PENGUIN SHAKESPEARE

Founding Editor: T. J. B. Spencer
General Editor: Stanley Wells
Supervisory Editors: Paul Edmondson, Stanley Wells

T. J. B. SPENCER, sometime Director of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, was the founding editor of the New Penguin Shakespeare, for which he edited both Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.

STANLEY WELLS is Emeritus Professor of the University of Birmingham and Chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. He is general editor of the Oxford Shakespeare and his books include Shakespeare: The Poet and His Plays, Shakespeare: For All Time, Looking for Sex in Shakespeare and (with Paul Edmondson) Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

PETER DAVISON has written or edited forty books on Orwell, Shakespeare and drama; he was appointed an OBE in 1999 for services to English Literature, and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Bibliographical Society in 2003.

CHARLES EDELMAN teaches at Edith Cowan University, Western Australia. His books include Shakespeare’s Military Language: A Dictionary, Shakespeare in Production: The Merchant of Venice and The Stukeley Plays.

William Shakespeare

HENRY IV, PART I

Edited with a Commentary by Peter Davison
Introduced by Charles Edelman

PENGUIN BOOKS

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This edition first published in Penguin Books 1968
Reissued in the Penguin Shakespeare series 2005
1

This edition copyright © Penguin Books, 1968
Account of the Text and Commentary copyright © Peter Davison, 1968, 1996
General Introduction and Chronology copyright © Stanley Wells, 2005
Introduction, The Play in Performance and Further Reading copyright © Charles Edelman, 2005

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Contents

General Introduction

The Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works

Introduction

The Play in Performance

Further Reading

HENRY IV, PART I

An Account of the Text

Claimants to the Throne of England after the Deposition of Richard II

Commentary

General Introduction

Every play by Shakespeare is unique. This is part of his greatness. A restless and indefatigable experimenter, he moved with a rare amalgamation of artistic integrity and dedicated professionalism from one kind of drama to another. Never shackled by convention, he offered his actors the alternation between serious and comic modes from play to play, and often also within the plays themselves, that the repertory system within which he worked demanded, and which provided an invaluable stimulus to his imagination. Introductions to individual works in this series attempt to define their individuality. But there are common factors that underpin Shakespeare’s career.

Nothing in his heredity offers clues to the origins of his genius. His upbringing in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was born in 1564, was unexceptional. His mother, born Mary Arden, came from a prosperous farming family. Her father chose her as his executor over her eight sisters and his four stepchildren when she was only in her late teens, which suggests that she was of more than average practical ability. Her husband John, a glover, apparently unable to write, was nevertheless a capable businessman and loyal townsfellow, who seems to have fallen on relatively hard times in later life. He would have been brought up as a Catholic, and may have retained Catholic sympathies, but his son subscribed publicly to Anglicanism throughout his life.

The most important formative influence on Shakespeare was his school. As the son of an alderman who became bailiff (or mayor) in 1568, he had the right to attend the town’s grammar school. Here he would have received an education grounded in classical rhetoric and oratory, studying authors such as Ovid, Cicero and Quintilian, and would have been required to read, speak, write and even think in Latin from his early years. This classical education permeates Shakespeare’s work from the beginning to the end of his career. It is apparent in the self-conscious classicism of plays of the early 1590s such as the tragedy of Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, and the narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1592–3) and The Rape of Lucrece (1593–4), and is still evident in his latest plays, informing the dream visions of Pericles and Cymbeline and the masque in The Tempest, written between 1607 and 1611. It inflects his literary style throughout his career. In his earliest writings the verse, based on the ten-syllabled, five-beat iambic pentameter, is highly patterned. Rhetorical devices deriving from classical literature, such as alliteration and antithesis, extended similes and elaborate wordplay, abound. Often, as in Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he uses rhyming patterns associated with lyric poetry, each line self-contained in sense, the prose as well as the verse employing elaborate figures of speech. Writing at a time of linguistic ferment, Shakespeare frequently imports Latinisms into English, coining words such as abstemious, addiction, incarnadine and adjunct. He was also heavily influenced by the eloquent translations of the Bible in both the Bishops’ and the Geneva versions. As his experience grows, his verse and prose become more supple, the patterning less apparent, more ready to accommodate the rhythms of ordinary speech, more colloquial in diction, as in the speeches of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, the characterful prose of Falstaff and Hamlet’s soliloquies. The effect is of increasing psychological realism, reaching its greatest heights in Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Gradually he discovered ways of adapting the regular beat of the pentameter to make it an infinitely flexible instrument for matching thought with feeling. Towards the end of his career, in plays such as The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline and The Tempest, he adopts a more highly mannered style, in keeping with the more overtly symbolical and emblematical mode in which he is writing.

