SOURCE: Cohen, Derek. “History and the Nation in Richard II and Henry IV.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 42, no. 2 (spring 2002): 293-315.

[In the following essay, Cohen assesses the perception of history in the Henry IV plays, emphasizing a turbulent process of nation-building that survives both the murder and usurpation of Richard II and the pervasive moral uncertainty of Henry IV, Part 2.]

I

The past, in the figure of the murdered King Richard, haunts the protagonists of the Henry IV plays. The relation between the Richard they remember or merely imagine and the Richard of Richard II is fraught with emotional, moral, and ideological consequences. Richard's post-mortem power turns out to be greater than that he possessed alive and figures significantly in the various constructions of the English nation of these histories. His murder is the transforming fact and detail of Henry's monarchy, and it looms over and transfigures the events of Henry's reign. All crucial events refer to it. Richard, in death, becomes the focal point of action, the site of conflict, and the means by which the present and future are made coherent. Richard himself is a curious presence, represented in the plays in which he figures in strangely ambivalent ways. Richard searches for a defining royal essence in his character, and for some of those who observe him it seems to express itself in the great moments of self-consciousness just prior to his violent death. For others, Richard remains the fixed emblem of failure, a king who never achieved sufficient command of himself or his kingdom. His tragedy is, of course, coincident with the process of his failure and commences only after the loss of his monarchy has become an established fact. In the play of Richard, the king stands in a contradictory and perplexing relationship to many of his subjects. Among those close to him are his enemies as well as his friends; those who love and those who hate him stand in dangerously equal proximity to this monarch. The array of perspectives upon the beleaguered king includes, of course, that of the audience, privileged to see a private side invisible to both his friends and his enemies.

The Elizabethan preoccupation with history was, as Phyllis Rackin describes it, a matter of urgent national interest, regarded both as a means of preserving peace and political stability and as a matter of national self-definition. The multiplicity of understandings of the nature and purpose of the study of history is reflected in the plays, where radically different conceptions of history and its relevance to national identity are subjected to intense dialectical pressures.¹ Richard II himself is engaged in the making of history. This is a conventional and inevitable function and byproduct of monarchy, and it is the way in which, for centuries, we have been schooled to understand the historical process—large affairs under the management of large men. The notion of history as justificatory political narrative confirming and legitimizing bourgeois political ideology has been explained by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his pursuit of a definition of the postmodern. To Lyotard, the postmodern is the very antithesis of the presumed credibility of the political imperatives that demand acquiescence and obedience to the authority by which history is heroic, male, and seamlessly woven into master narratives. Postmodernism is the rejection of that authority.² The progressive and often contradictory historical revelations of the second tetralogy indicate that Shakespeare was aware of the traps and simplifications of traditional historical narrative.

The symphonic, ordered heroics of Richard II and of even the first part of Henry IV break up in the narrative dissonance and foundering of Henry IV's second part. The self-reflexivity of Part Two, as it refers backwards to the originating tragedy of the cycle, and as it somewhat cynically deconstructs its predecessor part, has, in its almost compulsive backward-looking perspective, the effect of setting Henry V apart, of separating it from its founding history. Indeed, this play, one of Shakespeare's most popular, does seem to have a critical and theatrical existence that is exclusive of the first three history plays of the tetralogy. Graham Holderness argues that these plays help mark the beginnings of modern historiography, that they present “a clear, historically informed apprehension of the political struggles of later medieval society; in particular the long struggle between monarchy and nobility which developed out of the contradictory nature of feudal order, and was arrested by the accession of the Tudors.”³ They also chart the uneasy and sometimes violent shift from a notion of England as a medieval monarchy to modern nationhood. The “realm,” imagined by John of Gaunt in act II, scene i of Richard II with its secure sense of how things should be, describes a world before the decline of the barons, a medieval England, like that described by Liah Greenfeld, “in which the population [is] related to the polity only as occupants of the land and the king's subjects; their stake in it being of a utilitarian and accidental nature.”⁴ Gaunt and Richard, too, are possessed by a nostalgia for lost plenitude, a world in which an imaginary unity, simplicity, and certainty once prevailed, a world that, according to Catherine Belsey, “precedes symbolic difference.”⁵

The sequence of Richard II through both parts of Henry IV expresses a familiar process of nation building and history making. A subject of his age, Shakespeare possessed a sense of history that would, to some extent, have been determined or influenced by the established pattern and practice of sequentiality in history making. Informing Shakespeare's sense of this pattern, however, is an awareness of many inherent contradictions that more formalist and monologist historians have always been at pains to subdue to their single political visions. Shakespeare gives a compelling dramatic version of the fraught process by which history and its concomitants such as nationality are created. He and his characters try to make sense of the past by transforming it into narratives of whose ideological pressures they are often unaware; those who are aware of ideology are usually its servants or promoters and create versions of history designed to advance political causes. Shakespeare and his characters are not, as is sometimes suggested, sophisticated, quasi-modern historians; they do, however, obey the human urge to assemble history out of the complex and only partially known and understood raw material of the past. The present essay is an attempt to understand a central contradiction of the sequence. On the one hand, Shakespeare and his characters seem to be seduced by the clarity and authority of the grand narrative of history and are prone to sweeping generalizations and magisterial pronouncements about history's so-called laws. On the other, there is a deep uncertainty, evident throughout the sequence, about the undeniably attractive simplicity and lucidity that such “laws” seem to proffer. The conflicting and contending historiographies voiced with such conviction in the plays throw the whole project of historical writing and historical narration into question. King Richard is a badly deluded monarch and not a historian. He sees himself as a participant in the master narrative of a continuous history. He adverts, refers, and alludes to his historic role. Those around him, for and against him, similarly recognize this function as the unavoidable destiny of a king. It is his self-perceived and self-produced historical role as one monarch in a political continuum that explains his appeal both to those who court his favor and those who seek his destruction. The king is the emblem of the future, according to this narrative; he ensures its coming because he is the essential link in a lineal progress that has no predictable or apparent end and springs from a mysterious beginning hedged with myth and magic. He is the personification of continuity in the nation and thus the locus of its stability or disturbance. To and from him all things are seen to tend. Thus his strength and weakness are rooted in the same place.

