Shakespeare's Henry IV. Part first

Front matter

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Copyright N°.

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Introduction

History of the Play.

JOHNSON rightly observes that the First and Second Parts of King Henry the Fourth are substantially one drama, the whole being arranged as two only because too long to be one. For this cause it seems best to regard them as one in what follows, and so dispose of them both together. The writing of them must be placed at least as early as 1597, when the author was thirty-three years old. The First Part was registered at the Stationers' for publication in February, 1598, and was published in the course of that year. There were also four other quarto issues of the play before the folio edition of 1623. The Second Part was first published in 1600, and there is not known to have been any other edition of it till it reappeared along with the First Part in the folio. It is pretty certain, however, for reasons to be stated presently, that the Second Part was written before the entry of the First Part at the Stationers' in 1598.

It is beyond question that the original name of Sir John Falstaff was Sir John Oldcastle ; and a curious relic of that naming survives in Act i. scene 2, where the Prince calls Falstaff " my old lad of the castle." And we have several other strong proofs of the fact ; as in the Epilogue to the Second Part : " For any thing I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat, unless already he be killed with your hard opinions ; for Old castle died a martyr, and this is not the man." Also, in Amends for Ladies, a play by Nathaniel Field, printed in 1618 : " Did you never see the play where the fat Knight, hight Oldcastle, did tell you truly what this honour was?" which clearly alludes to Falstaff's soliloquy about honour in the First Part, Act v. scene 1. Yet the change of name must have been made before the play was entered in the Stationers' books, as that entry mentions "the conceited mirth of Sir John Falstaff." And we have one small but pretty decisive mark inferring the Second Part to have been written before that change was made : in the quarto edition of this Part, Act i. scene 2, one of Falstaff's speeches has the prefix Old; the change in that instance being probably left unmarked in the printer's copy. All which shows that both Parts were originally written long enough before February, 1598, for the author to see cause for changing the name.

" Sir John Oldcastle, the good Lord Cobham," was much distinguished as a Wicklifiite martyr, ancL his name was held in high reverence by the Protestants in Shakespeare's time. And the purpose of the change in question probably was to rescue his memory from the profanations of the stage. Thus much seems hinted in the forcited passage from the Epilogue, and is further approved by what Fuller says in his Church History : " Stage-poets have themselves been very bold with, and others very merry at, the memory of Sir John Oldcastle, whom they have fancied a boon companion, jovial royster, and a coward to boot. The best is, Sir John Falstaff hath relieved the memory of Sir John OkU castle, and is substituted buffoon in his place."

Another motive for the change may have been the bettei to distinguish Shakespeare's play from The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth ; a play which had been on the stage some years, and wherein Sir John Oldcastle was among the names of the Dramatis Personce, as were also Ned and Gadshill. There is no telling with any certainty when or by whom The Famous Victories was written. It is known to have been on the boards as early as 1588, because one of the parts was acted by Tarleton, the celebrated comedian, who died that year. And Nash, in his Pierce Penniless, 1592, thus alludes to it: "What a glorious thing it is to have Henry the Fifth represented on the stage, leading the French King prisoner, and forcing him and the Dauphin to swear fealty," It was also entered at the Stationers' in 1594; and a play called Harry the Fifth, probably the same, was performed in 1595 ; and not less than three editions of it were printed. All which tells strongly for its success and popularity. The action of the play extends over the whole time occupied by Shakespeare's King Henry the Fourth and King Henry the Fifth. The Poet can hardly be said to have built upon it or borrowed from it at all, any further than taking the above-mentioned names. The play is indeed a most wretched and worthless performance ; being altogether a mass of stupid vulgarity ; at once vapid and vile ; without the least touch of wit in the comic parts, or of poetry in the tragic ; the verse being such only to the eye ; Sir John Oldcastle being a dull, lowminded profligate, uninformed with the slightest felicity of thought or humour ; the Prince, an irredeemable compound of ruffian, blackguard, and hypocrite ; and their companions, the fitting seconds of such principals : so that to have drawn upon it for any portion or element of Shakespeare's King Henry the Fourth were much the same as "extracting sunbeams from cucumbers."

Abstract of the Historic Matter.

In these plays, as in others of the same class, the Poet's authority was Holinshed, whose Chronicles, first published in 1577, was then the favourite book in English history. And the plays, notwithstanding their wealth of ideal matter, are rightly called historical, because the history everywhere guides, and in a good measure forms, the plot, whereas Macbeth, for instance, though having much of historical matter, is rightly called a tragedy, as the history merely subserves the plot.

