[In the essay that follows, Yachnin contends that what is perceived to be a structural problem in Henry IV Parts 1and 2 (that is, the question of whether the plays should be approached as one ten-act play or two separate five-act plays) ceases to be an issue when the plays are understood to be performance texts, rather than literary texts. As such, the critic maintains, the two plays reveal Shakespeare's critique of Renaissance historiography and demonstrate the ‘open-ended’ character of historical change.]

The question of whether Shakespeare's Henry IV plays constitute one ten-act play or two separate plays of five acts each is one of those embarrassments literary criticism has brought on itself by its investment in the notion of organic form.¹ The fact that the two plays were never performed together in Shakespeare's time should have constituted definitive evidence against the view that the two plays are in fact one play with two parts—but it has not, and the view is still current.² Indeed, the entire controversy concerning the relationship of the plays—on both sides of the issue—has arisen from what I believe is the mistaken attempt to force the idea of aesthetic unity upon the genre of Shakespeare's Histories. In this essay, therefore, I want to argue that the “structural problem in Henry IV” lies not in the plays themselves, but rather in the “structural” approach which has both created the problem and has gone on to produce a range of correspondingly problematic solutions. I want to suggest that the seeming puzzle of the two Henry IV plays can be solved merely by replacing the term “structure” with the term “sequence.” Moreover, as I shall argue, this rethinking of the Henry IV plays in terms of sequence rather than structure allows us to see how the two plays develop Shakespeare's critique of Renaissance historiography, and enact the revisionist, open-ended nature of historical change which provides one of their two central thematic interests (the other being the operations of political power).

Of course, there is no novelty in referring to the second Henry IV plays as the “sequel” to the first: Dr. Johnson called the second play a “sequel,” as has Sherman H. Hawkins (and both Johnson and Hawkins hold that the two Henry IV plays are one play).³ However, neither of these critics develops the idea of sequence into an interpretive approach. On the contrary, most, if not all, critics assume that the Henry IV plays constitute either one or two literary texts, that the meaning of a literary text subsists outside the movement of time, and that literary meaning is, by its nature, structural and synchronic; whereas if one takes seriously the theatrical idea of sequence, then one will assume that meaning is produced in time, that therefore meaning is either cumulative or revisionist, and, specifically, that the meaning of the Henry IV plays is changeable as well as contingent upon one's temporal position with respect to the sequence.

The very terms of the question of the “structural problem in Henry IV” point to a kind of thinking at odds with the emphases of theatricality. The central question about the relationship between the two plays, in Harold Jenkins's formulation, has been: “is Henry IV one play or two?”⁴ The question can be elaborated—as Jenkins recognizes (p. 3)—in metaphysical terms: is Henry IV one unity or two, one “structure” of stable meanings or two distinct “structures”? It is easy to see that the “structural problem in Henry IV” is a consequence of the desire to render Shakespeare's meaning full, stable, and permanent, since interpretive stability depends upon the construction of a unified text in which all meaningful relations between parts will be fully present “all at once.” Such a network of synchronically related meanings can be achieved only in terms of an interpretive model which excludes change as a condition of the text. In contrast, the interpretive model I will apply to the Henry IV plays includes change as the central condition of the production of meaning. From this point of view, meaning is never stable or full, but rather is constantly changing and revising itself. This model dissolves rather than resolves the “structural problem in Henry IV.” Since, as I shall argue, neither play is a structure, there is no logical dilemma attendant upon their relationship—the second play merely follows the first, in basically the same way as scene follows scene within the individual plays.

The eighteenth century was the first great age of Shakespeare editing (as opposed to Shakespeare performance), and it was, not surprisingly, in the context of this shift from theater to text that the “structural problem” first appeared.⁵ John Upton was the first to raise the relationship between the Henry IV plays as a problem in need of a solution. In his Critical Observations on Shakespeare (1746), Upton argued that both the Henry IV plays had what Aristotle demanded of a unified work—a beginning, a middle, and an ending—that each was therefore an independent play, and that it was an error to speak of a first and second part.⁶ Dr. Johnson responded to this claim by insisting that the “two plays will appear to every reader, who shall peruse them without ambition of critical discoveries, to be so connected that the second is merely a sequel to the first; to be two only because they are too long to be one.”⁷ In spite of Johnson's use of the word “sequel,” it is clear that both his response and Upton's original claim depend upon seeing the Henry IV plays as literature rather than as performance-texts (so Johnson assumes that the plays are for readers rather than for audiences). This local dispute is in turn an effect of the larger eighteenth-century cultural project which sought to recuperate the player Shakespeare as an icon of conservative values by arresting and hypostatizing the traffic of the stage. The controversy that, since the eighteenth century, has swirled intermittently around the Henry IV plays has obscured the overall purpose, shared on both sides, of rescuing Shakespeare from the instability and temporality of theatricality. While the structural approach has changed Shakespeare's plays from their original nature as theatrical events, and while it has worked efficiently in terms of the critical privileging of synchronic over diachronic elements in the Comedies and Tragedies, it has nonetheless broken down with respect to the Henry IV plays since time-charged theatricality is crucial to those plays' production of meaning.

