The analogies adumbrated by Shakespeare between the reign of Henry IV and the Tudor period indicate that his interpretation of English history is here affected at every level by ideas derived from the major political and cultural experiences of his own time, as well as by notions of historical recurrence long established in western historiography.⁴¹ In particular, those analogies intimate that the bitter intestinal divisions of the later period, with their conflicting loyalties and mixed and confused motivations, contributed much to his sense of the tortuous relationship in political affairs between right and wrong, justice and injustice, morality and expediency, freedom and necessity, present and past. Neither the rebellious bishop nor the regicidal King in Henry IV is blameless, but both claim with some sincerity and truth that the strong necessity of the times—the accumulated pressure of events—compelled them to do what they did not want to do. Elizabeth might have said the same about the execution of her Catholic cousin, Queen Mary, and of the eight hundred northerners who supported Mary and 'the old religion'.⁴²

For Shakespeare, it would seem, the nature of politics is such that most leaders will necessarily do things they would rather have withheld from 'chronicles in time to come'. But if they are to make peace with themselves and posterity, they must confess and beg pardon and not wrap themselves in the rhetoric of righteousness and evasion. And since no one else is guiltless, they may, if they are lucky, be forgiven. Hardly a theme (either political or literary-critical) for our time; but it was probably Shakespeare's intended, final message from the stage. In the epilogue to The Tempest, Prospero, the all-powerful but less-than-perfect ruler, addresses the audience in language of moving simplicity. Like his rude and rebellious subject, Caliban, he humbly 'seek[s] for grace' (5.1.299), reminding the audience of its own faults, echoing the Lord's prayer, and gently recalling the old religion's overly indulgent attitude to forgiveness and redemption:

And my ending is despair
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardoned be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

Notes

¹The Idea of History (Oxford, 1961), p. xi; cited (approvingly) in Paul Q. Hirst, Marxism and Historical Writing (1985), p. 44.

² Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (1944); Campbell, Shakespeare's Histories: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy (San Marino, California, 1947); Richard Simpson, 'The Political Use of the Stage in Shakespeare's Time', New Shakespere Society Publications, series 1, no. 2, part 2 (1875): 371-95. Simpson's claim was casually anticipated by Sir Cuthbert Sharpe in his Memorials of the Rebellion of 1569 (1840), p. 336.

³ Greenblatt, 'Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion, Henry IV and Henry V', in Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, ed. Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (Manchester, 1985), pp. 17-47; Holderness, Shakespeare Recycled: the Making of Historical Drama (1992).

⁴ Scoufos, Shakespeare's Typological Satire: a Study of the Falstaff-Oldcastle Problem (Athens, Ohio, 1979).

⁵ Penry Williams, The Tudor Regime (Oxford, 1979), pp. 316-17. Scoufos (pp. 125-6) briefly notes a parallel between Henry VIII's suppression of the Pilgrimage of Grace and Prince John's handling of the rebels at the end of 2 Henry IV. She assumes (wrongly, I believe) that John's treachery is presented in an uncritical fashion.

⁶ C. S. L. Davies, 'The Pilgrimage of Grace Reconsidered', Past and Present, 41 (1968): 54-75; J. J. Scarisbrooke, Henry VIII (1968), pp. 338-9; Scott Michael Harrison, The Pilgrimage of Grace in the Lake District (1981), pp. 1-3, 132-6.

⁷ Edward Hall, Chronicle Containing the History of England During the Reign of Henry IV and the Succeeding Monarchs to the End of the Reign of Henry the Eighth (1548-50; 1809 edn), pp. 322-3; Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ire-land, 6 vols. (1587 edn rept. 1808), vol. 3, p. 800. See also

⁸ For evidence of contemporary criticism of Henry's treachery, see William Thomas, The Pilgrim: A Dialogue on the Life and Actions of King Henry VIII (1546), ed. J. A. Froude (London, 1861), pp. 11, 50-1. Tudor apologists imputed the bloodless suppression of the rebellion to 'the kynges wisedom and … discrete counsayle'. See John Hardyng, The Chronicle. Together with the Continuation by Richard Grafton (1543), p. 605; and cf. Hall, Chronicle, p. 823.