King Henry the Fourth, surnamed Bolingbroke from the place of his birth, came to the throne in 1399, having first deposed his cousin, Richard the Second, whose death he was generally thought to have procured shortly after. The chief agents in this usurpation were the Percys, known in history as Northumberland, Worcester, and Hotspur, three haughty and turbulent noblemen, who afterwards troubled Henry to keep the crown as much as they had helped him in getting it.

The lineal heir to the crown next after Richard was Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March, a lad then about seven years old, whom the King held in a sort of honourable custody. Early in his reign, one of the King's leading partisans in Wales went to insulting and oppressing Owen Glendower, a chief of that country, who had been trained up in the English Court. Glendower petitioned for redress, and was insultingly denied ; whereupon he took the work of redress into his own hands. Sir Edmund Mortimer, uncle to the young Earl of March, and brother to Hotspur's wife, was sent against him ; but his forces were utterly broken, and himself captured and held in close confinement by Glendower, where the King suffered him to lie unransomed, alleging that he had treacherously allowed himself to be taken. Shakespeare, however, following Holinshed, makes the young Earl, who was then detained at Windsor to have been Glendower's prisoner.

After the captivity of Mortimer the King led three armies in succession against Glendower, and was as often baffled by the valour or the policy of the Welshman. At length the elements made war on the King; his forces were stormstricken, blown to pieces by tempests ; which bred a general belief that Glendower could "command the Devil," and "call spirits from the vasty deep." The King finally gave up and withdrew ; but still consoled himself that he yielded not to the arms, but to the magic arts of his antagonist.

In the beginning of his reign the King led an army into Scotland, and summoned the Scottish King to appear before him and do homage for his crown ; but, finding that the Scots would neither submit nor fight, and being pressed by famine, he gave over the undertaking and retired. Some while after, Earl Douglas, at the head of ten thousand men, burst into England, and advanced as far as Newcastle, spreading terror and havoc around him. On their return they were met by the Percys at Homildon where, after a fierce and bloody battle, the Scots were totally routed ; Douglas himself being captured, as were also many other Scottish noblemen, and among them the Earl of Fife, a prince of the blood royal. The most distinguished of the English leaders in this affair was Henry Percy, surnamed Hotspur; a man of the most restless, daring, fiery, and impetuous spirit, who first armed at the age of twelve years, after which time, it is said, his spur was never cold.

Of the other events suffice it to say that they are much the same in history as in the drama ; while the Poet's selection and ordering of them yield no special cause for remark. One or two points, however, it may be well to notice as throwing some light on certain allusions in the play.

In the Spring of 1405, Prince Henry, then in his nineteenth year, was at the head of an army in Wales, where Glendower had hitherto carried all before him. By his activity, prudence, and perseverance, the young hero gradually broke the Welshman down, and at length reduced the whole country into subjection. He continued in this service most of the time for four years ; his valour and conduct awakening the most favourable expectations, which however were not a little dashed by his rampant hilarity during the intervals of labour in the field. His father was much grieved at these irregularities ; and his grief was heightened by some loose and unfilial words that were reported to him as having fallen from the Prince in hours of merriment. Hearing of this, the Prince went to expostulate with his father ; yet even then he enacted a strange freak of oddity, arraying himself in a gown of blue satin wrought full of eyelet-holes, and at each eyelet the needle still hanging by the silk; probably meaning to intimate thereby, that if his behaviour, his moral garb, were full of rents, it was not too late to sew them up, and the means were at hand for doing so. Being admitted to an interview, he fell on his knees and, presenting a dagger, begged the King to take his life, since he had withdrawn his favour. His father, much moved, threw away the dagger, and, kissing him, owned with tears that he had indeed held him in suspicion, though, as he now saw, without just cause ; and promised that no misreports should thenceforth shake his confidence in him.

At another time, one of his unruly companions being convicted of felony, and sentenced to prison by the Chief Justice, the Prince undertook to rescue him, and even went so far as to assault the Judge ; who forthwith ordered him to prison also, and he had the good sense to submit. Upon being told this incident, the King exclaimed, "Happy the King that has a judge so firm in his duty, and a son so obedient to the law ! "

Perhaps I should add, that the battle of Homildon was fought September 14, 1402 ; which marks the beginning of the play. The battle of Shrewsbury, which closes the First Part, took place July 21, 1403; Prince Henry being then only sixteen years old. The King died March 19, 14 13 ; so that the two plays cover a period of about ten years and a half.

