[In the following essay, Forker examines how Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and the remaining plays of Shakespeare's second historical tetralogy promote a cyclical, providential, ironic, and tragicomic view of time's progress.]

For the Methode of a Poet historical is not such, as of an Historiographer. For an Historiographer discourseth of affayres orderly as they were donne, accounting as well the times as the actions, but a Poet thrusteth into the middest, euen where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the thinges forepaste, and diuining of thinges to come, maketh a pleasing Analysis of all.

—Edmund Spenser's letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, prefixed to The Faerie Queene

I

That eight of the ten Shakespearean histories are arranged into tetralogies—two sequences of four plays each—suggests an important point about the form of the history play as opposed to the form of the other major genres, comedy and tragedy—namely, that the history play (almost by the nature of its subject) is an open as opposed to a closed form.¹ History is a continuum, and any historical drama must, in an important sense, commence in medias res. Of course, each of the four plays in the two tetralogies has its own organic structure and may be performed as a self-contained unit. But all these plays contain prominent references to what went before as well as predictions or foreshadowings of what is to come, so that an important part of our experience of a history play consists of being caught up dramatically in the stream of events as these impinge upon us immediately, while being constantly made aware that there are longer vistas of cause and effect that cannot be ignored.

Comedy is a self-contained and generally closed form because it creates its own fictional world tied to a completed narrative and a set of characters who exist only to fulfill the particular requirements of the fiction. When Orlando and Rosalind in As You Like It or Bassanio and Portia in The Merchant of Venice join hands as married couples in the fifth act, the drama is over, and the world they have brought to life before us ceases to exist except as memory. These plays do not encourage us to imagine the young lovers twenty years later as the parents of children, growing thicker in the waist, losing their hair, or having problems with gout or lumbago. In another way, the same point may be made about tragedy. Elizabethan tragedies always end with death—the most absolute kind of closure that we know—and the devastation is usually such that we are forced to look backward over what was or what might have been rather than at what may follow. After Hamlet's death no one cares very much about a Denmark under Fortinbras's rule, and at the end of King Lear, the future will scarcely bear thinking about at all. Edgar's final words sum up the typical mood at the end of tragedy:

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

(V. iii. 328-331)²

This is obviously not the way that Richard II or 2 Henry IV, for instance, conclude. Bolingbroke in the first play is just beginning a reign that will be as important for England as the one that has just ended with Richard's assassination. We hear of the new king's concern for his “unthrifty son” (V. iii. 1), even though Prince Hal has not yet appeared as a stage character, so we know that Henry IV is already saddled with a family problem that remains very much unresolved. Moreover, Henry's political difficulties, far from being over, are just commencing. He hopes to make a voyage to the Holy Land to wash the bloody guilt of Richard's murder from his hands, but we already know from Aumerle's abortive revolt, if not from the Bishop of Carlisle's ominous prophecy in Act IV, that more or less continuous rebellion will keep him at home and never permit him to go on crusade. Hence the poignant irony of his dying two plays later in the Jerusalem chamber of his London palace. Also, the dying king advises his son to “busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels” (2 Henry IV, IV. v. 213-214), and, after the rejection of Falstaff, Prince Hal's brother, John of Lancaster, lays the foundation for the next play by anticipating the great triumph of Agincourt:

I will lay odds that, ere this year expire,
We bear our civil swords and native fire
As far as France. I heard a bird so sing,
Whose music, to my thinking, pleas'd the King.

