SOURCE: "Misconstruction in I Henry IV" in Cahiers Élisabéthains, No. 37, April, 1990, pp. 43-54.

[In the following essay, Willems suggests that Shakespeare encourages a misreading of 1 Henry IV as a traditional morality play, when in actuality Shakespeare uses Prince Hal to examine the ramifications of political ideas that likely would have been viewed as subversive if Shakespeare had explored such concepts directly.]

Misunderstandings, mistaken identity, misconstruction of event or character are devices commonly used in Shakespearean drama. They allow the dramatist to engineer complicated comic plots which reach their denouement when the misled characters realise their mistakes. They are also part of character drawing, as the propensity to misconstrue generally reveals a defective judgement which can lead to tragic error, as in the case of Cassius who dies from having misconstrued everything (Julius Caesar, V.3.84), while the capacity to induce misconstruction in others can signal a superior, if sometimes devious, intellect.

Just before / Henry IV reaches its conclusion through the victory of the king over the rebels at Shrewsbury, Vernon, reporting in the rebel camp the Prince of Wales' offer of a single combat with Hotspur, comments:

England did never owe so sweet a hope
So much misconstru 'd in his wantonness.

(V.l.67-8)¹

Coming after a long panegyric of the prince, this remark is generally taken as a sign that, as the king his father will soon confirm, Hal has redeemed his lost opinion (V.4.47) after his pranks at the tavern, and that the news of his reformation has reached even the rebel camp. The use of the verb misconstru 'ed also attracts attention to the fact that, as Hal himself mentions on two occasions, he has been the victim of detraction, of what Holinshed refers to as slanderous reports.² The interview between father and son (III.2) which some see as the turning point of the whole play, indeed closely follows the historical source and shows the prince trying to clear his name from many tales devis'd . . . By smiling pickthanks (23-5), the very word used by Holinshed. This is when Henry alludes to the kingdom's dour predictions about Hal's future, which will be so dramatically belied at the end of the play:

The hope and expectation of thy time
Is ruined, and the soul of every man
Prophetically do forethink thy fall

(III.2.36-8)

Later, on the battlefield, just after he has rescued the king from the attacks of Douglas, the prince again alludes to some particularly nasty rumours circulated against him:

O God, they did me too much injury
That ever said I hearken 'd for your death.
If it were so, I might have let alone
The insulting hand of Douglas over you,
Which would have been as speedy in your end
As all the poisonous potions in the world,
And sav'd the treacherous labour of your son.

(V.4.50-6)

The note of detraction is also struck in the comic plot, when Falstaff accuses Hal behind his back of being a Jack, a sneak up (III.3.83), and of owing him a thousand pounds. Here the hostess reveals Falstaff's slander to the prince, and this results in a comic confrontation.

The detractors at court are never seen or heard and Hal is never confronted with them, but the opinion of Vernon, a rebel, as well as the attitude of the nobility on the battlefield confirms that, at the end of the play, detraction has given way to praise. One may even wonder whether detraction has not been an accessory in Hal's strategy of self-detraction, such as it is expounded in his much discussed soliloquy. In this perspective, the remark made by Vernon, a secondary character to whom Shakespeare assigns several choric eulogies of the Prince of Wales, may also be taken to allude to the misconstruction of his wantonness which Hal himself encourages throughout the play: the heir apparent wants to be perceived as a wastrel, the better to surprise the kingdom with the news of his reformation.

That a mere two lines delivered by a secondary character should lend themselves to so many constructions gives the measure of the play's complexity and of the ambiguity of response it induces. Over the years, the character of the prince and his progress through the play have been construed in different ways. If it is now widely accepted that Hal embarks from the start on a strategy of deception,³ for a long time he was considered as a Prodigal undergoing a straightforward process of reformation: having sown his wild oats at the tavern, he redeems himself by his valour on the battlefield. The theory of Hal's reformation and moral regeneration went together with the interpretation of the work as a Morality play, to which Quiller-Couch gave the following subtitle: The Contention between Vice and Virtue for the Soul of a Prince.⁴ E.M.W. Tillyard later defined this Vice and Virtue as Sloth and Vanity on the one hand, and Chivalry on the other.⁵ It is striking, and it seems to me significant, that the theory of Hal's reformation should be shared by those very critics who see in Shakespeare an exponent of the Tudor myth and who read the Chronicle plays as propounding a providential view of history. Both the idea of the punishment of the father's sin of usurpation through the son's mistreadings and the notion of the regeneration of the Prodigal indeed tally with a conception of history as moral because of its divine ordination, and the progress of Hal from Vanity to Chivalry or, better still, retaining the best out of both worlds, conforms with the education of the ideal sovereign in Aristotelian terms, one who can strike a middle course, or find a golden mean, between two extremes of conduct.

What I want to suggest is that such an interpretation of 1 Henry IV, which is now generally recognised as itself a misconstruction, or at least a very incomplete reading of the play, is in fact encouraged by Shakespeare, in the same way as Hal encourages the kingdom to misconstrue him as a wastrel. By casting his protagonist in the role of Prodigal and his play in the mould of Morality, the dramatist presents himself as playing the orthodox game. At the same time, like Hal and through Hal, he is able to explore the implications of political concepts which might have been considered subversive if they had been approached in a more straightforward manner.