The king defines the entity we call the nation. He transcends in his person the complexities and ambiguities of geography, ethnicity, and even civility—in both the technical and political senses of the word. He is the nation, and, thus, he and his body civil must be preserved. When and however he dies, the office must still survive, for on that survival depends the survival of the organism known as the nation—this contingency has been transformed into a fixed political imperative in the minds and behavior of the citizenry and its masters. The falsity of the ideology—and hence the falsity of the analogy which in Shakespeare turns it into a truism—was not predicted by Shakespeare but was, remarkably, demonstrated by the real event of the civil war and its aftermath—a coherent England without a monarch. In Shakespeare, however, the English nation as an entity is dependent on and referable to its kings. The passionate anxiety of all engaged in preserving, protecting, restoring, or replacing the monarchy testifies to the continuous presence of a fear of its demise.

The context of this fear, however, is something of a paradox. Shakespeare was writing in a period of unprecedented social mobility. Under the New Aristocracy, in which noble birth was losing importance in the face of an aristocracy of ability and merit, a tentative process of democratization was under way. The old nobility, Greenfeld argues, was all but extinct by 1540, replaced by a new Henrician elite of men of modest birth but remarkable abilities.⁶ This perceptible, if still exclusive and partial, tendency toward equality of condition among different social strata remained focused on the monarch throughout the century; it was he or she who symbolized England's distinctiveness and sovereignty. In Tudor England, Robert Weimann reminds us, “those who upheld the independence of the nation supported the sovereignty of the crown; its authority was accepted not only against the claims of the Roman church but also in the face of domestic unrest and foreign invasion.”⁷

What is good or bad in Shakespeare's medieval or Tudor monarchies is always subordinated to the simple but overwhelming fact of kingship. The king simply is: his monarchy survives until his death or until he is usurped. What kind of king he was depends entirely upon his use of power and power's use of him. The king, in his lifetime, while making his history, is feeding the maw of his posterity—the successors and descendants who will remember him, will praise or blame him, and the writers who will reinvent him for their time.

II

The monarch's history making is abetted by the ideology that has made him monarch. His place in history is assured, but how does he perceive himself filling that place? Are his motivations those of a man who wishes to be remembered in a particular way? Does he seem to care whether history records his as a good or bad monarchy or him as a good or bad king? He is, of course, always at the mercy of the historians: while it is his destiny to be “historical,” a named part of the process, it is his chroniclers and not himself who will make his history. Shakespeare's Richard is, in the end, a very human character, driven, it seems, by ordinary desires and hopes and by ordinary malice. He is a subject of his power very much as his subjects themselves are. Because he has enormous political power, his use of that power is always vastly consequential to others. He must, therefore, be careful, but his impulses are frequently spontaneous and lead him to abuse his power. The responsibilities of office are at war with the inclinations to carry that office into spheres of life where it does not belong. There are at least three Richards in the play. There is the Richard known only as a public figure, the man his enemies fear and despise; there is the Richard known to and supported by his friends; and there is the Richard known privately to the audience through asides and through the audience's privileged view of both friendly and hostile perspectives offered publicly and privately.

Richard the king, the public man, the icon of the nation, appears most commanding in the opening scene of the play. He is surrounded by men who are implicated in the necessary deceptions of public politics. They all behave according to the dictates of form. They flatter him by the performance of ceremonies designed to honor him and confirm his authority. In the first scene we have pure performance, pure acting on all sides, and winnowing out enemies and friends is not possible without the aid of historical information. We have a king apparently reveling in his authority, surrounded by subjects, some of whom play at being loyal and obedient. The play's first speech implies a Richard in complete control. Harry Berger Jr. has noted the way in which his (deliberate?) use of the word “boist'rous” has the effect of infantilizing Bolingbroke, his hitherto unrecognized nemesis, and thus, by extension, aggrandizing or (to use Richard's own word) monarchizing the king.⁸ The stage belongs to Richard, and he uses it to full effect. All addresses made to him in this scene allude to his royal station. His regality is in the foreground of each speech and is reinforced by his self-conscious and ostentatious use of the royal plural. While Richard here adverts to the dissension between the two contestants, he manages to keep control over the proceedings, and, of course, his failure to force the contestants to give up their quarrel is ominous in the light of future events. Gaunt, Bolingbroke, and Mowbray's performance of obedience continues the illusion that Richard is in charge. It is an illusion not long sustained, but it is the canny Richard himself, the arch actor, who observes how the two contestants are vying for his credulity:

We thank you both, yet one but flatters us,
As well appeareth by the cause you come,
Namely, to appeal each other of high treason.(9)

Richard's failure is captured in the irony of the scene's conclusion where, having failed to make the two opponents do what he has willed and commanded, he now commands them to do what they have desired from the first:¹⁰

We were not born to sue, but to command,
Which since we cannot do to make you friends,
Be ready, as your lives shall answer it,
At Coventry upon Saint Lambert's day.
There shall your swords and lances arbitrate
The swelling difference of your settled hate.