(2 Henry IV, V. v. 106-109)

Shakespeare's histories have a more ambiguous sense of ending than the comedies and tragedies, not merely because in eight cases out of ten they are parts of a larger sequence but also because they deal, for the most part, with actual events that cannot be neatly separated from their origins and consequences—with events, by the way, that were near enough in the cultural memory of the Elizabethans to seem contiguous with the present. As Americans, we regard our own Civil War not only as an episode from the past but also as exerting a formative kind of pressure on our present culture. Shakespeare and his audience were interested in the political struggles of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries because these turbulent times allowed them to make sense of their own national heritage. The older age was seen as helping to shape their own age—even, in a way, as reflecting contemporary issues—and as having the potential, theoretically at least, to yield insight into what the future might be like.³ The form of the history play as Shakespeare develops and refines it becomes, then, the dramatic means by which we as an audience experience time. The duration of the play in the theatre—what Shakespeare referred to in Romeo and Juliet as “the two hours traffic of our stage” (Prologue, 12)—is an artistic convention that permits Shakespeare and (through his artistry) permits us to explore the endlessly fascinating phenomenon of time and temporality in a complex way.

Renaissance historiography regarded the purpose of history as being principally didactic. Shakespeare might have said (with Santayana and, later, Churchill) that those who cannot remember their past are condemned to repeat it. But Shakespeare and his age knew that the past was both different from and similar to the present and also that the future would in some mysterious way be a product of both present and past. They also knew, as we do, that today's past was yesterday's present and that today is tomorrow's past. Also, of course, in a more puzzlingly philosophical or epistemological sense, they were aware, as we are, that one could only know either past or future through the mediation of the present. There is a kind of truth in saying that past and future exist only in the mind as it confronts these through the medium of imagination. In one sense all historians create the past—reconstruct it out of materials not wholly available to the age being represented. Everyone's re-creation of the past and the meaning stamped upon it, moreover, will differ according to the historian's particular angle of vision, or his cultural, religious, and moral biases. Shakespeare's histories as a group raise these issues powerfully to our consciousness—but dramatically rather than discursively, concretely rather than abstractly—by clothing the intellectual paradoxes with human flesh and giving us not only a vivid sense of the past but also the essence or process of historical flow in both its universal and particular aspects. My purpose in this essay, keeping these generalizations in mind, is to illustrate a few of the ways in which the concept of time, which must underlie all historical inquiry, lends a special kind of richness and significance to Richard II, the two Henry IV plays, and Henry V considered as an unfolding progression.

II

Elizabethan England inherited two models of the shape of human history—one classical, the other medieval. The notion of historical movement that Shakespeare derived, indirectly, from Thucydides and, more particularly, from Polybius was cyclical. In this view, civilization had its happy and its unhappy periods, its fortunate and unfortunate phases, but recurrence was its defining feature. The ups and downs of one period could be expected to replicate themselves in succeeding times, and (at least in Polybius's analysis) in more or less the same—or analogous—sequence. The past thus became the mirror of present and future ages, but, since all change obeyed an ineluctable rule of predictable but unending alteration, the sense of long-range direction, progress, or purpose in history could be only relative and contingent. Eternal flux was the irreducible law of nature, and a kind of saturnine determinism its final implication. Of necessity, the practical historian must focus his attention upon some particular segment of a movement that had no ultimate beginning or end but that nevertheless might disturb or reassure through the recurring impressions of déjà vu that it afforded.

Contrastingly, the medieval concept of history regarded all human events of whatever period as part of salvation history under the aegis of Christian revelation. St. Augustine, for instance, viewed time as a uniquely human condition and its wearisome pressure as a consequence of the Fall. Time had an identifiable beginning (the Creation as described in Genesis) and an identifiable end (the Last Judgment as foretold in the book of Revelation). It also enclosed two intermediate points of vast significance—the fall of man (through Adam's original sin) and the salvation of man (through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the second Adam). All human activity from the creation until the end of the world was thus seen theologically as an aspect of divine providence. Any historical period or pattern of change must then be interpreted as part of an overarching and eternal pattern in which time itself becomes a mere parenthesis (the phrase is Sir Thomas Browne's) between the nothingness out of which God made the world and the physical nothingness to which He will ultimately reconvert it. History in the medieval view becomes teleological, part of the pilgrimage of the soul through earthly changes and vicissitudes to its final destination, the City of God. Even if Shakespeare did not read the Church Fathers, he could have absorbed this latter view of time by attending the biblical plays of the late Middle Ages—the Corpus Christi pageant cycle that survived in certain provincial English towns into the period of the dramatist's boyhood. These plays, performed in sequence on wagons, began with a dramatization of the Creation and ended with the Final Judgment, orienting the most famous stories of the Old and New Testaments between these absolute termini to the central fact of Christ's death and resurrection.

