

Part 2 is riddled with double-takes, false starts and stops, rewrites and reversals of expectation: all of them calculated to resist, and thereby transform, the ultimate course things must take to climax in the defeat of the rebels and the coronation of the prodigal redeemed. The infectious doubling of identities discussed above is matched by a doubling of incidents, in which the actual occurrence is unsettled by the sustained imagination of another possibility. Thus the achievement at Gaultree of a bloodless and just resolution, whereby the rebels' grievances will find redress and both sides enjoy the concord of ‘restorèd love and amity’ (IV.i.293), is acted out convincingly up to the very last moment, at which the apparent meaning of events is abruptly turned on its head by Prince John's brutal duplicity. A similar effect is produced when King Henry envisions a persuasive future ruled by Hal's ‘headstrong riot’:

The blood weeps from my heart when I do shape
In forms imaginary th'unguided days
And rotten times that you shall look upon
When I am sleeping with my ancestors.

(IV.ii.58-61)

But these grim predictions prove as mistaken as the abandoned future under Hal which excites Falstaff's fantasies, or the prophecy of the king's death in a Jerusalem which turns out to be the name of a palace chamber far from the Holy Land he hoped to wrest from the infidel.

Most disconcerting of all, perhaps, is the way the play trips Hal up on the very threshold of his accession and moral resurrection. Having diagnosed his father's death with exemplary alacrity, he seizes the crown from the pillow and ceremoniously sets the ‘polished perturbation’ (IV.ii.153) on his own head:

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

(IV.ii.171-7)

Seconds later, the conclusive resonance of this speech is shattered as the king revives, denounces his son's precipitate, callous theft, and forces Hal to crawl back, crown in hand, to convince him of the innocence of his motives and the genuineness of ‘the noble change that I have purposèd’ (IV.ii.283). Shakespeare's dramatization of the episode exploits its disruptive impact to the full, compelling the denouement to double back and restart from revised assumptions about Hal, and with a refreshed feeling for the unpredictability of experience before the fact.

Such backtracking devices allow the blood to flow once more through the veins of chronicled history, flushing act and incident with the indeterminacy denied them by the Medusan gaze of providential narrative. It comes as no surprise to find the question of history on the overt agenda of 2 Henry IV, with characters speculating continually on the relation of the past to the future and on the possibility of foreknowledge:

KING:
O God, that one might read the book of fate
And see the revolution of the times …
WARWICK:
There is a history in all men's lives
Figuring the natures of the times deceased,
The which observed, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life, who in their seeds
And weak beginning lie intreasurèd.
Such things become the hatch and brood of time, …

(III.i.44-5, 79-85)

‘Jesus,’ exclaims Shallow, ‘the days that we have seen!’, confirming in his nostalgia for ‘the times deceased’, when he heard ‘the chimes at midnight’ (III.ii.180, 177), that a predilection for edited highlights of the past is not the exclusive preserve of great lords. This gentle guying of selective retrospection (‘Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying!’ (III.ii.246)) calls the whole project of the Henry IV plays to account. For it keeps alive in the spectator's mind the distortions inevitably entailed in the process of historiography, the gap which must always divorce long-gone realities from the discursive representations in which alone they become intelligible. Not the least virtue of the Epilogue's appearance at the close of Part 2, to promise that ‘our humble author will continue the story’ (Epil. 21), is its oblique insistence that as a story, to quote Samuel Daniel's Defence of Rhyme (1603),

an Historie … is but a Mappe of Men, and dooth no otherwise acquaint us with the true Substance of Circumstances then a superficiall Card dooth the Seaman with a Coast never seene, which alwayes prooves other to the eye than the imagination forecast it …

(Smith 1904, 2: 370)

Both power and history in Henry IV are demystified, even as the plays complete their putative contract with the dominant ideology. The prescribed royal reading of history dictates the narrative shape of Parts 1 and 2. But the strategies of disenchantment built into the dramatization rob that narrative of its supremacy, breaking its monopoly on what is thought to have happened. This critique of the approved account is anchored in the utopian assumptions of an anticipated world. At the end of 1 and 2 Henry IV monarchy, hierarchy and the illusions that sustain them emerge intact, even strengthened, within the world of the plays; but our understanding and judgement of them has been changed completely by the way they have been presented. What the protagonists persist in believing, and what the spectators are encouraged to conclude from the standpoint they are obliged to adopt, are two quite different things. The perspectives of the denizens of Henry IV—high and low, urban and rural alike—must remain bound by the categories and limits of the imagined universe they inhabit; our assessment of them, however, is released from that bondage by our vantage point as audience or readers, whose vision of their universe is filtered through the warped lens of defamiliarization. As a result the plays liberate us to decipher ‘the main chance of things / As yet not come to life’ encoded in their depiction of ‘the times deceased’ (III.i.82-3, 80). They afford us a proleptic glimpse through their eyes of the future in the past.