⁹ Antony Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions (1968; 3rd edn, 1983), p. 101.

¹⁰ Frances Rose-Troup, The Western Rebellion of 1549 (1913), p. 128, 257, 411-14; R. R. Reid, 'The Rebellion of the Earls', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1906): 171-203.

¹¹ Irving Ribner, The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (London, 1957; revd edn, 1965), p. 182; David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: a Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), p. 20.

¹² Edn of 1583, pp. 1086-7.

¹³All such treatises as haue been lately published by Thomas Norton (1569), sigs. D5v-Clr. Norton's pamphlets were drawn on by other polemical writers throughout the remainder of the Elizabethan period. See James K. Lowers, Mirrors for Rebels: a Study of Polemical Literature Relating to the Northern Rebellion of 1569 (Berkeley: Calif., 1953), pp. 36, 55, 64.

¹⁴The Two Books of Homilies, ed. J. Griffiths (Oxford, 1859), pp. 594-5.

¹⁵Sermons, ed. G. E. Corrie (Cambridge, 1844), pp. 25-32 (the Elizabethan editions were entitled Frutefull Sermons). Concerning the 1536 rebellion, George Whetstone says in The English Myrrour (1586): 'It is yet within the compasse of oure memorie' (p. 167). He gives an account of this and later rebellions and conspiracies against the Tudor monarchy (pp. 24-68).

¹⁶ See the Acts of 1585 and 1593 against priests and recusants, rept. in G. R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge, 1960), pp. 424-32.

¹⁷ Richard Verstegan (c. 1550-1640), Letters and Dispatches, ed. Anthony Petti (1959), p. 145 (trial date, 1593; Catholics and Brownists both likened to 'the rebelles in the northe'; their 'diabolicall perswasions tendeth to plaine insurrection and rebellion … clooked under the face of religion'); Christopher Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr (1956), p. 305 (trial date, 1595: 'The Rebellion in the North, by whom was it stirred but by … Jesuits and Priests?').

¹⁸ J. B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, 1558-1603 (Oxford, 1936; 2nd edn, 1959), pp. 406-18. Fletcher, Tudor Rebellions, p. 100, notes that the years 1595-8—within which period 1 and 2 Henry IV were probably written—were arguably 'one of the most insecure periods of Tudor government'. In addition to the political-religious threat, there was widespread rioting over enclosures and dearth.

¹⁹Actes and Monuments (1583), p. 1087; he is echoing Hall (Chronicle, p. 823), who is copied by Holin-shed, Chronicles, 3, 800. Cf. the Act of 1593 on 'rebellious and traitorous subjects … hiding their most detestable and devilish purposes under a false pretext of religion and conscience' (Elton, Tudor Constitution, p. 428).

²⁰To the Quenes Maiesties poore decerned Subiectes of the North Country, drawen into rebellion by the Earles of Northumberland and Westmerland, in All such treatises [n. 13 above], sigs. A3v, Blr. The figure of the rebels' deceitful 'colours' is used repeatedly in this pamphlet.

²¹To The Quenes Maiesties poore decerned Subiectes, sig. C4v.

²²Two Books of Homilies, ed. Griffiths, pp. 579, 581-2.

²³The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby (1561), Everyman edn (1966), p. 42. The nature of grace, and the means by which it is achieved, preserved, or lost is the subject for discussion in the central part of the book (pp. 42-184).

²⁴Institution of the Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton (1582), pp. 96-8 (II, v. 4-5). For Augustine's On Rebuke and Grace, see The Works of Aurelius Augustine, ed. Marcus Dods, vol. 15, The Anti-Pelagian Works, vol. 3 (Edinburgh, 1876), pp. 68-117.

²⁵ M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism (Chicago, 1939), p. 344. Cf. Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967), pp. 41, 100-2, 346-7, The Religion of Protestants (Oxford, 1982), pp. 105-8, 111.

²⁶Actes and Monuments (1583), p. 557.

