Henry IV Part 1
Immediately and enduringly popular, this rich and assured sequel to the events dramatized in Richard II (1595) was probably composed and first acted in 1596: the changes to certain characters’ names, discussed below, was probably connected with court performances at the end of that year.
Text: The play was entered in the Stationers’ Register in February 1598 (as ‘The history of Henry the IIIIth with his battle of Shrewsbury against Henry Hotspur of the North with the conceited mirth of Sir John Falstaff’), and was published in at least two quarto editions in the same year (the earliest known of which survives only in an eight-page fragment). Five more appeared before the publication of the Folio (in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, and 1622), and its early texts also include the *Dering manuscript, though this derives from the 1613 quarto rather than from an independent source. The Folio, which retitles the play The First Part of Henry the Fourth, also draws its text from the 1613 quarto, but removes all oaths in scrupulous compliance with the *Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players. This was not the first time the play had undergone censorship: when first composed its greatest comic character was called Sir John Oldcastle, but a descendant of this real-life historical figure (who was regarded as a Protestant hero, and features in *Foxe’s Book of Martyrs), insisted on its being changed. (This was either William Brooke, 7th Lord *Cobham—Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain from August 1596 until his death the following March—or his son Henry, 8th Lord Cobham.) Even the play’s altered text, though, retains traces of the original name (Sir John is called ‘my old lad of the castle’ by the Prince, 1.2.41–2), as well as the original names of two of his tavern companions (Harvey and Russell, changed to Bardolph and Peto, probably for fear of offending the earls of Bedford, whose surname was Russell, and Sir William *Harvey, who was about to marry the dowager Countess of Southampton). There is some evidence that the substitution of ‘Falstaff’ (a name based on that of the cowardly Fastolf who appears in 1 Henry VI) was not always made in performance even after 1596. The Oxford edition, consequently, restores not only the fat knight’s blasphemies but his original surname, but maintains the continuity of the sequence by calling him only Sir John in speech prefixes throughout this play and the subsequent Merry Wives of Windsor and 2 Henry IV.
Orson Welles as Falstaff with Jeanne Moreau as Doll Tearsheet in Welles’s film adaptation of both parts of Henry IV, Chimes at Midnight, 1967.
Sources: Shakespeare drew both the name and the reprobate character of Oldcastle from an anonymous play about Prince Harry’s wild youth, sudden reformation, and glorious kingship, The *Famous Victories of Henry V, entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1594 and printed in 1598: this work undoubtedly influenced not only 1 Henry IV but the rest of the *Second Tetralogy, but the surviving text offered by the 1598 edition is so evidently garbled and truncated that it is hard to tell how much. For his historical material Shakespeare also consulted *Holinshed and Samuel *Daniel’s The First Four Books of the Civil Wars (1595), while his comic scenes draw broadly on the traditions of medieval mystery and morality plays.
Synopsis: 1.1 King Henry IV speaks of his long-standing desire to mount a crusade, but this scheme has to be postponed once more when news arrives that after a fierce battle Edmund Mortimer has been taken prisoner by the Welsh rebel Glyndŵr. In the north, however, Harry Percy, known as Hotspur, has won a great victory against the Scots—causing the King to envy Northumberland for having such a valiant son, unlike the dissipated Prince Harry—but at the instigation of his uncle Worcester Hotspur has refused to deliver more than one of his prisoners to the King, who has summoned them to Windsor to explain themselves.
1.2 In London the King’s eldest son Prince Harry is bantering with the fat old knight Sir John when Poins invites them to take part, along with three other confederates, in a highway robbery planned for the following morning at Gads Hill: Poins privately suggests that he and Harry should allow Sir John and the others to commit the robbery alone and should subsequently rob them of the spoils, in disguise, meeting them in the evening in Eastcheap to hear how they explain their loss. Alone, Harry confides that he is only pursuing this career of idleness for the time being, the better to amaze the world when he finally stages his reformation.
1.3 The King confronts Worcester, Northumberland, and Hotspur with their refusal to deliver their prisoners. After Worcester is dismissed for insolence, Hotspur claims he only failed to do so because tactlessly asked for them by an effeminate courtier in the immediate aftermath of the battle, and he has now made it clear that he will hand them over as soon as the King pays Mortimer’s ransom. The King, however, insists that Mortimer, who has married Glyndŵr’s daughter, is a traitor, and, refusing to believe Hotspur’s account of Mortimer’s combat with the Welshman, reiterates his demand for the prisoners. Left alone, Northumberland and the angrily voluble Hotspur, soon rejoined by Worcester, reflect on the ingratitude of the man they helped to make king in Richard II’s place and on Richard’s alleged choice of Mortimer as his heir, and Worcester, when Hotspur has finally calmed down sufficiently to listen, outlines an eagerly seconded plot to combine their forces with those of the Scots, the Welsh, and the Archbishop of York against the King.