Character of the King.

If these two plays are substantially one, it is the character of Prince Henry that makes them so ; that is, they have their unity in hint; and the common argument of them lies in the change alleged to have taken place in him on coming to the throne. Why was Henry of Monmouth so loose and wild a reveller in his youth, and yet such a proficient in noble and virtuous discipline in his manhood ? what causes, internal and external, determined him to the one ; what impulses from within, what influences from without, transformed him into the other? Viewed in the light of this principle, the entire work, with its broad, rich variety of incident and character, and its alternations of wit and poetry, will be seen, I think, to proceed in a spirit of wise insight and design.

Accordingly, in the first scene of the play, this matter is put forth as uppermost in the King's thoughts. I refer to what passes between him and Westmoreland touching the

IO KING HENRY THE FOURTH.

victory at Homildon ; where the Earl declares " it is a conquest for a prince to boast of," and the King replies,

Yea, there thou makest me sad, and makest me sin,

In envy that my Lord Northumberland

Should be the father to so blest a son ;

Whilst I, by looking on the praise of him,

See riot and dishonour stain the brow

Of my young Harry. O, that it could be proved

That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged

In cradle-clothes our children where they lay,

And call'd mine Percy, his Plantagenet !

Then would I have his Harry, and he mine.

One reason of Prince Henry's early irregularities seems to have grown from the character of his father. All accounts agree in representing Bolingbroke as a man of great reach and sagacity ; a politician of inscrutable craft, full of insinuation, brave in the field, skilful alike at penetrating others* designs and at concealing his own; unscrupulous alike in smiling men into his service and in crunching them up after he had used them. All which is fully borne out in that, though his reign was little else than a series of rebellions and commotions proceeding in part from the injustice whereby he reached the crown and the bad title whereby he held it, yet he always got the better of them, and even turned them to his advantage. Where he could not win the heart, cutting off the head, and ever plucking fresh security out of the dangers that beset him ; his last years, however, were much embittered, and his death probably hastened, by the anxieties growing out of his position, and the remorses consequent upon his crimes.

But, while such is the character generally ascribed to him, no historian has come near Shakespeare in the painting of it. Much of his best transpiration is given in the preceding play of Richard the Second, where he is the controlling spirit. For, though Richard is the more prominent character in that play, this is not as the mover of things, but as the receiver of movements caused by another ; the effects lighting on him, while the worker of them is comparatively unseen. For one of Bolingbroke's main peculiarities is, that he looks solely to results ; and, like a true artist, the better to secure these he keeps his designs and processes in the dark ; his power thus operating so secretly, that in whatever he does the thing seems to have done itself to his hand. How intense his enthusiasm, yet how perfect his coolness and composure ! Then too how pregnant and forcible, always, yet how calm and gentle, and at times how terrible, his speech ! how easily and unconcernedly the words drop from him, yet how pat and home they are to the persons for whom and the occasions whereon they are spoken ! To all which add a flaming thirst of power, a most aspiring and mounting ambition, with an equal mixture of humility, boldness, and craft, and the result explains much of the fortune that attends him through all the plays in which he figures. For the Poet keeps him the same man throuilkout.

it, taking the whole delineation together, we have, at

jrth and done to the life, the portrait of a man in act

bold, decisive, in thought sly, subtle, far-reaching ;

:ter hard and cold indeed to the feelings, but written

with success ; which has no impulsive gushes or

it all is study, forecast, and calm suiting of means

^pointed ends. And this perfect self-command is in

frt the secret of his strange power over others, mak-

almost as pliant to his purposes as are the cords

and m^|cles of his own body; so that, as the event proves, he grows great by their feeding, till he can compass food enough without their help, and, if they go to hindering him, can eat them up. For so it turned out with the Percys ; strong sinews indeed with him for a head; while, against him, their very strength served but to work their own overthrow.

Some points of this description are well illustrated in what Hotspur says of him just before the battle of Shrewsbury, in the speech beginning,

The King is kind ; and well we know the King Knows at what time to promise, when to pay.

Hotspur, to be sure, exaggerates a good deal there, as he does everywhere, still his charges have a considerable basis of truth. - As further matter to the point, observe the account which the King gives of himself when remonstrating with the Prince against his idle courses ; which is not less admirable for truth of history than for skill of pencil. Equally fine, also, is the account of his predecessor immediately following that of himself; where we see that he has the same sharp insight of men as of means, and has made Richard's follies and vices his tutors ; from his miscarriages learning how to supplant him, and perhaps encouraging his errors, that he might make a ladder of them, to mount up and overtop him. The whole scene indeed is pregnantly characteristic both of the King and the Prince. And how the King's penetrating and remorseless sagacity is flashed forth in Hotspur's outbursts of rage at his demanding all the prisoners taken at Homildon S wherein that roll of living fire is indeed snappish enough, but then he snaps out much truth.

