SOURCE: Council, Norman. “Prince Hal: Mirror of Success.” Shakespeare Studies 7 (1974): 125-46.

[In the following essay, Council examines how Prince Hal, Falstaff, and Hotspur each respond to the code of honor documented in various Renaissance texts. The critic asserts that while Hotspur rigidly adheres to the code and Falstaff flatly rejects it, Hal remains aloof from its requirements but manipulates and exploits it to achieve political success.]

The idea that Shakespeare arranges the three principals of 1 Henry IV in a quasi-Aristotelian paradigm of the theme of honor has been so often iterated and has so dominated the teaching of the play that it has become a virtual truism. Hotspur, the argument goes, represents the excess, Falstaff the defect, and Hal the virtuous mean of the honorable man.¹ This has been an appealing idea, I suspect, partly because it is a convenient scheme and partly because if it were valid it would help to demonstrate either that Shakespeare had read his Aristotle or that the humanist revival had made the Aristotelian ethic so commonplace as to be dramatically useful. Unfortunately, this reading of the play does not bear scrutiny.

The difficulty is that Falstaff's and Hotspur's behavior in no way resembles any of the definitions of defective and excessive desire for honor which a wide variety of late sixteenth-century books on honor provide. The Nicomachean Ethics had defined honor as the “reward of virtue” and had clearly established that the desire for honor is to be judged excessive, moderate, or defective according to desert:

honour may be desired more than is right, or less, or from the right sources and in the right way. We blame both the ambitious man as aiming at honour more than is right and from wrong sources, and the unambitious man as not willing to be honoured even for noble reasons. …²

This statement of the idea was accepted with no substantial modification by most of the writers on honor of the 1580s and 1590s.³ Robert Ashley, a faithful Aristotelian eager to lay claim to his “Peripatetike” authority, whose essay Of Honour is likely to have been precisely contemporary with Shakespeare's play, makes it clear that Shakespeare's contemporaries think of a man's “deservings” as the mark by which he is to be judged ambitious or base minded. “The ambitious ys blamed because he hunteth after honour … more greedilie than he ought,” Ashley argues, and “contrariwise the abject or base minded ys … reprehended bicause that notwithstanding his good deservings he refuseth honour …” (pp. 41-42). Half a dozen other books or essays written in the decade surrounding Shakespeare's play deal in more or less detail with the question of an excessive desire for honor; they all rely on the basic assumption that honor is a positive good which man has an ethical responsibility to pursue, and that his pursuit of that honor is to be judged excessive or defective according to his deserts. John Norden's The Mirror of Honor is within a year of being contemporary with Shakespeare's play, and the danger to true honor which he remarks is typical. “Among the rest [of the dangers] Pride is the most perillous … whereby … highest reputation [may be] blemished, and that by assuming more of it selfe to it selfe, then reason or desert will yeeld, from other men” (p. 22). The Courtiers Academie, translated from the Italian in 1598, defines honor as “that ardent heate which enflameth the mind of man to glorious enterprises making him audacious against enemies, and to vices timorous,” a Platonic rather than an Aristotelian definition …, and the same work consistently justifies only that desire to acquire honor appropriate to the virtuous deed performed.⁴ The idea is a commonplace of such books as these. George Whetstone's The Honorable Reputation of a Souldier, printed in 1585, and William Segar's Honor Military and Civil, printed in 1602, display the consistency with which standard opinion judged a man excessive in his desire for honor only if he sought more honor than he deserved. Whetstone's book praises nineteen illustrious generals, emperors, and kings who, though of mean parentage, were justly elevated to such honorable eminence for valorous and virtuous deeds, but it damns the ambitious desire for unjustified honor. In one place, for instance, Whetstone describes the honor due soldiers who give their lives to protect the state, but he warns against “the difference between rash and necessary bouldnesse.” Martial virtue consists in doing the state service; “willful falling upon the enimies sword, is reduculous, daungerous, and very dishonorable.”⁵ Segar's book is more a codification of the rules of honorable combat than a definition of the idea, but he expresses the familiar assumption when he bewails the decadent tendency of the aristocratic young to “glory in the ancient badges, titles, and services of their Auncestors” even though they have done nothing to warrant the honor they claim.⁶ In as august a place as Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and in as unexpected a place as Thomas Nashe's bid for epic respectability one can observe the ubiquity of this basic judgment. In Book 7, Hooker justifies the rewards of honor, even to ecclesiastics, by arguing that “there is always some kind of virtue beneficial, wherein they excel who receive honour.” “Degrees of honor,” he concludes, “are distinguished according to the value of those effects which the same beneficial virtue doth produce.”⁷ And in Christs Teares Over Jerusalem Nashe reverts to a characteristic tone to condemn as ambition the desire for honor beyond one's—in this case martial—deserts. “Ambition,” Nashe asserts, “hath changed his name unto honor. … Not the honour of the fielde (Ambitions onely enemy) … but Brokerly blowne up honour … honour bestowed for damned deserts.”⁸

These are only a few instances, of course, but most of these writers are expounders rather than explorers of the orthodox, so they do provide evidence that standard opinion among Shakespeare's contemporaries viewed honor as a positive good—indeed, the “chief good,” as Ashley, following Aristotle, defines it—to be pursued, and that those contemporaries judged a desire for honor excessive or defective according to desert. If Shakespeare's intent had been to shape his play according to the Aristotelian paradigm which Tillyard and others have proposed, he would surely have used the widespread understanding of Aristotelian excess and defect which was available to him. He did not, however, create Hotspur as “the ambitious man … aiming at Honour more than is right and from wrong sources,” Falstaff as “the unambitious man … not willing to be honoured even for noble reasons,” nor make Hal a resolution of those extremes as the man who desires honor “from the right sources and in the right way.”