Using a dramatic mode with which his public was familiar (morality plays were acted until the last decade of the sixteenth century) Shakespeare could conform to the legend of the madcap Prince made good, as it was circulated during Henry V's own reign, through Titus Livius' semi-official Vita Henrici Quinti, and later through the anonymous rudimental play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth.⁶ With the pressure of both history and folklore upon him, the dramatist could not overtly depart from a story in which, traditionally, the prince moves from riot to repentance. Besides, the structure of the Morality play offered him a means of combining history with comedy: it was acceptable for the forces of evil to take over the stage transformed into tavern or brothel, provided they were curbed in the end. Thus Hal's commerce with his Eastcheap companions is a source of great enjoyment during a good half of the play, constituted of entertaining scenes between Hal, a fugitive from the Court, and Falstaff, considerably and inventively developed from the character of Oldcastle, who only speaks about 250 words in the Famous Victories. Within the framework of the Morality play, Falstaff, accompanied by a crew of picturesque rascals, represents the Vice, and he does indeed encompass within his enormous girth a number of deadly sins: Gluttony, Lust, and Sloth. He is the misleader of youth, tempting the prince, with the help of Poins, to take part in the Gad's Hill robbery, attracting him to anarchy, irresponsibility and enjoyment of the present moment. At the other extreme from Falstaff's cowardice and unconcern with honour, stands Hotspur whose heroism and fame are much envied by the king. A son who is the theme of honour's tongue (I.1.80): this is how King Henry describes Northumberland's son whom he would gladly exchange for his own wastrel.⁷ With Hal in the part of Youth or Mankind, or rather the Prodigal son, the king is naturally cast in the role of the Prodigal's father, which creates a neat correspondence between the rebellion of the son and the rebellion of the Percies. Disorder in the family reflects and counterpoints disorder in the realm and both are perceived as consequences of Bolingbroke's usurpation of the throne. In this, as R.B. Pierce demonstrates, Shakespeare was again drawing on "truisms of Renaissance orthodoxy."⁸ The dramatist even completes the family by including the Prodigal's brother in his list of dramatis personae, although Lancaster is only mentioned by Holinshed much later. Unlike the Prodigal, Prince Hal is given a younger brother who nevertheless takes his place in Council when he defects to the tavern⁹ and later surprises everyone by his bravery in battle.

Whichever way we look at it however, I Henry IV is a morality play without a psychomachia. We do not expect Shakespeare to stage a confrontation between Vice and Virtue but we may wonder at Hal's transformation from rioter to dutiful prince which takes place without a trace of inner conflict. Unless we accept that his interview with his father suddenly awakens his sense of duty (in which case his complete turn-about is almost as sudden as in The Famous Victories), we look in vain for signs of evolution or of repentance. But in actual fact Hal's reformation is meant to take everyone by surprise, as the prince himself explains, as early as 1.2, in his famous I know you all soliloquy.

This soliloquy is a thorn in the flesh of those critics who insist on reading the play as the story of the prince's moral regeneration. The speech is delivered just after Hal's first bantering exchange with Falstaff and his decision to take part in the robbery. It begins with:

I know you all, and will a while uphold
The unyok'd humour of your idleness

(1.2.190-1),

and concludes:

I'll so offend, to make offence a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will

(1.2.211-12).

Even allowing for the comparisons and complications that may obscure the argument, it seems difficult for an audience not to get the message that Hal can see through his loose companions, that he controls a situation in which he appears as a wastrel, and is only biding his time at the tavern until he can strike the kingdom with the wonder of his new chivalrous image. Such a disturbing piece of evidence used to be explained away as a choric appendage, a conventional monologue through which Shakespeare is at pains to reassure his audience about the future of the heir to the throne: what they are going to see is only an entertaining parenthesis; there will be no debasement of royalty.¹⁰

This sudden stepping-out of character on the part of the hero of the play is, to say the least, an unusual device in Shakespearean drama, where the first monologue spoken by the protagonist—whether purely expository or more subtly introspective—is generally the first clue given by the dramatist to the psychology of his character.¹¹ Dr Johnson's analysis of Hal's soliloquy as an alibi for his misdemeanour is more attractive,¹² but it still does not take into account the form and detail of a speech that reads like a profession of faith, with its projection into the future through its repeated use of the future tense. The recurrence of comparisons is another interesting feature. The first one is implied: his companions are likened to base contagious clouds (193), to foul ugly mists (197), but he remains conscious that he is the sun, the traditional symbol of royalty. More significant for the rest of the play is the definition of his future course of action through two comparisons developing the idea that contrast is a means of creating wonder: the sun hides behind the clouds the better to impress men with its brilliance. Playing holidays are all the more pleasing as they interrupt the tedium of work. In every case, the opposition between the two terms of the comparison is resolved by the fact that one, like sullen ground behind bright metal (207) acts as a foil to the other. Hal's strategy of reformation follows the same pattern, the opposition between reformation and fault being resolved by the use of wantonness as a foil (the word is used in line 210) in order to set off his eventual redemption.