But, though policy was the leading trait in this able man, nevertheless it was not so prominent but that other and better traits were strongly visible. And even in his policy there was much of the breadth and largeness which distinguish the statesman from the politician. Besides, he was a man of prodigious spirit and courage, had a real eye to the interests of his country as well as of his family, and in his wars he was humane much beyond the custom of his time. And in the last scene of the Poet's delineation of him, where he says to the Prince,

Come hither, Harry ; sit thou by my bed, And hear, I think, the very latest counsel That ever I shall breathe ;

though we have indeed his subtle policy working out like a ruling passion strong in death, still its workings are suffused with gushes of right feeling, enough to show that he was not all politician ; that beneath his close-knit prudence there was a soul of moral sense, a kernel of religion. Nor must I omit how the Poet, following the leadings both of nature and history, makes him to be plagued by foes springing up in his own bosom in proportion as he ceases to be worried by external enemies • the crown beginning to scald his brows as soon as he has crushed those who would pluck it from him.

The Hotspur of the North.

How different is the atmosphere which waits upon the group of rebel war-chiefs, whereof Hotspur is the soul, and where chivalry reigns as supremely as wit and humour do in the haunts of Falstaff ! It is difficult to speak of Hotspur satisfactorily ; not indeed but that the lines of his character are bold and emphatic enough, but rather because they are so much so. For his frame is greatly disproportioned, which causes him to seem larger than he is ; and one of his excesses manifests itself in a wiry, red-hot speech, which burns such an impression of him into the mind as to make any commentary seem prosaic and dull. There is no mistaking him : no character in Shakespeare stands more apart in plenitude of peculiarity ; and stupidity itself cannot so disfeature him with criticism, but that he will be recognized by any one who has ever been with him. He is as much a monarch in his sphere as the King and Falstaff are in theirs ; only they rule more by power, he by stress : there is something in them that takes away the will and spirit of resistance ; he makes every thing bend to his arrogant, domineering, capricious temper. Who that has been with him in the scenes at the Palace and at Bangor can ever forget his bounding, sarcastic, overbearing spirit ? How he hits all about him, and makes the feathers fly wherever he hits ! It seems as if his tongue could go through the world, and strew the road behind it with splinters. And how steeped his speech everywhere is in the poetry of the sword ! In what compact and sinewy platoons and squadrons the words march out of his mouth in bristling rank and file ! as if from his birth he had been cradled on the iron breast of war. How doubly- charged he is, in short, with the electricity of chivalry ! insomuch that you can touch him nowhere but he gives you a shock.

In those two scenes, what with Hotspur, and what with Glendower, the poetry is as unrivalled in its kind as the wit and humour in the best scenes at Eastcheap. What a dressing Hotspur gives the silken courtier who came to demand the prisoners ! Still better, however, is the dialogue that presently follows in the same scene ; where Hotspur seems to be under a spell, a fascination of rage and scorn : nothing can check him, he cannot check himself; because, besides the boundings . of a most turbulent and impetuous nature, he has always had his own way, having from his boyhood held the post of a feudal war- chief. Irascible, headstrong, impatient, every effort to arrest or divert him only produces a new impatience. Whatever thought strikes him, it forthwith kindles into an overmastering passion that bears down all before it. We see that he has a rough and passionate soul, great strength and elevation of mind, with little gentleness and less delicacy, and a " force of will that rises into poetry by its own chafings." While "the passion of talk" is upon him, he fairly drifts and surges before it till exhausted, and then there supervenes an equal " passion of action." " Speaking thick " is noted as one of his peculiarities ; and it is not clear whether the Poet took this from some tradition respecting him, or considered it a natural result of his prodigious rush and press of thought.

Another striking trait in Hotspur, resulting perhaps, in part, from his having so much passion in his head, is the singular absence of mind so well described by Prince Henry : "I am not of Percy's mind, the Hotspur of the North ; he that kills me some six or seven dozen of Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, Fie upon this quiet life / I want work, O, my sweet Harry ! says she, how many hast thou killed to-day? Give my roan horse a drench, says he ; and answers, an hour after, Some fourteen ; a trifle, a trifle /" So again in the scene of Hotspur and his wife at Warkworth. She winds up her strain of tender womanly remonstrance by saying,

Some heavy business hath my lord in hand, And I must know it, else he loves me not.