Falstaff never rejects reward, merely the established honorable ways of getting it; far from unambitiously declining to be honored for noble deeds, he, ambitious to a fault, very much wants to be honored for ignoble deeds. Shakespeare makes the distance between Falstaff's deserts and his desire for reward clear in both the comic and the chronicle scenes. Most explicit are his early exaggerations of the numbers that robbed him and his later demand for reward for killing Hotspur. In the first instance every line he speaks seeks unwarranted acclaim for his presumed swordsmanship and heroism.

I am a rogue if I were not at half-sword with a dozen of them two hours together. I have ‘scaped by miracle. I am eight times thrust through the doublet, four through the hose; my buckler cut through and through, my sword hacked like a handsaw—ecce signum. I never dealt better since I was a man. All would not do. A plague of all cowards!

(II.iv.162-68)⁹

In the second instance he demands an honorable title on the pretense of having killed Hotspur.

There is Percy: if your father will do me any honour, so; if not, let him kill the next Percy himself. I look to be either earl or duke, I can assure you.

(V.iv.138-42)

Compared with Falstaff's, Hotspur's desire for honor is modesty itself, for he quite consciously bases his claim on what he and everyone else in the play, enemies and allies, consider to be noble deeds. Even King Henry sees Hotspur's honor as unstained.

A son [Hotspur] who is the theme of honour's tongue;
Amongst a grove, the very straightest plant;
Who is sweet Fortune's minion and her pride. …

(I.i.80-82)

And throughout the play “honour's tongue” sounds Hotspur's name again and again. The emphasis is consistently on the honor his valor deserves, and though Henry will see it as the beginning of rebellion, he never questions that Hotspur deserves the “never dying honor” he has gained “against renowned Douglas!”

If Hotspur and Falstaff do not represent Aristotelian moral extremes for Hal to stand between, clearly the play employs the pervasive theme of honor in a different manner than has commonly been supposed. Reference to sixteenth-century books on honor demonstrates a remarkable similarity between the details of behavior which they describe as the perfect attributes of the honorable man and the behavior which Shakespeare gives Hotspur. This close and consistent similarity makes it clear that Hotspur's role in the play is to embody perfectly the principles of a rigorous and well-defined code of honor; he is a “mirror of honor,” as many contemporary “remembrances,” exempla, and biographies of illustrious men used the phrase. Conversely, Shakespeare makes Falstaff consciously and explicitly reject the code of honor, the demands of which he understands but repudiates; rather than representing a defective desire for less honor than he deserves, therefore, he dramatizes the nature and consequences of a reasoned rejection of the pervasive code of honor. Shakespeare keeps Hal aloof from the demands of the code, for, rather than accepting or rejecting the code, Hal exploits it for his pragmatic purposes; he is thereby made, much as Shakespeare had done with Bolingbroke in Richard II, a mirror of success.

Regarded in this way, the issue of Falstaff's cowardice is moot. At the heart of the code of honor is the principle that honor is more precious than life. Various tracts elaborately codify the forms of honor to be sought and protected through virtuous deeds; virtually all of them begin with the assumptions that honor originates in martial valor done in service of the state and that death is to be preferred before the dishonor caused by defeat or flight. “In any case,” Count Romei has Gualinguo remark in The Courtiers Academie, “a man of honor should alwaies preferre death, before infamous saftie. …”¹⁰ William Segar, in the preface “To the Reader” in The Booke of Honor and Armes, lightly makes the same assumption before he goes on to codify the rules of honorable combat. “The matter of content is Iustice and Honor. For love whereof, we shun no care of minde, losse of wealth, nor adventure of life.”¹¹ This position is familiar enough, and, of course, a number of Shakespeare's characters, with varying degrees of sincerity, maintain it. Shakespeare confronts Falstaff with this honorable demand in both the chronicle and comic scenes and has him consistently and consciously reject it. Falstaff's catechism on honor is in response to Hal's saying, as he exits, that Falstaff “owest God a death.” “Well,” Falstaff muses, “'tis no matter; honor pricks me on.” But he will have none of the widespread contention, displayed by the books on honor, that honor is more precious than life. It is but a nominal ethic, and clearly not worth dying for.

What is honor? A word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? Air.

“Insensible” to the dead, unavailable to the living, honor is finally for Falstaff “a mere scutcheon” (V.i.127-41). By having Falstaff place such emphasis on honor's belonging uniquely but only ornamentally to the dead, Shakespeare produces a character who is perfectly aware of the central demand which honor makes but who is unwilling to pay the price. Poins has Falstaff exactly, and distinguishes him from his more simply motivated fellows, when he anticipates Falstaff's flight from Gad's Hill.

Well, for two of them, I know them to be as truebred cowards as ever turned back; and for the third, if he fight longer than he sees reason, I'll forswear arms.

