SOURCE: Quinones, Ricardo J. “The Growth of Hal.” In William Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 71-95. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1972, Quinones traces the development of Hal's character.]

The shadow of Richard II hangs over the waywardness of Hal in 1 Henry IV. The young prince is threatened with the same historical isolation and discontinuity. In their critical confrontation, his father the King accuses him of straying “quite from the light of all thy ancestors.” His place on the council has been “rudely lost” to his younger brother. “The hope and expectation of thy time / Is ruined.” He then startles his son's self-possession by declaring that Percy is more like his true heir, and that he (Hal) is more like Richard.

[Percy] hath more worldly interest to the state
Than thou, the shadow of succession.

(3.2.98-99)

To be sure, the scope of Hal's conversion can be exaggerated. As we insisted [elsewhere] with Petrarch and Montaigne, before one can be reformed there must be some prior inclination to reformation: something convertible must inhere before conversion. And Hal's first soliloquy where he shows some of his father's calculation and vows to redeem his time, can be taken to show that the ground was ready. Yet there is a difference between vowing to do something, knowing that one will, and actually doing it. There is something headstrong and, in a way, deceived in that young man who knows his capacities and yet feels no need to demonstrate them to other people. This is no mean alteration; it can be summarized in the change from adolescence to adulthood. The father is crucial in this transformation as is the son's personal pride, his felt need to redeem his time to fulfill his “hopes and expectations.” As we have seen in Dante and Petrarch, both of these elements, the father-figure (in Hal's case, his actual father) and a sense of time, are crucial in this phase of commitment. The argument of time, in its ramifications, is the instrument of conversion from the aesthetic to the ethical stage of existence.

Kierkegaard's terminology is highly useful in describing Shakespeare's character delineation. In Dante and Petrarch the aesthetic stage importantly includes a reliance on the substitute satisfactions of art and beauty. But in each it extends somewhat beyond that to the aesthetic personality. In the Purgatorio Dante had to change his interest as he ceased to be a passive witness and began to take more positive action. Petrarch's aesthetic stage had even more to do with a preference for contemplative distance and consciousness rather than commitment and moral effort. Although Shakespeare's characters have something of the “literary” in them (Richard II and the “bookish” Henry IV), they fulfill the aesthetic function more in terms of personality. What strictly joins Hal with Richard II (and through him with other representatives of the aesthetic—although at the time we did not so designate them—Marlowe's Calyphas in II Tamburlaine, Edward II, and Dr. Faustus) is (1) the inclination to be a spectator rather than an actor, (2) a divorce between consciousness and willed action, and (3) a kind of identity-diffusion. Not all of these figures fully enjoy all three characteristics, but all have a sufficient share of them to invalidate their effectiveness in the temporal realm. It is to spare his son their fates (particularly that of Richard II) that the concerned father puts before Hal an objective picture of his actions—the way his behavior is read by both the public and his father.

The structure of 1 and 2 Henry IV—the multiple plot levels—is essential to the character of Hal. This technical device (also employed in A Midsummer Night's Dream) was of major usefulness to Shakespeare from the mid-nineties on. If in Henry IV he has found his character and his theme, in the multiple plot he has found the mechanism for revealing them. Richard II too, has multiple personalities, but they are all imaginary, and he only gives flight to them when the hard world of history presents him with the truth of his nothingness. But Hal still has time, and with time, choice. Hal is a fluid participant in multiple levels of existence. In many ways that is his glory and, as we shall see, his redemption. But it can also be his destruction if he refuses to commit himself to a single identity, and if he refuses to accept the responsibilities and historical limitations into which he was born. We come here again to a basic characteristic and function of time in the Renaissance and its relationship with the possibilities of variety. Petrarch, too, accused himself of distraction, of having too many options, and thus neglecting the most important condition of his soul. Time was a crucial element in his conversion. Later in the Renaissance, in Alberti's regola, we saw the rationale for scheduling. Each morning he charted the things to be done that day, and assigned a time to them. In this way the variety of his interests did not prove his undoing, and all things were accomplished con ordine. In Guarino, too, we observed an explicit connection between scheduling and variety. “So many subjects claim our attention that concentration and thoroughness are impossible” unless we regulate our existence. And the education of Gargantua is a greater dramatic example of the arrangement of time required to order many interests. Although there is no odor of schedule in Hal, still time is about its same purpose as in these other Renaissance writers: it channels and makes more effective, it marshalls into a functioning unity, the variety of interests and talents that otherwise might be merely dissipated, and to their possessor's harm.

This quality in his prince attests also to Shakespeare's talent for comprehensiveness, his ability to recreate imaginatively various levels of existence. It further shows his concern with the many ways of regarding reality, with consciousness trying to feel out and determine the nature of the world. Yet while this multifaceted world reveals a rich Renaissance sense of variety and possibility, and is related to the artist's own protean capacities, Shakespeare fully recognized the dangers involved. Not only are potentially ideal characters threatened or destroyed by a dissipation of energy, but Shakespeare's evil characters also seem unsettled and chameleon-like:

Why, I can smile, and murther whiles I smile,
And cry “Content!” to that which grieves my heart.
And wet my cheeks with artificial tears,
And frame my face to all occasions:
.....I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.

(3 Henry VI 3.2.182-85, 191-93)

We must remember that Iago, too, was “motiveless” in his malignity. The mind is a dangerous and shifting place, “no-man fathomed.” And while Romantic critics like Bradley and Yeats groaned at the heavy ethic of Lancaster, there is every indication that their “strong fixed” house, “like a mountain” lent some stability to a world that for Shakespeare was becoming increasingly complex. Their world of time and consequence might bear too great a yoke (although we must remember that Hal's own modified comprehensiveness represented a more graceful advance on that “silent king” his father), yet it was preferable to the uncontrolled actor Richard III and to the vainly deluded and destroyed Henry VI and Richard II.