Both of these historical perspectives appear in Shakespeare's tetralogy, superimposed—as it were—to create an interesting ambiguity or indeterminacy of response to the characters and events dramatized. Richard II's deposition and murder tended to be interpreted by Shakespeare's chronicle sources (particularly by Edward Hall and even here partly by implication) as analogous to the Fall, as a kind of original sin in its political dimension. The unlawful removal of an anointed king by the illegitimate usurper Bolingbroke fundamentally disturbed the created universe as ordained by God, the inevitable consequence being perpetual unrest in the body politic, continuing rebellion, and a socio-political chaos that did not run its full course until Richard III, a monster-king deformed in body as in soul, brought England to the verge of ruin. This was a nadir from which only Queen Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry VII, the first Tudor, could deliver the nation.⁴ Shakespeare gives us a clue to this kind of historical thinking by having Richard II's queen refer to her husband's impending disaster as “a second fall” (Richard II, III. iv. 76). Moreover, Richard II so weds his conception of self to the doctrine of the divine right of kings, regarding himself as an extension of God on earth, that he fatally confuses his timeless and eternal body with his time-bound and finite body. Thus, he can unblushingly compare himself to Christ and his persecutors and betrayers to Pontius Pilate and Judas Iscariot. He sentences Bolingbroke and Mowbray to banishment with a kind of finality that suggests the assumption of divine rather than of human judgment. Bolingbroke comments bitterly on the difference between a king's sense of time and a mere subject's:

How long a time lies in one little word!
Four lagging winters and four wanton springs
End in a word; such is the breath of kings.

(I. iii. 213-215)

Richard's words of banishment ironically take on something of the force of the Word in St. John's sense of logos.

But the youthful king, of course, proves all too fallible and human as a ruler, and Shakespeare shows that he is very much the victim of time as well as, in another sense, its theologically privileged voice. Richard violates the very sanctions that entitle him to his own special authority. By confiscating his cousin's estates to finance his war in Ireland, he interrupts the orderly sequence of events over which he theoretically presides and of whose eternal law he considers himself to be the temporal enshrinement. York warns him of the disastrous inconsistency:

Take Hereford's rights away, and take from Time
His charters and his customary rights;
Let not tomorrow then ensue today;
Be not thyself; for how art thou a king
But by fair sequence and succession?

(II. i. 195-199)

The later plays contain many nostalgic allusions to Richard, and Shakespeare preserves the idea, inherited from the chronicles, that the multifarious sufferings of England flow in some primordial way from the crime of deposing a legitimate monarch, the “deputy elected by the Lord” (Richard II, III. ii. 57). But he also undercuts this long-range Christian and mythic concept of historical causation by showing us Richard's ironically partial and self-deceived view of his own nature and by bringing him at length to a tragic recognition of his own time-boundness and finitude: “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me” (V. v. 49). And the unfolding events of the whole tetralogy repeatedly confirm our awareness of cyclical change, of bafflingly rapid fluctuation in political affairs, that runs counter to any sense of purposive or linear advance and that leaves us with a profound skepticism about historical providence or teleology.

Bolingbroke as king, sleeplessly speculating on how inscrutable the future is to those who would read her secrets, voices a more realistic and less comforting attitude toward historical process that cannot be set aside:

O God, that one might read the book of fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea. …
                                                  O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die.

