SOURCE: Bevington, David. Introduction to The Oxford Shakespeare: Henry IV, Part I, edited by David Bevington, pp. 1-110. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

[In the following excerpt, Bevington discusses the structural unity and major themes of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, and considers the dramas' exposition of identity, honor, cowardice, father-son relations, and princely education.]

THE QUESTION OF STRUCTURAL UNITY

The debate over [E. M. W.] Tillyard's insistence on Elizabethan world-order as the key to Shakespeare's history plays has interesting ramifications, not only for characterization—e.g. is Falstaff a Vice tempter or a free spirit?—but also for structure. Are 1 and 2 Henry IV a unified whole, and integrally part of the larger structure of the Henriad, or is each play a separate theatrical event? Tillyard's argument … impels him towards the unitary view, towards seeing the rejection of Falstaff and the emergence of Henry V as the necessary conclusion to a story of political conflict whose ultimate concern is the welfare of the state. Similarly, Dover Wilson, though he sees Henry V and especially Merry Wives as quite separate creations, argues for a close tie between 1 and 2 Henry IV. He concedes that the plays were performed separately, but his argument about Falstaff's relationship to Hal depends on the idea of a ten-act whole, of which each half is incomplete, unintelligible even, without the other. In particular, Wilson argues that Hal's soliloquy at the end of 1.2 looks forward to his coronation as Henry V and his rejection of Falstaff, that the father-son relationship is in need of further clarification at the end of Part 1, that the otherwise unnecessary introduction of the Archbishop of York in 4.4 serves to prepare for Prince John's expedition in Part 2, that the rebels (though deprived of Hotspur) remain at large after the Battle of Shrewsbury, and that Falstaff's false claim of credit for Hotspur's death is a key to Falstaff's character in Part 2 more than in Part 1.¹ Falstaff's itinerary for Part 2, taking him far out of his way to Gloucestershire en route to, and returning from, Yorkshire, might seem to suggest that material from an original but overly long single play had been moved into a second part. Tillyard and Wilson thus carry forward and particularize the judgement of Dr Johnson, who in 1765 wrote: ‘These two plays will appear to every reader, who shall peruse them without ambition of critical discoveries, to be so connected that the second is merely a sequel to the first; to be two only because they are too long to be one.’²

The opposing theory is that 2 Henry IV was an unpremeditated sequel generated by the great success of Part 1, and, like most spin-offs, one that proved to be little more than a vehicle for the continuing antics of a single character, in this case Falstaff.³ Such a disparaging view of the second play is not critically justified, however, and is unnecessarily extreme as a counter to the unitary theory. More persuasive are arguments that allow for separate performance of the two plays, for a degree of uncertainty about Shakespeare's overall plan as he wrote, and for the idea that the second play deliberately varies the focus of interest and the characterization, even while it underlines through repetition the difficulty of resolving certain problems.

That 1 Henry IV was performed separately from 2 Henry IV is a virtual certainty; there are in fact no records of performance on the same or succeeding days before the twentieth century.⁴ The phenomenon of the multiple-part play in Elizabethan drama offers instructive analogies. Even though Henslowe records performances of the two parts of Tamburlaine on successive days, he also records them on quite separate occasions; Part 1 was certainly performed before Part 2 was written. The same is true of Tamar Cam and others. The unity in multiple-part plays is one of theme, achieved through parallel episodes, as in Chapman's Byron and Marston's Antonio plays, rather than of integrally connected action.⁵ The implications of separate performance are important. Since 1 Henry IV was originally and regularly performed as a separate play, it must have achieved closure for its first audience, which is another way of saying that it must have made dramatic sense by itself.

What then was the extent of Shakespeare's planning for the separation of the two parts? The occasionally uncertain links between Richard II and 1 Henry IV suggest that he might have begun with a broad outline and then refined it as he worked. The single report of Prince Hal's conduct in Richard II insists on his supporting the wildest outrages such as beating the watch, robbing passengers, frequenting stews, and the like (5.3.1-22), whereas in 1 Henry IV Shakespeare puts the Prince at some distance from these acts. The Henry Percy of Richard II, not yet graced with the nickname of Hotspur, is an attractive well-spoken youth in a very minor part (2.3.21-56, 3.3.20-9, 4.1.44-8) who resembles the fiery rebel of 1 Henry IV in little more than his age. Nor is there any hint of the scheming nature of Worcester, who is mentioned twice but is never present on stage. In 1 Henry IV we can look back on these first impressions with the advantage of hindsight, but as clues to the planning of 1 Henry IV they afford room for considerable extemporizing.⁶2 Henry IV concludes with a promise of another play ‘with Sir John in it’, though Falstaff does not materialize in Henry V.

1 and 2 Henry IV are closely bound, however, by the rejection of Falstaff, and by the use of a story that had already appeared in Famous Victories as a single dramatic structure. Did Shakespeare intend from the start to leave the rejection out of 1 Henry IV, despite anticipations of that event? Or did he plan originally to include the rejection, as in Famous Victories, as has been argued by Harold Jenkins? According to Jenkins's theory, Shakespeare originally set up a series of parallels between comic and serious plots designed to culminate, as promised in Hal's soliloquy, in the besting of Hotspur and the rejection of Falstaff. Falstaff serves as a foil for Hotspur at every turn in matters of robbery and cowardice, and Hal's announcement of his intention towards Falstaff in the play-acting scene (2.4) is paired with his announcement of his intention towards Hotspur in the interview with King Henry (3.2). Once the dooms of Falstaff and Hotspur are in sight, however, Jenkins sees Shakespeare changing his mind; the comic material for the rest of the play is less compressed, and Part 2 improvises its sub-plot on a theme of justice. This hypothesis explains, in Jenkins's view, why the second play, for all the parallelisms with the rebel scenes and tavern scenes of Part 1, does not contain the same real double action. History does not repeat itself; Hal does not go through a cycle of riot and reform again.⁷

Whether or not Shakespeare changed his mind this drastically as he wrote, the structural integrity of the two separate plays we now have in 1 and 2 Henry IV is surely more substantial than Jenkins's or Wilson's theories of improvisation would seem to allow. The ending of 1 Henry IV is suited to the play for which it is provided. Falstaff is to be rejected ultimately, but not now. Meantime, the Battle of Shrewsbury brings to a resolution the issue of honour with which Part 1 has been concerned. Hotspur lies dead, and Hal has vindicated himself as promised, having both proved his worth in arms and reformed his wasteful ways. The symmetries of the serious and comic plots have permitted the stories of Hotspur and Falstaff to develop side by side, each with its beginning, middle, and end. In one, a rebellion is conceived and developed, whereupon the rebels prepare for battle and are defeated; in the other, the Prince takes part in a conspiracy to rob in the name of companionship with Falstaff, yet declares his intent to reform, appears penitentially before his father, and puts some distance between himself and Falstaff thereafter. The coincidence of Hal's declarations against Hotspur and against Falstaff marks the simultaneous progression of the two plots, even though we must allow that the two follow divergent and irreconcilable time-schemes; an interval of some three or four weeks is needed to ripen the serious rebellion hatched in 1.3, for example, while the highway robbery is planned and executed in a matter of hours.⁸

Loose ends are apparent at the end of 1 Henry IV, to be sure, for history is open-ended even in a play that achieves brilliant closure.⁹ After all, even Henry V concludes, for all its triumphs in war and marriage, on a reminder of the failures of Henry VI that are to follow in the course of history. In 1 Henry IV rebellion is never wholly quelled, and the introduction of the Archbishop of York in 4.4 is a reminder of unfinished business. Falstaff's deplorable behaviour at the expense of Hal's military reputation is both a fit testimonial to the distance that has come between them and a promise of further roguery. The uneasy relationship between Hal and his father attains a moment of trust appropriate to Hal's emergence as his father's son, but there is unfinished business here too. The actions in Part 2 that involve repetition—the second rebellion of the Percys, the second long tavern scene, the second interview of father and son—all arise from the perception that what seemed so easy of solution is in fact deeply problematic. Falstaff just won't go away, and neither will Hal's reputation for wanton behaviour. In Part 1 Hal's business was to reform his conduct; in Part 2 he finds he must convince the world that he has reformed and is fit to be king.¹⁰

THE PATTERN OF OPPOSITIONS: HOTSPUR AND FALSTAFF ON HONOUR

As a dramatic entity, 1 Henry IV reveals a structure that is simultaneously manifested through character and theme. The alternation of action from serious to comic and the parallel movement in two plots from rebellion to reformation take visible shape in the contrasts between Hotspur and Falstaff and the King and Falstaff, with the Prince occupying a central position. Such oppositions invite definition. One focus of definition is the concept of honour.