So far as we know, Shakespeare lived in Stratford till after his marriage to Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, in 1582. They had three children: a daughter, Susanna, born in 1583 within six months of their marriage, and twins, Hamnet and Judith, born in 1585. The next seven years of Shakespeare’s life are virtually a blank. Theories that he may have been, for instance, a schoolmaster, or a lawyer, or a soldier, or a sailor, lack evidence to support them. The first reference to him in print, in Robert Greene’s pamphlet Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit of 1592, parodies a line from Henry VI, Part III, implying that Shakespeare was already an established playwright. It seems likely that at some unknown point after the birth of his twins he joined a theatre company and gained experience as both actor and writer in the provinces and London. The London theatres closed because of plague in 1593 and 1594; and during these years, perhaps recognizing the need for an alternative career, he wrote and published the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. These are the only works we can be certain that Shakespeare himself was responsible for putting into print. Each bears the author’s dedication to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton (1573–1624), the second in warmer terms than the first. Southampton, younger than Shakespeare by ten years, is the only person to whom he personally dedicated works. The Earl may have been a close friend, perhaps even the beautiful and adored young man whom Shakespeare celebrates in his Sonnets.

The resumption of playing after the plague years saw the founding of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, a company to which Shakespeare was to belong for the rest of his career, as actor, shareholder and playwright. No other dramatist of the period had so stable a relationship with a single company. Shakespeare knew the actors for whom he was writing and the conditions in which they performed. The permanent company was made up of around twelve to fourteen players, but one actor often played more than one role in a play and additional actors were hired as needed. Led by the tragedian Richard Burbage (1568–1619) and, initially, the comic actor Will Kemp (d. 1603), they rapidly achieved a high reputation, and when King James I succeeded Queen Elizabeth I in 1603 they were renamed as the King’s Men. All the women’s parts were played by boys; there is no evidence that any female role was ever played by a male actor over the age of about eighteen. Shakespeare had enough confidence in his boys to write for them long and demanding roles such as Rosalind (who, like other heroines of the romantic comedies, is disguised as a boy for much of the action) in As You Like It, Lady Macbeth and Cleopatra. But there are far more fathers than mothers, sons than daughters, in his plays, few if any of which require more than the company’s normal complement of three or four boys.

The company played primarily in London’s public playhouses – there were almost none that we know of in the rest of the country – initially in the Theatre, built in Shoreditch in 1576, and from 1599 in the Globe, on Bankside. These were wooden, more or less circular structures, open to the air, with a thrust stage surmounted by a canopy and jutting into the area where spectators who paid one penny stood, and surrounded by galleries where it was possible to be seated on payment of an additional penny. Though properties such as cauldrons, stocks, artificial trees or beds could indicate locality, there was no representational scenery. Sound effects such as flourishes of trumpets, music both martial and amorous, and accompaniments to songs were provided by the company’s musicians. Actors entered through doors in the back wall of the stage. Above it was a balconied area that could represent the walls of a town (as in King John), or a castle (as in Richard II), and indeed a balcony (as in Romeo and Juliet). In 1609 the company also acquired the use of the Blackfriars, a smaller, indoor theatre to which admission was more expensive, and which permitted the use of more spectacular stage effects such as the descent of Jupiter on an eagle in Cymbeline and of goddesses in The Tempest. And they would frequently perform before the court in royal residences and, on their regular tours into the provinces, in non-theatrical spaces such as inns, guildhalls and the great halls of country houses.