None of the attempts to impose structure upon the Henry IV plays has been entirely successful. Sherman Hawkins' recent argument for seeing the plays as a single unified structure succeeds in rebutting many points of Jenkins's influential Structural Problem in Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth; but fails, we shall see, to validate its own position. Moreover, in spite of Hawkins' strictures, Jenkins's argument—of all the attempts to solve the “structural problem”—still comes closest to being entirely satisfactory, although only by describing the relationship between the two plays in terms of a paradox—that “Henry IV … is both one play and two. … The two parts are complementary, they are also independent and even incompatible” (p. 26). Further, if Jenkins's paradox is the right answer to the structural problem (and it has won wide acceptance),⁸ then it seems to follow that the structural approach to the Henry IV plays—since it produces a paradoxical conclusion—must itself be inherently illogical. I would even suggest that Jenkins's argument could be seen as a reductio ad absurdum which demonstrates the inadequacy of the structural approach.

Sherman Hawkins's argument against Jenkins represents the most sustained attempt to prove the single-play theory. If Hawkins's argument fails (as I think it does), it is probably not the fault of the advocate, but rather the necessary consequence of attempting to apply structural terms to material whose meaning is produced temporally and sequentially.

Following the general views of Dr. Johnson, Dover Wilson, and E. M. W. Tillyard, Hawkins argues that “Part 1” looks ahead to, and is incomplete without, “Part 2,” and that the “double conversion” of Prince Hal does not contradict the single-play theory.⁹ According to Hawkins, the ending of the first play, as well as the presence of the Archbishop of York within the play, anticipates and necessitates the second:

Part I ends in a battle that establishes the house of Lancaster
as the present and probably future victor in the civil war. But again triumph
is blended with precaution: Northumberland and the Archbishop are “busily
in arms” and Westmoreland and Lancaster must set off to meet then with “dearest
speed.”
Rebellion in this land shall lose his sway,
Meeting the check of such another day;
And since this business so fair is done,
Let us not leave till all our own be won.

(5.5.41-44)

Could Shakespeare say more plainly that while Hotspur's
business is done, he does not mean to leave his story yet? Shrewsbury is not
its ending end: the King, the Archbishop, and the audience all look forward
to “such another day” (pp. 280-81).

It is true that the ending of the first play looks ahead to the future. However, the first play's anticipations of the second do not constitute proof that the two are one work; rather, the point is that such cues as the King's “such another day” or the presence of the Archbishop in act 4, scene 4 will strike us as anticipatory of a sequel only when they are in fact fulfilled by a sequel.¹⁰ As every story-teller knows, narrative is written backwards as well as forwards: links with earlier parts in the story are “discovered” as later parts are invented, unity is seldom planned out from the beginning (on the contrary, it is normally a product of the ending); more to the point, sequels (or continuations) are usually produced by opening up points of entry in the already written story, and sequels always change the meanings of the points of entry they create in the original. Therefore the ending of the first play means one thing in itself, and another from the viewpoint of its sequel; and the same is true of Hal's soliloquy in part 1, act 1, scene 1, of Falstaff's references, in the same scene, to Hal's eventual accession to the throne, and of the appearance of the Archbishop in act 4, scene 4.¹¹

If, as Hawkins wants to argue, the Henry IV plays constitute a unified two-part play, then he must explain the fact that Hal redeems himself in the first play, but then must redeem himself again in the second. Hawkins argues that the two conversions are “stages in a single process” on the basis of a series of claims about the psychological realism of the portrayal of Hal, the nature of Hal's conversion, the relationship between Hal and Henry, and the nature of history in the plays. However, none of these can substantiate the central claim that Hal's double conversion is a single process, since neither the King nor Worcester seems to think that Hal's delinquency in the second play is anything other than a continuous and uninterrupted state of lawlessness (2H4 4.4.54-80; 4.5.92-137); they do not seem to think Hal has relapsed after having been converted because neither seems able to remember that Hal has already redeemed himself in the first play. Finally, Hawkins seems unable to account for this crucial discontinuity between the plays he wishes to see as an unified structure.