According to one often repeated formulation, Hotspur is the excess and Falstaff the defect of military spirit; the former represents exaggerated honour, the latter dishonour. The Prince, comparing the rival merits of chivalry and vanity, comes to embody magnificence, or tasteful bounty, and is thus representative of Aristotle's middle quality between extremes, as is Guyon in Book 2 of Spenser's The Faerie Queene.¹¹ This scheme need not oversimplify the extremes or present them as unattractive: Hotspur is idealistic, brave, and charismatic, Falstaff wisely sceptical and philosophic about war. Still, each suffers from an incompleteness or immaturity that leads to failure of one extreme or the other on the field at Shrewsbury.

The scheme of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics can be expanded to include the four cardinal virtues as integral to a prince's ethical training, if, as Sherman Hawkins argues, Part 1 is seen as concerned with fortitude and temperance, Part 2 with justice and wisdom. The Prince, who in Part 1 tellingly speaks of himself as embodying all humours, and who proves a great mimic of those he would study, learns in the course of time to master the irascible and the appetitive; he does not repress, but instead masters, choler and fleshly indulgence, thereby assimilating the energies of both Hotspur and Falstaff. Each of these two figures represents the defect of one virtue and the excess of another, while the Prince becomes, in Macrobius' words, the ‘good man’ who is first made lord of himself and then ruler of the state.¹²1 Henry IV is Hal's institutio principis, and Hal is its epic hero.

These attractive schemes of opposition need careful qualification, however. Falstaff is happy enough, as Norman Council observes, to garner honour at Shrewsbury; he rejects merely the established code through which it is normally attained.¹³ Hotspur, conversely, is the unstained embodiment of that code, respected even by King Henry as one ‘who is the theme of honour's tongue’ (1.1.80). To see Falstaff as the embodiment of dishonour is to ignore the value of his insight; Falstaff gives us a reasoned rejection of honour, by reversing the terms of the code according to which honour is more precious than life. The debate is one of conflicting values, to which Hal comes as one detached: he will employ honour as a useful commodity, and redeem his own lost reputation by using Hotspur's reputation for his own gain, but he shows what he has learned from Falstaff by his ironic appreciation of a shrunken ‘ill-weaved ambition’ that is now food for worms (5.4.86-7). As W. Gordon Zeeveld has put it, ‘food for worms’ nicely expresses the cost of Hotspur's misdirected idealism, while ‘food for powder’ (4.2.62-3) exposes the limits of Falstaff's sardonic view of war. Hotspur is brave, but never gives a thought to the lives of his soldiers; Falstaff, too, regards his soldiers as expendable, though in the interest of preserving his own life in all its jollity. Hal sees war as the inhuman business it is, and yet his own superior honour takes the form of proposing to save blood on both sides through single combat. His honour, in contrast to Hotspur's cry of ‘Die all, die merrily’ (4.1.135), includes a regard for the value of human life.¹⁴

The opposition represented by Hotspur and Falstaff is thus one of paradox, rendering more complex the choice that Hal must make. Even the physical difference between Hotspur and Falstaff is instructive. In the opposition of prudence and economy to wasteful excess, Falstaff represents both the sickness of the state (like the caterpillars of the commonwealth in Richard II) and the remedy of some of its ills. His obesity is suggestive of luxurious surfeit, and yet he shows us the point of view from which thinness and economy can be inadequate and unpleasant. Hal stands to benefit from Falstaff's friendship, yet must know when to reject the reign of vanity that brought down Richard II.¹⁵ He must cultivate princely liberality in response to Hotspur's churlishness (as in Hotspur's dealings with Glendower) and Falstaff's prodigality. Hal must exhibit good-tempered bravery in response to Hotspur's irascibility and Falstaff's lack of combativeness.¹⁶ Paradox is evident here as well, for Falstaff is able to parody Hotspur's exaggerated manliness with his ‘A plague of all cowards’, his lament for old-fashioned ‘manhood’ that is now ‘forgot upon the face of the earth’, and his tale of ‘two- or three-and-fifty upon poor old Jack’ (2.4.110-81).

Hal studies manliness in Hotspur while learning, as Hotspur does not, to limit his sense of superiority; through Falstaff he discovers his weakness as a man and his capacity for witty laughter, without surrendering, as Falstaff does, to the fleshliness of appetite and the moral anarchy that wit can produce.¹⁷ In his ability to enlarge and be flexible, in contrast to Hotspur and Falstaff, both of whom diminish other people as means to an egotistical end, Hal finds a happy mean between humourless zeal and frivolity.¹⁸ Yet his choice is not simply between extremes, but between alternatives that cast light on each other's deficiencies and virtues alike, as when Falstaff's highway escapades illustrate, both by resemblance and contrast, the thievery that is part of the political story as well; at Gad's Hill and in Bolingbroke's dealings with the Percys, we see the ironic pattern of the robber robbed.

FROM FEUDAL CHIVALRY TO PRAGMATISM: LANGUAGE AND POLITICAL CHANGE

The symmetries of 1 Henry IV are thus not those of a stable pyramidal structure of order and degree. Authority at the apex is uncertain, as Sigurd Burckhardt has shown, producing two kinds of order, each attempting to destroy the other. The instability bespeaks a shift in Shakespeare's world-picture from the divinely ordered state of Richard II to a state that is ordered in accordance with human needs, from the seemingly permanent structures of feudalism and primogeniture to a state of combat and questionable legitimacy, from the king as divinely sanctioned to the king as self-made.¹⁹ The outmoded honour of chivalry gives way to machiavellian concern with power, and, in Hal, to the new virtue of courtesy; Hotspur remains a crusader in a romance, while Hal becomes a Renaissance gentleman, ‘the king of courtesy’ (2.4.10), showing this quality in his disposition of Douglas who has fled in the battle. As in Castiglione's The Courtier and Spenser's The Faerie Queene, courtesy is motivated in part by a desire for praise. It is exercised by ‘knowing what is fitting for oneself and others’, and by enacting this graciously.²⁰

The old order of Hotspur confuses personal with public welfare, personal with public conflict.²¹ Its ceremony must yield to history, divinity to mortality, the golden to the brazen. The ideal world of what ought to be gives way to the unselected, chaotic flow of history, to contingency and temporality. Our evaluation of this shift is ambivalent: on the one hand, we regret the destruction of a divinely sanctioned culture only to be replaced by cunning and political expediency; on the other, we applaud the acceptance of a vital historical movement. Hal's difficult task is to construct a symbolic order of monarchy out of diverse and unpromising materials, mingling the residues of a dying political theology of the king's two bodies with his own abilities in magisterial rhetoric and the language of the tavern. Poetic self-indulgence is replaced by the art of persuasive speech.²²