In discussing the argument of time it is relevant to mention a very consistent factor in the “weak king” type that Hal must transcend. Edward II opens with Gaveston reading a letter telling him of the death of the king's father. Henry VI begins with the inauspicious funeral procession of his father. Richard II, too, was a child king, who warred on his father's house. Dr. Faustus, with infinite possibilities before him, came from parents “base of stock” and consequently in no position to give him guidance. And what must assume some significance, given these other details, the young man of the sonnets is without a father. Sonnet 3 refers to his mother in the present tense, as still living, while sonnet 13 distinctly refers to his father in the past tense—“You had a father—let your son say so.” The absence of Northumberland in Hotspur's defeat is thus crucial. The office of the father is to educate the will, to deflate the “swoll'n cunning of self-conceit”—to strip the young man of vain illusions of permanence and omnipotence. He stands for an external objective world that is threatening to any deluded vanity. As such the father embodies the sense of time, and we are justified, I believe, in recalling the role of Cato in Dante's temporal cantica, the Purgatorio, and that of Augustine in Petrarch's Secretum.

That Hal required the important interview with his father in the very center of 1 Henry IV, even after his seemingly self-assured soliloquy, is proved by the fact that the intervening scenes all show him as an uninvolved participant in actions where the play element is strong and where he believes that his real self is essentially untouched by his involvements. To justify the Gadshill episode, he declares, “Once in my days I'll be a madcap,” (1.2.160). He is in rollicking humor as he tells of the drinking buddies he has just encountered, and will play with Francis, the rather limited waiter, “to drive away the time till Falstaff come” (2.4.31). he is “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” (1.4-7). He is not of Percy's mind, “I prithee call in Falstaff. I'll play Percy” (122).

And after the jest of catching Falstaff in his “incomprehensible lies,” he yields to the gaiety of the moment and Falstaff's urging, “Shall we have a play extempore?” (308). But the outside world intrudes on this play world. Sir John Bracy brings news of the Percy uprising, yet Hal takes it all lightly. And at the prospect of a chiding from his father the next day, he agrees with Falstaff's suggestion to play out the scene: “If thou love me, practice an answer” (411). This action, while ostensibly comic, reveals some serious motives: Falstaff's insistent defense of himself, and the prince's suddenly serious vow of banishment “I do, I will” (628). But this scene also is interrupted—this time by the knocking of the sheriff's men. Falstaff urges, “Play out the play. I have much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff” (531). The prince covers for him, one of several crucial scenes in the play where he pays the bill and spares Falstaff a reckoning. Despite all the wonderful fun and humor of the prince, it is obvious that here he is a different individual from the one who emerges following the interview with his father.

Several other elements in the father's lecture to his son remain important. We get some notion of what is means to redeem the time, when the king declares what he would have been if, at their relative stages, he had been like Hal, “so stale and cheap to vulgar company.” The opinion of the people would have still remained loyal to Richard,

And left me in reputeless banishment,
A fellow of no mark nor likelihood.

(3.2.44-45)

To be a “somebody,” to have a name, is crucial in Shakespeare's historical argument of time. (How much young Bolingbroke's sense of identity, “Harry of Hereford, Lancaster, and Derby / Am I” contrasts with Richard's subsequent namelessness and nothingness.) And to achieve this status one must learn the importance of “appearances” and the necessity of manipulating the human mechanism. That is how Bolingbroke came to be king, while

The skipping King, he ambled up and down
With shallow jesters and rash bavin wits,
Soon kindled and soon burnt.

(60-62)

An interesting element in the House of Lancaster is the way the son will repeat the attitudes and even the words of the father. “Soon kindled and soon burnt” recalls the fate old John of Gaunt predicted for Richard's “light vanity,” which “consuming means, soon preys upon itself.” There is a fundamental seriousness in the House of Lancaster that has only scorn for the ineffective bursts of wit and fancy that play themselves out and produce nothing of solid and enduring reality. Hal, too, will be in a position to reject “light vanity.”

But at the moment, his antagonist Hotspur is the occasion that informs against him. How irritating it is for the son to hear invidious comparisons with a more successful coeval. It is of course to emphasize this rivalrous competition and their destined confrontation and to increase the sting of the comparison that Shakespeare transforms the ages of Hal and Hotspur, making them contemporaries, when, in historical fact, Hotspur was older than Henry IV. But Hotspur is now Hal's Fortinbras. And to his father's lavish praise of “this Hotspur, Mars in swathling clothes” and to the suggestion that Hal would more likely fight in Percy's hire through fear and his patent inclination toward lowness, Hal's native pride stiffens

Do not think so. You shall not find it so.
And God forgive them that so much have sway'd
Your majesty's good thoughts away from me.
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.

(129-34)

Despite the sunny avowal, the language of economics persists. Percy is but his factor,

And I will call him to so strict account
That he shall render every glory up,
Yea, even the slightest worship of his time,
Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

(147-52)

In tracing the fortunes of Hal in Parts One and Two, one is indeed surprised to learn that after his splendid reformation he must again prove himself to his father. Yet the tone of Part Two has become so sombre, so intensified, and so dark, with such new problems raised, that one does not object to the replay. However much it may have been an afterthought, Part Two is radically different in atmosphere. The gaiety and the sun-drenched possibilities of Part One are weighted down by sickness, guilt, and the apparently unending troubles of Henry IV's reign. Falstaff's age and melancholy are more apparent; when we first meet him he is desperately in need of money. Hal himself is wearied with his former friends. At a crucial point of father-son feeling, Hal's cronies cross his true sentiments and make it appear that Hal would only be a hypocrite were he to show sadness at this father's illness: “By this hand, thou thinkest me as far in the devil's book as thou and Falstaff for obduracy and persistency. Let the end try the man. But I tell thee, my heart bleeds inwardly that my father is so sick; and keeping such vile company as thou art hath in reason taken from me all ostentation of sorrow” (2.2.48-54). His father had warned him of “vile participation,” and Hal comes now to experience it in his own way.