III

Reading Henry IV in the light of Jameson's theory of interpretation explodes the reductive misconception of literary texts which prevents Jameson's most fertile insights from releasing the full potential of literature from the past. Jameson begins by blazing a trail towards viewing texts as active transfigurations of vanished realities, capable of vexing modern preconceptions and signposting the extinction of oppressive social divisions. But this admirable enterprise soon shrivels into the extortion of progressive significance from works whose instinctive commitment to the legitimation of class society is taken as read. Henry IV testifies, however, to the historically evolved capacity of poetic language and dramatic form to turn what would otherwise comply with Jameson's assumptions into an undoing of the ideology of division from a standpoint beyond the reach of subjection. Jameson remains trapped in the historicist hermeneutics of suspicion from which his own more attractive arguments offer the readiest escape route. To demonstrate this, moreover, is to pull the plug on a range of critical responses and a long tradition of theatrical productions, which have diminished or denied the power of 1 and 2 Henry IV to undercut the ideological narratives they stage.

Scott McMillin has recently traced the British performance history of Henry IV from the 1945 Old Vic production starring Olivier and Richardson to the 1986 touring version by the English Shakespeare Company under the direction of Michael Bogdanov (McMillin 1991). His survey dwells on three bench-mark productions, all of which put the plays on as part of a cycle sequence: the staging by the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre Company in 1951, directed by Anthony Quayle, which established the cycle mode as the standard modern format for the Histories, and the RSC productions of 1964 and 1975, under the direction of Peter Hall and Terry Hands, respectively. McMillin discerns an uncomfortably direct relationship between the politics of the institutionalized theatre and the political message all too predictably read into Hal's reformation in Henry IV:

The modern subsidised theatre helps cycles be staged and cycles make Falstaff a figure to be rejected. This is what happens to 1 Henry IV in its modern cycle-oriented treatments: the Prince grows into royal authority by turning aside the old fat man, and it is government subsidy that provides the wherewithal … to let this lesson be dramatised.

(McMillin 1991: 11-12)

These major productions seem to have swallowed whole the hierarchical assumptions and the teleological conflation of personal and national destiny which the plays are not fooled by for a moment. For Peter Hall, the world-view affirmed by Henry IV was plain: ‘all Shakespeare's thinking, whether religious, political, or moral, is based on a complete acceptance of this concept of order. There is a just proportion in all things: man is above beast, king is above man, and God above king’; rebellion is monstrous because it ‘destroys the order and leads to destructive anarchy’ (quoted in McMillin 1991: 57). Terry Hands's production bent the drama into an ageless study in the growth of majesty, traced through the exemplary evolution of the adolescent male from callow disaffection to responsible maturity. For Hal, according to the programme note for the production, the stage ‘is always the blank slate on which life writes its lessons’, ‘the bare metaphysical arena in which the soul of a royal Everyman discovers his destiny and true friends’ (quoted in McMillin 1991: 83). As McMillin observes: ‘So long as Prince Hal is said to be caught up in such timeless and essential experience, his career will seem purified of the political and all the more agreeable to the managers of our affairs’ (1991: 87).

Given the opportunities for inculcating conformity afforded by suitably slanted productions, it leaves one less than astounded to learn that ‘More than any other play, 1 Henry IV is swung into position on occasions of dignity and ceremony in Stratford’ (McMillin 1991: 85). After baptizing the new Stratford Memorial Theatre in 1932 on the Bard's birthday, it was the birthday play during the History cycles of 1951, 1964 and 1975; and when the RSC opened at the Barbican in 1982 with another inevitable cycle of Histories, the birthday production was once more 1 Henry IV. ‘The thinking of the RSC’, remarks McMillin wryly, ‘had become so accustomed to taking the Henrys as curtain-raisers for occasions of wealth and power that the venture could be predicted before some of the actors in the eventual production were out of secondary school’ (1991: 86). It is the cultural centrality and enormous influence of these imaginatively stunted versions of the Henry IV plays that make the development of readings that can do them justice so important. And this endeavour demands an interpretative theory and practice fuelled by diametrically opposed ideas about the relation of poetic writing to the enthroned prescriptions and stereotypes of the age.

That E. M. W. Tillyard's study of Shakespeare's History Plays (1944) directly and indirectly shaped the 1951 and 1964 cycle productions of 1 and 2 Henry IV is no surprise. Tillyard's work has remained the cornerstone of the conventional view of the Histories to this day, and the automatic antagonist of those seeking to contest the nationalistic and authoritarian attitudes he found ratified in these plays. According to Tillyard, Shakespeare

expressed successfully a universally held and still comprehensible scheme of history: a scheme fundamentally religious, by which events evolve under a law of justice and under the ruling of God's Providence, and of which Elizabeth's England was the acknowledged outcome.