Once we dispense with the desire to render Shakespeare's meaning stable and “structured,” and replace the term “structure” with the term “sequence,” the relationship between the two plays can be seen to be straightforward and coherent. Hal's interview with his father in the first play provides an illustration. For most critics, this scene, containing Hal's promise to vanquish Hotspur or to die trying, has seemed decisive, a moment around which Hal's story is organized and in whose terms it can be hypostatized as a structure of chivalric reformation.¹² Jenkins calls the scene a “nodal point”: “when the King rebukes his son, the Prince replies, ‘I will redeem all this …’; in the fifth act he fulfils this vow at Shrewsbury, as is signalized by the King's admission that the Prince has ‘redeem’d his lost opinion.’ … The curve of the plot could hardly be more firmly or more symmetrically drawn” (p. 9).

It is true that, at the moment we witness Hal's interview with his father, we are likely to agree that the scene is crucial. More than that, we are likely to feel that Hal's promise to his father is the emotional fulfillment of the promise he made himself to “redeem all this” in soliloquy in act 1, scene 2, and (if we are thinking of the play in terms of structure) that the promise to his father links up with the earlier soliloquy and with the upcoming victory at Shrewsbury in order to provide the dramatic action with a solid interpretive framework. However, what this structural analysis overlooks is not merely that Hal returns to the tavern in act 3, scene 3 (a minor derogation which in any case is easily assimilated into the proposed pattern), but more importantly that Hal revises the meaning of the interview with his father in such a way as to destabilize it and to disable it as the “nodal point” in the proposed pattern of reformation. “O, my sweet beef,” Hal says to Falstaff after the apparently decisive interview with his father, “I must still be good angel to thee.—The money is paid back again. … I am good friends with my father and may do any thing” (1H4 3.3.176-81).¹³

Hal's revisionist glance backwards to his interview with his father forces a revaluation of that apparently decisive turning-point in terms of Hal's apparent desire to persist in delinquency. Further, Hal's conduct at Shrewsbury in turn invites a revision of his revision of his interview with his father, so that Hal's remark to Falstaff can then be seen to be inconsequential, and his promise to his father can be restored—but now only provisionally—to its former authenticity. Revisionism, as I have said, the way the meaning of actions and words is changed and destabilized by subsequent actions and words, constitutes the central condition of the production of meaning in the plays. The first speech of the first play breaks between Henry's expression, on the one hand, of his intention immediately to mount a crusade (“No more the thirsty entrance of this soil / Shall daub her lips with her own children's blood, / … those opposed eyes, / Which … Did lately meet in the intestine shock / … Shall now … March all one way” [1.1.5-15]) and his statement, on the other, that a crusade is out of the question at this time: “But this our purpose now is twelve month old, / And bootless ’tis to tell you we will go; / Therefor we meet not now” (1.1.28-30). The second part of the speech revises the first part as largely Henry's actorly performance of zeal rather than as his authentic expression of zeal. In this respect, of course, the revisionism of the play's production of meaning persistently reveals the actorly nature of characters' actions and words, in the sense that the characters are shown, not merely performing historically significant actions and speaking historically significant words, but rather that actions and words constitute the characters' attempts to crystallize their own meanings in the face of the fluidity of meaning. That is, that which is defined as authentic is constitutive of its own meaning; it may be interpreted subsequently, but there will remain in the authentic action itself a core of meaning which is stable by virtue of being prior to interpretation.¹⁴ On the other hand, an actorly performance of an action is already an interpretation; consequently, a performance of an action has no stable core of meaning. In this view, Hal's soliloquy, “I know you all,” constitutes Hal's attempt to predetermine the meaning of his own history. In the course of the two plays, Hal's initial construction of his history—his self-construction—is revised several times, repudiated and confirmed by turns; however, once revealed to be not a speech from the heart, but rather the performance of a speech from the heart, the soliloquy remains actorly, or theatrical, and thus radically changeable in meaning rather than authentic and permanent.¹⁵ The revisionism attendant upon the dramatic movement thus disables Hal's soliloquy from standing as a reference point which might be construed as stable by virtue of its externality to Hal's self-conscious construction of his history.