(I.ii.177-80)

At Shrewsbury, Falstaff's actions represent, as do those of the other major characters, precisely the attitude toward honor which he has maintained throughout, and the “battle” in which he engages there displays the logical conclusion of that attitude. Shakespeare gives Falstaff some very curious things to do at Shrewsbury; none of them furthers the plot, but the substitution of the bottle of sack for his pistol, the ragamuffin soldiers that Falstaff leads to slaughter, and the battle with Douglas all display a character who by rejecting all the principles of honor has become the antithesis of the honorable man. The ragamuffin soldiers and the sack are convenient instances of Falstaff's satisfying his desire for personal gain and his appetites rather than the demands of honor. As one would expect, the tracts on honor provide evidence that the code considered physical appetites a danger to a soldier's valor, and therefore his honor. Whetstone's Honorable Reputation of a Souldier, for instance, remarks that “When the body is stuffed with delicates, the mind is dull, and desirous of ease, which is the undoer of a Souldier …” (sig. Dii). One is reminded of the Antony whom Octavius Caesar admired because he, faced with famine, “didst drink / The stale of horses and the gilded puddle / Which beasts would cough at.” “And all this,” Caesar concludes in comparing the honorable Antony with Cleopatra's Antony, “(It wounds thine honour that I speak it now) / Was borne so like a soldier that thy cheek / So much as lank'd not” (I.iv.61-63, 68-71). When Hal discovers the bottle of sack in place of Falstaff's pistol we are given a clear if somewhat crude symbol of the deliberate inversion of honorable values which Falstaff represents: he prefers sack, let alone life, before honor. Hal throws the bottle at him and exits; Falstaff replies quite explicitly to this protest at his dishonorable behavior.

I like not such grinning honor as Sir Walter hath. Give me life, which if I can save, so: if not, honor comes unlooked for, and there's an end.

(V.iii.58-61)

Falstaff's counterfeit death is but the logical conclusion of the role he has played in regard to honor, for, by escaping from Douglas by feigning death, Falstaff is made quite literally to act out his preference for life before honor. Dead, Falstaff could anticipate only the “mere scutcheon” which honor can provide, and the battle with Douglas provides Falstaff with the opportunity to act upon, and to articulate, his priorities.

'Sblood, 'twas time to counterfeit, or that hot termagant Scot had paid me, scot and lot too. Counterfeit? I lie, I am no counterfeit: to die is to be a counterfeit, for he is but the counterfeit of a man, who hath not the life of a man: but to counterfeit dying, when a man thereby liveth, is to be no counterfeit, but the true and perfect image of life indeed.

(V.iv.112-19)

If Falstaff be the true and perfect image of life, Hotspur is certainly the true and perfect image of honor. Seemingly inconsequential details of Hotspur's behavior, from the outset of the play and in each of the eight scenes in which he appears, coincide so exactly with schematic descriptions of the honorable man which had become commonplace in the 1580s and 1590s that there seems little doubt that Shakespeare was at pains to create Hotspur as the perfect mirror of honor. This definition of the character represents a consistent modification of the Hotspur who appears in Holinshed. The chronicle characteristically provides the Percys with what little justification for rebellion it allows by reminding its readers that Henry is a usurper, “for the which [usurpation] undoubtedly both he, and his posteritie tasted such troubles, as put them still in daunger of their states, till their direct succeeding line was quite rooted out. …”¹² Shakespeare, on the other hand, carefully keeps Hotspur distinct from his fellow rebels by making his act of rebellion—and all his other actions—a consequence of his adherence to the principles of honor.

Hotspur's definition as the honorable man begins with King Henry's demand for the Scottish prisoners and his refusal to ransom Edmund Mortimer. Shakespeare develops the definition from a hint found in Holinshed that the king's demand is counter to the code of honor. Holinshed reports the quarrel, noting that only “Mordake, Erle of Fife, the Duke of Albanies sonne” had been delivered to the king in spite of the king's having demanded all the prisoners, and concludes by explaining the reason for the Percys' angry response to this demand.

Wherewith the Percies [were] sore offended, for that they claymed them as their owne proper prisoners, and their peculiar prayes. …¹³

The idea that prisoners are a source of honor (the peculiar praise of the captors) and the idea that prisoners, until ransomed, remain the property of their captors unless, as in the case of the earl of Fife, their royal blood requires their being delivered to the king—these had been commonplace enough aspects of the code of honor to permit using the ideas on the stage at least as early as The Spanish Tragedy. Half of Kyd's second scene, it may be recalled, debates whether Lorenzo or Horatio deserves the honor and reward of Balthazar's capture. The king, appropriately, adjudicates the issue; Hieronimo pleads Horatio's case, “enforced by nature and by law of arms,”¹⁴ and the king awards the ransom and arms to Horatio, the captor, but the noble prisoner to Lorenzo, the prince. Indeed, Shakespeare returns to the matter of honorable and appropriate disposition of prisoners in the final scene of 1 Henry IV, so this particular aspect of the codes of honorable behavior is a familiar enough subject for the stage. A. R. Humphreys notes that “the law of Arms” permits Hotspur to keep his prisoners and cites Pallas Armata (1683) as authority.¹⁵ He might also have cited William Segar, whose Honor Military and Civil details the various rules of honor governing the escape or ransom of prisoners and is more nearly contemporary with the play,¹⁶ though indeed the idea that ransom and other honorable rewards under the law of arms belong to the captor is implicit in most books on the subject. In Shakespeare's first scene, he has King Henry explicitly describe Hotspur's prisoners as “honorable spoil” and has Westmoreland call Hotspur's victory “a conquest for a prince to boast of.” It is consequently a clear affront to Hotspur's honor to demand more from him than is the king's due, namely, the royal earl of Fife, whom Hotspur has appropriately agreed to surrender. Shakespeare further develops that affront by introducing Hotspur's account of the popinjay lord into the quarrel. The emphasis has been on Hotspur's “well deserved honor,” and Hotspur's description of the arduous battle makes clear the distinction between honor “dearily bought” on the battlefield, as Whetstone's Honorable Reputation phrases it (sig. Bv), and the foppish posturings of the popinjay.