2.1 Before dawn at an inn, two carriers and a chamberlain meet Gadshill, on his way to take part in the planned highway robbery.
2.2 The robbers, including Prince Harry, Poins, Gadshill, and an already exhausted Sir John, meet, and after the Prince and Poins slip away to disguise themselves the travellers arrive and are robbed.
2.3 In disguise the Prince and Poins easily rob their confederates, who run away.
2.4 Hotspur, having angrily read a letter from someone declining to join the rebellion, is asked by his wife Lady Percy why he has been so sleepless and agitated: declining to tell her of the conspiracy, he only promises that though he must set off shortly she will follow the next day.
2.5 At the Boar’s Head Tavern in Eastcheap, Prince Harry has been fraternizing with the bar staff, and he and Poins perplex the drawer Francis. Sir John and the other robbers arrive, Sir John railing against the Prince’s absence from the robbery and its sequel, and in reply to Harry’s promptings he gives an increasingly exaggerated account of how they were robbed of their booty, claiming to have fought eleven of over 50 attackers in single combat, killing at least seven. When Harry finally confronts him with the truth he claims to have known his identity all along and to have instinctively declined to fight against a true Prince. News arrives of the rebellion, and in a mock-play an undaunted Harry rehearses for the upbraiding he expects to receive from his father for his absence from court, Sir John playing the King and urging the Prince to banish all his idle companions except Sir John. When they swap roles the Prince as King urges Sir John as Harry to banish Sir John, and hints that in time he himself will indeed do so. Nonetheless when officers come seeking to arrest Sir John and his associates for the robbery Harry protects them, concealing the fat knight behind an arras, where he falls asleep. Having sent the officers away on a false trail Harry picks the sleeping Sir John’s pocket and finds a bill for little food and much drink. He promises to repay the robbed travellers, and undertakes to obtain Sir John a place in the King’s army during the impending civil war.
3.1 In Wales Mortimer, Hotspur, and Glyndŵr divide a map of England and Wales into the three parts each hopes to receive after the defeat of King Henry, supervised by Worcester, who does what he can to moderate Hotspur’s impatience with Glyndŵr’s grandiloquent claims to possess magic powers. Along with Lady Percy comes Mortimer’s wife, who can speak only Welsh to her monoglot anglophone husband: interpreted by her father Glyndŵr, she laments his impending departure, and sings a Welsh song.
3.2 King Henry reproaches Harry at length for his cheapening of himself among the taverns, comparing him unfavourably to Hotspur and to his own younger self, but is appeased by Harry’s promise to win back his honour in combat against Hotspur: the royal forces set off to confront the rebels at Shrewsbury.
3.3 Sir John accuses the Hostess of allowing his pocket to be picked of valuables: Harry arrives, busy with military preparations, and having confronted the bluffing Sir John with the truth about what was taken from his pocket assigns him an infantry command.
4.1 Worcester, Hotspur, and the Scots commander Douglas receive news that Northumberland is sick and will not be present with his forces at the impending battle: Sir Richard Vernon brings further news, that the royal army is gathering, including both the King himself and the unexpected Prince Harry, and that Glyndŵr’s army will not be ready in time for the battle.
4.2 In Warwickshire Sir John has accepted bribes to exempt able-bodied men from conscription and has instead mustered a regiment with which he is ashamed to be seen: Prince Harry, passing with Westmorland, comments on their poverty, and urges an unenthusiastic Sir John to hurry their march lest he miss the battle.
4.3 The rebels, disputing whether their outnumbered forces should give battle at once, are visited by Sir Walter Blunt, sent by the King to learn of their grievances: Hotspur outlines their cause and questions the King’s right to the crown, promising to send Worcester to parley with him the next morning.
4.4 The Archbishop of York, anxious about the outcome of the battle, musters forces to defend himself should the rebels lose at Shrewsbury.
5.1 Worcester outlines the rebels’ grievances to the royal party, including Harry, who offers to fight Hotspur in single combat: the King promises to pardon them if they will abandon their rebellion, but Harry has little hope the offer will be accepted, and the royal army makes ready for battle. Sir John, left alone, reflects on the frail vanity of honour, preferring survival.