Henry continues, pessimistically reviewing the paradoxical shifts in human alliances that alter the course of nations:

'Tis not ten years gone
Since Richard and Northumberland, great friends,
Did feast together, and in two years after
Were they at wars. It is but eight years since
This Percy was the man nearest my soul,
Who like a brother toil'd in my affairs
And laid his love and life under my foot. …

(2 Henry IV, III. i. 45-63)

Thus does Bolingbroke notice—and Shakespeare through his words—that (to borrow a tragic phrase from Romeo and Juliet) “all things change them to the contrary” (IV. v. 90). Shakespearean chronicle plays may give some sense of a divine purpose in history, but they also create a countervailing weariness about the hope of plucking comfort from the giddy revolutions of Fortune's wheel. Bolingbroke's reaction to the “necessities” of mutability—even though (because of the principle of recurrence) they may enable us to look into the seeds of time—must be a gloomy stoicism:

                    Are these things then necessities?
Then let us meet them like necessities.

(2 Henry IV, III. i. 92, 93)

Since the opposed views of time suggested here nudge and modify each other in Shakespeare's dramatic practice, it is interesting to note that the histories as a group embrace both comedy and tragedy without succumbing totally to the generic dictates of either. Perhaps the dual perspective on history presupposes this combination: the medieval Christian view, though not lacking in tragic emphases (the murder of Abel, the sacrifice of Isaac, and the Crucifixion, for instance) is essentially comic in direction, while the classical view, though allowing for moments or periods that might justify optimism, is essentially pessimistic in its positing of ceaseless change and in the obscurity it implies as to final purpose.

The Henry IV plays balance comedy against tragedy brilliantly in the contrasted worlds of tavern and rebel camp. Both worlds are defined in part by their radically different sense of time. Indeed, opposing attitudes toward clock and calendar become a major device of characterization in these dramas. When we first meet Falstaff, the very incarnation of the comic spirit not only in the history plays but in all of Shakespeare, the fat knight is asking Hal, “What time of day is it, lad?” The prince's elaborate reply to this routine question is, of course, no answer at all, but a facetiously extended analysis of why the question itself has no relevance to Falstaff's style of life:

Thou art so fat-witted with drinking of old sack and unbuttoning thee after supper, and sleeping upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of the day?

(1 Henry IV, I. ii. 1-6)

In the ethos of the tavern, which, incidentally, Falstaff carries with him both to Gadshill and to Shrewsbury, urgency has no meaning. Time is suspended for the sake of pleasurable escape from the grimmer realities of life. Refusing to acknowledge the discomforts of age in the robbery scene (“They hate us youth” [II. ii. 85], the old reprobate bellows), Falstaff willfully inhabits a fantasy world of playful adolescence, of eternal gaming and holiday, that does not fully dissipate until Hal's crushing rejection of him at the end of Henry IV, Part II. Even as late as the scenes in Gloucestershire, Falstaff, “play[ing] the fool … with the time” (2 Henry IV, II. ii. 134) in the prince's phrase, finds his actual past too painful to contemplate seriously and insists on a comic world of present amusement and future hope. To Shallow's senile reminiscences of their youthful highjinks fifty-five years ago when, as students, they “lay all night in the Windmill in Saint George's Field,” Falstaff can only rejoin, “No more of that, good Master Shallow, no more of that” (2 Henry IV, III. ii. 193-196); and he begs Doll Tearsheet, who reminds him of his age, not to “speak like a death's-head”: “do not bid me remember mine end” (II. iv. 232-233).

If the aging Falstaff symbolizes the comic refusal to accept his mortality by insisting on a world of eternal youth, Hotspur, his ironically youthful foil in the first play, is wedded to the tragic necessity—indeed almost the desire—of death for honor's sake. As his name implies, everything Hotspur says or does is associated with risk and with speed: “O, let the hours be short / Till fields and blows and groans applaud our sport!” (1 Henry IV, I. iii. 301-302). With a romantic's appetite for high adventure and importunity, he recognizes the brevity of life and measures human dignity not in years but in the quality and intensity of the life lived:

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.
And if we live, we live to tread on kings;
If die, brave death, when princes die with us!