The shift in language from the medieval and ceremonial speech of Richard II to the Renaissance and practical speech of 1 Henry IV is evident in the latter's extensive and brilliant use of prose (not used at all in Richard II, and scarcely at all in the earlier history plays except for the Jack Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI), in its proliferation of tongues and accents (including Welsh), and, as Joseph Porter has pointed out, in the topic of naming.²³ The validity of names in the linguistically absolutist world of Richard II is a test case for the validity of language generally; only sick men play with their names, and Richard devoutly believes that ‘the King's name’ is ‘twenty thousand names’ (3.2.85). In 1 Henry IV, by contrast, the magical authority of names comes increasingly into question, and the invention of abusive appellations is one of the chief vehicles in the combat of wits between Hal and Falstaff. Hotspur's speech is like Richard II's in his tuning of his ear to his own tongue and in his holding to an absolutist conception of language that does not take time into account; his verbal scepticism is also appropriate to one who is a political rebel.²⁴ Falstaff regards honour merely as a word, as air, and accordingly treats words as the proper object of linguistic playfulness, punning, and comparison. Hal enjoys the hilarity and irresponsibility of Falstaff's speech acts, revelling in a polyglot facility with languages, but ultimately he is asking very different questions about language from those of Hotspur or Falstaff. He is interested in learning how to cope practically with the potentially anarchic aftermath of the fall from Richard II's linguistic absolutism, and so Hal's characteristic speech acts involve promising, vowing, giving and keeping one's word (as the rebels and even King Henry do not).²⁵

Hal's speech takes account of the passage of time, for changes in history demand changes in language. King Henry, having instigated the idea that a king's word lacks sacred ranking, must suffer the consequences: for him, the oath as a locutionary act can no longer be binding. Not coincidentally, Falstaff uses oaths in this play more freely and irresponsibly than anyone else. The boast is another characteristic locutionary act in this play, as Ronald Macdonald has observed, and it is one that is peculiarly vulnerable to deflation, whether in Glendower's assertion of a power to summon devils or in Falstaff's fiction of a triumph over two young men in Kendal green in the dark. Because Hal is wise and self-knowing in his mastery of new languages, he is able to avoid these pitfalls of empty oath-giving and boastfulness. Most of all he senses that people like Richard II and Hotspur who do not grow in language are defeated by history.²⁶

FATHERS AND SONS: ROLE-PLAYING AND IDENTITY

In such a changing world, King Henry provides both positive and negative examples in his roles of king and father to Hal. Here the King acts as a foil to Falstaff, providing a very different set of alternatives from those put to Hal by Hotspur and Falstaff. King Henry and Falstaff are alternative parental figures: the King is distant and awesome, serving as the guilt-based conscience of adult responsibility, whereas Falstaff is nurturing and permissive, offering the infantile world of the child. Hal must come to terms both with resentment towards the restrictions of social life and with the seemingly innocent wish to love and enjoy a life of self-gratification. By killing Hotspur, argues Franz Alexander, Hal kills or assimilates his own self-destructive tendencies and overcomes his own natural aggression and jealousy towards his father.²⁷ Shakespeare thus accounts for both the debauchery and the sudden conversion registered in the chronicles and in Famous Victories.

The legend of parricidal near-violence subsequently giving way to filial acceptance of the father whom the son must replace is a profoundly resonant one for any account of a young man's wavering struggle towards maturity. The centrality of the motif is apparent in the several configurations of father and son in 1 Henry IV. King Henry has in effect two sons (Hal and Hotspur), just as Hal has two fathers; and Hotspur also stands between a weak father and his uncle, Worcester. Glendower attempts to be a father to the fiery youth whose kinsman has married his daughter, only to be met with witty hostility and scepticism towards his claims of magical authority. With no mother present, Prince Hal's conflict (as Ernst Kris terms it) takes the form of filial attachment to a father substitute, one who satisfies his need for warmth and love, even while Hal acts out with this substitute his feelings towards the lineal father whom he must test against an ideal of royal dignity. Hal goes to the tavern, according to Kris's argument, rather than acquiesce in regicide; the tavern gives Hal some respite, some time to explore dimensions of himself that have no place in his father's world. By the time of the battle of Shrewsbury, he is ready to save his father's life and kill his alter ego instead.²⁸ W. H. Auden puts it well: we were all Falstaffs once upon a time, and then we became social beings with super-egos, dreaming the potentially hazardous dream of a narcissistic self-sufficiency.²⁹

The form of this play is thus one of conflict successfully resolved, though, as Richard Wheeler points out, success is achieved only by the suppression of the young man's relationship to women.³⁰ Hal is provided with neither mother nor love attachment in this play about maturation. Women generally play a peripheral role in 1 Henry IV; they are dependent on their husbands' whims, like Lady Percy, or separated from the male world by impassable barriers, like the Welsh wife of Mortimer. Brief scenes of tenderness between men and women merely accentuate by means of contrast the centrality of male conflict, between twinned rivals or fathers and sons.³¹

1 Henry IV aptly demonstrates how the adult world of political struggle can easily dismay one who is expected to assume a role of leadership. The predominant metaphors of the opening scene are of England as mother, daubing her lips with her own children's blood, and, conversely, of war trenching England's fields and bruising her flowers; the mother violates and is violated.³² Civil butchery is cannibalistic and suicidal, as seen in the knife-edge of civil war that cuts its own master. Metaphors of disease occur throughout (‘This sickness doth infect ¦ The very life-blood of our enterprise’, says Hotspur, 4.1.28-9), hearkening back to the motif of the physician and the sick land in Richard II.³³ The division of England is given literal form on stage in the map used by the rebels to chop up their country into three parts. Henry's wish for a pilgrimage to the Holy Land mocks him in 1 Henry IV because it remains so unattainable;³⁴ again, a recurring motif from Richard II (1.3.49 and 264, 4.1.92-100) contributes to an ominous mood of unfinished business.

Troubled by a rebellious son, continually having to weigh the demands of humanity and those of authority, King Henry faces difficulties not unlike those of King David with Absalom.³⁵ Because he continually masks his personal and political self, King Henry is a hard character to read. Why does he speak so sternly to Hotspur over the business of the Scottish prisoners, when he has already confessed his father-like envy of Northumberland for siring so noble a son? We are inclined to view the reprimand and warning as expressive of the King's parental regard; he wants Hotspur as a kind of son, but on the terms of fatherly command and filial obedience. Hotspur is easily persuaded by Northumberland and Worcester to see the King's attitude as one of arrogance and hostility, and so a relationship that might have flourished is instead poisoned. The irony of a war that might have been averted never disappears, for the King's admiration of Hotspur prompts him even at the last minute to seek genuine peace.

The offer is undone by Worcester's perfidious refusal to transmit the offer fairly to Hotspur. Yet can we really blame Worcester? His logic in describing the King's implacable hostility towards him and Northumberland, however much the King may be ready to forgive Hotspur, is unassailable.³⁶ The barons who helped Bolingbroke to usurp the throne must have expected great favours from him, and authority to do much as they pleased in their own territories; Henry's assertion of royal prerogative strikes at the heart of their political self-interest. Henry must suspect the Percys of feelings of ingratitude towards him as he moves to centralize power, and so he cannot rely on them. No less inevitably, they sense that Henry is no longer their friend. The response of the two sides to Mortimer's capture at the hands of Glendower is symptomatic: Henry sees it as evidence of an interest in Mortimer's claim to the throne, and finds his suspicions confirmed by the marriage to Glendower's daughter, whereas the Percys see the refusal to provide ransom as one more proof of Henry's cooling sympathy with their cause. War between the two sides is as unavoidable as it is unnecessary. Hal senses this fact, and makes an offer of single combat through which pointless bloodshed might be avoided. Once again a sane and generous solution proves impossible, and the battle goes forward. How is Hal to rule an England so divided against itself?

In his dealings with his son, King Henry is no less enigmatic, distant, and pursued by ironies that seem destined to kill his most fervent hopes. Why, in a time of grave national crisis, should such a careworn king be plagued by rebellion in the very person on whom his futurity depends? Shakespeare invites us to sympathize with the father as with the rebels, to see the point of view of all sides even in what is often self-destructive behaviour.

