R. G. Collingwood once remarked that all historical writing is a selective process governed by a sense of contemporary relevance.¹ Most historical critics who have sought to interpret Shakespeare's interpretation of the past in 1 and 2 Henry IV seem to have been in agreement with this view. There has, however, been remarkable divergence among both recent and not-so-recent historicists on how the play (I shall use the singular term for convenience's sake) connects with sixteenth-century practice and ideas; on how, in other words, we should define the context (or larger 'text') which makes most sense of its conceptual orientation. E. M. W. Tillyard tied the play to the Tudor, providentialist philosophy of history focused on the Wars of the Roses and the birth of the Tudor dynasty. But he saw in it nothing more specific to sixteenth-century political experience than a large, approving picture of Elizabethan England, rendered vivid by its social and topographical detail. Like Tillyard, Lily B. Campbell read the play as an uncomplicated endorsement of Tudor political orthodoxy; she was much concerned, however, to establish a central analogy with the Northern Rebellion of 1569-70 (an idea first advanced by Richard Simpson in 1874), as well as a number of politically significant parallels between some of the dramatis personae and contemporary individuals.²

The two most self-consciously historicist among recent critics of Henry IV have constructed interpretative frameworks which also differ strikingly from each other. For Stephen Greenblatt, the dynastic conflict between the houses of Lancaster and York in fifteenth-century England makes most sense when seen in relation to the treacherous methods used by the Elizabethan ruling classes in securing control over the trusting natives of Virginia and the vagabonds and thieves of the domestic underworld. Graham Holderness shares Greenblatt's preoccupation with power, domination, and class conflict as the key to social and political history, but denies this play any important connection with sixteenth-century politics; instead, he sees in it a genuinely historicist concentration on the contradictions of fifteenth-century feudalism.³

The limitation of Tillyard's history-of-ideas approach is not just that it constructed a monolithic Elizabethan world-picture, but that it seems to have distracted his attention from the material realities of sixteenth-century political history. So too the interpretative frameworks created by Greenblatt and Holderness, by excluding the high politics of Tudor England, seem initially implausible and leave an impression of contextual mislocation. Campbell's approach (utilized by Alice-Lyle Scoufos in her study of the Falstaff-Oldcastle problem),⁴ although unduly speculative in its pursuit of topical allusions, and insensitive to Shakespeare's political scepticism, seems to me to have pointed in a direction which has not been adequately explored. For as I hope to show, Henry IV is shaped by certain patterns of thought, action, and characterization which suggest deep affinities between Henry's reign and the religio-political and cultural experiences of sixteenth-century England. Shakespeare was here viewing the rule of Henry and the rise of Hal through the lens of a century when, in one complex process, the English Reformation was coercively established and the crown finally centralized (and 'southernized') power by subduing the Catholic leaders of the North; and when, too, the Renaissance ideals of civility were enthusiastically embraced by gentry and Court. The basis for this interpretation lies in the play's constellation of motifs and historical analogies centred on a complex theme of immense importance in the sixteenth century, that of grace.