Time is no longer altogether in front of Hal. He begins to feel the weight of his own waste. Here, by focusing on some elements of the argument of time, we can perceive a dramatic justification of Part Two. As in all father-son encounters, the older voice tries to persuade the younger person of a truth that he did not learn abstractly himself, but rather gained from experience. The absence of the same experience in the son and the importance of the lesson account for the mounting exasperation and impatience in the father. It is not until the son himself knows by experience the lessons of time—and this lesson all too often is only learned, unfortunately, in the shadow of the father's death—that he comes to appreciate in his own marrow the truths that previously were mere abstractions. We have seen this already in the dynamic of Petrarch's development. It was only by experience that the lessons of time could be really learned, and a true conversion take place. The advance of Part Two over its predecessor is precisely here. In Part One Hal was still glorious; in Part Two, he begins to feel the waste of his own energies and talents. Falstaff's overweening letter tells the prince that Poins has been speaking of a marriage between his sister and Hal. When Hal asks if this is true, Poins in effect declares that he could do worse. These involvements depress the prince: “Well, thus we play the fools with the time, and the spirits of the wise sit in the clouds and mock us” (2.2.154-57). Yet he undertakes one more jest to catch Falstaff. Hiding behind the arras he has the opportunity to observe “desire outlive performance.” And although Falstaff, as in Part One, wriggles out of the trap, the scene ends disappointingly. News of war again intrudes, but this time only serves to burden the prince with guilt:

By heaven, Poins, I feel me much to blame
So idly to profane the precious time,
When tempest of commotion, like the South,
Borne with black vapour, doth begin to melt
And drop upon our bare unarmed heads.

(2.4.390-94)

So, too, the king's burden is heavier in Part Two. The end of his life is approaching and the crucial action of his life is still unjustified. The source of concern is his as yet unredeemed son. Through Hal's dereliction the king sees his own guilt reflected. Rather than an event leading to a better future, his accession to the throne seems only to be a curse. Should Henry IV provide an orderly succession, the ambiguities surrounding his rise to power would be resolved. The doubtful resolution of the prince turns back on Bolingbroke. In Richard II he is already aware that “if any plague hang over us, 'tis he.” And in Part One, his first words to his son emphasize this fear that Henry is Henry's punishment:

I know not whether God will have it so,
For some displeasing service I have done,
That, in his secret doom, out of my blood
He'll breed revengement and a scourge for me;
But thou dost in thy passages of life
Make me believe that thou are only mark'd
For the hot vengeance and the rod of heaven
To punish my mistreadings.

(3.2.4-11)

In Part Two (3.1), the worn and sleepless king has time to reflect on the ironies of history. Ten years ago Richard and Northumberland were friends; eight years ago he and Percy were friends. Rather than simple “revolution of the times,” a formal line, reminiscent of the curses of the first tetralogy, is given these events by Richard's prediction of them. To a certain point, then, the issues of the first and second tetralogy follow similar courses. Action in the first merely brings on further action; a curse seems to operate over the whole. In the second, as far as Henry IV is aware, the same is true. His act of revolution seems to have involved him in a series of necessary actions that hold not promise for resolution. His hope in the time to come is also blighted by his son. Not only has Hal, as we have seen, turned the garden of his youth in to a weedy patch, and thus reversed one benevolent process in generation, he threatens the more public hopes of the king:

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.

(4.4.54-61)

This same double curse that produces bitter emulation within the family and disorder in society is the object of the king's attack on his son in their moving interview in Part Two. “See, sons, what things you are …” (4.5.65ff.). Believing that Hal seized the crown before his death, Henry IV assails this ingratitude:

For this the foolish over-careful fathers
Have broke their sleep with thoughts, their brains with care,
Their bones with industry:
.....When like the bee tolling from every flower
The virtuous sweets,
Our thighs pack'd with wax, our mouths with honey,
We bring it to the hive, and, like the bees,
Are murd'red for our pains. This bitter taste
Yields his engrossments to the ending father.

That his son will dance on his grave, is the fear—perhaps ages old—that the anguished father expresses. His sense of injury at the apparent ingratitude is strong, “Canst thou not forbear me half an hour?” As in Tamburlaine, but without that play's zesty endorsement, the universe becomes an arena of naturalistic place-taking from which no service or relationship is immune. Henry IV, so the curse would run, who usurped the position of Richard II, is driven from office by his son. This is the way of the universe, where no channels exist that offer protection against the currents of emulation. The dilemma of Henry IV is precisely here: although he came to the crown through ambiguous means, he hopes to establish an orderly and a clear succession. His war is preeminently with an original sin, which his son's behavior seems to confirm. Yet his concern extends beyond his personal situation to the national consequences that his distraught fears imagine:

O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows!
When that my care would not withhold thy riots,
What wilt thou do when riot is thy care?
O, thou wilt be a wilderness again,
Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants!

(134-38)

It is part of Shakespeare's eminent reasonableness, of course, that the accusing father is wrong in his opinion of his son. But the concern is genuine, and it is this concern which turns out to be an expiating factor, in the second tetralogy, in the validation of the House of Lancaster. The two tetralogies assume a fundamental relationship with the Oresteia, where similarly two basic acts are performed, one vindicated, the other not. The House of York in the first tetralogy was unable to muster valid principles to justify its revolution. Yorkist vision, consumed by the golden crown, rarely rose to larger perspectives of time and place; its motives proved to result in a root individualism that in turn devours York's own house, “I am myself alone.” It is precisely this vision of life that Henry IV, however tainted he might be, criticizes in his own son. The Yorkists are like Clytemnestra, who brazenly exults over the fallen husband. Her own impure motives reveal themselves in the way her kingdom grinds to a dead stop, in the horror of fear and nightmare. On Orestes, however, a necessity operates that compels him toward the horrendous deed, and his own righteousness is revealed in the guilt that he feels, and by the pilgrimage of expiation he must undergo. His conscience has not been brazened by the act. Like Henry IV, his very guilt is part of the breaking of the curse.