(1 Henry IV, V. ii. 81-86)

Earlier, disdaining the politic caution of Worcester and his cooler-headed colleagues, Hotspur even magnifies the odds against him for the sake of greater glory:

Come, let us take a muster speedily.
Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily.

(1 Henry IV, IV. i. 133-134)

Like Tennyson's Light Brigade, Hotspur rides cheerfully into the jaws of death, savoring each moment the more because it is likely to be among his last. Nowhere does Shakespeare make the contrary views of time—the comic versus the tragic—more emblematic than in the scene at Shrewsbury where Prince Hal stands between two apparent corpses—the athletic body of Hotspur, whom he has just robbed of his youth, and the decrepit body of Falstaff, who feigns death in order to evade its terrors and who then pops up like a jack-in-the-box the moment it is safe to do so. Tragedy and Comedy, the death wish and the life force, symbolically occupy the right and left sides of the same stage.

Prince Hal, who assimilates some of Falstaff's wit and love of fun without his cowardice and some of Hotspur's bravery and idealism without his rashness, embodies a more complex attitude toward time than either of his opponents in verbal or military combat. Hal may seem to ignore the importunities of the court and the battlefield temporarily, “awhile uphold[ing] / The unyoked humor of … idleness—” (1 Henry IV, I. ii. 189-190), but his game-playing, unlike Falstaff's, is self-consciously calculated and accommodated to a longer temporal perspective. In its consciousness of foreseeable ends, Hal's sense of time may partake of both the comic and the tragic attitudes, but, in essence, it is political. The play-acting episode in the Boar's Head tavern ends with Falstaff in the role of Hal, pleading with the prince in the role of his father not to banish his corpulent companion: “banish plump Jack, and banish all the world.” Characteristically, the prince answers with a double voice: “I do, I will” (1 Henry IV, II. iv. 474-476). Falstaff draws no line between the charade and the reality it parodies, but the prince, by his change of tense, shows us that he carefully distinguishes between the present fun and the future reform. Hal's playfulness is not escapist, not rooted in the confusion of recreation with work. The boy knows, like his rapidly aging father, that a prince has only one life in which to make his mark and, unlike Hotspur, that one cannot afford to be too intense or obsessively single-minded in his loyalties. As a consequence, we are slightly repelled by the coldly utilitarian construction that he seems to put upon his association with his tavern cronies.

In his death speech Hotspur reminds us poignantly that life is “time's fool, / And time, that takes survey of all the world, / Must have a stop” (1 Henry IV, V. iv. 81-83). Hotspur stops the clock tragically for himself by getting himself killed in a mistaken cause. Falstaff tries to stop the clock in another sense by willfully refusing to acknowledge its existence. Hal can absorb something of value from both associations without opposing himself to the inevitable flow of time. He grows from boy to man, from tavern roisterer to the princely savior of his father's life—finally to the kingly hero of Agincourt—by moving with rather than against the tide of history and, in some sense, harmonizing the political and the moral, the realistic and the Christian, insights into temporality. Through a synthesis of attitudes toward the relaxations and pressures of history, he “make[s] offense a skill, / Redeeming time when men think least [he] will” (1 Henry IV, I. ii. 210-211).

III

Not content with playing off the interlocking worlds of comedy, tragedy, and politics against each other in respect of their varying responses to time, Shakespeare also makes us aware of other temporal contrasts and concerns. One of his most effective techniques is the counterpointing of an external, objective sense of time with a more internal, subjective sense of it, so that, as an audience, we may experience history both from the perspective of a dispassionate looker-on and also through the eyes of feeling individuals. The external sense of time is, of course, linked to the action and could hardly be avoided by any dramatist. Thus, the plays are full of simple information about scheduling, such as Bolingbroke's announcement after the deposition of Richard, “On Wednesday next we solemnly proclaim / Our coronation. Lords, be ready all” (Richard II, IV. i. 320-321), or Mortimer's statement about the rebel plans: “Tomorrow, cousin Percy, you and I / And my good Lord of Worcester will set forth / To meet your father and the Scottish power … at Shrewsbury” (I Henry IV, III. i. 80-83). But the ordinary sequence of events is constantly being intersected by a more private sense of time that discloses personality or lights up the moral or spiritual interior of a speaker. Richard II's heartless remark at the news of Gaunt's death shows us the flippant and youthful king at his most shallow:

The ripest fruit first falls, and so doth he;
His time is spent, our pilgrimage must be.
So much for that.