Beyond the basic message that Hal is not the wanton boy he appears to be, but that he will exploit this misconstruction of his behaviour to give more lustre to his reformation, what is striking is the prince's concern for his political image, for the way in which he is perceived by the kingdom and for the manner in which he can influence this perception. This striving after effect is accompanied by a well-developed sense of timing. The second line of the couplet which concludes the soliloquy, Redeeming time when men think least I will certainly attracts attention, through the biblical echo of Ephesians¹³ to Hal's connection with the Prodigal son and to his final atonement; but the line also suggest his far-sightedness and his awareness of the importance of biding one's time in politics. Even at this early stage of the play, the dissolute Youth of Morality seems to know exactly what he wants and what he is doing, and hardly seems to hesitate between the primrose way and the straight and narrow. His own oblique route to the throne follows a more complicated but perfectly controlled course which runs through the tavern but definitely heads towards the court. It is appositely described by the image of truancy which recurs several times in the course of the play and whose ambivalence is well adapted to the prince's strategy of deception. Shall the blessed sun of heaven prove a micher and eat blackberries? (II.4.403-04), Falstaff asks rhetorically when playing the part of mock-king at the tavern. Later, Hal himself takes up the image as he casts a critical glance at his wanton past, for the benefit of the nobility gathered on the battlefield:

For my part, I may speak it to my shame
I have a truant been to Chivalry

(V.l.93-4),

a declaration which is echoed by Vernon in the rebel camp:

He made a blushing citai of himself
And chid his truant youth.

(V.2.61-2)

By taking up in a serious mode an image which Falstaff used as a comic anticlimax to his orthodox metaphoric evocation of royalty, the prince encourages the court to look back on his flight to the tavern as on the misbehaviour of a schoolboy running away from constraint. Through this shame-faced confession of his past dishonour, he implies that he now repents this error and is determined to return to the path of duty which he defines as 'Chivalry'. The fact that later, as he promised his father, he kills Hotspur in order to get rid of his rival in the chivalrous game (Two stars keep not their motion in one sphere, V.4.64), seems to confirm the return to Chivalry of the prodigal prince. And this is certainly how court and rebels—and a number of critics¹⁴—construe the itinerary of the Prince of Wales.

That this is a misconstruction, but one engineered by the prince himself and by Shakespeare's use of the Morality play structure, is borne out by a number of factors. First of all, Chivalry would appear as a more convincingly desirable ideal if Hotspur, who represents it, and Henry, who advocates it, were not so often submitted to irony. Hotspur's honour, with its quest for fame at all costs and its childish concentration on virile heroism¹⁵ often closely resembles Vanity. This judgement is encouraged by Shakespeare even through Henry's definition of his hero as Mars in swathling clothes (III.2.112), which conjures up an incongruous, ludicrous vision of the very man who is set up as an example. Hal launches into a panegyric of This same child of honour and renown (III.2.139) for his father's benefit, but at the tavern he improvises a parody of a conversation between the warrior and his wife on the subject: how many hast thou killed today? (II.4.104), and even on the battlefield, his farewell speech to the hero he has just defeated, stresses the vanity of the quest for honour in the face of death: Ill-weaved ambition, how much thou art shrunk! (V.4.87). Although expressed with more distance and couched in more acceptable terms, the exclamation is not fundamentally different from Falstaff's in front of Sir Walter Blunt's body: I like not such grinning honour as Sir Walter hath (V.3.59). Neither Hotspur nor Chivalry can be said to represent the positive pole of this Morality. The fact that King Henry keeps proposing as an example to his son the man who is leading the rebellion against him betrays his flawed conception of virtue, and confirms that the play has no real model of conduct to offer the heir apparent. If Hal, as E.M.W. Tillyard will have it, chooses Chivalry, or rather appears to choose it, it is as part of the role which he has assigned to himself, that of the dishonourable Prodigal who reforms in order to follow the path of honour. Honour is a cardinal virtue expected of the sovereign, therefore Hal appears to embrace it. An analysis of the promise he makes his father in the course of their interview reveals his true reasons for wanting to kill Hotspur. At first, he presents his future duel with him as a ritual of purification, as the way to redemption through shedding the blood of a worthy opponent:

I will redeem all this on Percy's head [ . . . ]
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.2.132; 135-7)

But soon his genuine motivations are betrayed, as is so often the case in Shakespearean drama, by the imagery that structures his speech.

For the time will come
That I shall make this northern youth exchange
His glorious deeds for my indignities.
Percy is but my factor, good my lord,
To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf
And I will call him to so strict account
That he shall render every glory up,
Yea, even the slightest worship of his time,
Or I will tear the reckoning from his heart.

(III.2.144-52)

Hal gets quite unusually excited over the metaphor of commerce which runs through this solemn promise. The mercantile approach to honour which is here revealed does not tally with the genuinely chivalrous conception of fame as an end in itself. It would seem that, for Hal, honour is no more than a commodity. This is confirmed by his words to Hotspur as he is about to kill him:

And all the budding honours of thy crest
I'll crop to make a garland for my head.

(V.5.71-2)

While Hotspur was fighting at Holmedon, defeating the glorious Douglas and earning fame as a brave warrior, Hal was making merry at the tavern, his only 'actions' (he uses the word in parody to refer to his learning the language of tinkers) being robbing thieves and taunting tapsters. But when the time is ripe, he appears on the battefield, saves his father from the fierce Douglas, collects all of Hotspur's glory at one go, and presents king and kingdom with precisely the type of heroical prince which they expect and have been longing for.