Henry's interviewing of his son in 3.2 is an astonishing performance. He offers his son a lesson in statecraft that depends on the staging of public appearances, on learning how to steal ‘all courtesy from heaven’ and dress oneself in humility, plucking allegiance from men's hearts, and avoiding at all costs the unwise behaviour of one who like Richard II cheapens his dignity through over-exposure and glibness. Royal governance, in this view, is the art of manipulating the awesome images of power, by whose means the astute monarch can ‘steal’ and ‘pluck’ what he desires from the populace (3.2.50-2). King Henry may be a ‘well-graced actor’ (Richard II, 5.2.24) compared with Richard II, but he can never shake off the theatrical associations of a dissembler who has cleverly created for himself a role as king.³⁷

Hal, despite the rehearsal of the night before, finds himself abashed and denied the ‘glittering’ reformation that his soliloquy of 1.2 had anticipated.³⁸ The son gives a poor account of himself at first, so much so that he subsequently laughs at his performance in the interview; ‘I am good friends with my father’, he tells Falstaff, ‘and may do anything’ (3.3.174-5). Yet father and son break through their reserve at the crucial moment, in part because of the unexpected candour of King Henry's account of his anxieties and the honesty of his weeping. Hal's vow to redeem the time is put in terms of a promise to his father: ‘I will … Be bold to tell you that I am your son’ (3.2.132-4). Identity is attained by acknowledging the father, by assimilating the best that he has to teach, while at the same time preserving one's sense of self. Hal will save his father's life at Shrewsbury. At the same time his bravery on the field of battle will bear little resemblance to the ‘counterfeits’ of soldiership displayed by the older man protected by other warriors marching in his coat of arms.³⁹

In order to differentiate himself from his father and be free of the demand for unquestioning obedience that parents often make when they view their children as extensions of themselves, Hal finds that he must explore his identity in the liberating company of Falstaff. The instructive games they play include masquerading and name-calling, both forms of altering and testing identity. In the long tavern scene, Hal proposes playing Hotspur to Falstaff's ‘Dame Mortimer his wife’ (after having shown how well he can mimic Hotspur's mannerisms of speech), agrees to a ‘play extempore’ if the ‘argument’ or plot is Falstaff's running-away at Gad's Hill, and undertakes with Falstaff to play-act an interview between himself and his father. Inveterate actors, Hal and Falstaff shift roles with a versatility that bespeaks their familiarity with this form of entertainment. Hal's role-playing takes him through the parts of Hotspur and King Henry, both essential models in his forging of his own identity, and brings him into continual juxtaposition with Falstaff. Hal's insight into Hotspur's fanatical self-absorption and King Henry's stern disapproval are as sympathetic as they are witty; Hal studies character even while he good-naturedly mocks it. The role-playing also allows Hal to depose his father in jest and to rehearse the rejection of Falstaff.

Closely allied is the game of name-calling. Hal and his companions have many names for Falstaff—Sir John Sack-and-Sugar Jack, Monsieur Remorse, grey iniquity, swollen parcel of dropsies, and the like—but Hal, too, must hear his legitimacy subjected to comic doubt, and must hear himself asked whether a son of England will prove a thief and take purses. To his assertion that Falstaff is a bed-presser and huge hill of flesh, Hal is answered with the labels of ‘bull's pizzle’, ‘stockfish’, and ‘vile standing tuck’ (2.4.238-40). Falstaff's fondness for ‘if’ clauses underlines flexible identity, as in ‘If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet’ (4.2.11-12).⁴⁰

Falstaff is incessantly the actor, creating roles to captivate the young Prince. William Hazlitt has suggested that Falstaff may have put the tavern reckoning in his pocket deliberately, for his comic gambit is always to offer himself and his gluttonous ways at the expense of glory.⁴¹ He not only is called many names by others, but is always renaming himself, like Misrule assuming the disguise of Good Government. At one moment he is a highwayman identifying himself with youthful riot against age and respectability, at another he is a pious penitent; at one time he is a patriot wishing the tavern were his drum, at another he is a flagrant abuser of military conscription. He wittily defends his ‘vocation’, but what is it other than to amuse Hal? His grossness is essential to the comic effect, for a circus clown cannot seem to be an accomplished athlete; gaucherie and laughable failure are part of the routine. Being a humorous figure, for us and for Hal, he cannot be brave in a hero's way.⁴² As Mark Van Doren says, Falstaff's wit is the wit of a man ‘who knows that other men are waiting to hear what he will pretend, what he will become, how he will get out of it’. Falstaff doesn't live to drink or to steal; he is an artist who assumes most of his roles with comic detachment, understanding everything through parody and at a remove, hence never seriously.⁴³

FALSTAFF'S COWARDICE AND LYING: HIS PLAY WORLD

What, then, are we to make of Falstaff's cowardice at Gad's Hill? Is it, too, an act for Hal's benefit, a guise calculated to offer Falstaff as the target of laughter and thus ingratiate him with the Prince upon whose favour he must depend? The wish to exculpate Falstaff of cowardice is strongly apparent in the ‘character’ criticism of Maurice Morgann, whose Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777) argues that our overall impression of Falstaff must take account of his natural vigour, alacrity of mind, freedom from malice, and reputation for bravery in his youth that led to his being knighted and pensioned. In this context we must note that Poins distinguishes between true-bred cowards, like Bardolph, and those who will fight no longer than they see reason, like Falstaff (1.2.170-3). Before the robbery, we see no alarm on Falstaff's part, no holding back. He seems to object when the Prince and Poins separate themselves from the company, thereby reducing the number of the attackers, but takes part in the robbery itself with glee. He sleeps unconcernedly while the sheriff and a ‘most monstrous watch’ seek to arrest him. The Prince commissions him with a company of foot-soldiers for the forthcoming battle. At Shrewsbury he behaves reprehensibly, but with no indication of terror or disorder of mind. Courage must have been required for him to have led his ‘ragamuffins’ where they are ‘peppered’ in the fighting (5.3.35-6). Corbyn Morris, also writing in the eighteenth century, gives us a similarly amiable Falstaff, one whom we like even in his cowardly predicaments for the occasions they provide to his wit.⁴⁴

Opposing arguments, however, are no less strong. Robert Langbaum has shown how the ‘character’ criticism of Morgann and Morris arose out of a post-Enlightenment response to literature not in Aristotelian terms of action and moral meaning but in Romantic terms of self-expression and self-discovery. Literature should contain events that provide the central character with an occasion for experience. Falstaff, viewed in this light, attains a kind of heroism in going down to defeat. Romantic hatred of hypocrisy takes solace in Falstaff's attack on prudence; Falstaff becomes an autonomous force, guilty of a generous error but gifted with a vision of life, a virtuoso.⁴⁵ Such a theory is implicitly hostile towards drama, and finds its most eloquent expression at a time when the staging of Shakespeare failed to satisfy many acute readers of Shakespeare. In the study one can provide Falstaff with a life that extends beyond the limits of Shakespeare's play.