This is especially so, to return to Shakespeare's second tetralogy, when the father's guilt is centered on Hal and his tenure, on the kind of king he will be. In one of his denunciations of his son, Henry IV charges that his attitude toward government is frivolous: “O foolish youth! / Thou seek'st the greatness that will overwhelm thee” (2 Henry IV 4.5.96-97). Yet it is precisely in his sense of the burdens of rule and the other difficulties and either/or necessities of the world of time that Henry most duplicates his father. Unlike the Yorkists' frequent apostrophes to the Elysium of the crown (in the Marlovian vein), the Lancasters are impressed with the hardships and burdens of kingship. “O polished perturbation! Golden care” is Hal's address to the crown he finds beside his sleeping father. And after his father's denunciation, in his own defense he proceeds to recount what he actually had said. The golden crown is carnivorous: it eats the bearer up, as it has fed upon the body of his father:

                                        if it did infect my blood with joy
Or swell my thoughts to any strain of pride,
If any rebel or vain spirit of mine
Did with the least affection of a welcome
Give entertainment to the might of it.

(170-74)

This oath, sworn with gravity and determination, pleases the father in two ways; it shows that his own labors have been appreciated, and that like himself Hal will be a serious ruler. Through their very sense of guilt and responsibility, added to determination, the Lancasters show a capacity for effective rule. The original sin, so dominant in the first tetralogy and looming in the second, has been purged through the very father-son ideal that is at the heart of Shakespeare's political ethic. The crown sat uneasily upon the head of the father. Bolingbroke, as the original man in the middle, had to assume the guilt of historical action. But that guilt has been broken. To his son the crown will descend with better quiet,

Better opinion, better confirmation;
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth.

(189-91)

Henry is the scapegoat who carries the sins away. But his burden has been eased by his son's proving his right to succession. Henry IV does not die as a tragic figure, nor as a Christ-figure who simply absorbs the blow. At the end, as with Henry VIII, Henry IV's victory is historical. His action at a crucial moment of historical change, rather than being doomed by a sense of life that fears all doing, is justified in his son. As Henry VIII exclaims with pride and praises his Maker, so Henry IV finds his life's work vindicated, and cries out “Laud be to God.” Where he does this is important. Waning fast, he asks in what room he fainted. Told it is called the Jerusalem room, he rejoices and then explains that he was once told he would die in Jerusalem, which he had thought to mean the Holy Land. Some critics have considered this to be a “juggling prophecy” which robs Henry IV of any contentment and shows him in the end to be a defeated man. Correct reading of this scene and Henry's attitude would seem to dispose of that interpretation. Far from being a juggling prophecy, it places the seal of approval on his actions. If he could not go to Jerusalem, Jerusalem came to him. And as in Henry VIII, there is some religious confirmation of this man who faced with resolution and courage the bitter choices that the new times presented to him.

This tetralogy is at the core of the larger developments of the study of time in the Renaissance. It shows, as in Spenser, the basic Elizabethan reinvestment in the ways of succession. In Dante, we recall, all rightness comes from God, and not through the lines of succession. We do not have to go back as far as Dante for that. Samuel Daniel, whom some have thought Shakespeare followed in his historical vision, also sees a controlling providence at work in the lines of English kings. After the superb attainment of Edward III and the promise of his sons, disaster strikes when the Black Prince predeceases his father and the throne is left to a child.

But now the Scepter, in this glorious state,
Supported with strong power and victories,
Was left unto a Child, ordain'd by fate
To stay the course of what might grow too hie:
Here was a stop, that Greatness did abate,
When powre upon so weake a base did lie.
For, least good fortune should presume too farre,
Such oppositions interposed are.

The world is still governed by the inscrutable powers that allow man his glory but are jealous when it seems to continue too long, and for the same reason as in Dante: then he will believe that he, and not these mastering powers, is the measure of things. But Shakespeare's vision differs even from that of Daniel. There is a kind of human effectiveness that does not act in opposition to the great powers of the world, but, as in the Oresteia, seems willing to give them their place of honor and their due of guilt, and the sweat of scrupulous preoccupation with law and government. This effectiveness is not of the Yorkist-Clytemnestra type, whose brag and insolence merely add to the process of retribution they thought they were breaking, but neither does it share the vision that utterly despairs of any redemption in time. That man can act safely in time—however harrowing and difficult it might be—is the credo of Shakespeare's development in the second tetralogy. Importantly, then, where argument of time is seriously used, it works to dissolve the hold of original sin.

Also related to the development of time in the Renaissance is the fact that a secular paideia replaces the Christian. In the Dante of the Commedia, man is a truer man the less he has of manliness, and the more he regains of the purity, innocence, and sense of life's coherence that a child has. As in other Renaissance works fundamentally concerned with education, so in Shakespeare's second tetralogy, the ideal formation takes place strictly between father and son. The older figure leads the son to maturity, responsibility, and order. Time is redeemed when this secular paideia functions, just as time is forfeited in the Inferno and in Richard III when that process is destroyed. In two speeches, one of which is memorable, Hal vows to maintain the processes of succession that his father feared were broken. Taking to himself the crown that (as he believed) killed his father, Hal affirms his right to it and his willingness to defend it:

          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.

(44-47)

We have already observed the “lineal honour” operating in the several reformations of the son, especially in Part Two, and also indirectly in the many echoes and resemblances passed on from father to son. Falstaff, especially, courts disappointment when he seeks to insert himself between the father-son relation.

The same order of stability that Hal comes to represent is absent from the worlds of Hotspur and Falstaff, but, significantly, they can be validly discussed in the temporal terms we have established. Hotspur is Hal's foil not only in reaped honors, but also in awareness. Hal's broad-gauged participation in many levels of existence is a kind of fortunate fall. While it seems to present him with greater difficulties (“most subject is the fattest soil to weeds”) it also indicates greater possibilities—the “sparks of better hope”—which his father quite early detects. Separate and diffuse, his multiple identities can be damaging, but unified they show greater tolerance, broader perspectives, and a disposition to embrace life. Hotspur, or course, has none of these qualities. He is caught in that older way of reducing life to ultimate alternatives: honor or death, “or sink, or swim!” This tendency derives from his basic devaluation of life's normal activities and his fierce devotion to those moments of combat when all will be determined. Before battle he has no time for the letters brought by a messenger—“I cannot read them now”:

O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long
If life did ride upon a dial's point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.
An if we live, we live to tread on kings;
If die, brave death, when princes die with us!