It is gradually becoming clear that Hal's strategy is in fact more complex than what was expounded in the soliloquy and that it implies misconstruction at several levels. Not only does the prince deceive public opinion into thinking that he has suddenly reformed, but he also induces them to believe that he has turned into an orthodox hero of Chivalry. Vernon's panegyric of him, for the benefit of an obstinately incredulous Hotspur and of his more readily convinced companions, proves that the news of his reformation has taken the kingdom by storm:

I saw young Harry with his beaver on,
His cushes on his thighs, gallantly arm 'd,
Rise from the ground like feather 'd Mercury,
And vaulted with such ease into his seat
As if an angel dropp 'd down from the clouds
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus,
And witch the world with noble horsemanship.

(1V.1.104-10)

This is the new image of the Prince of Wales, as he is now commonly referred to, even by himself. Hal is presented as an apparition, a striking vision; whether rising from the ground or dropp 'd from the clouds he has succeeded in playing upon surprise. The panegyric characteristically parallels that of Hotspur by Henry in III.2: it is part of the chivalrous game to acknowledge even an enemy's glory, and we are here given the first indication that Hal has taken over from Hotspur as a recognized hero. Indeed, it is he who is now described with all the trappings of a hero, the beaver, the cushes, and essentially the horse, that mythical adjunct to the knight-at-arms; all that is, except one, the reference to Mars, present both in King Henry's description of Hotspur and in the latter's evocation of future combats. Strikingly, Vernon does not compare Hal to Mars, but to feather'd Mercury, which may be taken as a significant sign in a speech which has an obvious choric function. The reference to Mercury, in its implicit opposition to Mars, attracts attention to the fact that Hal's conception of heroism, though cloaked in an orthodox garb, is something fundamentally different from Hotspur's and Henry's martial creed. At the same time, the comparison with the messenger of the gods, who is all at once god of commerce, of eloquence, of skill, and of trading and thieving, bears much relevance to the prince such as the play has presented him so far: he is prepared to use skill and cunning, even stealing and lying to achieve his aims; he has a mercantile approach to notions which others assimilate to an ideal. All that matters to him is the achievement of the end he has set himself from the beginning.

Hal's unquestioned emergence into the political world of the play is precisely the consequence of his control over the way in which the kingdom perceives him and over the image of himself he projects. It is ironical that the astute Henry should not see this, but should compare him to Richard II, while comparing himself aptly, but again with damaging unconscious irony, to Hotspur who heads the rebellion against the state. Both Hal and Richard, he says, have made themselves common, while he, as Bolingbroke, was Ne 'er seen but wonder'd at (III.2.57).

By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wonder 'd at,
That men would tell their children "This is he!"
Others would say, "where, which is Bolingbroke?"
And then I stole all courtesy from heaven,
And dress'd myself in such humility
That I did pluck allegiance from men's hearts . . .

(III.2.46-52)

The tendency to use deception to build up one's political image evidently runs in the family, and manipulation of public opinion through surprise and the exploitation of the subjects' need to wonder at their sovereign thus appears as the trade mark of the ruler by political consent. Hal, although the legitimate heir to the throne, is still a usurper's son and, as such, needs to give new lustre to his tarnished title. But the. two characters are set in sharp contrast. Henry is presented as a counterfeit king who sends various noblemen marching in his coats (V.3.25) to meet their deaths in his place. Besides, his misconstruction of his son's behaviour and motives, added to his obstinate admiration for the head of the rebels, signal the self-deception of a self-righteous worshipper of honour. This is echoed, in the rebel camp, by Hotspur's refusal to see the Prince of Wales as a worthy opponent. Hal's foresight and breadth of view are clearly opposed to the narrow-mindedness and self-interest of the political world at large. Whereas the scenes at the tavern serve to parody or to call into question the values of courtiers and rebels, they never submit Hal to straightforward irony. The prince's political superiority over the rest of the dramatis personae comes from the fact that he is constantly in control of his strategy, a superior actor who opposes his own counterfeiting to that of the court and who uses his madcap disposition to establish his own public identity.