5.2 Worcester does not tell his fellow rebels of the King’s offer of clemency, convinced that even if the young impetuous Hotspur is forgiven he and the older rebels never will be, and they prepare for immediate battle.
5.3 In the fighting Douglas kills Blunt, who is one of many royal troops disguised as the King, and is disappointed to learn from Hotspur of his real identity. Sir John, whose own soldiers have been decimated, is met by Harry, who is furious to find that Sir John’s pistol case contains only a bottle of sack.
5.4 Harry, though wounded, declines to leave the field. He rescues his father from the assault of Douglas, then duels with Hotspur, while Sir John, spectating, is apparently killed by the Scot. The Prince kills Hotspur and speaks regretfully of his courage, then, seeing Sir John lying beside him, laments his disreputable friend. When Harry has left, though, Sir John gets up, and, resolving to claim to have killed Hotspur himself, wounds his corpse and lifts it onto his back. Harry arrives with his younger brother John of Lancaster and is astonished to find Sir John alive and willing to make such boasts, but undertakes not to hinder Sir John from receiving an unearned reward.
5.5 The battle won, the King sentences Worcester and Vernon to death. Harry reports that Douglas has been captured, and is allowed to have him set free as a tribute to his valour. The King divides his forces so that they may follow up this victory against the remaining rebels throughout the kingdom.
Artistic features: The play is the first of Shakespeare’s histories to weave together tragedy and comedy (into the ‘double plot’ influentially analysed by William *Empson): its mainly prose scenes in which Prince Harry seems disloyally to prefer the company of his surrogate parent Sir John to that of his real father provide a comic counterpoint to the political rebellion with which King Henry is confronted in the main plot. The play is remarkable for the range of distinctive voices and vocabularies with which it supplies its characters, from the realistic common speech of the carriers to the chivalric idealism of Hotspur, with Prince Harry’s centrality to its design underlined by his protean ability to operate across all of them.
Critical history: The play’s initial popularity is attested by the proliferation not only of early editions but of allusions, principally to Sir John, who has dominated much writing about the entire Second Tetralogy. Largest in conception as well as in bulk of all Shakespeare’s comic characters—the funnier and the apparently freer for his running combat with the realities of chronicle history—Sir John captivated the imagination of the (equally corpulent) Dr *Johnson (‘Falstaff, unimitated, unimitable Falstaff, how shall I extol thee? Thou compound of sense and vice; of sense which may be admired but not esteemed, of vice which may be despised, but hardly detested’), inspired a pioneering essay on Shakespearian characterization by Maurice *Morgann (1777), and has been preferred to the calculating Prince who will eventually reject him by commentators from *Hazlitt through *Bradley to *Auden and beyond. Outside the long-running discussion of Sir John’s career—which has variously depicted him as a representative of Vice, a ritual sacrificial substitute for the King, and an image of national fertility, an ancient but undying personification of the English people—the play has usually been discussed in relation to Shakespeare’s view of history, and to 16th-century views of national destiny more generally. The Second Tetralogy has often been seen, from the early 20th century onwards, as showing England’s fall from Richard II’s lost Eden and its providential reunification and redemption under Henry V, a view associated particularly with E. M. W. *Tillyard. He and subsequent commentators have pointed out that the England of 1 Henry IV seems far less remote from Shakespeare’s own times than the more recent events dramatized in the *First Tetralogy (with Hotspur embodying a nostalgic idea of feudal valour doomed to defeat at the hands of modern politicians like King Henry and his son), and have related the play plausibly to the interests of the Tudor nation-state, an institution for which critics have in general expressed progressively less enthusiasm since Tillyard’s own time. In an influential essay the American *New historicist Stephen Greenblatt compared Harry’s strategies among the common people of Eastcheap with those of 16th-century English colonists in the New World, while King Henry’s attempts to subdue the Welsh have been repeatedly compared to Queen Elizabeth’s efforts to put down rebellions in *Ireland.