The relationship between the two Henry IV plays is also revisionist in that the second play constitutes a critique—even an undoing—of the first. The central problem in the relationship between the two plays, as we have seen, consists in the fact that Hal must redeem himself twice. Jenkins claims to see no problem in this repeated pattern. He bases his explanation of Hal's double conversion on his idea that Shakespeare intended to write only one play, but then found he had sufficient material for two.¹⁶ However, according to Jenkins, the sequel also required an unreclaimed prince in order to achieve the desired dramatic effect: “The Prince cannot come into Part 2 unreclaimed without destroying the dramatic effect of Part 1. Yet if Part 2 is not to forego its own dramatic effect … it requires a prince who is unreclaimed. This is Part 2's dilemma, and the way it takes out of it is a bold one. When the King on his deathbed exclaims against the Prince's ‘headstrong riot,’ he has not forgotten that at Shrewsbury he congratulated the Prince on his redemption. He has not forgotten it for the simple reason that it has never taken place. … Accordingly the ideal spectator of either part must … sometimes remember what he knows and sometimes be content to forget it” (pp. 25-26).

As Sherman Hawkins has remarked, it is incredible to suppose that Shakespeare expected his audience to forget the main action of a play in that play's immediate sequel (p. 300). Indeed, far from expecting us to forget Hal's first reformation, Shakespeare seems to want us to remember it: the first scene of the second play provides a lengthy account of Shrewsbury, and Poins recalls Hal's reformation the first time Hal is onstage in the second play (Hawkins, p. 294).

What, then, is the nature of the relationship between Hal's reformation in the first play and the apparent requirement that he reform again in the second? I suggest that the second play relates to the first in basically the same way as the second part of Henry's “pilgrimage” speech relates to its first part, or as Hal's radically destabilizing comment (“I am good friends with my father and may do anything”) relates to the interview with his father. That is, Hal's unreclaimed state in the second play contradicts the apparent reclamation in the first. In the light of this contradiction, Hal's actions at Shrewsbury are recast as an actorly performance of a reformation rather than a reformation itself; the meaning of Hal's actions is not then constituted in itself as a stable and permanent point in a changeless text, but rather is destabilized and made subject to the revisionist interpretations that come with the future.

The revision of Shrewsbury engineered by the second play brings into different focus Hal's rescue of his father. Whereas from the point of view of the first play, the moment of rescue authenticates the reconciliation between father and son, from the viewpoint of the sequel, the moment is burdened by continued mutual distrust and resentment—the father's praise is grudging and the son's response is uncomfortably defensive:¹⁷

King. Thou has redeem’d
thy lost opinion,
And show’d thou mak’st some tender of my life,
In this fair rescue thou has brought to me.
Prince. 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.

(1H4 5.4.47-56)

The revisionist relationship between the two plays explains why the first play is complete in itself until it is brought into juxtaposition with the second; the second play, that is, undoes the first, revises its meaning in order to appropriate it to its own darker view of political life.¹⁸ The difference between the revisionist relationship between the plays and the revisionist movement within each of the plays consists, then, only in the fact that the latter is necessary and inescapable whereas the former is optional—was optional initially for the playwright himself, and has been subsequently for Shakespeare's audiences.

.....

In the Henry IV plays, Shakespeare's idea of history is implicit in both the revisionist dramatic movement and the ironic undercutting of the characters' historiographical assumptions. Shakespeare's version of history as revisionist and open-ended (and therefore not providentialist)¹⁹ seems to be a product of his sceptical engagement with conflicting Renaissance models of history. In the broadest terms, these historiographical models are divisible according to two patterns (linear and cyclical) and two modalities (providentialist and humanist). (While it is not always the case, there is nonetheless a strong tendency for linear models of history to be providentialist and cyclical models to be humanist.)²⁰ Thus Shakespeare had available to him a wide variety of combinations, all sharing the basic assumption that history is explicable in terms of a particular pattern and a particular modality.²¹

It should also be noted that while the Henry IV plays do critique the idea of history as patterned and hence as grounded in the transhistorical, Shakespeare does not develop an exclusively materialist account of history, since—in spite of their tendency to ascribe the causes of historical change to the level of nature—the plays do preserve an atmosphere of the uncanny. The dramatic irony of Henry IV's death in a room called “Jerusalem” in fulfillment of the prophecy that he would die in Jerusalem or the persuasive, but unauthoritative, “fatefulness” of Hal's meeting-up with Hotspur at Shrewsbury both suggest the persistent operation of the uncanny in spite of Shakespeare's generally sceptical representations of history.