Shakespeare's introduction of this curious lord also assists in the resolution of the most troublesome problem implicit in his effort to define Hotspur as a mirror of honor. Honor, in both its tangible and intangible forms, is ultimately dispensed by the monarch, and rebellion is per se a dishonorable act. The popinjay lord provides Hotspur with an honorable excuse for not having delivered his prisoners and thus delays his open rebellion. He is, of course, still denying the king his prisoners when he describes the popinjay's behavior to the king, but again Shakespeare has Henry pursue the matter in a manner designed to affront Hotspur's honor without raising the question of his loyalty. When the king describes Hotspur's brother-in-law as “the foolish Mortimer, / Who, on my soul, hath wilfully betray'd / The lives of those that he did lead to fight …” (I.iii.79-81), the insult is clear. This, after all, is what Falstaff does at Shrewsbury.¹⁷ Hotspur's reply implies no disloyalty to the king; it, rather, defends Mortimer's honor. He has “dearily bought” his honor in battle with Glendower, and the honor so gained cannot, for Hotspur, exist side by side with the dishonorable treachery of which Mortimer stands accused.

He never did fall off, my sovereign liege,
But by the chance of war: to prove that true
Needs no more but one tongue for all those wounds,
Those mouthed wounds, which valiantly he took
.....In changing hardiment with great Glendower.
.....Then let not him be slander'd with revolt.

(I.iii.93-111)

The king does not argue. He answers Hotspur with a deliberate insult, accusing him of lying and dismissing him with a belittling form of address.

Thou dost belie him, Percy, thou dost belie him.
.....Art thou not asham'd? But sirrah, henceforth
Let me not hear you speak of Mortimer:
Send me your prisoners with the speediest means,
Or you shall hear in such a kind from me
As will displease you.

(I.iii.112-20)

It is this affront which arouses Hotspur's celebrated ire, but this is a quite appropriate, not an excessive, response for the honorable man to make. The speech in which Hotspur thinks “it were an easy leap, / To pluck bright honour from the pale-faced moon” is set in a scene which displays Hotspur's irascibility, not his ambition, and sixteenth-century books on honor usually associate anger with honor. This is probably the speech which most occasioned the quasi-Aristotelian reading of the play, but if the urge to see the play as being organized according to a specific philosophical scheme remains overpowering, the Platonic description of man's tripartite soul provides a considerably more satisfactory explanation of Hotspur's outburst—and of Falstaff's sensuality—than does the Aristotelian ethic. In the fourth book of The Republic, Plato identifies the desire for honor with “passion or spirit,” which combines with the rational and the concupiscent to make up the three principles of the soul. This identification is expressed in the sixteenth century in various places; Robert Ashley is the most explicit:

And seeing (as Plato will have yt) the powre of the mind ys of three partes, whereof one ys named reason, another termed anger, and a third called desire. … Honour seemeth to have his root and beginning of the second, for … the desire of honour … as Plato saieth, cometh out of the angry part of the mind. … So we see that men of great mindes are much moved with honour, but that the abject, and baser sort be nothing affected therwith because the sence and feeling thereof ys geven only to those that are of high spirite.

(Of Honour, p. 40)

This connection between the irascible passion and the desire for honor is a more likely origin of Hotspur's outburst in Act I than the theory of Aristotelian excess, just as the Platonic idea that concupiscence uncontrolled by reason turns to sloth is a more likely origin of Falstaff's behavior. One has only to recall Pyrochles' ire in Canto 5 and Cymochles' sloth in Canto 6 of Book II of The Faerie Queene to observe a more explicitly allegorical use of the Platonic idea and, indeed, to observe how excessive irascibility was apt to be portrayed in a sixteenth-century poem. By having Hotspur respond with this angry outburst to the affronts Henry has leveled against his honor, Shakespeare continues to define Hotspur as a man who perfectly embodies all the characteristics of the honorable man.

The dilemma remains that it is the king who has affronted Hotspur's honor, and disloyalty to the king is itself a source of dishonor. Hotspur, after all, has just asked that Mortimer not “be slander'd with revolt.” At the next moment in the play, after King Henry's insult and Hotspur's angry response have been displayed, Shakespeare has Worcester and Northumberland quite illogically tell Hotspur, as though he were ignorant of the fact, that Mortimer has been proclaimed heir to the throne by Richard. This delayed information provides a resolution to the dilemma, even if it be realistically improbable that Hotspur would not know of Mortimer's claim, for Hotspur can now see his virtuous and therefore honorable duty to be the restoration of Mortimer as the rightful king. The long speech that he is given in response to this information emphasizes the injustice of which his father and uncle have been guilty in aiding Bolingbroke and the honor which they have consequently lost.

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?

(I.iii.168-74)

This justification is as much a part of Hotspur's honorable behavior as his anger. By providing it, Shakespeare allows Hotspur to pursue his honor by righting the wrong which he considers Bolingbroke, with the Percys' aid, to have committed.

                    yet time serves wherein you may redeem
Your banish'd honours and restore yourselves
Into the good thoughts of the world again;
Revenge the jeering and disdain'd contempt
Of this proud king. …

(I.iii.178-82)

Restoring their tarnished honor is never, of course, Northumberland's or Worcester's motive. They, rather, are concerned to protect themselves against the king, who they know will find “a time to pay us home.” Hotspur's commitment to the principles of honor isolates him from the pragmatic workings of his allies and of his enemies, leaving him with a naïveté which will have disastrous consequences for him at Shrewsbury.