(Richard II, II. i. 153-155)

Then later on we are exposed to a deeper and more sympathetic example of Richard's interior sense of the clock, when, for the first and only time he is alone in the entire drama, he plays painfully at manufacturing a whole private microcosm based on the psychology of isolation. He works out an intricate poetical conceit by which his thoughts become minutes, his eyes the outward watch, his heart a bell that tolls the hours, and his finger, wiping away tears of grief, a dial's point:

                    So sighs and tears and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours. But my time
Runs posting on in Bolingbroke's proud joy,
While I stand here, his Jack of the clock.

(V. v. 57-60)

Richard constructs an inner world of time out of thoughts and emotions in a therapeutic attempt to adjust to an exterior onslaught of time that has passed him by. Thus does Shakespeare dramatize through a moving soliloquy how sorrow and joy make for different experiences of time and how dynastic change alters the tempo of life in diverse ways, depending on whether one is the loser or the winner.

Some of the playwright's most piercing ironies arise from niceties of historical timing. In the very scene in which Richard II disinherits his cousin, we learn that Bolingbroke has already raised an army and is even then making for England “with all due expedience” (Richard II, II. i. 287), apparently ignorant of the king's action against him.⁵ Then, after Bolingbroke has already consolidated his power, Richard himself returns from Ireland “one day too late” (III. ii. 67) to prevent the defection of his own adherents, and Salisbury wishes futilely that the inexorable march of the calendar could be reversed:

O, call back yesterday, bid time return,
And thou shalt have twelve thousand fighting men!
Today, today, unhappy day, too late,
O'erthrows thy joys, friends, fortune, and thy state;
For all the Welshmen, hearing thou wert dead,
Are gone to Bolingbroke, dispers'd, and fled.

(III. ii. 69-74)

In this dramatic juxtaposition Shakespeare hints that Bolingbroke ambitiously rushes the time for his own political advantage while Richard's more leisurely and passive approach to political crisis is self-defeating. The king loses even before he can begin to fight. Bolingbroke makes time his servant. Richard becomes time's prey.

The collision of two differing misperceptions of time in 2 Henry IV makes for one of the most memorably ironic episodes of the entire tetralogy. Prince Hal enters the bedchamber of his father and, thinking the king dead, reverently takes his crown from its pillow in the belief that his most solemn moment of responsibility has at last arrived. Then the king awakes, and, doubtless remembering his own youthful seizure of the diadem from Richard, misinterprets his son's behavior as an act of usurpation:

Dost thou so hunger for mine empty chair
That thou wilt needs invest thee with my honors
Before thy hour be ripe? O foolish youth,
Thou seek'st the greatness that will overwhelm thee. …
What, canst thou not forbear me half an hour?
Then get thee gone and dig my grave thyself. …

(2 Henry IV, IV. v. 94-110)

Henry IV protracts this misplaced rebuke to his son almost unendurably, bitterly alleging that “a time is come to mock at form” (IV. v. 118) at the very moment when Hal's consciousness of kingly form and identity has been raised to its highest pitch of intensity.