(5.2.80-87)

His code of honor actually compels him to seek out dangerous situations:

Send danger from the east unto the west,
So honour cross it from the north to south,
And let them grapple. O, the blood more stirs
To rouse a lion than to start a hare!

(1.3.195-98)

Hotspur is a man possessed, and when he speaks it is rarely to others, but rather out of some demonic trance within himself. These words, for instance, spoken at a council of war, are not really addressed to the group. Some inner jockey is spurring him on, and the crowd stands back in amazement at his frenzy. Northumberland, his father, provides the actor's cue:

Imagination of some great exploit
Drives him beyond the bounds of patience.

(199-200)

But Percy proceeds:

By heaven, methinks it were an easy leap
To pluck bright honour from the pale-fac'd moon,
Or dive into the bottom of the deep,
Where fadom line could never touch the ground,
And pluck up drowned honour by the locks,
So he that doth redeem her thence might wear
Without corrival all her dignities.

Worcester, his uncle, grows somewhat impatient at all of this fantasy:

He apprehends a world of figures here,
But not the form of what he should attend.

(201-10)

With Hal, however, despite his own kind of isolation, we have none of this blind imagination. He seems to see better into people and situations: “I know you all …” And while he is deluded in thinking that he is in control of the situation (other forces must help effect his regeneration), still his presence in the easy world of jokes and stories, of small beer, provides a larger perspective from which to view the ludicrous warrior-myths and pride of the Glendowers and Hotspurs. In 1 Henry IV, when Falstaff tells of the spreading rebellion, his very telling satirizes the spectacular pretensions of the soldier clan:

That same mad fellow of the North, Percy, and he of Wales that gave Amamon the bastinado, and made Lucifer cuckold, and swore the devil his true liegeman upon the cross of a Welsh hook—what a plague call you him?

(2.4.369-73)

Hal picks up the marvelous puncturing, completing Falstaff's similar description of Douglas, “that runs a-horseback up a hill perpendicular—”

PRINCE:
He that rides at high speed and with his pistol kills a sparrow flying.
FALSTAFF:
You have hit it.
PRINCE:
So did he never the sparrow.

(378-82)

His sense of fun and humor is sparkling when he puts Francis' inarticulateness on parade or when he makes fun of Percy:

That ever this fellow should have fewer words than a parrot, and yet the son of a woman! His industry is upstairs and downstairs, his eloquence the parcel of a reckoning. I am not yet of Percy's mind, the Hotspur of the North; he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, “Fie upon this quiet life! I want work!” “O my sweet Harry,” says she, “how many hast thou kill'd today?” “Give my roan horse a drench,” says he, and answers “Some fourteen,” an hour after, “a trifle, a trifle.” I prithee call in Falstaff.

(110-22)

The prince too knows that Hotspur apprehends a world of figures, and not what he should attend. His parody of Hotspur emphasizes his lack of responsiveness, his lack of consecutiveness. All consumed in his own world, time is unimportant. Rather than answering his wife's question (still in Hal's parody) he gives an order instead, and one hour later registers his response. There is strong evidence in the play that Hal's comic version of Hotspur is not inaccurate.

With the exception of the material in the section [in The Renaissance Discovery of Time] on “The Dramatic Exploitation of Time,” I have generally ignored the interesting problems of the sequences of actual plot time. But because of the conceptual value of the presentation of dramatic time in 1 Henry IV, I make an exception here, Mable Buland has studied the problems and development of double time in Elizabethan drama, with particular attention to Shakespeare. In brief, she states that double time in the plays results from “an attempt to give the effect of close continuity of action, and to use at the same time a plot requiring the lapse of months or years.” I find that the use of double time in Henry IV serves the added purpose of reflecting the two young heroes' varying attitudes toward life. Miss Buland summarizes the plot-times of the play:

In 1 and 2 Henry IV … Shakespeare reverted to the epic type of the chronicle, but not to the kind of construction used in the Henry VI plays; for into the episodic scenes of Hotspur's rebellion he has woven a comic story possessing such close continuity that a semblance of coherence is imparted to the whole play. In 1 Henry IV, we hear Falstaff and Prince Harry plan to take a purse “to-morrow night in Eastcheap” (1.2); we see the early morning robbery, we enjoy the supper scene after the night's adventures; we hear the Prince resolve, “I'll to the court in the morning” (2.4.595); and presently we find the son and father together (3.2). It is then arranged that “on Wednesday next” the prince shall set forward with his troops, and a few days later, at the battle of Shrewsbury, the play is concluded. Nevertheless, the affairs of Hotspur, which should be concurrent with those of the Prince of Wales, cover a period of three months, and their long-time extension is clearly indicated.

Although Hotspur's activities cover a longer period of time, they do not suggest continuity. They represent a disrupted sequence of heightened moments: they are crisis episodes. Human interest is kept up by the sheer eccentricity and “humor” of the wild-eyed devotee of soldier's honor. Yet there is no suggestion of the fuller life, or any interest other than honor (which has a strong echo of cracking heads). Time between the crucial episodes is of little value:

Uncle, adieu. O, let the hours be short
Till fields and blows and groans applaud our sport!

(1.2.301-2)

The prince, on the other hand, is involved in the more quotidian world of community and consecutive experience. His plot time, if briefer, is more continuous, and therefore more open to extension. Hotspur's time, while covering a longer period, is actually contracted into short moments: it is more suggestive of the tragic world of passion to which his end is the consummation.

Beneath Hotspur's devotion to crisis-time is a certain devaluation of the small things in extended time. Underlying his stance is a desperate skepticism that comes out in his last speech:

But thoughts the slaves of life, and life time's fool,
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop.