In the first of the scenes at Shrewsbury Shakespeare develops a virtually self-contained dramatic pattern which reflects in small both the nobility and the practical shortcomings of Hotspur's commitment to honor. He enters with Douglas, who calls him “the king of honour,” to discover that Northumberland's forces will not arrive. Holinshed had indeed reported wholesale defections from the rebels' cause, and Shakespeare dramatizes these defections as the occasion of a series of choices which Hotspur must make. He responds to the first news in practical fashion; he knows that his father's absence weakens their army, but argues that they now have a refuge should fortune turn against them. “Were it good,” he asks, “To set the exact wealth of all our states / All at one cost?” (IV.i.45-47). But Shakespeare has Worcester argue that Northumberland's absence might “breed a kind of question in our cause. / … We of the off'ring side,” he argues, “Must keep aloof from strict arbitrement, / And stop all sight-holes, every loop from whence / The eye of reason may pry in upon us” (IV.i.68-72). This slur on the justice of their cause touches Hotspur's ruling concern, and Shakespeare gives him a characteristic reply. Northumberland's absence, for Hotspur, now “lends a lustre and more great opinion, / A larger dare to our great enterprise. …” Vernon enters to this with his glittering description of the king's forces and of the renascent Prince of Wales, news which fills Hotspur with eager expectation of the honorable actions of war, the same sort of eager irascibility Shakespeare has him display in his response to the king's insult in Act I.

They come like sacrifices in their trim,
And to the fire-ey'd maid of smoky war
All hot and bleeding will we offer them.
.....                    I am on fire
To hear this rich reprisal is so nigh,
And not yet ours!

(IV.i.113-19)

Shakespeare delays Vernon's other news, Glendower's absence, until after Hotspur's compelling desire for honor has been thus brought forward, by which time no deterrent of a merely practical kind can compete. The scene begins with Hotspur's debating the effect on the rebellion of Northumberland's sickness; it concludes with Hotspur so committed to honor that he can happily dismiss success—and life—to serve it.

Doomsday is near; die all, die merrily.

(IV.i.134)

Yet this compulsion is but part of the perfect image of honor, corresponding to Hotspur's outburst in Act I, scene iii. There, Shakespeare has Hotspur justify his opposition to the king by describing it as a virtuous and therefore honorable effort to restore Mortimer; he reintroduces that justification into the play in Hotspur's next scene. After a brief scene which introduces Falstaff's pitiful soldiers, the action returns to the rebel camp to disclose a Hotspur who, though eager for battle, is prepared by the end of the scene to send his uncle to negotiate with the king. Much of this scene is taken up by a long speech which Shakespeare gives Hotspur to rehearse the Percys' role in Bolingbroke's usurpation and the dishonor they have consequently suffered.

In short time after, he deposed the King,
Soon after that, deprived him of his life.
.....To make that worse, suffered his kinsman March,
Who is, if every owner were well placed,
Indeed his king, to be engaged in Wales
.....Disgraced me in my happy victories
.....Rated mine uncle from the Council board,
In rage dismissed my father from the Court
.....And in conclusion drove us to seek out
This head of safety. …

(IV.iii.90-103)

No narrative or expository purpose is served by this rehearsal, for the information it provides is already common property. It does, however, provide the necessary balance to Hotspur's honor. In his prior scene, Hotspur's honorable impatience for the glories of battle was emphasized; here his sense of the virtuous intent which justifies his actions and of the dishonor the king has offered him is the central concern. Hotspur's offer to negotiate a settlement thus balances the grandiose “Die all, die merrily” with which Shakespeare concludes the previous scene. At the end of the next scene in which Hotspur appears these two aspects of his honor are merged in a single speech. After further characterizing Hotspur by having Worcester assume that he would abandon the war should “the liberal and kind offer of the King” be made known to him, Shakespeare gives Hotspur a speech which precisely states the balance between his eager pursuit of honor and his justification of that pursuit.

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!
Now, for our consciences, the arms are fair
When the intent of bearing them is just.

(V.ii.81-88)

Hotspur thus enters battle the picture of an honorable man, secure in conscience and indifferent to death if it add honor to an otherwise valueless life. His death is displayed as the logical consequence of this attitude. Hotspur, wishing that Hal's “name in arms were now as great as mine,” only regrets that Hal is not a more honorable foe, and his death, immediately juxtaposed with Falstaff's feigning death, is as precisely the true and perfect image of honor as Falstaff's action is the image of life. He dies pronouncing the basic article of the creed of honor.

I better brook the loss of brittle life
Than those proud titles thou hast won of me:
They wound my thoughts worse than thy sword my flesh. …

(V.iv.77-79)

As Shrewsbury is the scene where Shakespeare brings Hotspur and Falstaff to the conclusions demanded by the roles in the theme of honor he has given them to play, so it displays the successful consequences of Hal's role. Hal, throughout the play, is kept aloof from the intricate demands of honor that so compel Hotspur and repel Falstaff; Shakespeare makes Hal concerned with honor only as a means to other ends. Hal sounds the theme of honor in his first soliloquy, which, if viewed in terms of the code of honor, is more devious than the “Aristotelian” reading of the play assumes. That soliloquy, the interview with his father in Act III, and his actions at Shrewsbury comprise Hal's explicit part in the theme of honor, though some comic commentary on the theme may be intended by the scenes at Gad's Hill and The Boar's Head. Hal's part in the theme of honor is, then, conspicuously less extensive than Hotspur's, and, though Shakespeare uses extranarrative scenes such as Hotspur's conversation with Kate and argument with Glendower to expand the idea of Hotspur's commitment to honor, he consistently displays Hal in the comic scenes as indifferent to, or even amused by, the sort of honor which Hotspur so thoroughly serves. Success is Hal's motive, and he differs from Hotspur and Falstaff in his capacity to use honor as a means to that success.

Hal's first soliloquy announces his attitude toward honor; he intends, by engaging in low behavior, to delay the acquisition of honor so that, when acquired, his reputation will seem grander than it otherwise would. The soliloquy is familiar, but attention to its metaphoric and literal statements that reputation is but a facade that can be advantageously enhanced demonstrates it to be a thoroughly pragmatic plan to exploit apparent dishonor for advantage, rather than a statement of a sort of nascent nobility awaiting education or maturity. The images all emphasize the effects of unexpected behavior on observers; Hal nowhere considers the inherent worth of the behavior he plans.