Shakespeare was able to find the two principal Renaissance patternings of history in two of his favorite authors—Holinshed and Plutarch. In spite of his intermittent expressions of scepticism, Holinshed's construction of history as a linear causative chain represents merely a post-Reformation softening, rather than a repudiation, of Augustinian apocalyptic history, an historiographical model given a harder and more political turn by Reformation polemicists such as John Bale and John Foxe.²² Holinshed's linear historiography remains basically providentialist in conception (especially in the 1587 second edition which was used by Shakespeare), and therefore progressivist, figuring the “great perplexitie and little pleasure” of Henry IV's reign as the necessary consequence of the usurpation of Richard II and as the precondition of Henry V's victorious reign, all of which events are seen in turn as contributing to the accession of the Tudors.²³ In contrast, North's translation of Amyot's translation of Plutarch (which Shakespeare was getting to know when writing Julius Caesar, c. 1599)²⁴ emphasizes the basic repetitiveness of history, the cyclical structuring of time which underlies Plutarch's paralleling of famous Greeks and Romans, and which allows Amyot's conventional recommendation of the educational value of history so conceived—“it is a certain rule and instruction, which by examples past, teacheth us to judge of things present, and to foresee things to come: so as we may know what to like of, and what to follow, what to mislike, and what to eschew.”²⁵ Further, Plutarch's late classical model of cyclical history was renewed in Renaissance humanist versions of historical recurrence such as that of Machiavelli.²⁶

The conventional Christian response to the apparent circularity of history (and, implicitly, to the model of history as cyclical) was to assimilate repetition into the overarching linearity of Providence. Thus the Tudor historians routinely dovetail the retributive cycles following upon the usurpation of Richard II with the overall linear movement towards the accession of Henry VII, an ideological maneuver which may be epitomized by Thomas Browne's statement that the operations of Fortune constitute in fact “that serpentine and crooked line [whereby God] draws those actions that his wisdom intends in a more unknown and secret way.”²⁷ In contrast, Shakespeare's history is open-ended because Shakespeare conflates, and thereby cancels, the two principal Renaissance patternings of history—history as linear and progressive (or regressive); history as cyclical and repetitive—so that we simply cannot know where we are or even what kind of “where” we are in. In other words, the crowning of Henry IV might feel like a moment of real progress, but might merely be a step in a cyclical movement which will return us to where we have already been—civil disharmony and feuding over the throne. On the other hand, the delinquency of Hal might seem a mere repetition of Richard II's “skipping” trespasses (1H4 3.2.60-128), but might turn out to be a step in a progress towards the recuperation of royal authority (a recuperation which itself might be assimilated into a cycle of national expansion and senescence). The revisionist nature of historical change has the effect of persistently altering the basic shape of history, and so depriving history of basic shape altogether. History's consequent failure to resolve itself into a determinate shape means, then, that the full significance of events is unknowable at any time.

In the face of the open-endedness and “unpatterning” of history, the characters in the Henry IV plays undertake to adapt one or the other of the basic conventional constructions of historical movement, if only to explain their own meanings to themselves. Hastings, Warwick, and Henry IV construct history as repetitive and cyclical; each invests cyclical history with a different modality—Hastings adopts a secularized retributive cycle (2H4, 4.2.44-49), Warwick a pragmatic analysis of personality types (past behavior determines future behavior [2H4 3.1.80-92]), and Henry a fatalistic nihilism (1H4 3.2.93-128; 2H4 3.1.45-65). In each case, the historiographical model is revealed as a rationalizing attempt to shape time by the measure of either the character's sense of defeat (Hastings and Henry) or the character's sense of present political requirements (Warwick needs to bolster the King's confidence); and in all cases the model fails to provide an adequate account of events.

