the House of Lancaster in the person of Henry VI., was held to have befallen it, no longer as a Nemesis for their usurpation, but because of his state so many had the managing, That they lost France and made his England bleed. Lastly certain discrepancies of detail between Richard II. and Henry IV. confirm the view that a considerable interval separated their composition. Henry's account of Richard's prophecy (2 Hen. IV. iii. 1. 65 f.) does not agree with the actual representation of it in Rich. II. v. I. Warwick was not 'by,' Henry was already king, when according to the later play he 'had no such intent.' And what is more important, Henry in the earlier play accepts the throne as a divine mission ('in God's name, I'll ascend the regal throne,' iv. 1. 113), while in the later he sorrowfully excuses the act as unavoidable. The cold and calculating Bolingbroke of the earlier is not clearly recognisable in the remorseful king. And the prince, as reported, is much more like the ruffianly scapegrace of the Famous Victories than the Hal of Shakespeare. The relation of the Two Parts is not altogether clear. The Second can hardly be maintained to be either an integral part of the original plan or a mere afterthought. Much in the first four acts looks like a reworking of motives used in the First Part: the plot of Scroop tamely echoes the rising of the Percies; Falstaff's recruiting is a dramatised version of his account of a corresponding exploit before Shrewsbury. On the other hand, the loose threads left hanging at the close of the First Part point to a sequel; the appearance of the Archbishop of York in the First has no meaning unless his conspiracy was to follow. The great death-scene of Henry, and the new king's final rebuff to his followers must have been designed from the outset. And much that makes the Second Part less attractive is due to the deliberate preparation for this catastrophe. The prince is no longer 'the king of good fellows.' After once becoming himself at Shrewsbury, he cannot again throw his soul into the squalid revels of Eastcheap. He is fain, it is true, to 'remember the poor creature, small beer'; but he is conscious that the desire 'shows vilely' in him, and he is 'exceeding weary' of it all (2 ii. 2.). His jests are bitter and joyless, and already in the third act his curt 'Falstaff, good night' closes the days of their fellowship. Falstaff himself is far from falling off in humour; and his intellectual ascendency is thrown into relief by the introduction of new and contemptible figures, Pistol and Doll Tearsheet, Shallow and Silence. In place of a farcical victory over the dead Hotspur, he is allowed to effect a bona-fide (though dramatically questionable) capture of the 'famous rebel' Colevile. But his more imposing position only makes more emphatic and significant the abrupt dismissal in which his glories end. The political movements of Henry IV.'s reign, as told by Shakespeare's standard authorities, Holinshed and Halle, offered little salient matter for the dramatist. Nevertheless it is here that he most decisively abandons the boldly reconstructive methods of Marlowe; here that he unfolds with most consummate power his own method, of creating character and detail within the limits of a general fidelity to recorded fact. His most direct divergences from the tale of the chroniclers amount to little more than compressions of isolated and scattered event.1 But he supplements their tale and 1 Even this applies chiefly to the Second Part, where the revolt of Scroop (1405) nearly coincides in date with that of Northumberland (defeated 1408), and with the death of Glendower (in 1408-9 according to Holinshed; actually in 1415). The king is throughout imagined an old man (cf. 1 Hen. IV. v. 1. 13, 'our old limbs '), yet he died at forty. interprets their silence with a prodigal magnificence of invention unapproached in the other Histories. Hence Henry IV. presents analogies to the group of brilliant Comedies with which it was nearly contemporary, not only in its obvious wealth of comic. genius, but in the points at which this is exercised. The historic matter, like the serious story of Twelfth Night or Much Ado, is taken over without substantial change; while within its meshes plays a lambent humour which, ostensibly subordinate and by the way, in reality reveals the finer significance of the derived story itself, and forms, as literature, the crowning glory of the whole. Some hints of the comic substructure Shakespeare found in one of the crudest of the older Chronicleplays, The