Unlike his father, Hal is presented less as a deceiver than as a consummate actor. Like Hamlet after him, he is a player of roles who can speak all the languages of the play, from the courtly rhetoric of the political world to the colourful prose of the tavern, unbeaten even by Falstaff in the quick give and take of the comic scenes or the accelerating exchange of witty puns and picturesque insults. The fat knight sometimes has the better of him where inventiveness and imagination are concerned,¹⁶ but still Hal emerges as the master of both verse and prose, just as capable of conversing with tapsters as with the nobility. Hal's capacity for acting is not manifested only in his ability to wear the disguise of the Prodigal in a convincing manner. In fact, his role-playing is continuous, from the moment when he decides to play the false thief at Gad's Hill, to the time when he impresses the kingdom with his new image as a chivalric knight. In between, he gives a parodic impersonation of Hotspur and Kate, offers himself, and Poins, an amusing interlude at the expense of Francis the tapster, and accepts to play his own part in an entertaining play extempore imagined by Falstaff, in which the latter gives a euphuistic representation of King Henry before he is deposed by the prince who is eager to play the king himself. This constant shifting from one role to another is part of the conscious education of one who boasts that he can drink with any tinker in his own language during [his] life (II.4.18-19). But it also testifies to a chameleon-like versatility which appears to be the secret of success in politics. When at the tavern, Hal is able to conform to the image of the dissolute young man that is expected of him by his loose companions. Apart from an occasional faux-pas (which also gives the dramatist a means of reminding his audience that Hal is only pretending), as when he first rejects Falstaff's suggestion that he join the robbery with self-conscious indignation (who, I rob? I a thief? Not I, by my faith [II.2.134]), apart also from some unconscious signs of distaste in his commerce with Falstaff,¹⁷ Hal's disguise as a Prodigal seems to fit him like a glove. And he is just as convincing when he assumes a tone of candour and quiet authority to assure the sheriff that Falstaff is not in the room, whereas he is sleeping behind the arras; or when, on the battlefield, he falls easily into the part of the repentant truant prince, and, without apparent effort or change of mind, immediately steps into that of the chivalrous hero. When is he sincere and when is he pretending? Obviously, in Shakespearean terms, he is most true to himself in what we may call the play-within-the-play, when one disguise annihilates another, when he stops faking wantonness and when, projecting himself forward into the part of the king with which he will soon be entrusted, he reveals that Falstaff will have to be banished. Roleplaying is here neutralized by acting. In answer to Falstaff's long pathetic plea for himself, whom he describes indulgently as plump Jack: banish not him thy Harry's company (II.4.472), the reply is brief, but unmistakably clear: I do, I will (475). Hal banishes Falstaff both in the present and in the future tense, as the true prince that he is everytime he stops pretending to be a Prodigal, and as the king he is to become. The I will has the same prophetic force as the repetition of I will which frames the first soliloquy and also his subsequent promise of atonement to his father.

Though we may be reasonably certain of having been given a glimpse of the true Prince (a recurrent expression in the play), we can never be sure who the true Hal is. The play makes it clear that being a true prince and an efficient ruler implies being able to juggle with a collection of roles so as to be in a position to offer the kingdom, at any given time, the image it expects. This is what Hal does when he appears on the battlefield like a mythical vision of the knight-at-arms. Hal's role-playing, unlike Hamlet's, is not a quest for identity. It is his political identity, which is as versatile as Mercury's assortment of functions.

It is through Hal's relationship with Falstaff that Shakespeare explores the human implications of this conception of kingship which can be defined as Machiavellian in the total subservience of the private individual to his public image, even more than in the quest for efficiency and shrewd pragmatism. In the case of Falstaff also, Shakespeare complicates the Morality pattern. Basically, it is true to say that the fat knight is cast in the role of Vanity,¹⁸ but the fact that it is the prince playing the part of king who describes him as That reverend Vice, that grey iniquity, that father ruffian, that vanity in years (II.4.447-9), should make us wary of confining his function to that of the traditional Vice. Hal is meant to express here his father's opinion of Falstaff's influence over his son, and we have seen that Henry's understanding of his son's madcap behaviour is as manichean as the plot of any Morality play. At the same time the prince is giving both his own opinion and that of the king he will become: the king of misrule has to be deposed; Falstaff is no fit companion for a responsible statesman. Even though he is not seen doing much counselling except on the subject of his own future, he does represent Vanity, that is the lure of a sensual life totally immersed in the present moment. But, in so far as the audience knows, from the Prince's soliloquy and his solemn vow at the end of the play-within-the-play, that Falstaff's disgrace is looming large, Hal's companion appears as an unwitting accessory in his strategy, one who will have to be rejected when he has served his purpose as the Prodigal's bad genius. The misleader of youth is unaware of being misled, an irony increased by Falstaff's constant pretence that it is Hal who is leading him astray:

But Hal, I prithee, trouble me no more with vanity . . . Thou hast done much harm upon me, Hal, God forgive thee for it; before I knew thee, Hal, I knew nothing, and now am I, if a man should speak truly, little better than one of the wicked.

(I.2.79; 89-92)

This reversal of roles is confirmed by his frequent allusions to his virtuous past¹⁹ which is as much a figment of his imagination as the slender waist he is supposed to have lost. But Shakespeare gives other indications that Falstaff could indeed be the Prodigal himself: he loses money gaming; he has his pocket picked—by the prince—and lives in Hal's debt. The multitude of sometimes conflicting signs makes it impossible for Falstaff to be perceived as a monolithic type. On the contrary, they induce ambivalent response in the spectator and explain why so many critics, in the wake of Bradley, wax sentimental when faced with Falstaff's banishment.

Why should we regret Falstaff's banishment more than Hotspur's death? After all, both are unwittingly enrolled in Hal's strategy of reformation. Just as Hal needs Falstaff as a loose companion, so he needs Hotspur as his 'factor'. In their different ways, both are necessary foils to enhance his supposed redemption. These two also have in common a propensity to self-deception revealed by their obstinate misconstruction of the prince: Hotspur refuses to the last to accept the Prince of Wales' new image and Falstaff chronically ignores the warning signs sent out by his friend. But precisely no such human feelings as friendship, pretended or otherwise, are at stake where Hotspur and the political world at large are concerned. The king does not blame Hal for being a bad son but for being a bad prince. Political necessity supersedes emotion. Similarly, Hotspur's death appears as part of a game whose rules he has not only accepted but participated in laying down. He is defeated by Hal in fair combat, and even at the belated moment of anagnorisis (O Harry, thou has robb'd me of my youth! [V.4.76]), emotion is tempered by the fact that, like the miser clinging to his gold until his last hour, he finds it more difficult to part with his proud titles (V.4.78) than with his life. The purely conventional oration delivered by Hal does little more to stir the spectator in favour of a character who dies as he lived, the victim of a misconstrued conception of honour, more than the victim of Hal's deception.