(R, I.i. 196-201)

Earlier in the same scene Richard has offered, in what may be an aside, a remark that refers to the tone of Bolingbroke's determination to avenge the death of his uncle, the duke of Gloucester, a death that he lays at the door of Mowbray (but that, we know and learn, implicated the king himself). As he watches and listens to Bolingbroke, Richard notes: “How high a pitch his resolution soars” (R, I.i. 110). The line has a thoughtful, private quality, as though whispered or wryly observed to a trusted friend. And it tells of the astuteness of the king who knows more than he tells, sees more than he lets on. And so the ceremony is subverted and with it—but only momentarily—the notion that this monarchy is an example of a pure, flowing, sequential “history” of an ordered medieval world. The possibility of Richard's words being an actual aside lends it the appearance of a line overheard only by the audience: this possibility introduces a note of irony; Richard knows things that have not been declared or revealed. A subtext of subterfuge, secrets, and lies is suddenly exposed. The human motive of simple distrust pierces the carapace of ceremony. The man who is king is shown to possess another side. The play seems to take off from this point. Its vitality depends upon the conflict of the private and public personae constructed for private and public occasion. The spectacle of Richard and his friends, later in the first act, talking with malicious glee of Bolingbroke's departure provides a curious scene, one in which the sarcastic pleasure of malicious young men almost obscures the presence of danger to the throne:

Wooing poor craftsmen with the craft of smiles
And patient underbearing of his fortune
.....Off goes his bonnet to an oyster wench;
A brace of draymen bid God speed hime well
And had the tribute of his supple knee.

(R, I.iv.28-33)

Perhaps it is the cynicism of Richard that helps undo him. So caught up and delighted does he seem in his awareness of pretense and acting that he almost forgets to wonder what it truly conceals, what danger the perceptible duplicity of his subjects offers his security. This lighthearted banter, with its serious implications, is a nice contrast to the vehement duchess of Gloucester's bloodthirsty exhortation—also in private—to her lawabiding brother-in-law Gaunt to avenge his brother as, she tells him, a brother should and a real man would.

The contentions that drive the play are multifarious. Their danger is in the secrecy and caution with which they are marshaled by Richard's enemies and in Richard's culpable blindness to them. This, at least, is Shakespeare's version of events. The moment of Richard's direst peril is the moment when, just after John of Gaunt's death, he leaves Ely House with the contemptuous parting words: “Think what you will. We seize into our hands / His plate, his goods, his money and his lands” (R, II.i.209-10). The place is left occupied by angry conspirators who talk of the impending return of Bolingbroke and rebellion. Belsey notes that Richard's words are absolute only on condition that they remain within the existing system of differences. Like his subjects, he is subject to the symbolic order, which allots meaning to the orders he gives. But he surrenders his absolutism by his transgression of the system of differences: “Richard-as-England has consumed England's material wealth in riot, misusing his sovereignty to mortgage the land, devouring in the name of his title his own entitlement … Richard violates the symbolic order, and in consequence his words lose their sovereignty.”¹¹

The rest is history. At the end of the play, rebellion has triumphed, Richard is horribly killed, and the new king is enthroned. Henry's reign is doomed from its commencement. Or, rather, Shakespeare presents his reign as doomed and supplies a heavily moralistic underpinning to the start of that reign to account for its unhappy history. Here, the play interrogates the utility of the moral and political forces that animate the drama and dominate the sequel plays. Bolingbroke's disavowal of Sir Piers of Exton is an act of double treachery that only reifies the habit and practice of moral compromise that is to characterize his reign. Of the treachery of the powerful in the two Henry IV plays, which continue the tradition, Paola Pugliatti makes the useful point that the way the denouement comes about “involves an interesting exchange of prerogatives, for it is achieved by means of a double betrayal: the betrayal by John of Lancaster of the forces of rebellion and the betrayal by Hal of the forces of misrule.”¹² Political action is profoundly rooted in an apparently unavoidable duplicity and finds its historical power in compulsive hypocrisy. Stephen Greenblatt does not exaggerate when he observes of the Henry plays that in them “moral authority rests upon a hypocrisy so deep that the hypocrites themselves believe it.”¹³ Actions that lack spontaneous double awareness, such as the bishop of Carlisle's attempted obstruction of Bolingbroke's accession, are dangerous in the extreme. From Richard's quietly ironic recognition of Bolingbroke's ambition to Henry IV's double dealing with Exton, the pattern of secrecy followed by lying establishes monarchy as a political practice that is necessarily sustained by public dishonesty.

III

So deeply embedded in the practice of monarchy is the form and habit of deception that the actors of Shakespeare's history—kings and noblemen alike—do not themselves comprehend the extent to which they are involved in its convolutions. They write, record, and recall history with apparent sincerity, and yet their versions of the same past events are remarkably different. The multiplicity, even infinity, of meanings to which history is automatically and eternally subject marks Shakespeare's awareness of what has more recently been described as a process of deferral. This difference arises partly because the past of Henry IV is fixed in the crime of murder, which calls out for revenge or expiation. Thus the plays that succeed the reign and the death of Richard are locked in a remembered and recorded eternity. The past cannot be laid to rest if the murderer goes unpunished and dies quietly in his bed in the Jerusalem Chamber. So the past persists into the eternal present, a sore in the mind that worries the history being enacted and shapes and forms the nation.