In the theatre, on the other hand, as Arthur Colby Sprague has amply demonstrated, Falstaff's cowardice takes on an immediacy that few actors can resist. The cowardice was simply taken for granted by most critics in the play's first 150 years, especially those who were responding to theatrical performances. In the theatre, we are forced to watch Falstaff as he runs away from the disguised Hal and Poins, sweating to death and larding the lean earth as he walks along. ‘How the fat rogue roared!’ says Poins (2.2.105). Falstaff's response to Hal's twitting him about cowardice, in the tavern scene, is not that of one who has the last laugh: ‘Ah, no more of that, Hal, an thou lovest me!’ (2.4.273). During Falstaff's temporary absence in this scene, Bardolph relates how Falstaff hacked his sword to simulate the effects of combat and to browbeat his fellow robbers into tickling their noses with spear-grass to make them bleed (2.4.293-301). Falstaff's leading of his own soldiers into deadly fire at Shrewsbury is a self-serving tactic with minimal danger to himself. The motif of fear is recurrent in his speech: he asks Hal if he is not ‘horrible afeard’ of Douglas, Percy, and Glendower (2.4.355), wishes it were bedtime and all well (5.1.125), and fears the shot at Shrewsbury (5.3.30-1). However humorously played, such lines derive their energy from Falstaff's role as coward, and the role must be played for the audience as well as for Hal. We allow of course that Falstaff runs away at Gad's Hill ‘after a blow or two’ and is thus unlike the natural coward Bardolph, who admits, ‘Faith, I ran when I saw others run’ (2.4.292). Whatever Falstaff means by his claim to be a coward on instinct, he is set apart from the rest. Nevertheless, the actor's instinct to invite laughter at cowardice deserves our most serious critical consideration. In the theatre we usually find, as Sprague says, ‘a Falstaff of dexterous evasions and miraculous escapes, lawless in his exaggerations, redoubtable only in repute, and the funnier for being fat and old and a coward’.⁴⁶

What about Falstaff as a liar? As Dover Wilson has observed, the issues of cowardice and lying are connected, for the craven behaviour at Gad's Hill and Shrewsbury could be part of an act in anticipation of evasive story-telling, all calculated to ‘tickle’ the young Prince (2.4.427-8). Certainly Hal and Poins invite us to connect cowardice and lying: ‘The virtue of this jest’, says Poins of the robbery and the robbing of the robbers, ‘will be the incomprehensible [i.e. boundless] lies that this same fat rogue will tell us when we meet at supper—how thirty at least he fought with, what wards, what blows, what extremities he endured; and in the reproof [i.e. disproof] of this lives the jest’ (1.2.173-8). The speech is a virtual stage direction for what in fact occurs, suggesting that this sort of game has been played before.

If Poins and Hal can anticipate what Falstaff will do, why cannot Falstaff guess at their game as well? He observes that Hal and Poins agree to take part in the robbery, but then suddenly absent themselves on a slender pretext just when they are needed, whereupon two disguised athletic young men set upon Falstaff and his companions in the dark. Does the coincidence in numbers fail to impress Falstaff? Or does he hint at suspected perfidy when he boasts of peppering two of his adversaries, two rogues dressed in buckram suits (2.4.185-6)? ‘Rogues’ might seem an insult cunningly directed at the Prince and Poins, who cannot respond to the insult without revealing their identities. Does Falstaff hint again at an awareness of their identity when, having expanded his attackers from two to an imaginary eleven, he speaks of ‘three misbegotten knaves in Kendal green’ who treacherously came at his back (ll. 214-15)?

Perhaps, then, Falstaff fabricates an entertaining lie, with just such an exaggeration in numbers as Poins and Hal have predicted, and illustrates it with precisely those ‘blows’ and ‘wards’ they knew he would use. The palpable impossibility of the lie, the mounting inconsistencies in statistics, seem to beg for exposure. By the time he sees Falstaff in the tavern again in 2 Henry IV, at any rate, hindsight has suggested to Hal that Falstaff indeed recognized him when he ran away at Gad's Hill (2.4.293-4). This evidence, even though it forms no part of an audience's response to 1 Henry IV, does provide an interesting interpretation after the fact by the dramatist himself. To imagine Falstaff offering to be caught out in a lie, for the Prince's amusement and sense of superiority, is to conceive of a compassionate man who wishes to be loved at whatever cost to his own dignity.⁴⁷ Falstaff, according to this view, is wiser and more self-denying than the Prince who condescends to him, and our knowledge of Falstaff's wisdom significantly redresses the balance of sympathy in his favour.

Again, however, the conditions of theatrical performance give support to an opposing interpretation. The lovable Falstaff of Morgann and A. C. Bradley is a product of the literary imagination, and in these terms Falstaff's lies and cowardice cannot be taken at face value. Falstaff is judged as a real person by the literary student of character, and no real person of Falstaff's endearing qualities would behave so outrageously other than in jest, or expect others to believe his outlandish lies. In the theatre, on the other hand, ‘character’ is created by what the actor does, and ‘belief’ is the result of an understanding between dramatist and spectators. We do not ask how Falstaff could believe his lie, A. J. A. Waldock argues; instead, we accept it as a burlesque or exaggeration. The point of Poins's and Hal's anticipation of Falstaff's lie is to heighten the spectators' eagerness to see the outcome.⁴⁸ Surely we are not meant to suppose that Falstaff persuaded Bardolph and the rest to lie about the wounds they received at Gad's Hill with an expectation of his being caught out; such an argument is too circumstantial for the theatre. Eighteenth-century adaptations of the text enabled an actor like James Quin to assert Falstaff's recognition of the Prince in disguise at Gad's Hill, but only by adding lines to Shakespeare's dialogue.⁴⁹ Otherwise, actors have generally not known what to do with the proposition that Shakespeare's meaning is multi-layered, offering the broad comedy of satirical exposure to the groundlings while sharing with more discriminating audiences a covert understanding of Falstaff's compassionate wisdom. Falstaff is a lovable and inventive liar, but still a liar.

In the long tavern scene Falstaff gives the performance of his career, a virtuoso performance of lying and recovering himself when caught. He outdoes himself in his comic role as a misunderstood defender of good old-fashioned manhood, and as an ageing sinner on the verge of repentance. Play-acting to him is more than a means of captivating Hal. It is the essence of the temptation he lays before Hal, one in which (as Paul Gottschalk observes) all things are reduced to play. Falstaff offers Hal a child's world in which he need never grow up, in which even King Henry's most serious worries can be parodied in the comic language of euphuistic bombast.⁵⁰ Falstaff's plea is for the companionship of eternal youth: sport with me, he says in effect to Hal, and let those who covet the world's rewards suffer the attendant risks.

This kind of all-consuming play world offers an invaluable critique and means of testing reality, but as an end in itself it becomes an escape. Because Falstaff puts his appeal in terms of choice, Hal must respond in the same theatrical language, by usurping Falstaff's role as King and Lord of Misrule in order to restate the proposition in his own terms. Stage properties—chair, dagger, cushion—that serve Falstaff merely as devices for creating illusion become for Hal the means of rehearsing his future. Falstaff, absorbed in the fantasy of a timeless world of game, wants to ‘play out the play’ even when the knock is heard at the door, for he still has ‘much to say in the behalf of that Falstaff’ (2.4.466-7). Hal uses the medium of play-acting to proclaim his regality and his acceptance of the challenge represented by that knock at the door.⁵¹

At Shrewsbury field, Hal will have nothing to do with Falstaff's play-acting, and, indeed, we perceive that play-acting is now out of place. The refusal to take war seriously produces fine reflections on the incorporeality of honour, but to substitute a bottle of sack for a pistol or deliberately abuse one's authority to recruit is to endanger lives and a cause to which Hal is now fully committed. Falstaff persists, nonetheless, and with his greatest lie of all challenges the very relationship between history and theatrical illusion. When he arises from apparent death, he surprises a theatrical audience as well as Hal, for the actor has lain as though dead (or should do so), and we all know that actors can rise—once they step out of their roles. Falstaff claims his literary heritage as Vice, clown, miles gloriosus, and the rest; Hotspur is ‘really’ dead, as recorded in the chronicles, while Falstaff rises. Hal's response, Sigurd Burckhardt and James Calderwood argue, must be to acquiesce in the lie, to accept it as a practical necessity in order that Falstaff's claim to a purely theatrical life may be contained once more within the necessary confines of mimesis.⁵² Falstaff seems ‘larger than life’ in part because he is so adept at transcending the boundaries of illusion. Hal, too, shares a world in which theatre and mimesis interact. ‘Lying’ in 1 Henry IV is thus far more than a yardstick by which to judge Falstaff's character, for it continually hints at the artist's way of using illusion to depict historical life.