So when this loose behavior I throw off,
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men's hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o'er my fault,
Shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I'll so offend, to make offence a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

(I.ii.203-12)

This attitude toward honor differs from Hotspur's in its intention to exploit, rather than serve, the code of honor. Instead of considering honor an ideal to which life itself must be sacrificed, Hal sees an honorable reputation as a useful political commodity, and he intends to exploit appearances to increase his grip on that commodity. To comprehend the difference between this attitude and the one Shakespeare gives Hotspur, one only need realize that most of the books on honor considered it so demanding a code that they argue that a single dishonorable act irrevocably destroys one's honor. The Courtiers Academie addresses itself to the problem with a typical judgment.

The greater sort of men hold their honor so deare, as that they dare not do evill, for feare of the losse thereof, knowing that it once only being lost, can never be recovered.

(Sig. P2)

Nor is the company one keeps to be taken lightheartedly by the man bent on honor. James Cleland's advice to his student reader describes “with what company [they] should converse.”

Companie changeth mens manners. … Hee that keepeth company with the wicked shal hardly escape without blemish, either in life or credite.¹⁸

Certainly the jealous and constant protection of honor is a familiar enough characteristic among noble figures of the Elizabethan stage for this manipulation of it to be marked in Hal. This first soliloquy introduces to the audience a unique character who, though no malignant Machiavel, intends to exploit appearances to gain success.

Hal's interview with his father develops the plan. As Falstaff will serve as a contrast, so Hotspur will serve as a means to the reputation Hal intends to acquire. It is an unusual scene. After a series of scenes filled with Hotspur's honorable outbursts or with rapid, witty, and irreverent dialogue between Falstaff and Hal, this scene stands alone with its long, discursive speeches both analyzing the nature and prophesying the effects of Hal's behavior. Save for the single, if major, fact that Henry can after this count Hal as a trusted ally, the scene contributes nothing to the narrative. It is clearly a pause, put right at the center of the play, designed to unfold the basic characterization of Hal which his first soliloquy has implied.

Hal is first and last his father's son, for, though Shakespeare here keeps Henry IV from recognizing the fact, they share the same assumptions and aspirations. Henry has two kinds of complaints about Hal's behavior, and the fact that the first is dealt with perfunctorily and the second at detailed length further defines the sort of response which Shakespeare gives Hal to the code of honor. Henry finds it incomprehensible, unless Hal be divinely sent to punish him, that Hal should match the “greatness of [his] blood” (III.ii.16) with “such inordinate and low desires” (III.ii.12). Hal, discrediting the excessive reports that “base newsmongers” have brought to Henry's ear, admits to the faults of youth and asks forgiveness. They are speaking the language of honor, for throughout sixteenth-century discussions of the idea runs the assumption that those of high birth have a correspondingly greater responsibility to be honorable. Castiglione's Courtier is one example.

For it is a great deale less dispraise for him that is not born a gentleman to faile in the acts of vertue, then for a gentleman. If he swerve from the steps of his ancestors, hee staineth the name of his family.¹⁹

William Segar sounds the same note.

And the more highlie he be borne, the worse reputation he meriteth, if he cannot continue the honor left him by his Ancestors.

(Booke of Honor and Armes, sig. F1-F2)

Shakespeare gives only thirty lines to Henry's concern about, and Hal's apology for, having ignored these basic demands of honor. Hal asks forgiveness, and Shakespeare has Henry dismiss the issue with a brief “God pardon thee!” before he turns the scene to its central concern with the practical effects of Hal's action, a concern which will occupy the next 130 lines.

Henry complains that Hal's actions have ruined “The hope and expectation of thy time” (III.ii.36) and quite unabashedly asserts that the manipulation of public reputation is necessary to success. As in Hal's first soliloquy, the terms in which Shakespeare has the Lancasters express themselves emphasize their assumption that honor is a useful facade which may be put on or off, like masks, at will. Hal has there determined that his reformation should “show more goodly, and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off.” Henry here describes the effects of having “dressed” himself in humility.

And there I stole all courtesy from heaven,
And dressed myself in such humility
That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts,
Loud shouts and salutations from their mouths,
Even in the presence of the crowned King.
Thus did I keep my person fresh and new,
My presence, like a robe pontifical,
Ne'er seen but wonder'd at, and so my state,
Seldom, but sumptuous, show'd like a Feast. …

(III.ii.50-58)

Conspicuously absent from this is any sense that an honorable reputation, being the mark of virtuous action, is valuable in itself, an attitude Hotspur is consistently made to exemplify. And when Henry turns to comparisons between Hal and King Richard, as he then was, and between Hotspur and himself, as the young Bolingbroke, his description of honor as a means to political ends becomes more extreme. Richard lost the crown because he did not attend to his reputation, Henry asserts, and he warns that Hal stands in similar danger. Hotspur, Henry most illogically asserts, has more right to the crown than Hal, for he has achieved a more honorable reputation. This last is at once the most extreme conclusion of Henry's attitude toward the practical political effects of an honorable reputation and the clearest instance of the difference between Hotspur's thoroughgoing commitment to the ideals of honor and the Lancasters' exploitation of those ideas.

Now, by my sceptre and my soul to boot,
He hath more worthy interest to the state
Than thou, the shadow of succession:
For of no right, nor colour like to right,
He doth fill fields with harness in the realm,
Turns head against the lion's armed jaws,
And, being no more in debt to years than thou,
Leads ancient lords and reverend bishops on
To bloody battles and to bruising arms.