Things are different where Falstaff is concerned because here Shakespeare explores a relationship which is outside the range of the political world. The scenes at the tavern stage a crowd of colourful characters sharing companionship, entertainment, jokes, and fun. The fact that some critics can find in Falstaff Hal's surrogate father or describe him as representing all the human qualities which the prince will have to sacrifice in order to become an efficient ruler²⁰ is sufficient indication that Shakespeare was not content with making his misleader of youth an old white-bearded Satan (II.4.457). The character is so life-like and has so many congenial traits that some critics contend that he runs away from his creator and endangers the balance of the play. It is clear that the prince's jester sees himself as his friend and seeks constant assurance of Hal's love for him. The only time when his immersion in the present is tinged with concern for the future is when he wonders what will happen to him when Hal becomes king. But his escapism soon immerses him once more in enjoyment of the present moment. Seen in the light of Hal's strategy, the scenes at the tavern appear as a succession of confrontations which are comic only because they take the form of trials of wit between the false Prodigal and his supposed Tempter. But each of these games ends with Falstaff's defeat, which is immediately forgotten because the prince gives his companion new cause to believe in his friendship. The robbery, for instance, misfires and Falstaff is forced into a form of self-defence which turns against him; or the play-within-the-play begins with his plea for eternal friendship, develops into the indictment of his character and ends with more than a threat of banishment. The stark line of the strategy is largely concealed by the verbal pyrotechnics of the participants. Falstaff's resilience, his capacity to wriggle, despite his enormous size, out of every tight corner and to get off with a pirouette also create a sense of sometimes hilarious enjoyment which blurs the fact that the prince is actually making use of his companion.

But here again, Hal is the superior actor capable of deceiving even a master of histrionics. Whereas he sees through Falstaff's lies and poses, the old knight misconstrues him throughout the play. What may appear as ruthlessness on the part of the prince is due to the fact that he constantly encourages this misconstruction of his motives and feelings. Falstaff is indeed an escapist but Hal regularly feeds his illusions and self-deception. Immediately after he has vowed to banish him, he saves him from the prosecution of the sheriff and even lies to cover up for him so that Falstaff can comfortably ignore the threat of banishment. Signs of friendship alternate throughout with reproaches and criticism, as when the prince accepts to join in the entertainment of a play extempore after having read his fat companion a lecture on his gross lies.²¹ We may perhaps, along the same lines, read Hal's last lie as betraying the same desire to feed Falstaff's belief in his friendship for as long as he can be useful. Many interpretations have been suggested to explain the prince's easy acceptance of Falstaff's pretence that he killed Hotspur:

If a lie may do thee grace,
I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have.

(V.4.156-7)

Hal's readiness to let Falstaff reap the glory of Hotspur's death confirms his opinion of the vanity of chivalrous acts but contradicts his desire to crop the budding honours on Hotspur's crest, as Lancaster apparently remains the only one to know the truth about the death of the noble Percy.²² One critic²³ has suggested that Shakespeare needed this loose end in order to leave possibilities open for a second part. The public victory of Hal over Hotspur and the exposure of Falstaff as liar would have tied up the play once and for all. A similar reasoning may be applied to the relationship between Hal and Falstaff, if one notices that Hal's last lie logically follows in the wake of his other lies which may be construed as tokens of friendship, but are also a means of delaying the rejection of Falstaff. It is clear that the knight's banishment has been decided by the prince, but in the interests of his strategy, it must be postponed until the political time is ripe.

Another interesting, but disturbing, incident in the play's denouement is Falstaffs faked death which enables him to pretend that he has killed Hotspur, after having escaped being killed by Douglas. For the first and last time in the play, Hal is actually deceived by Falstaff and delivers a farewell oration to Poor Jack:

Poor Jack, farewell!
I could have better spared a better man:
O, I should have a heavy miss of thee
If I were much in love with vanity.

(V.4.102-05)

In the sole presence of what he takes to be two dead bodies, Hal can stop pretending that he is a Prodigal, or a Prodigal made good. This is the real Hal expressing himself for the first time since the soliloquy and he confirms that he is not attracted by vanity and that his affection for Falstaff does not run very deep: after the quibble on heavy miss and a pun on deer/dear, the speech ends on a rhyming couplet which makes it sound like a public oration more than like a private expression of genuine grief. As far as Falstaff is concerned, the text only indicates that he has heard the end of the speech, since we see him shuddering at the thought of being embowelled as he rises from his pretence of death. If he has heard what came before, he gives no sign of being any the wiser for it.