Early in his career Shakespeare may have worked in collaboration, perhaps with Thomas Nashe (1567– c. 1601) in Henry VI, Part I and with George Peele (1556–96) in Titus Andronicus. And towards the end he collaborated with George Wilkins (fl. 1604–8) in Pericles, and with his younger colleagues Thomas Middleton (1580–1627), in Timon of Athens, and John Fletcher (1579–1625), in Henry VIII, The Two Noble Kinsmen and the lost play Cardenio. Shakespeare’s output dwindled in his last years, and he died in 1616 in Stratford, where he owned a fine house, New Place, and much land. His only son had died at the age of eleven, in 1596, and his last descendant died in 1670. New Place was destroyed in the eighteenth century but the other Stratford houses associated with his life are maintained and displayed to the public by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

One of the most remarkable features of Shakespeare’s plays is their intellectual and emotional scope. They span a great range from the lightest of comedies, such as The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors, to the profoundest of tragedies, such as King Lear and Macbeth. He maintained an output of around two plays a year, ringing the changes between comic and serious. All his comedies have serious elements: Shylock, in The Merchant of Venice, almost reaches tragic dimensions, and Measure for Measure is profoundly serious in its examination of moral problems. Equally, none of his tragedies is without humour: Hamlet is as witty as any of his comic heroes, Macbeth has its Porter, and King Lear its Fool. His greatest comic character, Falstaff, inhabits the history plays and Henry V ends with a marriage, while Henry VI, Part III, Richard II and Richard III culminate in the tragic deaths of their protagonists.

Although in performance Shakespeare’s characters can give the impression of a superabundant reality, he is not a naturalistic dramatist. None of his plays is explicitly set in his own time. The action of few of them (except for the English histories) is set even partly in England (exceptions are The Merry Wives of Windsor and the Induction to The Taming of the Shrew). Italy is his favoured location. Most of his principal story-lines derive from printed writings; but the structuring and translation of these narratives into dramatic terms is Shakespeare’s own, and he invents much additional material. Most of the plays contain elements of myth and legend, and many derive from ancient or more recent history or from romantic tales of ancient times and faraway places. All reflect his reading, often in close detail. Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577, revised 1587), a great compendium of English, Scottish and Irish history, provided material for his English history plays. The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans by the Greek writer Plutarch, finely translated into English from the French by Sir Thomas North in 1579, provided much of the narrative material, and also a mass of verbal detail, for his plays about Roman history. Some plays are closely based on shorter individual works: As You Like It, for instance, on the novel Rosalynde (1590) by his near-contemporary Thomas Lodge (1558–1625), The Winter’s Tale on Pandosto (1588) by his old rival Robert Greene (1558–92) and Othello on a story by the Italian Giraldi Cinthio (1504–73). And the language of his plays is permeated by the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the proverbial sayings of his day.

Shakespeare was popular with his contemporaries, but his commitment to the theatre and to the plays in performance is demonstrated by the fact that only about half of his plays appeared in print in his lifetime, in slim paperback volumes known as quartos, so called because they were made from printers’ sheets folded twice to form four leaves (eight pages). None of them shows any sign that he was involved in their publication. For him, performance was the primary means of publication. The most frequently reprinted of his works were the non-dramatic poems – the erotic Venus and Adonis and the more moralistic The Rape of Lucrece. The Sonnets, which appeared in 1609, under his name but possibly without his consent, were less successful, perhaps because the vogue for sonnet sequences, which peaked in the 1590s, had passed by then. They were not reprinted until 1640, and then only in garbled form along with poems by other writers. Happily, in 1623, seven years after he died, his colleagues John Heminges (1556–1630) and Henry Condell (d. 1627) published his collected plays, including eighteen that had not previously appeared in print, in the first Folio, whose name derives from the fact that the printers’ sheets were folded only once to produce two leaves (four pages). Some of the quarto editions are badly printed, and the fact that some plays exist in two, or even three, early versions creates problems for editors. These are discussed in the Account of the Text in each volume of this series.