(III.ii.97-105)

Shakespeare delays Hal's response until all of Henry's accusations have been expressed, then in that response gives Hal precisely the same assumptions about the nature of honor. There are alternative responses. The king has concluded by saying that Hal is even able “To fight against me under Percy's pay … / To show how much thou art degenerate” (III.ii.126-28); so, were honor at the stake, it would be logical for Hal to profess his interest in maintaining the succession in order to avert civil discord, or his interest in putting down rebellion, or some other manifestly virtuous interest. Indeed, in the sources from which the play is drawn, just such an interest is the prince's motive. In Holinshed and in The Famous Victories this meeting is used by the prince to convince his father that he has no intention of usurping the throne, which suspicion Holinshed reports slanderous informants to have planted in the king. In the play, however, Shakespeare modifies the scene to accord with his plan to develop Hal as the pragmatist who, aware of other men's commitment to the code of honor, determines that exploitation of that commitment is the way to success. Consequently, Shakespeare has Hal respond to Henry's complaints by announcing his intention to use Hotspur's reputation for his own gain.

I will redeem all this on Percy's head
And in the closing of some glorious day
Be bold to tell you that I am your son;
When I will wear a garment all of blood
And stain my favours in a bloody mask,
Which, wash'd away, shall scour my shame with it. …

(III.ii.132-37)

This is precisely the intention Hal has announced in his first soliloquy, and it is an intention which remains fundamentally different from the sort of commitment to honor which controls Hotspur. Hotspur's honorable reputation is useful to Hal, and he means to acquire it.

Hal's first speech at Shrewsbury puts into action his long-anticipated bid to enter the lists of chivalry. The reasons he gives for challenging Hotspur to single combat are beneficent and humane, and there is no evidence that the play intends that he be cynically or ironically understood. That Hal is pragmatic does not mean that he is diabolic. In fact, however, the action demands Shrewsbury, not a single encounter between Hal and Hotspur, so that Hal's offer can only be seen as a definition of character and not as a potential alternative to the narrative line. Hal has planned to make Hotspur exchange “His glorious deeds for my indignities,” and Shakespeare appropriately dramatizes that plan by having Hal challenge Hotspur to a trial of arms, the most explicitly honorable act available, to mark Hal's first step in his successful acquisition of an honorable reputation. The effect of this step is quickly seen in Vernon's glowing report to the rebel camp of Hal's challenge. Hotspur, jealous of his honor, asks if the challenge “seemed … in contempt,” and Vernon does considerably more than reassure him. His account describes a model instance of that honorable balance between the offering of honest praise and the rejection of self-praise which Glendower has so contorted in his argument with Hotspur and which Hotspur and Douglas so carefully maintain.

No, by my soul, I never in my life
Did hear a challenge urg'd more modestly.
.....He gave you all the duties of a man.
.....Spoke your deservings like a chronicle,
Making you ever better than his praise
By still dispraising praise valu'd with you,
And which became him like a prince indeed,
He made a blushing cital of himself. …

(V.ii.51-61)

This and Vernon's other descriptions exaggerate what the audience has already seen, and so exhibit the first successful consequence of Hal's deliberate entry into the honorable life. His plan is succeeding, for, as first described in Vernon's speech, his new reputation does in fact “show more goodly … / Than that which hath no foil to set it off.” Vernon, who has described Hal, armed, as having risen from the ground “like feather'd Mercury” and who has heard Hal's challenge, explicitly draws the comparison between these things and Hal's earlier behavior.

                              but let me tell the world—
If he outlive the envy of this day,
England did never owe so sweet a hope
So much misconstru'd in his wantonness.

(V.ii.65-68)

Hal's victory over Hotspur, with Falstaff lying by feigning death, puts into action the success which Hal has planned and Vernon described. It also dramatizes Hal's essential indifference to honor except as a means to other ends. The epitaph which Hal speaks over Hotspur's body is as much a farewell to the ideals of honor which have so compelled Hotspur's behavior as to Hotspur himself. John Dover Wilson compares Hal's supposed epitaph over Falstaff with Hamlet's over Yorick,²⁰ but Hal's speech over the dead Hotspur bears even closer resemblance to Hamlet's tracing the noble dust of Alexander until he finds it stopping a bunghole. Hamlet's trials in that play lead more logically to his rejection of human glory and honor as vanity, so in Hal's mouth, by comparison, the speech seems largely a commonplace; however, it is consistent with, and may even be a belated effort to provide a moral basis for, Hal's indifference to honor as an ideal.

HOTSPUR.
Percy thou art dust,
And food for—
HAL.
For worms, brave Percy. Fare thee well, great heart!
Ill-weav'd ambition, how much art thou shrunk!
When that this body did contain a spirit,
A kingdom for it was too small a bound;
But now two paces of the vilest earth
Is room enough.

(V.iv.84-91)

The Hal who then meets Falstaff with a willingness to gild a lie “with the happiest terms I have” and who elaborately arranges for the honorable release of Douglas is not a different or more educated Hal than the Hal of Act I, nor is he an embodiment of the triumph of moral mediocrity; he is a character in whom is dramatized the successful consequences of the pragmatic plans he has articulated in his first soliloquy and developed in his interview with King Henry. There is in the play no outright condemnation of this pragmatism, and if Hal's response to the world of the play makes him less sensual than Falstaff, less honorable than Hotspur, and less engaging than either, it is the response which, by definition, brings him success.

The structure suggested by the present argument is more characteristically Shakespearean than the supposed Aristotelian paradigm. To dramatize the beginnings of England's civil wars, Shakespeare makes honor a code of behavior central to the play and gives each of the major characters a different response to the demands of that code. Each suffers or enjoys the logical and ethical consequences of his response. Hamlet will, in a few years, call for plays “to hold, as 'twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (III.ii.24-27). The three principals of 1 Henry IV, and the play itself, are such mirrors.