Before answering her, he calls in a servant, makes several inquiries about his horse, and orders him to be brought into the park, hears her reproof, and exchanges divers questions with her ; then replies, " Love ! I love thee not ; I care not for thee, Kate " ; and presently heals up the wound :

Come, wilt thou see me ride ?

And when I am o' horseback I will swear I love thee infinitely.

Here it is plain that his absence grows from a certain skittishness of mind : he has not the control of his thinking ; the issues of his brain being so conceived in fire as to preclude steadiness of attention and the pauses of thought.

The qualities I have noted in Hotspur unfit him, in a great measure, for a military leader in regular warfare, his nature being too impulsive and heady for the counterpoise of so weighty an undertaking. Too impatient and eager for the contest to concert operations ; abundantly able to fight battles, but not to scheme them ; he is qualified to succeed only in the hurly-burly of border warfare, where success comes more by fury of onset than by wisdom of plan. All which is finely apparent just before the battle of Shrewsbury, where, if not perversely wrong-headed, he is so headstrong, peremptory, and confident even to rashness, as to be quite impracticable. We see, and his fellowchieftains see, that there is no coming to a temper with him ; he being sure to run a quarrel with any one who stands out against his proposals. Yet he is never more truly the noble Hotspur than on this occasion, when, amidst the falling-off of friends, the backwardness of allies, and the thickening of dangers, his ardent and brave spirit turns his very disadvantages into grounds of confidence.

His untamed boisterousness of tongue has one of its best

INTRODUCTION. I J

eruptions in the dispute with Glendower at Bangor, where his wit and his impudence come in for about equal shares of our admiration. He finally stops the mouth of his antagonist, or heads him off upon another subject, as he does again shortly after, in a dispute about the partitioning of the realm ; and he does it not so much by force of reason as of will and speech. His contempt of poetry is highly characteristic ; though it is observable that he has spoken more poetry than any one else in the play. But poetry is altogether an impulse with him, not a purpose, as it is with Glendower; and he loses all thought of himself and his speech, in the intensity of passion with which he contemplates the object or occasion that moves him. His celebrated description of the fight between Glendower and Mortimer has been censured as offending good taste by its extravagance. It would not be in good taste indeed to put such a strain into the mouth of a contemplative sage, like Prospero ; but in Hotspur its very extravagance is in good taste, because hugely characteristic.

Hotspwr is a general favourite : whether from something in himself or from the King's treatment of him, he has our good-will from the start ; nor is it without some reluctance that we set the Prince above him in our regard. Which may be owing in part to the interest we take, and justly, in his wife ; who, timid, solicitous, affectionate, and playful, is a woman of the true Shakespearian stamp. How delectable is the harmony felt between her prying, inquisitive gentleness and his rough, stormy courage ! for in her gentleness there is much strength, and his bravery is not without gentleness. The scene at Warkworth, where they first appear together, is a choice heart-refection : combining the beauty of movement and of repose, it comes into the surrounding elements like a patch of sunshine in a tempest.

Glendower the Magician.

The best of historical matter for poetical and dramatic uses has seldom been turned to better account that way than in the portrait of Glendower. He is represented, with great art and equal truth, according to the superstitious belief of his time ; a belief in which himself doubtless shared : for, if the winds and tempests came when he wished them, it was natural for him to think, as others thought, that they came because he wished them. The popular ideas respecting him all belonged to the region of poetry ; and Shakespeare has given them with remarkable exactness, at the same time penetrating and filling them with his own spirit.

Crediting the alleged portents of his nativity, Glendower might well conclude he was "not in the roll of common men " ; and so betake himself to the study and practice of those magic arts which were generally believed in then, and for which he was specially marked by his birth and all the courses of his life. And for the same cause he would naturally become somewhat egotistical, long-winded, and tedious ; presuming that what was interesting to him as relating to himself would be equally so to others for its own sake. So that we need not altogether discredit Hotspur's account of the time spent by him "in reckoning up the several devils' names that were his lacqueys." For, though Hotspur exaggerates here, as usual, yet we see that he has some excuse for his sauciness to Glendower, in that he has been dreadfully bored by him. And there is something ludicrous withal in the Welshman's being so wrapped up in himself as not to perceive the unfitness of talking thus to one so hare-brained and skittish.