In repudiation of Hastings' prophecy of ongoing civil war “Whiles England shall have generation” (2H4 4.2.49), is the audience's plain awareness that Gaultree Forest did not spawn such an endless civil war and Prince John's assertion of the open-endedness of history and the impenetrable depth of the future: “You are too shallow, Hastings, much too shallow, / To sound the bottom of the after-times” (2H4 4.2.50-51). In Henry's despairing speech in the middle of the second play (3.1.45-79), “the revolution of the times” acquires its root meaning of a “turning of the times,” in telling opposition to Henry's earlier view (in Richard II) of his own revolutionary role in history, then conceived as linear, progressive, and avowedly providential. Henry's fatalistic and inadequate construction of history in the second Henry IV play, and in his interview with Hal in the first play, implies a critique of history (as record of events) as fundamentally a misdirected and covert legitimation of the present.²⁸ In this sense, the past is revealed to be a product of the present, and history (as record of events) as well as history (as the events themselves) is shown to be constructed in terms of revisionism. Moreover, as I have already suggested, history as record and history as the events themselves are tightly linked in the Henry IV plays, for the reason that interpretation begins with and is integral to the event. Finally, Warwick's account of history as recurrent by virtue of the predictability of human behavior remains unable to explain or to predict the change which takes place when Hal becomes Henry V.²⁹

While, however, all constructions of history as cyclical are weakened by the bad motives of their advocates and vitiated by the actual unpredictability of events, all attempts to conceive history as linear—or to act as if history were linear—are equally undermined by the second play's patterned duplication of scenes from the first play, an effect which is especially prominent in the early scenes of the second play.³⁰ For example, the conspirators in Henry IV, act 1, scene 3 construct their role as political revolutionaries in terms of linear and progressive history: “in this great work,” Lord Bardolph says, “Which is almost to pluck a kingdom down / And set another up” (48-50). However, while the conspirators believe they are making progress, it is difficult for us to escape the impression that they are merely repeating the previous conspiracy between Hotspur, Northumberland, and Worcester, which took place at the same point in the previous play. The duplication of scenes, then, has the effect of making the characters in the second play appear to be merely time's fools, and, by virtue of their seemingly inevitable repetitions of the past, of repudiating their construction of history as linear and progressive. The “unpatterning” of history within the world of the plays, then, parallels the thwarting of structure in the plays themselves; the Henry IV plays thus recast both history and literature in terms of the mind's provisional attempts to order the unstructured movement of time.

Finally, the unpatterning of history in the Henry IV plays, achieved by conflating and cancelling the two principal models of history, is folded into Shakespeare's sceptical representation of Hal's construction of his own history. In terms of the first play on its own, Hal's history seems linear: in his interview with his father, Hal acknowledges the open-endedness and unpredictability of time; and at the moment of victory over Hotspur, he seems the beneficiary of a quasi-providential “destiny” to which he has submitted his will. On the other hand, Hal, from the viewpoint of the end of the second play, seems merely to have circled around to where he began (in his soliloquy in 1H4 1.2), so that Hal's conversion—at the very moment of its fulfillment—is brought under a sceptical analysis which is empowered to see Hal's history as cyclical rather than as linear (so that the last scene constitutes merely the public rejection of the man whom Hal has, from the outset, already secretly cast off), as occasioned by Hal's manipulative will to power rather than by “destiny,” and, consequently, as no conversion at all. Or not. That is, Hal's story can be seen as consistently linear and providential in spite of the availability of a sceptical viewpoint, since the second play empowers, but does not authorize, scepticism. Further, at this moment in the second play and in terms of the story of Hal (who is both the thematic focal point and, in Bakhtinian terms, a “semantic position” by virtue of his self-conscious production of his own meaning), questions about the shape of history merge with questions about the operations of political power, and in both cases all possible answers are revealed to be the always provisional and partial (in both senses) positions produced by the mind in the face of the fluidity of meaning and in its attempts to wrest the Real from the merely actual—by Hal's mind and by the minds of the individual members of the audience with respect to Hal. In this regard, the nature of history becomes, in a full sense, a matter of interpretation.