Henry IV describes the inevitable process by which real events are transmogrified into myth and, hence, national consciousness—or, more accurately, into the prevailing or dominant culture's idea of national consciousness. The murder of Richard is the great fact of the tetralogy. It permeates the consciousness of Richard's posterity, both his actual and his would-be heirs. Their ambitions and aspirations are shaped by the way they relate to the murdered king. Each side in the Henry rebellions defines itself by the way in which it defines its own and its enemy's perception of that relation. It holds onto its beliefs about the other side's perceptions of the crime. The murder is passed down to posterity as a murder. Its witnesses are implicated in its permutations of meaning, its subtle capacities, its effects on its perpetrators, and its transformative power. To posterity, the murder of Richard is just one of history's regicides; to the witnesses of the slaying, it is an individual and unique event in which a man—guilty and innocent like us all—is slaughtered by armed assassins. What happens in the minutes during which that slaughter occurs unavoidably becomes part of the witness' past and thus the means by which the privileged onlookers of the murder must measure the narrative simplifications and ideological tendencies of the inheritors of Richard's legacy. To Richard's successors, the murder becomes mythology the minute it becomes publicly known. To the audience, the actuality of the murder—its visible, brutal violence—thwarts or determines the mythologizing process of history. What Shakespeare's audience sees is a man killed; what recorded history comes to know, on the other hand, is a depersonalized version of the event and its transformation into a mythological instrument of use in the pursuit of political power. Myth is mythical because its incidents conform to familiar, recognizable patterns. The murder of a king is as old as kingship. The murder of Richard continues the familiar cycle.

The simplification and depersonalization of regicide have to do with the process of transformation from act to language. The murder of Richard is a vastly complex event, loaded with implications that are actual, imaginary, historical, ideological, and dramatic. There is and can be no definitive reading—or history—of the murder of Richard. It is a dramatic event that may be viewed from a multiplicity of angles and perspectives. We may choose, as critics usually have done, to view it as an integral part of a dramatic sequence or narrative. But it may, with equal validity, be viewed as a chaotic re-enactment of an already mythologized event upon which an author has chosen to impose form—aesthetic, moral, or monitory. The possibilities are literally endless. The deferral of a definitive reading has no limit. However, the inheritors of Richard's story, friendly and hostile, implicated and indifferent, fulfill some kind of human compulsion in their attempts to put the murder into the forms of language. This is the eternal human trap. By giving language to history in order simply to possess it, we unavoidably simplify it, attempting, as Belsey reminds us, “to arrest the play of meaning … since meaning is plural, to be able to speak is to be able to take part in the contest for meaning.”¹⁴ The murder of Richard looms over its own future, well into the age of Elizabeth. Those close to it recognize a need to position themselves in relation to it. Nothing less than the enveloping concept of the English nation is at stake. The focus, in these plays, on the deceased king was a reminder to Elizabethans of their own dependency on Elizabeth as the focus of their national aspirations.

IV

Henry IV presses the conceptualization of English nationhood in new directions. As the England of these histories is developed through the machinery of both formulated and implicit history, the creation of national identity becomes freighted with some of the contradictory impulses of history making. Imposing meaning on past events is one project of the two central plays of the tetralogy, and in them, different ways of making history contend for supremacy. There is, for example, the history of Henry's predecessor, which is foregrounded many times as it is remembered both by those who were there and by those who know it by report. And then there is the history contained in the dramatic reality of human character as it breathes life into the present. The first words spoken by King Henry are an example of the latter: “So shaken as we are, so wan with care / Find we a time for (righted peace to pant.”¹⁵ The lines are redolent with allusion and painful but contingent memory, referring obliquely to the conclusion of the previous play—but they are not the stuff of history. Yet the feelings they represent and the tidings to which they allude are all a part of the story in which the lives of those engaged in making history are intertwined. In the Henry plays, history, as recalled and recounted by the characters, is a means of negotiating with the present. The retrospective mode animates the present, and the past is a felt and perceptible force that directs and positions that present. It is, as we may expect, Prince Hal, the omnicompetent young politician, who possesses the keenest awareness of the crushing presence of the past on the present and future. His “I know you all” speech is a declaration of precisely this recognition (1H, I.ii. 190). He announces in advance his plan to mold the present in order to mold the future so that when the present has become the past, its groundwork, the conditions upon which it must be read and understood, will already have been established. This is a young man who is quite simply trying to avoid the unpredictable. That is, Prince Hal's project is to manipulate and control the forces of uncertainty that disturb, distort, and deflect history from the paths of the inconvenient reality to which it must so often submit. While there is no guarantee that the audience of one of the plays was present at the previous one in the tetralogy, Hal's speech, more than any other in the series, presents us with the notion of the connectedness of the first three plays of the tetralogy: it further justifies the unverifiable but appealing assumption that each play was addressed to an audience that was aware of or, better yet, present at the preceding play.

Unlike Richard and Henry IV, Prince Hal is more than merely aware of his assured place in history and his destined role: he is determined to direct the forces of history and bend them to his will. Hal's perspective on the past will prevail and, in prevailing, will give him the power to define the English nation in the terms he dictates. This mastering of all circumstances is his constant strategy and is what distinguishes him from his immediate predecessors. Surprise is not an emotion Hal ever seems to feel. There seems to be no moment unaccounted for, no eventuality for which he is unprepared, no passion for which he does not have the right words at his immediate disposal. This general readiness, not a quality that has greatly endeared him to the public, is nevertheless the secret of his continued successes. He thinks less about the past or the forces that have made him Prince of Wales and the future king than about the means needed to prepare himself for the great day. When it comes, he evinces only the most correct emotion and appropriate feeling. His life is a life's work. When he is king, and especially in the play of Henry V, his monarchy seems to be driven in part by retrospect and a sharp eye on the retrospective view of posterity.