Notes

1. David Berkeley and Donald Eidson, “The Theme of Henry IV, Part 1,” SQ [Shakespeare Quarterly], 19 (1968), 25-31, provide the most recent study. They consider honor only “a prominent subtheme” (p. 25), but in that context agree with the customary interpretation. They cite as proponents of this interpretation Zeeveld, SQ, 3 (1952); Haydn, The Counter-Renaissance (New York, 1950); Boas, Shakespeare and his Predecessors (New York, 1896); and W. B. Hunter, “Falstaff,” SAQ, 50 (1951), 86-95 (through error Hunter's article is cited as appearing in Shakespeare Quarterly). Hunter, indeed, extends this Aristotelian scheme to assign to the prince the virtues of “liberality,” “good temper,” “temperance,” “a sense of humor,” and even “magnanimity,” comparing these with appropriate excesses and defects in Hotspur and Falstaff. Curiously, Berkeley and Eidson overlook Tillyard's formulation of this interpretation in Shakespeare's History Plays (1944). Cleanth Brooks and Robert Heilman further sanction the idea and give it wide distribution in their text Understanding Drama (New York, 1948). A clear indication of the fairly recent but pervasive acceptance of the idea may be gained by comparing Kittredge's introduction to the play (Boston, 1940), where no hint of the “Aristotelian” reading of the play is implied, with Ribner's introduction to the play in The Kittredge Shakespeares series, where Ribner easily assumes that “Shakespeare adopts the Aristotelian principle of temperance, with real virtue as a mean between extremes” (Waltham, Mass., 1966), p. xvii.

2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IV.4, in The Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford, 1925), Vol. IX.

3. Curtis Watson, in the only book-length treatment of the idea to date, recognizes the pervasiveness of the Aristotelian definition, stating that “Aristotle's original definitions are a hidden spring from which flow most of the ideas [about honor] of the writers of the 16th century” (Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor [Princeton, 1960], p. 66). However, Watson's central concern to isolate honor as belonging uniquely to the ethics of “pagan humanism” and as being in explicit conflict with the ethics of Christianity renders his conclusions suspect, for he fails to consider such Christian uses of the Aristotelian idea as theologians like Richard Hooker make, and he disregards those portions of secular arguments which claim a Christian origin for human honor. Robert Ashley, for instance, easily accommodates the Aristotelian definition to a Christian context, concluding his inquiry into the origins of honor by saying, “so must I fetch the beginning of Honour from God” (Of Honour, ed. Virgil Heltzel [San Marino, 1947], p. 27). John Norden, to cite but one more sixteenth-century example, after another discourse on the divine origin of honor, concludes on a more practical note. “True honor is never gotten in the warres without Religion and virtue” (The Mirror of Honor [London, 1597], p. 12). Watson, in any case, is not concerned with Shakespeare's dramatic development of the idea of honor in individual plays and makes only a passing reference to 1 Henry IV.

4. Count Annibale Romei, The Courtiers Academie, trans. John Kepers. The copy in the British Museum is not dated, but Valentine Sims had a license to print this title in 1598.

5. George Whetstone, The Honorable Reputation of a Souldier (London, 1585), sig. E.

6. William Segar, Honor Military and Civil (London, 1602), p. 203.

7. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. VII, Chap. xvii, Sec. 4, in The Works of … Richard Hooker, ed. John Keble (New York, 1845).

8. Thomas Nashe, Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford, 1958), II, 82.

9. All quotations of I Henry IV are taken from A. R. Humphreys' Arden edition (London, 1961). References to other plays of Shakespeare's are to The Complete Works, ed. G. L. Kittredge (Boston, 1936).

10. Romei, p. 101. Watson, Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honor, cites this passage as evidence to support his disjunction of “pagan humanist” and Christian ethics on the issue of honor. He reads this passage as a justification for suicide, but Gualinguo's remark that the Stoics sometimes permitted suicide in preference to dishonor is intended to emphasize the power that honor has always held rather than to justify present suicide. Watson does, however, cite several other instances where the assumption that honor is more precious than life is expressed (pp. 157, 215, 217, 219, and 361).

11. William Segar, The Booke of Honor and Armes (London, 1590), sig. A2.

12. Raphael Holinshed, The Last Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande … (London, 1577), p. 1138.

13. Holinshed, p. 1136. The OED lists prayes as a sixteenth-century variant spelling of praise and provides a definition appropriate here: “That for which a person … is, or deserves to be, praised.” The second edition of Holinshed (1587) substitutes preies for prayes. Preies is not among the variants listed for praise, but one form of prize, or price, is preis. This may be the meaning the second edition intended.

14. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J. R. Malryne (The New Mermaids, London, 1970), I.ii.168.

15. Humphreys, p. 8, note to ll. 91-94. Humphreys further remarks that Holinshed does not mention Hotspur's justification under the law of arms. However, Humphreys uses the 1807-8 reprint of the second edition (1587) of Holinshed for his editorial purposes, which edition does not record Holinshed's original description of the Percys' claiming the prisoners as “their peculiar prayes.” (Cf. fn. 13.)

16. Honor Military and Civil, Bk. 1, Chaps. 31-32, passim.

17. Cf. Humphreys' note to V.iii.36 for citation of various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century statements which condemn betrayal by a commander of his men as particularly dishonorable.

18. James Cleland, The Institution of a Young Noble Man (Oxford, 1607), pp. 191-92.

19. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby (1561), ed. Ernest Rhys (London, 1928), pp. 31-32.

20. John Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge, 1943), pp. 67-68.