²⁷ Wilhelm Baeske, Oldcastle-Falstaff in der englischen Literatur bis zu Shakespeare, Palaestra 50 (Berlin, 1905); Scoufos, Shakespeare's Typological Satire, pp. 44-69. In 'The Fortunes of Oldcastle', Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), pp. 85-100, Gary Taylor contends—wrongly, I believe—that because of the name-change forced on Shakespeare (by the Elizabethan Cobhams) when he came to write Part 2, Falstaff of the second part is a different character to the re-named Oldcastle of Part I. Taylor's reference in the course of his argument (p. 93) to 'the original name of Shakespeare's most famous comic character' (my emphasis) indicates how difficult in will be for this view to win acceptance. It has been rejected by the editor of the New Cambridge Part 2 (below, n. 29) and strongly contested by Jonathan Goldberg: see his 'The Commodity of Names: "Falstaff" and "Oldcastle" in 1 Henry IV, in Reconfiguring the Renaissance: Essays in Critical Materialism, ed. Jonathan Crewe (London and Toronto, 1992), pp. 76-88.

²⁸ J. A. Bryant Jr, 'Prince Hal and the Ephesians', Sewanee Review, 67 (1959): 204-19.

²⁹ Hall, Chronicle, p. 4; Holinshed, Chronicles, 3, 61. Shakespearian references in this article are to Henry IV, Part I, ed. David Bevington (Oxford, 1987) and The Second Part of King Henry IV, ed. Giorgio Melchiori (Cambridge, 1989); and (for other plays) to The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford, 1988).

³⁰ William Cecil, Lord Burghley, The Execution of Justice in England (1583), ed. Robert Kingdon (Ithaca, N.Y., 1965), pp. 14, 16; George Whetstone, The English Myrrour, pp. 141-2.

³¹ William Camden, Remains Concerning Britain, rept. from the 1674 edn (1870), pp. 169-70.

³²Shakespeare Recycled, pp. 159-60, 167.

³³The Book of the Courtier, pp. 85, 93-5.

³⁴ 'Recklessness' is Hoby's translation of Castiglione's sprezzatura, signifying the impression of naturalness and careless ease. 'Recklessnesse … is the true fountaine from which all grace springeth' (p. 48; cf. p. 99). Somewhat pertinent to Falstaff's decline is Castiglione's remark on the 'noysome sawsinesse' of strained and untimely humour: 'thinking to make men laugh, which for that it is spoken out of time will appear colde and without grace' (p. 93).

³⁵ Cf. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays, pp. 278-80.

³⁶ Sidney Painter, French Chivalry: Chivalric Ideas and Practices in Mediaeval France New York, 1940), pp. 28-30.

³⁷ Canfield, World as Bond in English Literature from the Middle Ages to the Restoration (Philadelphia, 1989).

³⁸ Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace, II, pp. 1-25.

³⁹ Even when rebuke and censure lead to excommunication, says Calvin, 'such seueritie becommeth the Church as is ioyned with the spirit of mildnes'; 'punish them that are fallen, mercifully & not to the extremitie of rigor … hoping better of them in time to come than we see in time present' (Institutes, trans. Norton, II.xii.8-9).

⁴⁰The Two Books of Homilies, ed. Griffiths, p. 579 ('Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion').

⁴¹ See G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought: From Antiquity to the Reformation (Berkeley, California, 1979); Achsah Guibbory, The Map of Time: Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Ideas of Pattern in History (Urbana and Chicago, 1986).

⁴² I have side-stepped in this article the possibility—persuasively argued by E. A. J. Honigmann in his Shakespeare: the 'Lost Years' (Manchester, 1985)—that Shakespeare was brought up as a Catholic and spent his 'lost years' before 1592 working as a schoolmaster and player for a wealthy Catholic land-owner in Lancashire. If correct, the argument would certainly be relevant to my interpretation of Henry IV.

Source: "Pilgrims of Grace: Henry IV Historicized," in Shakespeare Survey: An Annual Survey of Shakespeare Studies and Production, edited by Stanley Wells, Vol. 48, 1995, pp. 69-84.