(Tillyard 1944: 320-1)

For Tillyard, therefore, the two parts of Henry IV exemplify the ideal education of the Christian prince for the office destiny has prepared for him. Tillyard's Hal ‘is a man of large powers, Olympian loftiness, and high sophistication, who has acquired a thorough knowledge of human nature both in himself and in others. He is Shakespeare's studied picture of the kingly type’ (1944: 269). Hal's tormenting of Francis in Part 1 clouds Tillyard's admiration for a moment, but the perfection of Hal's portrait is swiftly restored by the historian's appeal to the principle of degree: ‘The subhuman element in the population must have been considerable in Shakespeare's day; that it should be treated almost like beasts was taken for granted’ (1944: 277). It is perhaps too easy to feel superior now to that telling rationalization, whose offhand inhumanity has been highlighted in a recent radical study of the histories (Holderness 1992: 27). But it gives the measure of Tillyard's commitment to reading Shakespeare in 1 and 2 Henry IV as the unquestioning advocate of a rigidly stratified society.

Reinforced by similar views of the Histories promoted in John Dover Wilson's The Fortunes of Falstaff (1943), G. Wilson Knight's The Olive and the Sword (1944), and Lily B. Campbell's Shakespeare's Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (1947), this conception of Henry IV as a defence of the divine necessity of order and authority controlled discussion of the plays for decades. Its survival, in a subtly adapted form, was guaranteed by C. L. Barber's classic study, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959). Barber allows the saturnalian zest of Falstaff and the Eastcheap world much more play and purchase than most of the Tillyard camp are inclined to, but only because of its ulterior role as the negative pole in the moral schooling of the budding ruler. The temporary reign of misrule under Falstaff functions here as a kind of safety-valve, a cathartic release of anarchic energies and appetites, which Hal must finally reject to qualify as the governor of a stable, disciplined kingdom. The lawless threat to propriety is introduced in order to enhance the triumphant return of dutiful decorum with Hal's fulfilment of his royal vocation: ‘the misrule works, through the whole dramatic rhythm, to consolidate rule’ (Barber 1959: 226).

Thirty years on, this angle is still going strong: recycled in a still more sophisticated form and yoked now to a dissenting critical politics, but fundamentally unchanged. In his widely cited construction of a new-historicist Shakespeare, Power on Display (1986), Leonard Tennenhouse maintains that

the various confrontations between licit and illicit authority comprising the Henriad more firmly draw the distinction between aristocracy and populace even as they appear to overturn this primary categorical distinction … Criminalizing the popular figures of inversion is as necessary to the poetics of power as incorporating a certain popular vigor within the legitimate body of the state … Legitimate order can come into being only through disruption according to this principle …

(Tennenhouse 1986: 83-4)

This is also the position endorsed by the founding father of new historicism, Stephen Greenblatt, whose celebrated essay ‘Invisible Bullets’ selects 1 and 2 Henry IV as ideal texts with which to bolster his belief that ‘Shakespeare's plays are centrally, repeatedly concerned with the production and containment of subversion and disorder’ (Greenblatt 1988: 40). In Greenblatt's view, power feeds off the transgression and sedition it needs in order to define its identity and authority. And by inoculating itself with a controlled symbolic dose of realizations which could destroy it, the body politic helps preserve its immunity to genuine, full-strength subversion. Hence, as theatrical instruments of the power of the Elizabethan state, ‘the Henry plays confirm the Machiavellian hypothesis that princely power originates in force and fraud even as they draw their audience toward an acceptance of that power’ (1988: 65). Greenblatt's account of the relationship between drama and domination is incomparably more intricate than Tillyard's or Barber's, and its objective is demystification rather than occlusion, but the bottom line is the same: Henry IV is the voice of Elizabethan orthodoxy, and never more so than when it mimics the accents of dissent. This approach dovetails perfectly with Jameson's belief that the masterpieces of the past cannot earn political salvation by their own merits, but must depend for redemption on the grace of the modern critic.

In Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (1992) the cultural materialist, Graham Holderness, has attempted to overturn conservative readings of Henry IV by tying Falstaff into Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque and stressing his substantive function as

a constant focus of opposition to the official and serious tone of authority and power: his discourse confronts and challenges those of king and state. His attitude to authority is always parodic and satirical: he mocks authority, flouts power, responds to the pressures of social duty and civic obligation by retreating into Bacchanalian revelry. His world is a world of ease, moral licence, appetite and desire; of humour and ridicule, theatricals and satire, of community, freedom and abundance; a world created by inverting the abstract society, the oppression and the hierarchy of the official world.