Those around him, however imbricated in their history, are in a constant state of acute awareness of those traditions and their relation to these traditions. They look back in order to contextualize the present. The first reference in 1 Henry IV to the previous king occurs in the dialogue among Northumberland, Worcester, and Hotspur as together they ponder the cause of the present disarray of the nation. …

The passage reeks with regret. The least attractive part here is Northumberland's, with his remorse at having taken a wrong side. Richard, whom we have seen Northumberland bullying and attempting to force into confessions of crimes and royal transgressions in the first play, has become the “unhappy king,” as though the sympathy and “wrongs in us” that Northumberland has latterly discovered will put a gloss on his complicity in the king's murder. The passage, nevertheless, supplies a useful reminder that historical facts do, in fact, exist. Northumberland did, actually, in words and actions, support Bolingbroke's usurpation of Richard's crown. And no amount of ideological tampering can erase the fact. His regret at having done so is a fascinating example of rehistoricizing that fact. But, it cannot remove it. And young Harry Hotspur is equally interesting in his “reading” of his father's new version of his complicity. He sees fit to chastise Northumberland, not, however, for participating in the subornation of the murderers of Richard, but for doing so for the sake of “this forgetful man” (1 H, I.iii. 158) who has neglected his obligations to his fellow murderers. Hotspur's speech, passionate as usual, does manage to take the history in interesting new directions. He is unstinting in his blame of his father, but he loses some credibility in his reincarnation of Richard, whose downfall he himself aided. This is, of course, familiar narrative. The question, however, of what drives the narrative in these and other directions is what fascinates. There is, indeed, among the rebels and within the king himself, recognizable lust for political and personal power. The craving, however, bespeaks larger issues and larger desires, above all the determination that the meaning of “England” that finally prevails shall be the meaning imposed by themselves rather than that which has been stamped upon the nation by the reigning monarch.

Hotspur understands all too well the compelling force of history and the need to situate himself in relation to it. There is, on the one hand, his strong sense of the past and, on the other, a strong desire to create a favorable impression of himself in that relation. His rhetoric is provocative:

Shall it for shame be spoken in these days,
Or fill up chronicles in time to come,
That men of your nobility and power
Did gage them both in an unjust behalf
(As both of you, God pardon it, have done)
To put down Richard, that sweet lovely rose,
And plant this thorn, this canker Bolingbroke?

(1H, I.iii. 169-75)

This is both brilliant and naive. Hotspur distances himself from his friends as he embraces them. He understands the moral force by which chronicles are directed, the roles of shame and injustice in their construction. The “sweet lovely rose” is a palpably self-serving description that supplies a rallying point for the rebellion but violently contradicts the actions of these three men in the earlier play. Historical simplification carries the argument: good and bad, present and future, are its bases. The rebels see a need to talk themselves out of complicity in the crime of killing their king. They are enraged at having been duped by Bolingbroke, “this king of smiles,” “this fawning greyhound” (1H, I.ii.243, 248). The worse Bolingbroke is, the better they are. If the king is a villainous regicide and their enemy, they are, by logical extension, virtuous simply in their opposition to him. Thus, they are “for” England, while he is its enemy. And yet it is they, the rebels, who are willing to divide England into the spoils of victory. The tripartite division of the realm, described by Holinshed and realized in the play with the aid of a map in act III, scene i, runs counter to the prevailing mood of national consciousness and patriotism of Elizabethan England. The act of division effectively isolates the rebels and lends credibility to the prince's party as no amount of moralizing would have done. It is possible to see the rebels' division of the kingdom as an internal directive to the audience about the threat to the national well-being offered by those who would divide the nation.

Unlike those of the other histories, the characters of Part One seldom engage in conscious analysis of history, state, or politics. The motor of its drama is the psychological forces that prompt rebellion and the social aftermath that rebellion can produce; its historiography takes the form of self-justifying narrative. Northumberland's revolt is a product of envy and the perceived ingratitude of the king. Bolingbroke's version of his ascent to power is no deeper. In his crucial exchange with Hal, he remembers Richard and himself and the opposition that brought him to the throne. His speeches describe a king who degraded the dignity of his office, and he uses that perceived degradation as a justification for usurpation. The energy of the drama of Part One whirls about issues of motivation and personal and political morality. The issue of the criminal incipience of the reign of this monarch supplies a straightforward political moral. A great crime begets great consequences. This play's memory—its accumulated references and allusions to the past—has occluded the great speech of Richard II, who reminded his hearers of the history of bloodshed upon which the English crown was founded—on “the sad tales of the death of kings … All murthered” (R, III.ii. 156-60). Its focus is on the dramaturgical mechanics of war and heroism and opportunism. History has become a simple matter of sides. Henry's description of his ascent and Richard's fall invokes a Manichean view of the past that does nothing to find truth but does much to vindicate him. Its purpose is served with Machiavellian efficacy, since it elicits from the wayward son apparent feelings of guilt and the famous oath of both fealty and love and the promise of redemption:

I will redeem all this on Percy's head,
And in the closing of some glorious day
Be bold to tell you that I am your son.