(5.4.81-83)

As his approach to time has indicated and as this final turning away shows, Hotspur's attitudes do not promote the kind of temporal stability and controlling powers that Shakespeare valued in his more life-seeking monarchs.

In the histories, Falstaff is Shakespeare's prime creation of a negligent greatness. Hal is determined to redeem the time and move against the tempest of commotion that drops on his “unarmed head.” But there is strong evidence that Falstaff misdeems the time and is by his own admission heinously unprovided. He is the latter spring, and the all-hallown summer. His desire outlives performance. The man of incongruities and incomprehensible lies, whose predilection was for the latter end of a fray and the beginning of a feast, brought laughter in Part One. His sheer extravagances were rewarded, and his inconsecutiveness was much to the point. But a move persists to expose Falstaff, whether after Gadshill, or when Poins and Hal oversee him in Part Two. And like the Wife of Bath, Falstaff is an aging, melancholy comic hero, beset by occasional religious anxiety, but also driven by hard economic motivation. Underneath his inconsequence there is a hard line of practical shrewdness: “‘When thou art King’ runs like a refrain through what he has to say, and reveals the anxieties beneath the jesting … What is to happen when the old King dies? That, as we are reminded time and time again in this scene, is the leading problem of Falstaff's existence” (J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff). The hope is that the prince will spare him the reckoning of his more extravagant ways, that the prince will provide and set Falstaff's accounts in order.

The call to account is crucial to the argument of time. It is the fatal moment for which one must prepare, the sick hour that Richard's surfeit brought, the bitter realization against which Shakespeare warns the young man in the sonnets, and the crucial hour of combat for which the interview with his father prepares Hal. The call to account is the inevitable summons that breaks through illusion and presents a hard world of reality. But Falstaff, we are told at once in 1 Henry IV, is superfluous in demanding the time of day. “What a devil has thou to do with the time of day,” unless the signs and acts of pleasure were fitting marks for the world of time. Attached to the prince, Falstaff is the allowed jester: he never is called to pay. The prince may have called the hostess to a reckoning many a time, but he never called Falstaff to pay his part. “No, I'll give thee thy due, thou has paid all there” (1.2.59). The prince's credit redeems Falstaff's activities. As Gadshill, the spotter explains: his team of robbers includes some who are involved in the robbery for sport's sake, “that would (if matters should be look'd into) for their own credit sake make all whole” (2.1.79). Falstaff's world is a merry play world. Watch tonight, pray tomorrow … “A play extempore” is the proper happening for those who live by their wits. After the robbery, when the play world has been interrupted by the knocking of the sheriff's men, Hal engages his word that Falstaff (hidden fast asleep behind the arras) will answer the complaints. The prince promises that the money will be paid back “with advantage,” and persists in being the good “angel” to Falstaff.

Falstaff is ill-prepared for the emulative struggle to which the prince is called. The either/or challenge of Hotspur which Hal must answer is for Falstaff merely

Rare words! brave world! Hostess, my breakfast, come.
O, I could wish this tavern were my drum!

(3.3.228-29)

He is somewhat reluctant to settle accounts, especially in a world of struggle and real threats; in London's taverns his wit and verbal skills could get him by, but not in combat: “Though I could scape shot-free at London, I fear the shot here. Here's no scoring but upon the pate” (5.3.30-32). As the moment of battle approaches, Falstaff asks Hal's assistance. But Hal is not colossal enough to bestride him in battle: “Say thy prayers, and farewell.”

FALSTAFF:
I would 'twere bedtime, Hal, and all well.
PRINCE:
Why, thou owest God a death.
FALSTAFF:
'Tis not due yet, I would be loath to pay him before his day. Why need I be so forward with him that calls not on me?

(5.1.126-30)

While it would be foolhardy to rush toward that reckoning, still the postponement he seeks here is only part of the larger practice of deferral that is typical of Falstaff throughout both parts of Henry IV.

In the battle Hal significantly does not bestride Falstaff, but rather his father. And when Falstaff pulls the bottle of sack from where his pistol should be, the prince rebukes his poor timing: “What, is it a time to jest and dally now?” (5.3.57). The preparation for rejection proceeds—even if premature and bound to be deferred. When Hal sees the fallen Falstaff, whom he mistakenly believes to be dead, the prince hardly expresses any regret:

O, I should have a heavy miss of thee
If I were much in love with vanity!

(5.4.105-6)

Again the Lancastrian seriousness returns to judge the frivolity of those whom they reject or oppose. But Falstaff is not dead, only counterfeiting, and he springs to life to pull off his most incredible stunt: claiming he killed Hotspur. The claim has all the more chance of success in the world of Part One, the more preposterous and patently incredible it is. Falstaff lands on his feet, and the prince again uses his credit to spare him a reckoning:

For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,
I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have.

(161-62)

In Part Two, the law is not so easily fobbed off. The Lord Chief Justice holds the keys to this terrain, as the law-bound Cato did in the Purgatorio. He is just as severe in his retention of the past, and the object of his implacability is Falstaff: “It is not a confident brow, nor the throng of words that come with such more than impudent sauciness from you, can thrust me from a level consideration” (2.1.121-24). He is determined that Falstaff pay his debt to Hostess Quickly “both in purse and person.” Earlier the Chief Justice showed that he at least had not forgotten the events of Gadshill: “Your days's service at Shrewsbury hath a little gilded over your night's exploit on Gadshill. You may thank th' unquiet time for your quiet o'erposting that action” (1.2.168-71). Falstaff's pretensions of youthfulness, and his brawling are unseemly to the serious man of order, “Doth this become you place, your time and business?” (2.1.73). Such a complaint will be echoed by the newly crowned Henry V: “How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!” (5.5.52).

Falstaff is ill attended in Part Two. Like the Chief Justice, the prince's brother John is not an ideal audience for his antics. He warns Falstaff of the danger he is running by his eccentric ways:

Now, Falstaff, where have you been all the while?
When everything is ended, then you come.
These tardy tricks of yours will, on my life,
One time or other break some gallows' back.