In most of his plays, Shakespeare seems to be developing what I have characterized elsewhere as a Sidneian mystification of literary discourse.³¹ In the Apology for Poetry, Philip Sidney set the poet above the historian by virtue of the poet's freedom from the constraints of Nature. Sidney crystallized an ideology of literature as opposed to historical and other mundane discourses, as separate, self-enclosed, and expressive of permanent Truth (in contrast to history's mere facticity) and—most importantly—as removed from the flow of time by virtue of poetry's connection with the transcendent, and hence as productive of stable and unified meaning. To a large degree, Shakespeare shared Sidney's ideology of literary discourse. However, as I would like to suggest, in Shakespeare's time, and particularly in Shakespeare's theatrical milieu, the idea that a theatrical performance might be seen as both unified and separate from the world must have seemed avant-garde if not downright presumptuous. In this view, then, the “structural problem in Henry IV” is a consequence of the interpretation of the Henry IV plays in terms of a Sidneian theory of poetry; and that kind of interpretation has generated confusion, I suggest, because the Henry IV plays represent Shakespeare's critique of Sidney's, and his own, attempts to remove dramatic literature from both the context of theatrical performance and the day-to-day world of time.³²

Notes

1. I will refer to what are normally called “1 & 2 Henry IV” as “the Henry IV plays” throughout this essay. My designation reflects a theatrical rather than a literary emphasis, and is in conformity with the practice of designating the first Henry IV play in the quarto editions, whereas the received “unifying” designation derives from the single quarto edition of the second play and from the First Folio, which, as Leah S. Marcus has recently argued (in Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and its Discontents [U. of California Press, 1988], pp. 2-32), itself marks the inception of the movement to turn Shakespeare into a stable iconic figure, to transform (according to Marcus, p. 26) “the playtexts from records of performance to a form of literature in its own right, part of the realm called Art.” A related case is Tamburlaine, where the second play's prologue explicitly states that the playwright wrote the second play in response to the success of the first, but where the title page of the first edition (1590) unifies the two plays as one work “divided into two Tragicall Discourses, as they were sundrie times shewed upon Stages in the Citie of London.”

2. Of course, my point that the two Henry IV plays were never presented in a single performance is unexceptional. In addition, see Mary Thomas Crane, “The Shakespearean Tetralogy,” SQ 36 (1985): 282-99, for an analysis of Elizabethan multiple-part drama which concludes that there is little evidence for the consecutive performance, on successive days, of the Henry IV plays. For a brief account of the “structural” controversy up to 1983 see Dennis H. Burden, “Shakespeare's History Plays: 1952-1983,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 13-14. Recent studies which depend upon a structural account of the relationship between the two plays include Catherine M. Shaw, “The Tragic Substructure of the Henry IV Plays,” Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 61-67; and Robert B. Bennett, “Four Stages of Time: The Shape of History in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy,” Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987): 61-85 (Bennett's study depends upon the structural coherence of all four plays from Richard II to Henry V).

3. Samuel Johnson, Selections from Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Bertrand H. Bronson and Jean M. O’Meara (Yale U. Press, 1986), p. 178; Sherman H. Hawkins, “Henry IV: The Structural Problem Revisited,” SQ 33 (1982): 282.

4. Harold Jenkins, The Structural Problem in Shakespeare's Henry the Fourth (London: Methuen, 1956), p. 2.

5. For a stimulating discussion of the eighteenth-century redefinition of Shakespeare as a literary artist (as opposed to a player and playwright), see Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), pp. 52-99.

6. See Henry the Fourth, Part I, ed. S. B. Hemingway, New Variorum (Philadelpha and London: J. B. Lippincott, 1936), pp. 11, 41-42, 70-71.

7. Johnson on Shakespeare, p. 178.

8. See, for example, James L. Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare's Henriad: Richard II to Henry V (U. of California Press, 1979), p. 114. A. R. Humphreys, “Introduction,” King Henry IV, Part II, Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1966), p. xxvi.

9. See John Dover Wilson, “Introduction,” The First Part of King Henry IV, New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge U. Press, 1946), pp. vii-xiii; E. M. W. Tillyard, Shakespeare's History Plays (1944; rpt. Harmondsworth: Peregrine, 1964), pp. 264-68.

10. This point does not apply to the Epilogue of the second play, since it explicitly promises a sequel.

11. Cf. Hawkins, pp. 285-86. These two basic points—that a sequel changes the meaning of the play it follows; and that it creates, in the play it follows, the signposts which then are seen to anticipate it—can be illustrated by reference either to the revisionist relationship between The Return of the Jedi and Star Wars, or to the typological relationship between the New and Old Testaments.

12. See, for example, Derek Traversi, Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V (Stanford U. Press, 1957), p. 84; John W. Blanpied, Time and the Artist in Shakespeare's English Histories (U. of Delaware Press, 1983), pp. 155-64.

13. All quotations are from A. R. Humphreys' Arden editions, King Henry IV, Part I (London: Methuen, 1961) and King Henry IV, Part II (London: Methuen, 1967).