One of the ways in which Shakespeare conveys the sense of history developing and exfoliating before our eyes is to intermingle immediate with more remote, short-term with longer-term, measurements of time. The histories are replete with a feeling for temporality in its quotidian and urgent aspects. Historical drama depends for its background effects on verisimilar touches of location and period that lend a sense of “then-ness” to the play; but, in addition, its dramatic movement requires relationships of rapid cause and effect, of quick stimulus and response. The play, to come alive on stage, must make us care about the links between what happened ten minutes ago and what is happening now or will happen very soon—or, in the time scheme of the drama itself, between yesterday, today, and tomorrow. This is the sensation of temporality that Shakespeare dramatizes when he shows us Hotspur rushing fatally into battle without pausing to read important letters (“I cannot read them now!” [1 Henry IV, V. ii. 80]), or when messages arrive at the Boar's Head summoning Falstaff and Hal to the colors (“I'll to the court in the morning. We must all to the wars. … I'll procure this fat rogue a charge of foot …” [1 Henry IV, II. iv. 538-540]).

But longer perspectives interrupt this sense of daily bustle, connecting present urgencies with a more distant awareness of both past and future. The rebels are forever revising the past as a way of displacing their own guilt. When Henry IV, the usurper whom they have helped bring to power, disappoints their expectations, they reclothe Richard's memory in the robes of sentimentality and besmirch their own former leader. From the new revisionist angle of perception, Richard now becomes “that sweet lovely rose” and the king who supplanted him “this thorn, this canker, Bolingbroke” (1 Henry IV, I. iii. 175-176). The meritorious exile whose injustice they had once claimed to be righting has suddenly been transformed through self-deceptive rhetoric into “a poor unminded outlaw sneaking home” (IV. iii. 58). The gap between the original “then” and the “then” as perceived in this curiously skewed “now” becomes a major source of dramatic irony.

The prophecies with which the histories are laden also produce a sense of temporal distance in the forward direction—and with no less irony. The Bishop of Carlisle predicts that the deposition of an anointed king will transform England into a second Golgotha, bringing in its wake “Disorder, horror, fear, and mutiny” (Richard II, IV. i. 143) to successive generations, and he is instantly arrested for speaking a truth that everyone in the audience knew had already come to pass. Richard himself correctly predicts that Northumberland will be just as disloyal to his new master as to his old, and, when this happens in the plays that follow, Shakespeare pointedly reminds his audience of what was said but ignored in the first instance:

KING Henry.
But which of you was by—
[To Warwick.] You, cousin Nevil, as I may remember—
When Richard, with his eye brimful of tears,
Then check'd and rated by Northumberland,
Did speak these words, now prov'd a prophecy?
“Northumberland, thou ladder by the which
My cousin Bolingbroke ascends my throne”—
Though then, God knows, I had no such intent,
But that necessity so bow'd the state
That I and greatness were compell'd to kiss—
“The time shall come,” thus did he follow it,
“The time will come, that foul sin, gathering head,
Shall break into corruption”—so went on,
Foretelling this same time's condition
And the division of our amity.
WARWICK.
There is a history in all men's lives,
Figuring the nature of the times deceas'd,
The which observ'd, a man may prophesy,
With a near aim, of the main chance of things
As yet not come to life. …

(2 Henry IV, III. i. 65-84)

The long-range perspectives, whether of past or future, tend to lend the immediate actions something of the status of myth, thus conferring upon them a cultural dignity and significance they might otherwise lack. This dilation or expansion of a particular political context thus deepens the dramatic resonance effectively. Richard of Bordeaux, for instance, sees his own tragedy as part of a venerable literary tradition: the “lamentable tale of me” (Richard II, V. i. 44) that he enjoins his wife to narrate to future auditors in France becomes one more addition to that swelling anthology of “sad stories of the death of kings” (III. ii. 156) to which he had earlier referred. But Richard becomes the type of the murdered and desecrated monarch, not merely another example, through the literary and biblical traditions with which he so self-consciously associates himself. And Henry V before Agincourt inspires his troops with the promise that their bravery against almost impossible odds will enshrine them forever in the national memory:

He that shall see this day, and live old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors,
And say, “Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin's day.”
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. …
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.