(4.3.29-32)

For one scene only, prior to rejection time, Falstaff and Hal appear together in Part Two (2.4). And as in Part One, Poins and the prince have designed a trap to expose Falstaff. The directions of both plays seem toward Falstaff's exposure. But in Part Two, much of the former gaiety has passed out of the scene, and it ends unsatisfactorily and unresolved. The final impression is one of time profaned. Indeed, it is “Falstaff, good night.”

Although Falstaff has not altogether lost his charm in Part Two, he is no longer so outlandishly inconsequential. He has acquired authority, and he uses his new employment to deliver himself from the officers of the Chief Justice. But as he becomes more consequential in speech and behavior, he becomes more of a real problem and hence more open to rejection: “You speak as having power to do wrong” (2.1.141).

Debts past due, of which the Chief Justice is the unrelenting collector, are closing in on Falstaff. There are signs that his good angel of the past will no longer pay the reckoning. One indication of Hal's future behavior is in his father's accusation that under his reign any kind of hoodlum and criminal would find refuge: “England shall double gild his treble guilt.” The same term of covering was used by Hal in Part One, and by the Chief Justice in Part Two to describe the royal credit that was redeeming Falstaff's carelessness and illegality. The father's charge is pointed. But rather than to Falstaff, it is to the Chief Justice that Hal gives his hand, “you shall be as father to my youth.” In Parts One and Two Falstaff loses out to time and the Law. As in Dante's Purgatorio, these two principles, part of the argument of time, necessitate a rejection that continues to be debated.

It is quite natural that we should recoil at Falstaff's rejection, just as we did at Virgil's—even though the latter seemed to represent more positive ideals. After Romanticism, as Professor Langbaum has shown, the quandary of moral categories and sympathetic character seems only to have become thicker. Naive readers have continued to protest, and overly severe teachers have continued to pursue rigorously the textual logic that requires dismissal. However much we might wish to see Falstaff's presumption deflated and delight in the dramatic effects that build up to his final exposure, however much we might be aware that Falstaff's egotism personally intrudes on the proper and serious business of governing a country, and however much we are brought to realize that lurking on the verge of Falstaff's domain is disorder, crime, and even murder, still it is not without regret that we see the world deprived of his good force. It is this to which Edmund Wilson responds when he joins in association Falstaff and the later tragic figures, Lear and Antony. In their loss a great force has gone out of the world.

Falstaff's merits become apparent, not in contrast with the virtues required of the monarch, but when set next to the lesser characters who seem to thrive. Shallow, a simple fool except where money is concerned, is everything that Falstaff is not. Ever in the rearward of the fashion, this country squire still has more than Bardolph for security. His beefs and Falstaff's lack of provisions presents another of those occasions that inform against one, those bitter lessons that reveal a clear reality. Shallow sounds the depths of his name. He is nostalgic and backward-looking to a past he never had. In his great soliloquy (3.4), Falstaff has nothing but scorn (and some designs) for this lying old man, who in his youth was no way like himself. He only sang outmoded songs and never had the courage, enterprise, or wit to be the blade he later imagined himself to be. He was a hanger-on, one who circled around the outskirts of the tumult. He was never at the center of things; he never took the risks of the thrust. Yet, now he is wealthy and Falstaff desperately in need of provisions. This speech shows Falstaff's virtues in proper dialectic; Shallow's triumphant narrowness is degraded in contrast with the risk-taking Falstaff. It was Falstaff who ventured, who drew laughs, who was wit itself and the cause of wit in other men.

Falstaff had always misdeemed the time and ignored the need to provide prudently. And while there was always a latent cynicism in his profane detraction from heroics, still it is only in his advanced age, when he sees fools provided for, that he grimly sets about to hunt for himself: “If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of the nature but I may snap at him [Shallow]. Let time shape, and there an end” (3.2.356-59). Falstaff can hardly inspire his wonted affection in us when he speaks of the “law of nature.” This latter-day lapse into an opportunistic ethic, similar to that of the Yorkists, is a startling reversal from the earlier gaiety (for all its undertone of future gain). His freedom has become victimized by its own excess and desperately converts from happy inconsequence into hard calculation; perennially out of season, Falstaff too late in life adopts a grim code of provision. And ironically, it is this final resolve to take advantage of the time, that element which he had so grandiosely scanted, which helps to make Falstaff dramatically ripe for rejecting.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TIME IN SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORIES

True to its form, Shakespeare's argument of time exhorts response. And the response, as proclaimed in the sonnets, involves a faith in the augmentative potential of the ways of succession. Wherever these ways are open, and man places his confidence in them, children and fame are valuable counters in the war against nothingness and oblivion. And this perhaps is one of the values of the argument of time: it provides a bridge between the private voice of the sonnets and the more public world of the drama. It concentrates on the problems that help to make the histories intense personal, as well as political drama. But it also gives larger scope to the virtues of good government: prudence and responsibility and even decorum are more than that when they are stabilizing guards against a chaotic and destructive world of willful vanity, negligence, and nothingness. The argument of time provides such enlargements for Shakespeare's political ethic.