Even when Hal is temporarily and exceptionally fooled by Falstaff he is not subjected to irony. In this play where every character is at one time or another caught up in the dramatist's direct or indirect irony, it is obvious that the prince is in the situation of the master deceiver, in total control of his strategy and of his manipulation of the other characters, the leader of a political game which he paradoxically seems to have opted out of. By making Hal a false Prodigal in a false morality play and a consummate strategist who uses the misconstruction of his behaviour which he himself induces, Shakespeare grants him an unquestionable intellectual and political superiority. His deception of the court and his subversion of its outdated values appear as legitimate in so far as they enable him to defeat the general counterfeiting and to gain recognition for his flawed title.

But at the same time Shakespeare obliquely influences the spectator's judgement by plunging the prince into the environment of the tavern and by confronting him with Falstaff. Beyond the tavern's obvious function as a counterpoint to the court and a means of subjecting to scrutiny its cult of honour, Hal's relationship with Falstaff serves to reveal the total subservience of his private feelings to his public image. One may feel, with D. Traversi, that the prince is the poorer as a human being for excluding Falstaff, all the more so as the fat knight has an essential humanity which cannot easily be dismissed.²⁴ But one should also notice that Hal is a master-deceiver who never drops his mask, even at the tavern. The public image which he is at such pains to establish, the political values which he appears to cultivate, are all grounded on misconstructions which are never dispelled. And behind the collection of public masks which are shown to make up a political identity, Hal's private face remains a blank, as if the individual had been annihilated by his concern for his own image.

And so we find Shakespeare holding up for inspection not only the traditional political values of the court, but the portrait of his Machiavellian ruler; for with his quest for efficiency at all costs, his subordination of his private emotions to his political ends and his shrewdness verging on ruthlessness, Hal is Shakespeare's Prince in more than one sense. While both the court and the tavern are subjected to irony, the character of the prince provokes conflicting reactions to his political commitment but personal dearth, complicated by our ambivalent response to Falstaffs self-indulgent cynicism but essential vitality. The familiar Shakespearean ambiguity, the very opposite of Jonson's single lesson, is here often increased by encouragement to misconstrue, as the dramatist subverts traditional dramatic modes and types to explore dangerous political ground. Did Shakespeare manage to convince the court of Elizabeth of the orthodoxy of his views, as Hal manages to convince the court of his father? Did they, like King Henry IV, take his morality play at its face value? Or did they, on the contrary, recognize in Prince Hal a perfect imitation of his historical model, since he, like the real Henry V, uses a fictitious (or fictional) dissolute past as a foil to his heroic present? Might we not then conclude that politics thrive on misconstruction? A question not to be asked, to take up King Falstaffs words.

Notes

¹ All the references are taken from A.R. Humphreys's Arden edition of the play (Methuen, 1978).

² Holinshed presents the prince as the victim of detraction more than of actual wantonness. Indeed he was youthfullie given, growne to audacities, and had chosen him companions agreeable to his age . . . But yet (it should seem by the report of some writers) that his behaviour was not offensive or at least tending to the damage of anie bodie (The Chronicles of England. Scotland, and Irelande [2nd edition, 1587], in G. Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare [London & New York, 1962], vol. IV, p. 195). The fact that the word pickthanks only appears in the second edition provides another indication that this was the edition read by Shakespeare.

³ This conception is developed by D. Traversi who draws a severe portrait of the prince and a more sentimental one of Falstaff (Shakespeare from "Richard II" to "Henry V" [London, 1958]). It is also put forward by J. Winny in The Player King (London, 1968), by R.Ornstein in A Kingdom for a Stage (Harvard, 1972), and by N. Council in When Honour's at the Stake (London, 1973). More recently, J.L. Calderwood has explored the metaphoric creativity of Hal's lies in Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad (Univ. of California Press, 1979), and A.D. Nuttall, in A New Mimesis, Shakespeare and the Representative of Reality (Methuen, 1983), defines the prince as a "white Machiavel" (p. 147). See also my article "I Henry IV ou la stratégie du fils prodigue" in De Shakespeare à Golding, Presses Universitaires de Rouen (1984), 45-56.

⁴ Sir A. Quiller-Couch was the first to suggest the play's relation with the Morality play in Shakespeare's Workmanship (1918), p. 148. This suggestion was considerably developed by J. Dover Wilson in his book The Fortunes of Falstaff(Cambridge, 1943, rpt. 1964), under the title "Riot and the Prodigal Prince" (pp. 17-25). More recently, the play's analogy with the Parable of the Prodigal Son has been further explored by C.L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Ohio, 1963), p. 195, by W. Farnham, The Shakespearean Grotesque (OUP, 1971), pp. 82-4 and 90-1, and by R.B. Pierce, Shakespeare's History Plays, The Family and the State (Ohio, 1971), p. 173. Paul Bacquet in Les Pièces historiques de Shakespeare (PUF, 1979), 2 vols, studies more precisely the connection between Falstaff and the Vice. (In this respect, see also the analogues collected by Bullough from the interludes Mundus et Infans and The Four Elements.)

⁵Shakespeare's History Plays (London, 1964), p. 265.

⁶ Titus Livius' biography of Henry V first appeared c. 1437. It was influential even in MS form. In 1513, it was translated into English with additions. The Famous Victories is generally dated around 1594 but was probably performed earlier.