Shakespeare’s plays continued in the repertoire until the Puritans closed the theatres in 1642. When performances resumed after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 many of the plays were not to the taste of the times, especially because their mingling of genres and failure to meet the requirements of poetic justice offended against the dictates of neoclassicism. Some, such as The Tempest (changed by John Dryden and William Davenant in 1667 to suit contemporary taste), King Lear (to which Nahum Tate gave a happy ending in 1681) and Richard III (heavily adapted by Colley Cibber in 1700 as a vehicle for his own talents), were extensively rewritten; others fell into neglect. Slowly they regained their place in the repertoire, and they continued to be reprinted, but it was not until the great actor David Garrick (1717–79) organized a spectacular jubilee in Stratford in 1769 that Shakespeare began to be regarded as a transcendental genius. Garrick’s idolatry prefigured the enthusiasm of critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) and William Hazlitt (1778–1830). Gradually Shakespeare’s reputation spread abroad, to Germany, America, France and to other European countries.

During the nineteenth century, though the plays were generally still performed in heavily adapted or abbreviated versions, a large body of scholarship and criticism began to amass. Partly as a result of a general swing in education away from the teaching of Greek and Roman texts and towards literature written in English, Shakespeare became the object of intensive study in schools and universities. In the theatre, important turning points were the work in England of two theatre directors, William Poel (1852–1934) and his disciple Harley Granville-Barker (1877–1946), who showed that the application of knowledge, some of it newly acquired, of early staging conditions to performance of the plays could render the original texts viable in terms of the modern theatre. During the twentieth century appreciation of Shakespeare’s work, encouraged by the availability of audio, film and video versions of the plays, spread around the world to such an extent that he can now be claimed as a global author.

The influence of Shakespeare’s works permeates the English language. Phrases from his plays and poems – ‘a tower of strength’, ‘green-eyed jealousy’, ‘a foregone conclusion’ – are on the lips of people who may never have read him. They have inspired composers of songs, orchestral music and operas; painters and sculptors; poets, novelists and film-makers. Allusions to him appear in pop songs, in advertisements and in television shows. Some of his characters – Romeo and Juliet, Falstaff, Shylock and Hamlet – have acquired mythic status. He is valued for his humanity, his psychological insight, his wit and humour, his lyricism, his mastery of language, his ability to excite, surprise, move and, in the widest sense of the word, entertain audiences. He is the greatest of poets, but he is essentially a dramatic poet. Though his plays have much to offer to readers, they exist fully only in performance. In these volumes we offer individual introductions, notes on language and on specific points of the text, suggestions for further reading and information about how each work has been edited. In addition we include accounts of the ways in which successive generations of interpreters and audiences have responded to challenges and rewards offered by the plays. The Penguin Shakespeare series aspires to remove obstacles to understanding and to make pleasurable the reading of the work of the man who has done more than most to make us understand what it is to be human.

Stanley Wells

The Chronology of Shakespeare’s Works

A few of Shakespeare’s writings can be fairly precisely dated. An allusion to the Earl of Essex in the chorus to Act V of Henry V, for instance, could only have been written in 1599. But for many of the plays we have only vague information, such as the date of publication, which may have occurred long after composition, the date of a performance, which may not have been the first, or a list in Francis Meres’s book Palladis Tamia, published in 1598, which tells us only that the plays listed there must have been written by that year. The chronology of the early plays is particularly difficult to establish. Not everyone would agree that the first part of Henry VI was written after the third, for instance, or Romeo and Juliet before A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The following table is based on the ‘Canon and Chronology’ section in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, with John Jowett and William Montgomery (1987), where more detailed information and discussion may be found.

Introduction

One of the Elizabethan age’s most delightful books is John Florio’s Second Fruits (1591), from which one could learn to speak Italian through a series of typical conversations, Italian and English on facing pages. In this example some young Londoners discuss how to spend their day:

And then after dinner we will go see a play.
The plays that they play in England, are not right comedies.
Yet they do nothing else but play every day.
Yea but they are neither right comedies, nor right tragedies.
How would you name them then?
Representations of histories, without any decorum.

Unenthusiastic about seeing such a play, they decide on a game of tennis instead. Had Florio written his book about six years later, the play ‘without any decorum’ they missed could well have been the latest effort of London’s most popular playwright, William Shakespeare, about King Henry IV, his famous son and the son’s very fat friend, Sir John Falstaff.

As with most of Shakespeare’s plays, we have no sure knowledge of when Henry IV, Part I was first performed, but the year 1597 has gained general, if not unanimous, acceptance. Nor do we know exactly what the play was originally called; the first Quarto edition of 1598 had the title The History of Henry the Fourth; with the battle at Shrewsbury, between the King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henry Hotspur of the North, With the humorous conceits of Sir John Falstaff.