THE ‘EDUCATION’ OF PRINCE HAL

For some interpreters of Shakespeare, Hal is a more culpable liar than Falstaff. From Maurice Morgann and William Hazlitt to A. C. Bradley, G. B. Shaw, L. C. Knights, and H. C. Goddard, those who are most willing to excuse Falstaff's excesses are critical of the Prince for heartlessness, ingratitude, manipulation of friendship for the sake of public image, and (as King) warmongering.⁵³ In this regard, the interpretation of Hal's soliloquy (1.2) is crucial. Are we to view it as evidence of bloodless calculation, or as reassurance for the audience of good intent, or perhaps as whistling in the dark?

The newness of this kind of soliloquy in Shakespeare, so unlike Richard III's chortling confidences or Richard II's meditation on the vanity of human existence, leaves us uncertain as to its intent. On the one hand, Hal's dismissal of Falstaff as ‘foul and ugly mists’ seems harsh towards one who makes claims to companionship, and the accent on the timing of Hal's intended reformation suggests that his escapades are being used to generate a myth of rebirth.⁵⁴ Hal seems to be refining the methods of his father, husbanding the display of his virtues just as King Henry has withheld from the multitude the display of his royal person.⁵⁵ On the other hand, reassurance of the audience is a practical necessity in view of the wild traditions dramatized in Famous Victories. The first scene in which we see Hal with Falstaff has raised a worrisome issue: ‘shall there be gallows standing in England when thou art king?’ asks Falstaff, ‘And resolution thus fubbed as it is with the rusty curb of old Father Antic the law?’ (1.2.56-8). However much Hal may parry these suggestions, a chorus-like explanation directed at the spectators is plainly in order.⁵⁶ Perhaps Hal's plans are not as certain in his own mind as they appear to his critics; he may be postponing the necessary day of reckoning to some vague terminus in order to enjoy as long as possible the holiday of youth. Actors are seldom content to portray him as a machiavel in this soliloquy, if only because they perceive him as having such a good time with Falstaff. Who can better appreciate Falstaff's performance than the person to whom it is presented as a love-offering and a bribe?

Hal's encounter with Francis is another problematic test of his humanity. Does he simply use Francis in a crude practical joke, as he uses other tavern acquaintances? We hear a note of boredom and ironic impatience with himself as he devises an entertainment ‘to drive away the time till Falstaff come’ (2.4.26-7), for Hal has admittedly ‘sounded the very bass string of humility’ (ll. 5-6) in drinking below stairs with the tapsters, and he is probably drunk.⁵⁷ Even Poins cannot be sure what ‘cunning match’ Hal has made with this jest (ll. 87-8). Yet on closer inspection the episode resonates with much that Hal is thinking about. Like Francis, Hal is being pulled simultaneously in two directions, and has not devised as yet a better response than Francis's own ‘Anon, anon, sir!’⁵⁸ The transition to Hotspur seems like a non sequitur, and yet Hotspur is oddly like Francis in his uncommunicativeness, his obsession with the business at hand, and his being called away from conversation. Hal brings Francis into a situation that mimics Hal's own, creating a little drama that might be called ‘Francis the Rebellious Drawer’. A prince who would and would not be king calls Francis to account, and questions his loyalty to hard duty in a way that also arraigns the conscience of the questioner.⁵⁹ By thus parodying himself as a fellow Corinthian and fellow apprentice to Francis, Hal reflects through the medium of play-acting on his own neglect of his vocation. He takes seriously the trope of the ‘body politic’ by trying to encompass the whole state and the ‘humours’ of all ages in his own person, as J. D. Shuchter has argued, and comes to realize that the sloughing-off of his companions will be no simple matter that will cost him nothing.⁶⁰ Hal is asking, Who am I?, without fully answering his question. The scene is, like Hal's other play-acting, a trial of possible selves.

Is Hal's experience in the tavern, then, together with his studying of Hotspur and King Henry, his education? Tillyard … has argued that the Prince is indeed completing his education in the knowledge of men, in order to become the fully developed man, the cortegiano, universal in a way that Hotspur the provincial can never be.⁶¹ Yet in one sense, it has been suggested, Hal is ‘perfect’ from the start, knowing what he has to do, identified always with the sun of royalty.⁶² In his most self-revealing speeches, notes Alan Gross, the Prince speaks like a man who has already made up his mind. We perceive a basic stability in him, and are never privileged to enter the process of decision-making. Yet, we gradually realize that he has not yet totally committed himself to the decision he has made, and so in the comic scenes he is at once witty and judgemental, oscillating between folly and seriousness in a way perhaps characteristic of one who is weighing a decision.⁶³

His ‘reformation’ is thus not an amendment of life so much as a revelation of his true identity to men's eyes. Vernon's speech in praise of Hal's princely qualities (4.1.97-111) is as much a turning-point in the metamorphosis of Hal from irresponsible youth to mirror of Christian kings as is the vow to King Henry to redeem all the supposed faults of youth on Percy's head.⁶⁴ Even to his father, Hal does not so much apologize as insist that he has been falsely reported, and his promise is to ‘Be more myself’, that is, his father's son (3.2.92-134). Undoubtedly Hal needs to mature, to come of age, to learn the languages of his countrymen, to put away childish things. Still, as W. Gordon Zeeveld insists, he is never without a consciousness of the responsibilities of kingship or of restrictions on personal life inherent in the ceremonies that are an indispensable part of kingship. He puts aside ceremony until he has need of it, in a conscious policy of calculated reformation. He is redeeming time all the while, preparing to labour in his vocation.⁶⁵

The climax and culmination of Hal's metamorphosis in Part 1 is his defeat of Hotspur. Hal has tried on a variety of names, and has been referred to contemptuously by Hotspur as the ‘sword-and-buckler Prince of Wales’ (1.3.229) and ‘the nimble-footed madcap Prince of Wales’ (4.1.95); King Henry speaks of his son as though he were a changeling,⁶⁶ and Falstaff comically doubts his paternity. Hal's first words to Hotspur at Shrewsbury speak to this subject of naming. ‘If I mistake not, thou art Harry Monmouth’, Hotspur accosts him, to which the Prince replies, ‘Thou speak'st as if I would deny my name’ (5.4.58-9). Hal not only defends his name but proclaims his identity as ‘Prince of Wales’ (l. 62), one whose sober duty is now to vanquish his opposite number called Harry Percy, ‘A very valiant rebel of the name’ (l. 61). By claiming name and title, the Prince redeems his unprincely reputation, and denies the defamatory names by which he has been known.⁶⁷ Confirming Vernon's speech about him, Hal assimilates the wild and wanton energies of youth into a living embodiment of natural vitality, becoming one who bears the coat of arms of the Prince of Wales and displays through able horsemanship a capacity for discipline and good government.⁶⁸

Most of all, Hal settles accounts with Hotspur in a metaphor of financial liability. In his first soliloquy he resolves to ‘pay the debt I never promisèd’ (1.2.197). To his father he insists that ‘Percy is but my factor’ (i.e. agent) ‘To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf’, for which Hal will ‘call him to so strict account ¦ That he shall render every glory up’ (3.2.147-50). He returns to this motif at Shrewsbury when he vows to ‘crop’ all the budding honours on Hotspur's crest ‘to make a garland for my head’ (5.4.71-2). Hotspur dies lamenting that the Prince has ‘robbed’ him of his youth and has ‘won’ his proud titles. The scene is climactic in part because it recalls so many occasions when the play expresses ethical obligation in terms of financial responsibility: reckonings at the tavern, repentance as a form of repaying a debt, knowing when to promise and when to pay (4.3.53 and 5.4.42), metaphors of counterfeiting, legal tendering, commercial cavilling, and engrossing.⁶⁹ The persistent themes of thievery in high life and of the robber robbed are similarly brought to their climax and resolution in Hal's triumph over Hotspur.⁷⁰ We admire the Prince for his victory and for his generosity to the vanquished corpse of his opponent: having vied with Hotspur for the ‘budding honours’ on his crest, the Prince now covers the mangled face with his own favours in a token of restoring honour where it is due, and even allows Falstaff to claim the prize that the Prince has so valiantly won.⁷¹

THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF

The rejection of Falstaff and Hal's accession to the throne, the second and decisive stage in Hal's emergence as king, are not encompassed in the action of 1 Henry IV. They are adumbrated so forcefully, however, that they become central considerations in our evaluation of the Prince even when we view this play, as we must, as a single dramatic entity. On three occasions, arranged in climactic sequence, Hal indicates his intention of turning away from Falstaff's company: in his soliloquy (1.2), when he plays King Henry in the tavern revels (2.4), and when he promises his father that he will ‘scour’ his shame in glorious deeds (3.2.137). Each such statement of intention comes as though in answer to threatening suggestions of disorder, but each is followed by an apparent relapse: after the first, Hal takes part in a robbery, after the second, he protects Falstaff from the sheriff, and after the third, he procures for Falstaff a military commission. Shakespeare's strategy is to hide the process of Hal's inevitable transformation from those closest to him (and his enemies as well) while revealing it to his audience.⁷² The rhythm of this seemingly erratic advance pulls us both ways: we concede the ultimate necessity of his rejection of Falstaff, but like Hal himself we yearn to postpone it. Part 1 satisfies us as a dramatic whole because the rejection is at once assured, though not yet completed. We still have Falstaff, and have not yet been shown the extent of his decline, as we will be in Part 2.

Those who, like A. C. Bradley, deplore the rejection of Falstaff find fault with Hal for his ruthless alacrity in using people, and suppose that Shakespeare overshot his mark by making Falstaff more lovable than the story would bear.⁷³ Even those who are more admiring of Hal's decision, like Jonas Barish, agree that Falstaff's vitality stands in the way of the deterioration that is necessary to the grim business of preparing the fat knight for his ultimate role as scapegoat. We are forced from the domain of comedy into that of history, where the killjoys win out—as they do not, for instance, in Twelfth Night. To banish plump Jack, as Falstaff says in his own defence, is in a true sense to ‘banish all the world’ (2.4.462). If history defeats those who attempt to defy time and change, those who would live an eternal youth, the survivors must also suffer an inevitable diminution of spirit by their acquiescing in change. The Prince rejects himself, turning away from his former self in a way that is self-mutilating.⁷⁴ From being a man of all humours in the tavern, Hal becomes a public figure whose every move must be governed by the dictates of ceremony. His marriage will be political, however much he strives to succeed in it personally as well.

Falstaff has asked of Hal the impossible thing. He has asked to be loved as he is and for what he is, so that their games may continue for ever. He has offered Hal various comic stratagems for evading responsibility—the enjoyment of appetite for its own sake, gameplaying and parodies of success, carnival escape into holiday—but the Prince must learn to put these games behind him as he casts off the ‘old man’.⁷⁵ Falstaff has embodied the mythology of the cycle of the year and its ever-returning fertility, but by so doing he has created for himself the role of one who must be sacrificed to ensure that renewal.⁷⁶ We accept the rejection as necessary because it represents a process of death by means of which a diseased land can be restored to health.⁷⁷ At the same time, as Michael Goldman has said, we feel protective and sentimental towards Falstaff's life, which has been so preciously placed in the Prince's hands, because it represents our own sensuality and anarchic impulses. Falstaff is the sleeping child we will have to punish, the silly dying father we are destined to replace.⁷⁸

Although Hal's rejection of Falstaff is for these reasons self-mutilating, it can also be viewed as a compassionate act. The Prince is aware of the cost of success in terms of the human spirit. He neither scorns such success nor minimizes its difficulties. Politics has its own morality. Hal willingly embraces an understanding of the world that allows little room for the spirit of perpetual play.⁷⁹ There is even charity in his embrace of a public life thrust upon him and demanding that he play a leading role on behalf of the common weal.⁸⁰ Self is necessarily diminished as Hal takes up the awesome burdens of kingly office. This sacrifice has not yet been demanded or made when 1 Henry IV comes to an end, and much remains to be done to clear Hal's name of the wild associations that have accrued to it. Nonetheless, Hal's readiness to become king has been fully proclaimed.

Notes

1. [J. Dover] Wilson, NCS [The First Part of the History of Henry IV, New Cambridge Shakespeare,] x-xi.

2. [Samuel] Johnson, ed., Shakespeare (1765), iv. 235.

3. C. F. Tucker Brooke, Tudor Drama (Boston, 1911), 333; R. P. Cowl, ed., 2 Henry IV, Arden Shakespeare (1923), xxiii-xxiv.

4. M. A. Shaaber, ‘The Unity of Henry IV’, in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. James McManaway et al. (Washington, DC, 1948), 217-27.

5. G. K. Hunter, ‘Henry IV and the Elizabethan Two-Part Play’, RES [Review of English Studies,] NS 5 (1954), 236-48.

6. Leonard F. Dean, ‘From Richard II to Henry V: A Closer View’, in Studies in Honor of DeWitt T. Starnes, ed. Thomas P. Harrison and others (Austin, Texas, 1967), 37-52.

7. Harold Jenkins, The Structural Problem of Shakespeare's ‘Henry the Fourth’ (1956).

8. F. M. Salter, ‘The Play within the Play of First Henry IV’, Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, third ser. 40.2 (1946), 209-23.

9. David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (Hanover, NH, 1982), 37-55.

10. Sherman H. Hawkins, ‘Virtue and Kingship in Shakespeare's Henry IV’, ELR [English Literary Renaissance,] 5 (1975), 313-43.

11. Cleanth Brooks and Robert B. Heilman, Understanding Drama (New York, 1948), 376-87; [E. M. W.] Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, 265.

12. [Sherman H.] Hawkins, ‘Virtue and Kingship’, ELR [English Literary Renaissance,] 5 (1975), 313-43.

13. Norman Council, ‘Prince Hal: Mirror of Success’, ShakS [Shakespeare Studies,] 7 (1974), 125-46.

14. W. Gordon Zeeveld, ‘“Food for Powder”—“Food for Worms”’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 3 (1952), 249-53.

15. R. J. Dorius, ‘A Little More Than a Little’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 11 (1960), 13-26.

16. William B. Hunter, jun, ‘Prince Hal, His Struggle Toward Moral Perfection’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 50 (1950), 86-95.

17. Charles Mitchell, ‘The Education of the True Prince’, TSL [Tennessee Studies in Literature,] 12 (1967), 13-21.

18. John P. Sisk, ‘Prince Hal and the Specialists’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 28 (1977), 520-24.

19. Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings (Princeton, 1968), 144-205.

20. G. M. Pinciss, ‘The Old Honor and the New Courtesy: 1 Henry IV’, ShS [Shakespeare Survey] 31 (1978), 85-91.

21. Anthony La Branche, ‘“If Thou Wert Sensible of Courtesy”: Private and Public Virtue in Henry IV, Part One’, SQ, [Shakespeare Quarterly] 17 (1966), 371-82.

22. Eric La Guardia, ‘Ceremony and History: The Problem of Symbol from Richard II to Henry V’, in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. W. McNeir and T. Greenfield (Eugene, Ore., 1966).

23. Joseph A. Porter, The Drama of Speech Acts (Berkeley, 1979), 52-88.

24. M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (1957), 73-88.

25. [Joseph A.] Porter, Drama of Speech Acts, 52-88. See also Joseph Candido, ‘The Name of King: Hal's “Titles” in the “Henriad”’, TSLL [Texas Studies in Literature and Language,] 26 (1984), 61-73.

26. Ronald R. Macdonald, ‘Uneasy Lies: Language and History in Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 35 (1984), 22-39.

27. Franz Alexander, ‘A Note on Falstaff’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 3 (1933), 592-606.

28. Ernst Kris, ‘Prince Hal's Conflict’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 17 (1948), 487-506.

29. W. H. Auden, ‘The Prince's Dog’, in The Dyer's Hand (1948), 182-208. See also Robert N. Watson, Shakespeare and the Hazards of Ambition (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 47-75.