(Henry V, IV. iii. 44-60)

Nor is the tetralogy without its comic memories. Shallow lives wholly in the distant past—the frail relic of a bygone age the sexual excitements of which he vastly exaggerates in the impotence of his present condition: “Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent!” (2 Henry IV, III. ii. 33). The even wispier Silence joins the concept of time past to a unique compound of pathos and hilarity. When Silence, somewhat surprisingly, breaks into a drinking song and Falstaff is astonished to discover that he possesses enough vocal energy for the feat, the old man's response is delicious: “Who I? I have been merry twice and once ere now” (V. iii. 39-40).

IV

Thus does Shakespeare weave the mingled yarn of pastness, presentness, and futurity into the richest of dramatic tapestries. Prince Hal can drink in Eastcheap with Poins while reminding us of our common parent (he refers in passing to “the old days of goodman Adam” [1 Henry IV, II. iv. 93]), and Hotspur can locate his own demise in the wider context of time's ultimate cessation at the last trump. But, if in some sense Shakespeare takes all of time for his province, what finally may we say that his concept of it was?

The answer must be, I think, that the complexity of the individual plays—not to mention the additional complexity of their interrelatedness—makes it hazardous to affix labels. Many attitudes toward time are embodied in the plays I have been discussing, and there are still others to be found elsewhere in Shakespeare. But by way of conclusion it might be well to notice that the second tetralogy ends paradoxically with the same mixture of comic and tragic implications about time that we have been remarking throughout the series. The emergence of Prince Hal as “the mirror of all Christian kings” (Henry V, II, Prologue, 6) and the miraculous victor of Agincourt suggests the happy resolution of comedy. In marrying Katherine and joining England to France, Henry V concludes the final play in a way that reminds us of a romance structure with its “happily-ever-after” sense of finality. Certainly the closure of this history play implies a sunnier future for the nation than we have ever had reason to expect at earlier points in the historical sequence. England under Henry seems to have realized her greatest and most heroic potential, and Agincourt seems to have culminated her finest hour.

But the epilogue sounds a disquieting chord, reminding the audience that Henry's reign, however “greatly lived,” was but a “Small time” (1.5). The longer shadow that time inevitably casts darkened the glory of “This star of England” (1.6), and the poet sadly reminds us that Henry's son, who inherited the crown as a babe in arms, “lost France” through his weakness and, in the civil chaos that ensued, once more “made his England bleed” (1.12). The historical wheel, in other words, continues to revolve, and, in this case, it comes full circle, for Shakespeare returns our memories to the internecine strife that he had dramatized in his earliest chronicles, the three parts of Henry VI. And, as if this were not enough to dampen the comic optimism, Shakespeare gives us a funny but also pathetic account of Falstaff's death through the uncomprehending lips of Mistress Quickly. If the whirligig of time has brought Henry V success as a king, it has also brought in its revenges, for it diminishes him as a man through the rejection and loss of his most affectionate and emotionally vital companion.

Notes

1. This point has been developed in extenso by David Scott Kastan in Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 23-27, 37-55. Kastan, in turn, builds upon the work of Tom Driver and Ricardo Quinones; see Driver, The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), and Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).

2. The edition of Shakespeare quoted throughout is The Complete Works of Shakespeare, ed. David Bevington (Glenview, Ill., Scott, Foresman, 1980).

3. See Lily B. Campbell, Shakespeare's “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, Calif.: The Huntington Library, 1958); also David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).

4. As Henry Ansgar Kelly has usefully demonstrated, this formulation of the so-called Tudor myth, heavily indebted to E. M. W. Tillyard's influential Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1944), represents an historiographical oversimplification. Kelly refers to it as “an ex post facto Platonic Form, made up of many fragments that were never fitted together into a mental pattern until they felt the force of [Tillyard's] synthesizing energy”; see Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 298.

5. Although the apparent simultaneity of Richard's violation of Bolingbroke's rights and the latter's armed invasion of England might be explained, to quote Bevington, as “owing to Shakespeare's characteristic compression of historic time,” we nevertheless “gain the impression of an already-existing plot” against the king; see Bevington's introduction to the play in his Complete Works of Shakespeare, p. 756.