To label a play a ‘History’ was unusual – between 1578, when George Whetstone’s comedy The Right Excellent History of Promos and Cassandra was published, and 1597, only three other Elizabethan plays, all of them printed in 1594, had been so identified on their title pages. Two were by Robert Greene, The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and The History of Orlando Furioso; the third was A Pleasant Conceited History, called The Taming of a Shrew, which may have been another version of Shakespeare’s famous play or an earlier work that Shakespeare adapted. The varied subject matter and styles of these plays are a reminder that in Shakespeare’s day ‘history’ did not automatically carry a connotation of a record of past events, or of a branch of knowledge such as Roman or English history. Those meanings certainly existed, but the primary definition of ‘history’ was simply ‘story’, a shorter form of the same word, with the same derivation.

To regard Henry IV, Part I as a story rather than a history may bring us closer to the sort of work it actually is, for Shakespeare makes no pretence of being a historian or historiographer – his occupation is poet. Edmund Spenser, in dedicating The Faerie Queene to Sir Walter Raleigh, writes,

an historiographer discourseth of affairs orderly as they were done, accounting as well the times as the actions, but a poet thrusteth into the middest, even where it most concerneth him, and there recoursing to the things forepast, and divining of things to come, maketh a pleasing analysis of all.

In constructing his own ‘pleasing analysis’, Shakespeare freely mixes ‘real’ people – King Henry IV, the Earl of Northumberland – with ‘fictional’ ones – Falstaff, Poins, Mistress Quickly – but even the real people are fictional in that they speak words (usually in verse) that no one is to believe they actually said. ‘Truth’, in the sense of sticking to facts, does not matter: Hotspur is made a youth, the same age as the Prince of Wales, even though the real Hotspur was two years older than the Prince’s father.

When Shakespeare’s former partners, John Heminge and Henry Condell, collected his plays for publication in 1623, they grouped them into three categories and called the book Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies. Each of the ten Histories has an English king in its title, but in poetic style, dramatic construction and the ways in which what might be called the ‘historical record’ is used, differences outnumber similarities: to place a play originally known as The Tragedy of King Richard the Second with the Histories, and then put the True Chronicle History of the Life and Death of King Lear (the title of the 1608 Quarto) among the Tragedies, is arbitrary to say the least.

Heminge and Condell took an even more radical step in giving our play a new title, The First Part of Henry the Fourth, one it never had during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Although The Second Part of Henry the Fourth was performed in 1597 or 1598 and was published in 1600, The History of Henry the Fourth was reprinted eight times, more than any other Shakespeare play, between 1598 and 1639, without changing the title. One can understand how the play eventually became Part I, given the existence of a Part II, and in some ways the subject is unimportant, since every Shakespeare play is known today by a shorthand title, which can vary from edition to edition. The words ‘part one’ do, however, affect how the play is to be understood and appreciated by all readers, from students preparing essays to actors rehearsing their roles: there is an obvious difference between a text that is complete in itself and one that is only the first half of something.

Critics have long argued over whether or not Shakespeare had a second part in mind while writing The History of Henry the Fourth. It is hard to believe that plans for at least one more play about Henry V were not present early on: the Prince’s eventual throwing off of his former companions is foreshadowed clearly in his soliloquy of Act I, scene 2 and in the mock-rejection of Falstaff in the ‘play extempore’ of Act II, scene 4. This event, however, need not occur at the end of a second play, before going on to a third about the reign of Henry V, with its moving scene (II.3) describing Falstaff’s last moments. If a two-part Prince/Falstaff play was foreseen from the beginning, then Shakespeare made a poor job of it – no amount of explaining away will account for the glaring inconsistencies in the narrative, with the relationship of the King and the Prince in Part II showing little awareness that the events of Part I ever happened. It is not that Shakespeare was new at this game, since two of his earliest efforts, Henry VI, Parts II and III (not their original titles) do form a coherent historical narrative.