⁷ The father's disappointment in his son is already established in Richard II when Bolingbroke asks:

Can no man tell me of my unthrifty son?
Tis full three months since I did see him last . . .
Inquire at London, 'mongst the taverns there,
For there, they say, he daily doth frequent
With unrestrained loose companions . . .

(V.3.1-2, 5-7)

⁸ Pierce, op. cit., Preface.

⁹

Thy place in Council thou has rudely lost
Which by thy younger brother is supply 'd.

(III.2.32-3)

This reproach of the king to the prince is generally considered by critics as a tactful reference to the historical Henry's legendary beating of the Lord Chief Justice, which is punished by the loss of his place in Council. Shakespeare was indeed drawing on familiar material if such an oblique allusion could be understood by his audiences.

¹⁰ This interpretation is put forward by S.L. Bethell in Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition (New York, 1944, rpt. 1970), p. 79, and by E.M.W. Tillyard, op. cit., p. 271; it is taken up by Irving Ribner in The English History Play in the Age of Shakespeare (Princeton, 1957, rpt. 1965), pp. 169-70. Yet, as early as 1902, A.C. Bradley read the soliloquy as the first indication of Hal's ruthless political talents: "the prince describes his riotous life as a mere scheme to win him glory later. It implies that readiness to use other people to his own ends which is a conspicuous feature in his father" ("The Rejection of Falstaff, Fortnightly Review [1902], reprinted in Shakespeare, Henry IV Parts I and 2. A Casebook, ed. G.K. Hunter, Macmillan [1970], p. 65).

¹¹ W.H. Auden even finds a certain resemblance between Hal's soliloquy and lago's first monologue I am not what I am. See "The Fallen City", Encounter 13 (1959), reprinted in "The Prince's Dog" in his Dyer's Hand (London, 1963); and in Casebook, p. 187-211. We may also think of Gloucester's opening soliloquy in Richard III and notice that Hal is determined to prove a false Prodigal.

¹² This speech, Dr Johnson writes, with his usual interest for the nicer points of psychology, "exhibits a natural picture of a great mind offering excuses for itself and palliating those follies which it can neither justify nor forsake" (Notes on "Henry V" [from Johnson's edition, 1765] in Dr Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. W.K. Wimsatt, Penguin Books [1969], p. 116).

¹³ On this subject, see J.A. Bryant, "Prince Hal and the Ephesians", The Sewanee Review, LXVII (1959), 204-19, and Paul A. Jorgensen, "Redeeming Time" in Shakespeare's Henry IV", Tennessee Studies in Literature (1960), reprinted in Casebook, 231-242.

¹⁴ See, for instance, E.M.W. Tillyard, op. cit., p. 265: "The Prince . . . chooses Chivalry . . . to which he is drawn by his father and his brothers."

¹⁵ For a more detailed analysis of Shakespeare's presentation of martial virtues and of the function of the warrior, see my article "Le culte de Mars de I Henry IV à Coriolan ", in Shakespeare et la guerre (forthcoming, Paris, 1990).

¹⁶ See particularly the contest of insults in II.4, in which Falstaff interrupts Hal, supersedes him in comic invention, but has to stop for breath (237-44).

¹⁷ D. Traversi (op.cit.) notes for instance that Hal often alludes to Falstaff's fatness in terms which betray his fundamental repulsion.

¹⁸ For instance, when Falstaff threatened Hal to beat him out of his kingdom with a dagger of lath (II.4.133-4), the Elizabethan public immediately connected him with the Vice of the Morality.

¹⁹ Just as Hal conceals his virtue under a pretence of vice, so Falstaff constantly alludes to his virtue to conceal his vice.

²⁰ J.I.M. Stewart was the first to analyse Falstaff as a father-substitute (see the last chapter of his book Character and Motive in Shakespeare [London, 1949], entitled "The Birth and Death of Falstaff). He explains that Hal kills Falstaff instead of his own father. This interpretation was violently attacked by E.E. Stoll in a review entitled "A Freudian Detective of Shakespeare", but was later vindicated by Ph. Williams in "The Birth and Death of Falstaff Reconsidered", Shakespeare Quarterly 9 [1957], 359-65.

Hal's education at the tavern had been studied much earlier in psychoanalytic terms, as when Franz Alexander explained that the Prince had to master "the wholly self-centered pleasure-seeking principle", represented by Falstaff, in order to become a fully balanced adult (Psychoanalytic Quarterly 11 [1933], 592-606). Later, Traversi also made the point that part of Hal (the Falstaff part) must die before he can reign.

²¹ In another perspective, we might argue that Hal appears more often as a father-figure than Falstaff.

²² The only allusion to Hotspur's death is made by King Henry who merely mentions that the noble Percy has been slain (V.5.19).

²³ Keiji Aoki in Shakespeare's "Henry IV" and "Henry V": Hal's Heroic Character and the Sun-Cloud Theme (Kyoto, 1973). Mentioned by D. H. Burden in "Shakespeare's History Plays: 1952-83", Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985), 1-18.

²⁴ This is also the opinion of Jonas A. Barish who considers that Hal fits himself as a ruler by scrapping part of his humanity: "Political success is achieved at the cost of constricted sensibility" (Shakespeare Studies 1 [1965], 9-17, 16.