(1H, III.ii.133-5)

Hal's preoccupation with achieving greatness through the crown lends most of his great speeches a forward- rather than a backward-looking quality. He predicts and prepares a future from which he will be able to look back and through which posterity will judge him.

V

Part Two of Henry IV is another story. Here, the impulses of history and history making dominate the action, although the process is tainted and confused by popular and vulgar reality. As Part One devolves heavily on the personal, on issues and theories of character and the forging of historic personae, Part Two more sweepingly locates human character and action in an encompassing framework of political and historical conceptualization. This is a drama of ideas, in which the difficulty of writing history within the framework of a visibly and inconveniently awkward reality is addressed. The powerbrokers of this history want something more complex and ambitious than to seem ethical in the eyes of their subjects, their sons, and their posterity—they want to be right and to have been right. In pursuit of these aims they are constantly placed in the position of having to reflect on the past and to re-form their reflection into suitable and, usually, self-aggrandizing forms. We are thus inadvertently alerted to the potential unreliability of any history that is written by its participants. The often engaging triviality of Part One—Hal's mockery of Hotspur, Falstaff's joking, Lady Hotspur's threatening to break her husband's little finger—is sidelined in this play. There is, to put it simply, no innocence in Part Two. Even its naughtiness is tainted by the gravity of the issues of history. The play moves inexorably to its stunning and eternally ambiguous climax as Prince Hal becomes King Henry and promptly rejects Falstaff. Where Part One has dramatic excitement, life (comedy), death (tragedy), and heroic action (epic), Part Two has self-reflexive moral and intellectual magnitude, which are reinforced and complicated by the omnipresence of moral uncertainty. And it is in Hal's addressing the questions of uncertainty and ambiguity that his difference from the other makers of history is demonstrated. Unlike those around him, including his father, his brother John, Northumberland, and Westmoreland, among others, Hal shows strength in his ability and willingness to acknowledge the inevitable and inherent ambiguity of political and historical processes. While his friends and enemies argue by asseveration, Hal alone seems able to accept and abide with the reality of moral uncertainty or relativism.

A kind of ill temper pervades the play: each of the chief characters seems to anticipate impediment and conflict, to which expectation they respond in advance with quick and ready aggression. Rumor's presence as prologue establishes the sequence of lies followed by compromised and thwarted responses: this pattern somehow becomes fixed as a condition of the structure of the play. The result is an essentially human motive of angry pessimism that lends the project of history making a bias that the characters and the play never shake. Pugliatti argues convincingly that Part Two enacts “a process of corruption whose seeds are already present—albeit hardly stressed—in Part One. Various forms of sickness now attack the core … and in the end, the axiologies which militate against the king are defeated by a process of pollution which changes their very nature.”¹⁶

What Dover Wilson really showed in The Fortunes of Falstaff was not so much his own conviction that the rejection of Falstaff was morally justified as the fact that it was foolish of readers before him not to have seen it coming.¹⁷ Clearly he saw it coming, but clearly he equally wanted it to be right, proper, and Christian that it did occur. We have moved away from such moral certainty and absolutism in our reading of Shakespeare. Wilson's reading of the rejection is, interestingly, an example of the very reading of history advanced by a proponent of a rather secular notion of the “rules” of historiography. I refer, of course, to Warwick, whose “hatch and brood of time” speech propounds the convenient ideology of the repetitiveness, predictability, and inexorability of a comprehensible historical process:

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, who in their seeds
And weak beginnings lie intreasured.
Such things become the hatch and brood of time;
And by the necessary form of this
King Richard might create a perfect guess
That great Northumberland, then false to him,
Would of that seed grow to a greater falseness,
Which should not find a ground to root upon
Unless on you.

(1H, III.i.80-92)

Henry's response is a resounding affirmation of this view: “Are these things then necessities? / Then let us meet them like necessities” (1H, III.i.93-4). Looking back, we can wisely predict what is to come. The point is less banal than it might look. Warwick alludes to the complex forces that shape historical progressions. While a treacherous man must always be watched, it is also true that the “history” in all men's lives and the “nature” of times deceased have become something other than the things themselves—they have become language and argument. Warwick's way of understanding history repeats the notion of history as an orderly master plan, possibly presided over by a master planner. But it is not confirmed by the deliberate subversions and interstitial interventions of this extraordinary play, which constantly threatens to switch moral, political, and dramatic direction. Pugliatti makes the further point that “Warwick's idea of change taking place in time and his stress on the observer's activity also epitomizes the spectator's experience, which is obviously the mirror image of the dramatist's.”¹⁸2 Henry IV puts us on guard against the transformative power of speech in a quite explicit way. The Lord Chief Justice dismisses Falstaff with words that might be an epigraph for this play: “I am well acquainted,” he tells him, “with your manner of wrenching the true cause the false way.”¹⁹

“Wrenching the true cause” is a fine metaphor for much of the narrative pattern of this play's history. In the histories, particularly, abstractions, memories, ideas, and certitudes are recovered into pure, whole, and traditional narrative forms nowhere so vividly as in the descriptions of historical battles. Shrewsbury is innocently misrepresented by Lord Bardolph as the glorious triumph of the “rebels”:

The King is almost wounded to the death:
And, in the fortune of my lord your son,
Prince Harry slain outright …
.....                                                                                                              Sir John,
                    Is prisoner to your son.