There is no one right answer to the one- or two-play question, which is taken up later in the essay on The Play in Performance; in some respects it is more of a problem for readers of Part II, since our play did have an independent existence, however brief, as the only Shakespeare work about Henry IV and his wayward son. It is that play I would like to recover in this Introduction, in the hope that it could provide a path to a deeper appreciation of what, by all accounts, was Shakespeare’s greatest hit.

Let us imagine ourselves as London playgoers, some time in 1597. What might we be expecting as we approach the theatre? If we had attended Shakespeare’s Richard II a few years ago, we would remember the newly crowned Henry IV promising ‘a voyage to the Holy Land’ (V.6.49) to wash the blood of Richard II from his hands, along with the brief appearance of Harry Hotspur of the north. We would also recall King Henry asking,

Can no man tell of my unthrifty son?
’Tis full three months since I did see him last.
If any plague hang over us, ’tis he.
I would to God, my lords, he might be found.
Inquire at London ’mongst the taverns there;
For there, they say, he daily doth frequent
With unrestrainèd loose companions… (V.3.1–7)

Perhaps we would also have seen The Famous Victories of Henry V (c. 1586) at the Bull Inn, where the wild Prince Harry cavorted with his cronies Ned, Tom and ‘Jockey’ Oldcastle, only to reject them upon becoming king and going off to fight the battle of Agincourt.

There is nothing particularly surprising in the first scene of today’s play. The action begins in 1402, about twelve months after Richard II left off; hopes of a crusade to the ‘sepulchre of Christ’ (I.1.19) have been repeatedly put off by the King’s ill health and by continued civil strife at home. We hear ‘heavy news’ that the Earl of Mortimer has been captured in Wales by ‘the irregular and wild Glendower’, but ‘smooth and welcome news’ arrives from Holmedon in the north: ‘the Earl of Douglas is discomfited’, and much of his force taken prisoner (I.I.37–67). A promise of some adventures with the Prince of Wales is also given, as the King expresses his envy that Northumberland ‘Should be the father to so blest a son’ while ‘riot and dishonour stain the brow’ of his ‘young Harry’ (79–85). Again, nothing surprising, but the second scene opens with a fat man asking, ‘Now Hal, what time of day is it lad?’ Obviously, ‘Hal’ is the Prince of Wales, but who is his friend?

‘Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light’ (Hamlet)

Gordon Crosse was a London barrister who attended no fewer than 576 performances of Shakespeare between 1890 and 1953, and recorded his impressions in a series of diaries now kept at the Shakespeare Library, Birmingham. After his first Henry IV, Part I in 1896, he wrote, ‘the play consists of two sides, the serious and the comic interest, the one led by King Henry and Hotspur, the other by Falstaff, while Prince Hal, who participates in both, binds the two together’. It is both reassuring and instructive that Crosse was neither an English professor nor a professional drama reviewer; he felt no need to back his opinion by citing the critics. Had he wished to do so, there were plenty from whom to choose: Dr Samuel Johnson writes of the play’s ‘comic and tragic part’, William Hazlitt compares the ‘heroic and serious’ with the ‘comic and farcical’; to Victor Hugo, ‘all these changes of scene, ceaselessly alternating comedy with tragedy, are not mere caprices of a strange imagination; they have their reason in the plan of a great genius’ (Bevington, ‘Henry IV’: Critical Essays; Henry the Fourth, Part 1, New Variorum edition).

To see a play as alternately serious and funny does not take us very far; it describes the (presumably intended) effect on the audience, not the actual content. However, there is another, more revealing pattern: ‘the plan of a great genius’ is not only to alternate comedy with tragedy but also to alternate the past with the present.

A common observation about the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is that they lack any sense of historical chronology. To the Elizabethans, life centuries ago was more or less the same as life in their own era: Cleopatra plays billiards, a clock strikes three in Julius Caesar and cannons thunder in King John. Henry IV, Part I is seemingly no different – if the setting is the early 1400s, what is Falstaff doing with a pistol case at the battle of Shrewsbury (V.3.52), many years before the wheel-lock pistol was known in England? A closer look at this and other apparent anachronisms reveals an interesting pattern, however: nearly all occur within the so-called ‘comic’ world of Falstaff, Poins and, for the first half of the play, Prince Hal, where they are not anachronisms at all. Shakespeare has not placed these scenes in the time of Henry IV; they are in his own and the audience’s time, late in the 1590s.