14. The conversion of the Prince in Famous Victories provides an excellent example of an authentic action which retains a stable core of meaning. The ideological difference between the Famous Victories Prince and Shakespeare's Hal consists in the fact that the self in Shakespeare (Hal himself) remains radically interiorized and maintains its hegemony over action and expression whereas action and expression in the earlier play are authentic by virtue of their power to determine character.

15. For a related discussion of the hero as provisionally self-constructed, see Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Theory and History of Literature, 8 (U. of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 47-77, 101-2, passim.

16. Hawkins, pp. 282-84, decisively rebuts Jenkins' argument that Shakespeare wrote two Henry IV plays because he had too much material for one.

17. For readings which interpret the Shrewsbury reconciliation between Hal and Henry as strained and ironic in its immediate context, see Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare's History Plays (Harvard U. Press, 1972), pp. 150-51; and Hawkins, pp. 293-94. Of course, I would agree that this reading is valid, but only from the revisionist perspective of the second play.

18. Anthony B. Dawson, Watching Shakespeare: A Playgoer's Guide (London: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 88-89, discusses the ways in which the two plays together are different from the first on its own.

19. For a persuasive critique of the providentialist view of the Henry IV plays, see H. A. Kelly, Divine Providence in the England of Shakespeare's Histories (Harvard U. Press, 1970), pp. 109-60; for a good discussion of both the question of Shakespeare's providentialism and the open-endedness of history in Shakespeare, see David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 9-33.

20. See Tom F. Driver, The Sense of History in Greek and Shakespearean Drama (Columbia U. Press, 1960), pp. 19-66, for an extensive discussion of these historiographical models.

21. For a brief account of the various linear and cyclical models of time which were available to Renaissance historiography, see Bennett, “Four Stages of Time,” pp. 61-67.

22. For an account of Holinshed's historiography, see F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1967), pp. 182-86.

23. For the differences between the 1577/78 and 1587 editions of Holinshed with respect to their providentialism, see Kelly, Divine Providence, pp. 138-60.

24. Shakespeare seems to be sending up Plutarch's historiographical model in Fluellen's comparison of Alexander and King Henry. See “Introduction,” Shakespeare's Plutarch, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 11-12.

25. Plutarch's Lives Englished by Sir Thomas North, 10 vols. (1579; rpt. London: Dent, 1908), 1: 8-9. For an account of the relationship between linear and providentialist history on the one hand and cyclical and (what he calls) “exemplary” history on the other, see Kastan, pp. 12-23.

26. On Machaivelli's construction of history as recurrent, see G. W. Trompf, The Idea of Historical Recurrence in Western Thought: From Antiquity to the Reformation (U. of California Press, 1979), pp. 250-312.

27. Quoted in Herschel Baker, The Race of Time: Three Lectures on Renaissance Historiography (U. of Toronto Press, 1967), p. 65. Also see Baker's brief discussion of the Christian appropriation of the cyclical model of history, pp. 59-66.

28. In 1H4 3.2, Henry draws a parallel between Hal and Richard II which assumes cyclical view of history. Henry's reasons for seeing history in this way are far from disinterested: he seems to desire a repetition of the original regicide, this time with Hal as Richard and Hotspur as Henry Bolingbroke, as expiation for his own crime. However, Hal is not like Richard for a number of reasons, the most immediate being that Hal is not king, that even if he were, he would not have Richard's de jure claim to the crown, and that Hal will not be overthrown.

29. Bennett, p. 74, has noted that while Warwick predicts Hal's transformation, he does not in fact believe his own prediction.

30. Needless to say, the plays do not resolve into a “diptych” structure (as G. K. Hunter has argued, “Henry IV and the Elizabethan Two-Part Play,” English Studies, n.s. 5 [1954]: 236-48), for the reason that the duplications serve to contradict a linear account of history and so to problematize rather than to validate the attempt to structure history. Further, as Hawkins has pointed out (p. 298), the pattern of duplication dwindles and disappears in the later acts of the second play.

31. “The Powerless Theater,” English Literary Renaissance 21.1 (1991): 49-74.

32. This article represents a version of a paper given at the Tri-Universities Conference on Literature and History at the U. of British Columbia in 1990. I am grateful to the members of the conference for their insightful and helpful comments, especially Ed Berry, Tony Dawson, Terry Sherwood, and Kay Stockholder.