And then this:

                                                                                                              O, such a day,
So fought, so follow'd, and so fairly won,
Came not till now to dignify the times
Since Caesar's fortunes!

(2H, I.i.14-23)

That “Caesar” is perfect: an example of heroic glossing over the sordid realities of war in the borrowed robes of classical precedent, transporting both the orator and the auditor to those pure and unsullied realms of nostalgic imagination where history and mythology meet.

In the beginning of this play, however, the resolution is entirely illusory. The first dramatic scene begins with three rapid and confusing questions as the all-but-anonymous Lord Bardolph and the literally anonymous Porter fire interrogatives at each other, lending the opening a ferocious sense of anxiety. The scene then violently disjoins dramatic narrative by the introduction, not of lying—of which we have a plenitude in the play—but of sheer and terrible error. Lord Bardolph lyrically declaims the wrong tidings in full view of an audience that knows the truth, and he tragically compounds the error by sowing false hope amongst the rebels. The circulation of false information lends a potent, subversive force to this drama of disaster and produces feelings of confusion and preternaturally strained emotion. Among the rebels, to whom he brings this moment of misfounded ecstasy, is a man—Northumberland—who has to publicly carry the burden of having betrayed his own son and helped him to his grave. The scene is charged with multiguous and hopelessly confused emotions and information that cause the safety and certainty of conventional theatrical predictability to be radically disturbed. The audience is thrown into confusion about what it thinks and what it thinks it is supposed to think. The presence of a malevolent mischief is deeply felt by all who participate in and watch this scene as guilty and innocent parties to the rebellion are overwhelmed first by exhilarating and then shocking “news.” The heroic ugliness of Northumberland's “Let order die” speech, where he invokes murder and destruction upon mankind, calling on darkness to be “the burier of the dead” is a characteristically excessive and hyperbolical example of the tendency toward disintegration that is the signature of this play (2H, I.i. 155, 160). In Part One, whether we find the subplot carnivalesque, subversive of, or complementary to the monarchical plot, it is clearly and deliberately subordinate to it.²⁰

The same cannot be said of Part Two with its commencement in brutal and tragic error and its conclusion in ambiguity and disintegrity. Hal, it is true, is a kind of link with the heroic, but he is, by any standards, a critically compromised one by virtue of such things as his applause for Prince John's chicanery and his rejection and denial of the most spontaneous and vital part of his own past and, indeed, by his absence from so many of the crucial scenes of the play. The whole of this first scene, more of an overture to the play than even the induction, is a crazy vacillating career through a range of opposite emotions leading nowhere. And it is this pure, mad directionlessness of the scene that lends it strength. There is a quite extraordinary but emotionally charged pointlessness about it all. It is a scene whose purpose is entirely mysterious in terms of normal dramatic expectation. Nothing of the plot or story is advanced; it exists by itself as a surreal evocation of violently contradictory emotion, its connection to the drama merely temporal. It tells the audience nothing new. It simply reveals what everyone already knows: if you tell a dead soldier's father that his son is alive, you make him happy, and if you then tell him that he is, in fact, dead, you make him sad and violently angry. It is all very well to employ the Procrustean method of the kind of criticism that insists that such a scene strikes a thematic note, but this kind of analysis leaves more questions unanswered than answered. We are left with the simple but unpalatable reality of maliciously and gratuitously produced pain. However, more to the point is the way in which history is rendered unreliable, subjective, and susceptible to ideology, producing, instead of ultimate truth, a response of (healthy?) incredulity, which Lyotard recognized as the identifying stamp of the postmodern. The kind of mind—Lord Bardolph's in this case—that constructs a narrative of battle as Caesarian is a schooled, academy-forged and -mediated mind common to the “high people” of the plays in the tetralogy. The courtiers sound remarkably alike, regardless of what side they are on. Each has his own particular version of the “truth” without being capable of particularizing that truth as uniquely his. The moral uncertainties of this play, with its alternative histories of the recent events, reveal epistemological structures to be heavily and inevitably compromised. Thus, while the impulse to produce what Belsey following Lyotard calls a “grand narrative” reveals itself constantly in the posturing and the speeches of powerbrokers on both sides of the civil conflict, the play's actual narrative and moral energies tug it away from the ideological simplifications that such a narrative implies.²¹ Grand narrative is surely the impulse that motivates Northumberland's recognition of Morton, the bearer of ill news:

Yea, this man's brow, like to title-leaf,
Foretells the nature of a tragic volume.
So looks the strond whereon the imperious flood
Hath left a witness'd usurpation.

(2H, I.i.60-3)

Thus do the makers of history attempt to encompass and control the material of their narratives. Northumberland's deeply felt fearful anticipation is, nevertheless, couched in the accustomed metaphors of heroic history. Good news or bad is lifted from the realm of human action by an officially promulgated, academically sanctioned language of epic narrative. The story of Northumberland's family is presented in the speech as possessed of inherent and inevitable grandeur. The father strains to find meaning in the tragedy of his son's death. And he finds it in the precedents and rituals of rhetoric.

Disintegrity and a downwardly spiraling deconstruction of the enforced codes and forms of history making are the centers of energy of this strange play. They are most notoriously manifest in the treachery of Prince John; but criticism has not overlooked Prince Hal's complicity in the flagrant dishonesty. This is a modern world of expediency and pragmatism, and success is its highest reward, while honor and its effects are relegated to memory, to a quaint historical narrative upon which we may feed our thirst for order and old fashion but which will do nothing to enrich our lives. Hal's crown stands squarely upon the violation done to chivalry by the deception of the duke of Lancaster: chivalry dies in this play. The rejection of Falstaff is another of the signifiers of a monarchy centered in ambiguity and hypocrisy. And the erosion of certainties and the concomitant embrace of the “modern” are further exposed by the evidence of cruelty, corruption, and violence on the level of the street. Comic violence in the tavern is suddenly made very real and very ugly when the First Beadle warns Hostess Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, “Come, I charge you both, go with me, for the man is dead that you and Pistol beat amongst you” (2H, V. iv. 16-8).