After over a century of realistic drama we tend to assume that a play can have only one historical setting, but Henry IV, Part I (and Part II) are written in a very different way. When the King, Glendower or Hotspur is onstage, the time was, for the original spectators, nearly two hundred years before, but ‘enter Falstaff’ and they were in the present. That ‘present’ is often called the ‘age of Shakespeare’ – perhaps strange, since except for the brief Induction to The Taming of the Shrew our only opportunity to get a close look at Shakespeare’s England in his plays is with Sir John Falstaff as our guide, in the two parts of Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor. Here, Falstaff can be ‘fat-witted with drinking of old sack’, and, according to Poins, would sell his soul for ‘a cup of Madeira’ (I.2.2–3, 113–14), sweet wines from Spain, the Canary Islands and Portugal that were first imported into England during Tudor times; indeed, the Oxford English Dictionary cites Henry IV, Part I as the earliest recorded use of both ‘madeira’ and ‘anchovies’, another newly fashionable item in Falstaff’s tavern bill (a bill with 1590s not 1400s prices). Westmorland’s report of the ‘artillery’ employed at Holmedon and Hotspur’s ire at the ‘certain lord, neat and trimly dressed’ who would have been a soldier ‘but for these vile guns’ (I.3.32, 62) are unhistorical, but not anachronistic; the artillery at that battle was indeed bow and arrow, since cannon, at that time, was rarely used as a field weapon. However, Henry IV made full use of ‘vile guns’ when besieging rebel strongholds two years later.

Students of German drama might find something familiar in all this: much of what later came to be called ‘epic theatre’, as developed primarily by the great dramatist Bertolt Brecht in the 1920s and 1930s, can be found in Henry IV, Part I. Of course, Shakespeare could not employ Brecht’s slide projections, written captions and other appurtenances of the ‘alienation effect’, intended to discourage the spectator from empathizing with the characters, but then he had no need to, for there was no realistic theatre, with its painted scenery and linear plot, to overturn. Critics have often debated who the central character of Henry IV, Part I is, a difficult question given that Prince Hal, Hotspur and Falstaff have roughly the same number of lines. The best answer might be that this play does not, indeed cannot, have one central character, since there is no one plot which they inhabit. Like the great plays of the epic theatre, it presents a series of episodes that interrelate freely in both time and place, without restriction, and instead of a subsequent scene being the next thing that happens in the story, it is often a parodic, alternative version of what has just occurred. The past informs the present, and the present informs the past.

The events of the past in Henry IV, Part I take place over a mere ten months, by far the shortest period of time among the Folio’s ten Histories, plays noted, as the Chorus of Henry V says, for ‘Turning th’accomplishment of many years | Into an hour-glass’ (I.Prol.30–31). Relying mostly on Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles of England (1587), Shakespeare shows the breaking up of Henry IV’s alliance with the powerful northern lords and their subsequent rebellion, put down (temporarily) at Shrewsbury. These conflicts are foretold in Richard II, King Richard warning Northumberland,

                                 Thou shalt think,
Though he divide the realm and give thee half,
It is too little, helping him to all,

while the King

… shall think that thou, which knowest the way
To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again,
Being ne’er so little urged another way,
To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne.

(V.1.59–65)

King Henry’s dilemma is one that greets every ruler who seizes power by force. The Florentine statesman Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) advises in his treatise on political power, The Prince (1513), ‘you may find that you have enemies in all those whom you have injured in seizing the Princedom, yet cannot keep the friendship of those who helped you to gain it, since you can neither reward them as they expect, nor yet, being under obligations to them, use violent remedies against them’. As for those who place the new Prince on his throne, they are never safe. Machiavelli writes, ‘he who is the cause of another’s greatness is himself undone, since he must work either by address or force, each of which excites distrust in the person raised to power’. Most importantly, Machiavelli sees this as part of an inevitable historical process, a ‘general axiom, which never or rarely errs’, an axiom Worcester knows, as he refuses to tell Hotspur of Henry IV’s ‘liberal and kind offer’ (V.2.2) of pardon:

It is not possible, it cannot be,
The King should keep his word in loving us.
He will suspect us still, and find a time
To punish this offence in other faults. (4–7)

Appeals to the likely reactions of those in Shakespeare’s original audience are all too easy, since they always think whatever we want them to, but it must be fair to say that almost everyone watching this play in 1597 would know that Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather, Henry VII, took the throne by force, and had to defend it the same way.