Stage history: Early records of performances, especially at court, are complicated by the different titles under which both 1 Henry IV and its immediate sequel seem to have gone: it was certainly acted before the Flemish ambassador in 1600, and the plays referred to as The Hotspur and Sir John Falstaff at the wedding of Princess *Elizabeth in 1612–13 were probably the two Henry IV plays. The two were combined in the *Dering manuscript for a private, amateur performance in around 1623, and Part 1 was performed at court in 1625 (as The First Part of Sir John Falstaff) and in 1638 (as Oldcastle, unless this was the collaborative Sir John Oldcastle written in 1600 to counter Shakespeare’s depiction of the knight, though this seems less likely). In the public theatres, it is generally assumed that Richard *Burbage created the role of the Prince, but the identity of the original Sir John is uncertain: *Malone claimed to have seen a document which assigned the part to *Heminges. The role, however, was certainly one of the best loved of the entire pre-war repertory: in 1699 James Wright could still remember the applause *Lowin received in it before the Civil War. Sir John was popular enough to be acted even under Cromwell in the *droll The *Bouncing Knight (and to become one of the first Shakespearian characters depicted pictorially, on the title page to the anthology in which the droll was later printed, *The Wits). At the Restoration in 1660 this play about the successful defeat of a rebellion was one of the first Shakespeare plays to be revived: in the hands of *Killigrew’s King’s Company it became a firm favourite with Samuel *Pepys. The subsequent stage history of the play has often been shaped by which of its major roles leading actor-managers have preferred. *Betterton played Hotspur in 1682 but graduated to Sir John in 1700 (reviving both 2 Henry IV and The Merry Wives of Windsor to give himself even more scope), and this trajectory was repeated by James *Quin, who excelled as the fat knight from the early 1720s until his retirement in 1753. *Kemble, however, was too thin and too dignified to move beyond Hotspur (whom he first played in 1791), leaving the role of Sir John to his brothers, first Stephen and then Charles, who in 1824 became one of the first 19th-century producers to well-nigh bury the play under historically researched costumes and sets (which necessitated extensive cuts and transpositions of scenes). The Victorians found the tavern scenes coarse, and the play fell from favour, though Samuel *Phelps was a notable Sir John in 1847 and, at Drury Lane, in 1864, in a production otherwise best remembered for its spectacular pictorial recreation of the battle of Shrewsbury.
In the 20th century the play gradually regained some measure of its earlier popularity, though unlike Richard III it has never attracted very much interest outside the nation whose history it dramatizes, Sir John seeming as inexplicably English a joke as Mr Punch. Barry *Jackson staged a full text of 1 Henry IV in 1913, and revived both it and 2 Henry IV for Shakespeare’s birthday in 1921, anticipating subsequent directors who have sought to stage the Second Tetralogy as a grand, Wagnerian sequence. At the Old Vic in 1930 John *Gielgud played Hotspur to Ralph *Richardson’s Prince Harry, and another conspicuous production of that decade found the music-hall comedian George Robey playing a widely praised Sir John, in 1935. The legendary production of the century, though, of both 1 Henry IV and 2 Henry IV, took place at the Old Vic in 1945, when Ralph Richardson returned to the play as an alert, mercurial Sir John, Laurence *Olivier played a fiery, stammering Hotspur, and Sybil *Thorndike played the Hostess. Another impressive cast was assembled six years later in Stratford, where Anthony *Quayle played Sir John, Michael *Redgrave Hotspur, Harry Andrews the King, and Richard *Burton Prince Harry. Peter *Hall mounted an impressive production for the RSC in 1964, with Ian Holm as Harry, part of an ambitious presentation of the Second Tetralogy which staged it as a prelude to the First, famously condensed into the three-part *The Wars of the Roses. This immense undertaking was repeated, in a very different manner, by Michael *Bogdanov’s *English Shakespeare Company in 1985–6, with Michael *Pennington as a cold Harry and John Woodvine as a memorably cynical Sir John. Other notable Hal-Falstaff pairings in more recent times include William Houston and Desmond Barrit (RSC, 2000); Matthew Macfadyen and Michael *Gambon (National, 2005); Geoffrey Streatfeild and David *Warner (RSC, 2007); Jamie Parker and Roger *Allam (Globe, 2010); and Alex Hassell and Antony *Sher (RSC, 2014).
Michael Dobson, rev. Will Sharpe
On the screen: The earliest version for BBC TV (1959), an abbreviation in the tradition of *The Bouncing Knight entitled The Gadshill Job, aimed to attract younger viewers. More memorable was the BBC TV series An Age of Kings (1960), allotting four out of its fifteen parts to the Henry IV plays. A two-hour adaptation of 1 Henry IV on American television was transmitted in the same year. BBC TV screened full versions of both parts of Henry IV in 1979, and in 1995 John Caird adapted them for BBC television. In 2012 the BBC produced them again as part of The *Hollow Crown, a grand retelling of the *Second Tetralogy.
On film, Orson *Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965), which draws on both Henry IV plays, stands as a classic. Welles makes Falstaff the dramatic centre of his adaptation, and it is clearly Welles’s affinity with Falstaff’s condition which gives the film its poignancy.
Anthony Davies, rev. Will Sharpe