History proper makes its most visible and verifiable appearance in the epilogue, when Rumour traverses the boundary between fact and fantasy with his reference to Oldcastle and his unconvincing assertion that “this [Falstaff] is not the man” (2H, epilogue, 32). The passage informs us that the narrative will continue “with Sir John in it”—that is, it knowingly promises the delights of comedy and sex (“fair Katherine of France”) as though it understands where the audience's real interest lies—not, evidently, with Henry. Making history himself, Shakespeare, according to Rackin, “severs the connection between his disreputable theatrical creation and its original historical namesake in order to evade censorship and prosecution. Named for the real historical Oldcastle, the character would have had real historical consequences for the players in the enmity of Oldcastle's present descendants. Dehistoricized by the name of Falstaff, he acquires the impotence (fall-staff) of fiction, but he also acquires its license.”²² Perhaps, of course, “Falstaff” is a wordplay not on fallen staffs but on full staffs, and stands for the opposite of impotence, which more accords with my own feelings about him—certainly he is one of the sexier presences in the play just as, in my opinion again, Hal is one of the least sexual of Shakespearean characters. Be that as it may, Rackin is surely right in adverting to this passage's sheer historicity just as Shakespeare seems explicitly to be denying it. In that denial of the historicity of Falstaff and in his correction of the assumption that Falstaff is based on Oldcastle, Shakespeare, in a way, subverts his own denial.

The almost compulsive reconstructions of the past that animate these chronicle plays reflect the persistence of a need, both in the characters of his plays and in the author himself, to construct something whole out of something inherently fragmented. The past is known only in bits and pieces and has, by the time Shakespeare is writing his epic, been molded into something only partially and unsatisfactorily known. The multiplicity of versions of the same history, already a fact in the late sixteenth century, is itself an index of a restless recognition of the ultimate failure of the grand narrative to be what it always purports to be—the last word on the subject. The Shakespearean project, starting with Richard II and continuing through three more plays, is another attempt to view that past and to reshape it yet again. The symphonic and sweeping generalizations about history and England undergo critical deconstructive scrutiny in the plays which follow, culminating in the scratchy “unconformities”—to use Kristian Smidt's term—of Henry IV Part Two.²³ The pristine “England,” longingly recalled in Gaunt's speech, remains a barely intact but, nevertheless, remembered reality in Richard II. It is an England ruled by “Divine Right,” a feudalism, according to Holderness, that is given “cohesion and structure by the central authority of a king bound to his subjects by reciprocal bonds of fealty.”²⁴ But even the economic bonds that, according to Gaunt, tie the nation together in mercenary agreements appropriate to “tenement[s]” and “pelting farm[s]” are a form of wholeness (R, IIA.60). That wholeness is a conception which the trajectory of the group of plays interrogates by slowly breaking it down into its component parts. For all the flaws that modern criticism has found in the person of King Henry V, his play is a celebration of the coherence of the English nation, bound together by civil bonds that are not—as Richard had misunderstood it—the patrimony of the monarch, but rather a commonwealth of many essentially and potentially equal participants. One of the key elements in the formation of the nation was a new regard for its history and a concomitant search for its native roots.

Notes

1. Phyllis Rackin, Stages of History: Shakespeare's English Chronicles (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 4-8.

2. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 81.

3. Graham Holderness, Nick Potter, and John Turner, Shakespeare: The Play of History (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 19.

4. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), p. 36.

5. Catherine Belsey, “Making Histories Then and Now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V,” in Uses of History: Marxism, Postmodernism and the Renaissance, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 24-46, 44.

6. Greenfeld, p. 47.

7. Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function, ed. Robert Schwartz (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978], p. 166.

8. Harry Berger Jr., “Psychoanalyzing the Shakespeare Text: The First Three Scenes of the Henriad,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 210-29, 215.

9. Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure, Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1961), Li.25-7. Further quotations will be cited in the text as R followed by the act, scene, and line number.

10. Rackin writes on this point: “The first line is a proud assertion of Richard's inherited, institutional authority as king; the second an anticlimactic confession of his inability to exercise it” (p. 47).

11. Belsey, “Making Histories Then and Now,” p. 35.

12. Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996), p. 108.

13. Stephen Greenblatt, “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V,” in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 18-47, 41.

14. Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 6.

15. Shakespeare, The First Part of King Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys, Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1960), Li. 1-2. Further quotations will be cited in the text as 1H followed by the act, scene, and line number.

16. Pugliatti, p. 119.

17. J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1943).

18. Pugliatti, p. 130.

19. Shakespeare, The Second Part of King Henry IV, ed. A. R. Humphreys, Arden Edition (London: Methuen, 1966), ILL 107. Further quotations will be cited in the text as 2H followed by act, scene, and line number.

20. See especially Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled: The Making of Historical Drama (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 130-78.

21. Belsey, “Making Histories Then and Now,” p. 44.

22. Rackin, p. 240.

23. Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare's History Plays (London: Macmillan, 1982).

24. Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled, p. 64.