Although the rebels seek to depose Henry IV, what is at stake in Henry IV, Part I is not so much who the rightful King of England is but how England itself is to be defined. For all the eloquence of John of Gaunt’s famous evocation in Richard II of ‘This precious stone set in the silver sea, | Which serves it in the office of a wall’ (II.1.46–7), that silver sea does not surround England – as Owen Glendower says, it ‘chides the banks of England, Scotland, Wales’ (III.1.42). Even south of the Cheviot Hills that form England’s border with Scotland, the authority of the crown was the subject of bitter contention, constantly challenged by the northern barons seeking to maintain their rule under the old feudal system. When Mortimer, Glendower, Worcester and Hotspur divide their map, Glendower is to keep Wales, while England is to be split in two, Mortimer’s kingdom ending at the River Trent.

The driving force behind this effort to divide England is, as in the Quarto title, ‘Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henry Hotspur of the North’. Where Hotspur comes from is as important as who he is: Prince Hal speaks of the ‘Hotspur of the north’, Falstaff of ‘that same mad fellow of the north, Percy’ (II.4.101,328). Any comparison of Hal and Hotspur involves more than their ideas of honour, as is discussed below; it is a comparison, as the Elizabethan mapmaker and historian John Speed writes in his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britain (1612), between London, ‘the seat of British kings, the chamber of the English, the model of the land and the mart of the world’, and the north country, ‘exposed to extremity of weathers, as great winds, hard frosts, and long lying of snows’, with its ‘warlike people… made fierce and hard by the several encounters of the Scots’.

Hotspur died at Shrewsbury only weeks after first engaging in open rebellion, but northern affairs remained a constant source of worry to the crown. Once Henry VIII broke with the Papacy and established a separate English church the conflict became religious as well as political – in those times the distinction hardly existed – much of the north remaining staunchly Catholic. In 1569 the five-year-old Shakespeare may have seen the soldiers of Henry VIII’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth, march through Stratford on their way to put down the ‘Rising of the North’, led by the seventh Earl of Northumberland, Thomas Percy.

‘All westward, Wales beyond the Severn shore’

Henry IV, Part I ends with the northern rebellion in abeyance, as King and Prince head ‘towards Wales, | To fight with Glendower and the Earl of March’ (V.5.39–40). Owen Glendower is one of the many memorable Shakespearian characters who seem to have much larger parts than they actually do – he speaks fewer than eighty lines, in only one scene, but when well acted, Glendower never fails to make a lasting impression. Before he appears descriptions range from Westmorland’s ‘irregular and wild Glendower… that Welshman’ (I.1.40–41), to the King’s ‘that great magician, damned Glendower’ (I.3.82), to Hotspur’s ‘great Glendower’ (I.3.100), to Falstaff’s colourful ‘he of Wales that gave Amamon the bastinado, and made Lucifer cuckold’ (II.4.329–30). Anyone who could be even some of these things would be something of a marvel; upon meeting him, we find he is indeed, as he himself claims, ‘not in the roll of common men’ (III.1.40). His son-in-law Mortimer attests,

In faith, he is a worthy gentleman,
Exceedingly well read, and profited
In strange concealments, valiant as a lion,
And wondrous affable, and as bountiful
As mines of India. (III.1.159–63)

These are the very qualities Hotspur enjoys debunking, without quite succeeding in doing so.

A major distinction between the northern and Welsh revolts of the early 1400s should be kept in mind – one indicated by the small ‘n’ and capital ‘W’ in this sentence. While the crown’s conflict with the Percies was a political dispute among Englishmen, the Welsh were engaged in a nationalist insurrection, wanting to keep their separate language, culture and political-judicial system from being completely absorbed into a greater Britain. These cultural and linguistic differences are first presented through Glendower’s retort to Hotspur’s deriding of his accent,

I can speak English, lord, as well as you,
For I was trained up in the English court,