30. Richard Wheeler, Shakespeare's Development and the Problem Comedies (Berkeley, 1981), 158-67. See also Coppélia Kahn, Man's Estate: Masculine Identity in Shakespeare (Berkeley, 1981), 47-81.

31. Robert J. Lordi, ‘Brutus and Hotspur’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 27 (1976), 177-85.

32. L. C. Knights, ‘Henry IV as Satire’, Part II of ‘Notes on Comedy’, Scrutiny, 1 (1933), 356-67.

33. Ronald Berman, ‘The Nature of Guilt in the Henry IV Plays’, ShakS [Shakespeare Studies,] 1 (1965), 18-28.

34. James Black, ‘Henry IV's Pilgrimage’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 34 (1983), 18-26.

35. David Evett, ‘Types of King David in Shakespeare's Lancastrian Tetralogy’, ShakS [Shakespeare Studies,] 14 (1981), 139-61.

36. Moody Prior, The Drama of Power (Evanston, Ill., 1973), 59-82 and 199-262.

37. Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (1962), 127 ff.

38. Thomas Jameson, The Hidden Shakespeare (New York, 1967), 82-104.

39. James Black, ‘Counterfeits of Soldiership in Henry IV’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 24 (1973), 372-82.

40. James P. Driscoll, Identity in Shakespearean Drama (1983), 35 ff.

41. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1817), 190-1.

42. Wyndham Lewis, The Lion and the Fox (1927), 221 ff.

43. Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare (New York, 1939), 97-118. See also Theodore Weiss, The Breath of Clowns and Kings (New York, 1974), 260-97.

44. Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist (Chicago, 1960), 106 ff.

45. Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (1957), 168-81.

46. Arthur Colby Sprague, ‘Gadshill Revisited’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 4 (1953), 125-37.

47. [J. Dover] Wilson, Fortunes [The Fortunes of Falstaff,] 48-56.

48. A. J. A. Waldock, ‘The Men in Buckram’, RES [Review of English Studies,] 23 (1947), 16-23. See also Michael Goldman, Acting and Action in Shakespearean Tragedy (Princeton, NJ, 1985), 3-16.

49. [J. Dover] Wilson, NCS [The First Part of the History of Henry IV, New Cambridge Shakespeare,] xxxvi.

50. Paul A. Gottschalk, ‘Hal and the “Play Extempore” in 1 Henry IV’, TSLL [Texas Studies in Literature and Language,] 15 (1974), 605-14.

51. Ibid.; Richard L. McGuire, ‘The Play-within-the-play in 1 Henry IV’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 18 (1967), 47-52; J. McLaverty, ‘No Abuse: The Prince and Falstaff in the Tavern Scenes’, ShS [Shakespeare Survey] 34 (1981), 105-10.

52. [Sigurd] Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meanings, 144-205; James Calderwood, ‘1 Henry IV: Art's Gilded Lie’, ELR [English Literary Renaissance,] 3 (1973), 131-44.

53. E.g. [L. C.] Knights, ‘Henry IV as Satire’, Scrutiny, 1 (1933), 356-67; Harold C. Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (Chicago, 1951), i. 161-214. For the other references, see notes 113 and 145.

54. Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, 1957); Alan Gerald Gross, ‘The Justification of Prince Hal’, TSLL [Texas Studies in Literature and Language,] 10 (1968), 27-35.

55. Alfred Harbage, William Shakespeare: A Reader's Guide (New York, 1963), 200.

56. Levin L. Schücking, Character Problems in Shakespeare's Plays (1927), 221.

57. Fredson Bowers, ‘Hal and Francis in King Henry IV, Part 1’, Renaissance Papers 1965 (1966), 15-20.

58. Mark Rose, Shakespearean Design (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 50 ff.

59. Sheldon P. Zitner, ‘Anon, Anon: or, a Mirror for a Magistrate’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 19 (1968), 63-70; Waldo F. McNeir, ‘Structure and Theme in the First Tavern Scene (II. iv) of 1 Henry IV’, in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. W. McNeir and T. Greenfield (Eugene, Ore., 1966), 89-105.

60. J. D. Shuchter, ‘Prince Hal and Francis: The Imitation of an Action’, ShakS [Shakespeare Studies,] 3 (1968), 129-37; D. J. Palmer, ‘Casting off the Old Man; History and St Paul in Henry IV’, CritQ [Critical Quarterly] 12 (1970), 267-83.

61. [E. M. W.] Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, 264-304.

62. David Berkeley and Donald Eidson, ‘The Theme of Henry IV, Part 1’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 19 (1968), 25-31; Dean, ‘From Richard II to Henry V: A Closer View’, in Studies in Honor of DeWitt T. Starnes, ed. Thomas P. Harrison and others (Austin, Texas, 1967), 37-52.

63. [Alan Gerald] Gross, ‘The Justification of Prince Hal’, TSLL [Texas Studies in Literature and Language] 10 (1968), 27-35.

64. Peter J. Gillett, ‘Vernon and the Metamorphosis of Hal’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 28 (1977), 351-3.

65. W. Gordon Zeeveld, The Temper of Shakespeare's Thought (New Haven, Conn., 1974); Paul A. Jorgensen, ‘“Redeeming Time” in Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV’, TSL [Tennessee Studies in Literature] 5 (1960), 101-9.

66. M. C. Bradbrook, ‘King Henry IV’, in Stratford Papers on Shakespeare, 1965-67, ed. B. A. W. Jackson (Toronto, 1969), 168-85.

67. Marjorie Garber, Coming of Age in Shakespeare (1981), 66 ff.; Warren J. MacIsaac, ‘“A Commodity of Good Names” in the Henry IV Plays’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 29 (1978), 417-19.

68. [D. J.] Palmer, ‘Casting off the Old Man’, CritQ [Critical Quarterly,] 12 (1970), 267-83.

69. E. Rubinstein, ‘1 Henry IV: The Metaphor of Liability’, Studies in English Literature, 10 (1970), 287-95.

70. Robert Hapgood, ‘Falstaff's Vocation’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 16 (1965), 91-8.

71. Herbert Hartman, ‘Prince Hal's “Shew of Zeale”’, PMLA, 46 (1931), 720-3.

72. [Paul A.] Gottschalk, ‘Hal and the “Play Extempore”’, TSLL [Texas Studies in Literature and Language,] 15 (1974), 605-14.

73. A. C. Bradley, ‘The Rejection of Falstaff’, in Oxford Lectures on Poetry (1909), 252-73.

74. Jonas A. Barish, ‘The Turning Away of Prince Hal’, ShakS [Shakespeare Studies,] 1 (1965), 9-17.

75. Robert G. Hunter, ‘Shakespeare's Comic Sense as It Strikes us Today: Falstaff and the Protestant Ethic’, in Shakespeare, Pattern of Excelling Nature, ed. David Bevington and Jay Halio (Newark, Del., 1978), 125-32.

76. J. I. M. Stewart, ‘The Birth and Death of Falstaff’, in Character and Motive in Shakespeare (1949); Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy, 192-221; Moody Prior, ‘Comic Theory and the Rejection of Falstaff’, ShakS [Shakespeare Studies,] 9 (1976), 159-71.

77. G. K. Hunter, ‘Shakespeare's Politics and the Rejection of Falstaff’, CritQ [Critical Quarterly,] 1 (1959), 229-36; Philip Williams, ‘The Birth and Death of Falstaff Reconsidered’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 8 (1957), 359-65.

78. Michael Goldman, Shakespeare and the Energies of Drama (Princeton, 1972), 45-57.

79. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (1967), 95 ff.

80. Franklin B. Newman, ‘The Rejection of Falstaff and the Rigorous Charity of the King’, ShakS [Shakespeare Studies,] 2 (1967), 153-61; Hugh Dickinson, ‘The Reformation of Prince Hal’, SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly,] 12 (1961), 33-46; David Sundelson, Shakespeare's Restoration of the Father (Brunswick, NJ, 1983), 62-70.