Famous Victories of Henry V., containing the Honourable Battell of Agincourt (acted by 1588, licensed for printing in 1594, and extant in two editions, 1598 and 1617). Henry's riotous youth is painted in the early scenes; here we find 'Ned' and 'Sir John Oldcastle,' and a revel in 'the old tavern at Eastcheap,' and a robbery of carriers on Gadshill,— even the 'great race of ginger' they convey. The prince himself is arrested by the Mayor and Sheriff, and deals his famous box on the ear to the Chief Justice, -a scene immediately afterwards travestied by the Clown in a fashion which perhaps suggested Falstaff's brilliant personation of the king. But there are hints of the serious story too: Henry's apology to his father; his unlucky abstraction of the crown; his exoneration of the Chief Justice; his stern dismissal of his boon companions. 1 Derrick. Faith John, Ile tell thee what, thou shalt be my Lord Chiefe Justice, and thou shalt sit in the chaire, And ile be the yong Prince, and 1 Shakespeare's Henry IV. in so far resembles the early scenes of this crude jumble, that it is virtually a prelude to the Famous Victories of Henry V.,-that its real subject is the future, not the reigning, king. But the old playwright made no attempt to solve the psychological problem of Henry's career as recorded by the chroniclers; his only thought was to paint a crude and glaring contrast. He seems to have held the sudden-conversion theory put forward by Canterbury in the famous words :: At that very moment [his father's death] And whipp'd the offending Adam out of him. In Shakespeare this bald antithesis of riot and ripe wisdom receives for the first time a coherent interpretation, and the revels of Eastcheap and the frolics of Gadshill take their place in the development of a genial and large-hearted king. Not that we are entirely to accept the prince's own explanation of his conduct (1 i. 2. 173),-to suppose that he deliberately obscures his merits, in order that, when he pleases at length to be himself, 'being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at.' This is a flash of his father's politic artifice, not altogether in keeping with his own hearty delight in living and in all frank and unconventional forms of life.1 His Bohemianism may be controlled by tact and justified after the event by calculation, but it is immediately prompted by exuberant vitality and impatience of court formalism. He is not, like the prince of the Famous Victories, a ringleader in outrages which his gang reckon on his presence to commit with impunity; he accepts a share in the freaks, 1 The speech may be regarded as a late specimen of the programme-monologue of Shake speare's less developed technique. Cf. Bulthaupt, Dram. des Schau spiels, ii. 65. but rarely initiates them, and his comradeship has wide but definite limits. The prince of the Famous Victories robs the king's receivers; Shakespeare's Hal indignantly spurns a parallel suggestion ('What, I a thief?'), and agrees even to the comparatively innocent sport of robbing the robbers only by way of 'being a madcap for once.' Among the crowd of figures whom the drama brings into contact with the prince, two are obviously designed to throw his character into relief. Hotspur was first cousin of Henry IV. and perhaps his senior; in 1388, the year after Henry Monmouth's birth, he had led the English forces at Otterburne.1 Yet Shakespeare makes them youthful rivals of the same age, to point the contrast between Hotspur's passion for personal glory and Henry's contented self-effacement. Hotspur in his way, not less than Henry, rebels against the traditions of his order. His blunt petulance, his disdain for music and poetry, his somewhat bourgeois relations with his wife, infringe as rudely as Henry's choice of comrades, or his weakness for 'the poor creature, small beer,' upon the code of chivalrous breeding. But Hotspur's unconventionalities spring from mere insensibility to other ambitions than that of snatching 'honour' by heroic exploits; while Henry's most questionable compliances with the ways of mean men betray only a somewhat crude exercise of that 'liberal eye' which in later days discovered still 'some soul of goodness in things evil,' that genial sympathy which on the eve of Agincourt banished fear from the meanest of his 'brothers, friends and countrymen' (Henry V. chorus iv.). Henry is of kin with all Englishmen, a living embodiment of England; Hotspur is so far from embodying England that he conspires without a qualm 1 Holinshed, ed. Stone, p. 142. VOL. VI 257 S |