We have already had occasion to observe this double dimension of time in the Renaissance: it is a cosmic discovery that translates itself into schedule; with fervor it combines practicality. These aspects of time in the Renaissance help to explain the division on modern criticism over Shakespeare's successful House of Lancaster. Whether defending Richard II or Falstaff, men like Yeats or Bradley are repulsed by the calculation, priggishness, and prudence of the Lancasters. “To suppose that Shakespeare preferred men who deposed his king is to suppose that Shakespeare judged men with the eyes of a Municipal Councillor weighing the merits of a Town Clerk; and that had he been by when Verlaine cried out from his bed, “Sir, you have been made by the stroke of a pen but I have been made by the breath of God,” he would have though the Hospital Superintendent the better man” (“At Stratford-on-Avon” in Essays and Introductions). Indeed, there is part of us that wishes Yeats to be right, that feels uncomfortable whenever we insist too pompously on the correctness of deposition or dismissal. But, at the same time, we also feel that Yeats, bristling under the divisions of his own time, has stripped the growth and significance of Hal of half the interest it holds for us. He belittles the prudence, but he forgets the cosmic issues of time and nothingness against which prudence is a defense. He mocks the decisions of the public man, but he forgets the private setting for those decisions. In short, Yeats is prevented from seeing the crucial nature of time in the Renaissance. Time is a principle of reality that limits human freedom, but it also heightens reality. It is these deeper issues in Hal's development that the argument of time brings out. Yet Yeats is historically percipient. Just that severe division which would eventually come about between Verlaine's spirited vanity and the dull Municipal Councillor has its roots in the Renaissance triumph of time. And Shakespeare's own tragedies will show the split that Yeats detected in the histories. But for a while, with Shakespeare, as with other Renaissance writers, when time was still an important and fervent discovery, the union of energy and control was still possible. Rabelais could have his education of Gargantua and the freer air of the Abbey. The practical results of the discovery of time could still be exciting, especially when man was trying to liberate himself from an unworthy torpor, or in Shakespeare's case, from older ways that no longer served the modern prince. The modern world, especially in literature, would like to return to the world before time became a pressure and a commodity. Yet it was just this discovery of time that is intrinsic to the nature and accomplishments of the Renaissance.

The first tetralogy shows the transition from the high point of England's medieval achievement to the first Renaissance English monarch. So, too, the second tetralogy deals with the “change of times,” as it moves from a king whose values are medieval to one whose values are more like those of the Tudors (whether represented by Henry VII or the Cranmer oration in Henry VIII). In the first tetralogy Henry V is the last of the medieval kings; in the second, he is the glorious representative, shown in his growth and development, of the modern notions of realism, effectiveness, comprehensiveness of appeal. His contrast with Hotspur transcends mere competition between coevals; it is rather between two different ways of life. There is more in Hal that seeks and deserves survival; there is more in Hal that is in tune with the nature of the world and the demands of the time. With all of his tremendous vitality and spirited vision, Percy is still food for worms.

Ill-weav'd ambition, how much art thou shrunk!
When that this body did contain a spirit,
A kingdom for it was too small a bound;
But now two paces of the vilest earth
Is room enough.

(1 Henry IV 5.4.88-92)

Hal's vision includes human limitations and vulnerabilities. His spirit is not as doom-eager and death-insistent as the tragically motivated chivalric and aristocratic Hotspur. J. Dover Wilson's comments on these lines, especially “ill-weaved ambition,” are suggestive: “Such is the quality of Hotspur's ambition … and such the language of Shakespeare, the wool-dealer's son, who well knew that cloth loosely woven was especially apt to shrink.” Shakespeare, the wool-dealer's son, finds the values and personality of a Hotspur inappropriate for true management, stability, and safety in the world. There is not enough in Hotspur that seeks life over death. He shows too much willfulness, too great a reluctance to adjust one's spirit to the realities of existence. And one of the great realities is time.

Continuing to follow larger historical suggestions, it has been clear from our study that the sense of time as an urgent pressure was coincidental with the rise of bourgeois society and the middle class. More to the point, time figures prominently in the formation of middle-class values. It suggests an external world of real limitations, against which one must make provisions if he is to be spared an unsatisfactory reckoning. If, then, Shakespeare's England witnessed the great alliance under the Tudors between the throne and the middle class, it is clear why time is so important a force in Shakespeare's second tetralogy. Historical in value, the history plays reflect historical reality: Hal is the embodiment of the Tudor revolution in values that Shakespeare sought to dramatize. Against the bedeviled turmoil of a Hotspur, he sets Falstaffian life. But against Falstaff's nihilism, he sets a modified code of honor and historical continuity that is a consolidation of the traditions of the old in harmony with present realities. In his most stirring affirmation in 2 Henry IV, Hal draws a particularly English bridge over the gap of historical change, uniting in a single unit the old and the new. “The tide of blood in me,” he confesses,

Hath proudly flow'd 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.

(5.2.129-33)

Despite the disruption of Bolingbroke's revolution, despite the new realism of his house, continuity has been maintained—and more than maintained, gloriously advanced. Aristocratic and bourgeois, Hal represents the great tendency toward amalgamation of virtues that we had already observed in Spenser, and had further seen to be crucial to the problem of time in the Renaissance.

For Harry Levin, in his important essay “English Literature of the Renaissance,” Bacon's “Merchants of Light” symbolize “the belated yet determining role that Englishmen played in the Renaissance, the mediating practicality that reshaped its ideas into those of the Enlightenment.” While we could see in “Merchants of Light” the several facets of time, it is the phrase “mediating practicality” that is justified by many points in this study, and which the history plays dramatize. We could say that the fundamental contrast between the House of York and the House of Lancaster was the absence of this mediating practicality in the former. They too unreservedly in Shakespeare's plays took over the Machiavellian line without submitting to the larger needs of time and place. In the Marlovian vein, they were too unmitigated in their adoptions, without transforming their desires to the larger needs of life and order. If Richard II, Henry VI, and Falstaff were too negligent or improvident, the Richards of the first tetralogy were too aggressive and belligerent. And yet Shakespeare, and the directions of English thought in the Renaissance, sensed the importance of time and the need for man to manage it effectively, to husband it. Somewhere between the premature reliance on being and the unscrupulous seizure of time must, unfortunately, lie the difficult shadow area of proper action. Man can act safely in time, but it involves heavy responsibilities and burdens, with the quieter rewards and consolations of the ways of peace and succession. Indeed, given the Baconian context of Professor Levin's remarks, the second tetralogy—with its faith in a virtuous control of experience stabilized by the successful father-son relationship, with its recognition of a hard objective reality and the need for man to be modest in the face of his vulnerable exposure, yet through this submission to the laws of nature to be able, in turn, to control experience—the later group of history plays seems to have found its proper setting.

Bibliography

Levin, Harry. Shakespeare and the Revolution of the Times: Perspectives and Commentaries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Wilson, J. Dover. The Fortunes of Falstaff. New York: Macmillan, 1944.