(Holderness 1992: 138)

But Falstaff can indeed merely invert; he cannot transcend that official world, which beholds in him its mirror image, its secret sharer, not its negation or displacement. Exhilarating as Holderness's sketch of him sounds, to champion the cause of Falstaff against the bleak disciplines of authority and historical necessity simply reverses the poles of the orthodox view. Defecting to Eastcheap and elevating a sentimental idealization of its ethos over the imperatives of duty and national destiny sells the plays short. For it leaves them caged within the system of social disparities and moral dichotomies they seek to dismantle. To privilege the liberties of ‘headstrong riot’ (2 Henry IV, IV.ii.62) over ‘The majesty and power of law and justice’ (V.ii.77) is to repress the covert reciprocity of the royal and plebeian realms, whose values are in practice identical, and so leave the entrenched divisions of the status quo intact. This strategy plays straight into the hands of the new-historicist paradox whereby the upshot of subversion is to consolidate dominion and the rule of law.

As long as criticism of Henry IV keeps shuttling between the claims of the Crown and the lure of the taproom, it remains tangled in the spurious dilemma forged by Hal himself as he hesitates between his father and plump Jack. Whether the rejection of Falstaff is applauded, regretted or safely construed as ambivalent, the critic accepts the characters' perception of their world and the alternatives they confront at face value, as the terms on which we are supposed to interpret and evaluate Henry IV. But such readings must block out all the devices deliberately constructed to colour our vision and complicate our judgement. For, as I have tried to show, the plays are designed to withdraw through formal implication what they avow through overt statement and action. Both parts of Henry IV mobilize techniques of framing, interruption and conflation, which weave a counterfactual perspective into their dramatization of history, investing it with a buoyancy it would otherwise lack. By preventing our submersion in the mentality of the cast, they unravel the rationale of the standard interpretations. Far from enclosing the spectator in an Elizabethan perception of late medieval England, the Henry IV plays create a prospective climate of understanding, which invalidates the hierarchical terms in which the problems of the protagonists are posed and solved, even as it concedes the factual force and historical triumph of subjugation.

The inhabitants of Henry IV are doomed to dwell for ever in ‘the times deceased’ (2 Henry IV, III.i.80) which, as one of them laments, ‘Crowd us and crush us to this monstrous form’ (IV.i.262). But the plays' perspective on their lives reaches forward ‘to sound the bottom of the after-times’ (IV.i.279) and anticipate the transfigured shape the ‘hatch and brood’ (III.i.85) of history might take. The opening speech of Part 1 tunes us subliminally to this dual vision informing both plays:

                                                                      Those opposèd eyes
Which, like the meteors of a troubled heaven,
All of one nature, of one substance bred,
Did lately meet in the intestine shock
And furious close of civil butchery,
Shall now in mutual, well-beseeming ranks
March all one way, and be no more opposed
Against acquaintance, kindred, and allies.

(I.i.9-16)

Henry IV is written in a way which allows us to behold a world ruled by brutal divisions through the eyes of a world which has surrendered such barbarism to the cooperative sway of human solidarity.

Old and newer forms of historicist criticism share a notion of literature as the incurably anterior expression of an extinct reality. They evince a chronic aversion to the conjecture that works like 1 and 2 Henry IV might be drawn as much towards a future beyond our own apprehension as back to their points of origin in the past. For all its shortcomings, it is the virtue of Jameson's theoretical stance that it argues so effectively against such sterile historicism and so passionately for the activation of the utopian dimension of literature. Jameson's error, however, is to arrogate to the interpretative act alone that potent blend of critique and prescience which, as Henry IV attests, the most demanding literature of the past has always possessed, but which will remain inert and ineffectual if the prevalent accounts of that literature go unchallenged.

It is an error which Ernst Bloch, one of the most crucial influences on Jameson's thinking, never made, mistaking as it does the power of the critic for the power of the work. For Bloch,

Every great work of art, above and beyond its manifest content, is carried out according to a latency of the page to come, or in other words, in the light of the content of a future which has not yet come into being, and indeed of some ultimate resolution as yet unknown.

(Quoted in Jameson 1971: 149; trans. from Bloch 1959: 110)

And what lifts a work ‘above and beyond its manifest content’ and into the light of the future is the lever of form. As Theodor Adorno puts it: ‘Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light’ (Adorno 1974: 247). It is precisely such distortion that Henry IV inflicts on its age, which we are invited to see not as it was, but as it one day will have been for those no longer walled up in that kind of world. In these works we perceive Elizabethan realities transposed into the history of Henry IV, then filtered through the lens of futurity, which twists the plays out of line with convention and into their proleptic form. Parts 1 and 2 of Henry IV afford us nothing less than a preview of the past. They project us forward to a point where we can grasp Shakespeare's anachronistic version of his times as the eventual past of a still unfolding future.