1 Henry IV is the second in a series of Shakespearean history plays. The first play, Richard II, is the tragedy of a young king who abuses his authority and is usurped by his cousin, who becomes the present play’s King Henry IV. Because Richard lost the throne under suspicious circumstances, Henry’s authority is threatened by a kingdom divided between those who are loyal to him and those who believe that Richard was wrongly deposed and murdered. The ensuing rebellion is complicated by the fact that it is led by the Percy family—Northumberland, his brother Worcester, and his son Henry Percy or “Hotspur”— characters who were once loyal to Henry and instrumental in his rise to power.
For all its concern with this national rebellion and impending civil war, 1 Henry IV is also about a domestic rebellion, that of the king’s son, Prince Harry. The play’s scenes alternate between these two rebellions and the king’s efforts to contain them. As the Percys’ plot to take the throne from Henry is thwarted, the young Harry (or Hal as his friends call him) is transformed from mischievous truant to responsible prince and future king.
If Richard II is both a history play and tragedy, 1 Henry IV is perhaps best described as a history/comedy. For whereas Richard is a king in tragic decline, the Henry IV plays together with Henry V chart the making of a warrior king. The rise of prince Harry from obscurity as a tavern wastrel (briefly mentioned in Richard II, 5.3.1-22) to dutiful prince in 1 Henry IV is an archetypal comedic plot, the biblical tale of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32).
As is typical of tragedy (though not always the case with Shakespeare), Richard II has a single unified plot. 1 Henry IV, like most Shakespearean comedies, has two plots:
The first of these plots picks up where Richard II left off: the former Bolingbroke, now King Henry IV, is planning a crusade in the Holy Land in order “To wash this blood off from my guilty hand” (RII 5.6.50)—presumably the blood of Richard whose murder the new king may have ordered (see RII 5.4). Whatever his involvement in Richard’s death, King Henry must fortify his claim to the throne against the scandal surrounding it. For though Richard seemed willing to relinquish the crown, the deposition of a living monarch had no legal precedent and was therefore doubtful. Indeed, it might be argued that not even Richard had the authority to depose God’s anointed. Much of the play, then, is devoted both to the gradual consolidation of a new royal power and an interrogation of its philosophical justification. If Richard II questions and destabilizes the ideology of divine-right (the doctrine according to which a king’s authority is sanctioned by God), I Henry IV seems genuinely to ask, “What is the basis of political power?” This question becomes most pressing when a group of the king’s former allies, the Percy clan, plots a rebellion and denies the legality of his royal claim.
The second plot in the play—the maturation of King Henry’s son Harry—is a classic tale of adolescent freedom yielding to the sobering realities of duty and responsibility. Harry is a highly compelling character. We delight in his triumphant rise to eminence as Prince of Wales and heir apparent. But we also recognize that growing up has its costs, and we are left wondering in the end whether some of the old tavern Harry might yet remain.
Just as the comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream has two worlds, each contrasting and complementing the other, I Henry IV is structured around two intricately related locales, the court world and the tavern world. These worlds in turn correspond to the play’s two plots as described above.
The court is the bureaucracy and network of relations among the nobility surrounding the king. It is a world of political power, and thus also one of considerable danger and unpredictability—particularly given the circumstances of Henry’s rise to power.
The tavern world too is a network of social relations, though here the characters are not the English nobility but rather a colorful blend of the lower social order: tapsters and barkeeps, thieves and pimps and prostitutes.
The bridge linking these two worlds and plots is the Prince of Wales himself. Though at ease among his tavern friends, Harry tells us very early in the play that he plans to use his sojourn in their world as a foil against which to contrast his rise to glory (1.2.173-95). This sun-king soliloquy, as it is sometimes called, seems to reveal Prince Harry’s easy confidence about his destiny as heir to the throne. If this were all there is to it, however, his character throughout the remainder of the play would elicit little curiosity from the audience. Not merely foreshadowing a certain outcome, the speech is as much Harry telling himself what he must do as what in fact he will do. From this moment on we watch with interest as he seeks to fulfill his destiny while maintaining an obvious affection for the world he would leave behind.
Shakespeare reinforces the play’s double structure through one additional means, the foil character. A foil is a secondary or minor character whose dramatic function is to highlight the personal attributes of a primary character. Prince Harry has at least two such foils: Harry Percy, or Hotspur, and Jack Falstaff. Hotspur and Falstaff are distinct personalities, and they embody symbolically the play’s two worlds. As a noble warrior, Hotspur represents the courtly values of honor, chivalry, duty, and fame (reputation). Falstaff, on the contrary, epitomizes tavern values—pleasures of the flesh and self-preservation:
| Court Values | Tavern Values | |
| - honor, chivalry | - self-preservation; life over honor | |
| - dignity, fame (reputation) | - nonconformity, rebellion | |
| - sobriety, sacrifice, stoicism | - sensual indulgence | |
| Hotspur | Falstaff | |
| Prince Harry |
When at the end of the play Prince Harry stands between the dead Hotspur and the pretending-to-be-dead Falstaff, he stands in effect between two sets of values that have been vying for his allegiance throughout. Harry’s father, the former Bolingbroke, laments his wayward son’s reputation early in the play, openly wishing that Northumberland’s Harry had been switched at birth with his own Harry—that Hotspur, as it turns out, is his true son (1.1.77-89). And though the king never criticizes Falstaff directly, Harry imagines what his father thinks of his son’s companion when he (Harry) plays his father during a mock interview in the tavern. Falstaff, says Harry/King Henry, is a “villainous, abominable misleader of youth, an old White-bearded Satan” (2.5.421-22). Hotspur and Falstaff are thus extreme manifestations of Harry’s two sides—their opposed values somehow coexisting within the personality and psyche of a single man. How and to what extent these values are reconciled in the prince and future king is a question not easily answered—even at play’s end. It is this uncertainty, however, that makes Harry one of the more memorable of Shakespeare’s comic protagonists. If he were to remain entirely loyal to Falstaff and the tavern world, he would never realize his royal destiny. If he were to abandon that world without any reluctance or reservation, he would have betrayed and used his friends as mere props in a self-aggrandizing performance of the Prodigal Son made good. As is typical of Shakespeare’s best characters, Harry’s motives are far more complex than either of these simple alternatives suggests, and in this he is more plausibly human.
There is no question that Harry’s transformation is the most interesting and entertaining aspect of the play. But that subplot also effectively mirrors the history-play dimension of 1 Henry IV. Encouraged by his reformed son’s military bravado during the real interview (3.2.129-59)—the one for which the mock-interview in 2.5 is preparation—King Henry declares, “A hundred thousand rebels die in this” (3.2.160). This single line nicely captures the play’s parallel plot structure: Harry’s progression from truant son to loyal and responsible prince is matched scene for scene by his father’s success in defeating his enemies. Two rebellions, Harry’s and the Percys’, are put down simultaneously.
But just as Harry at the end remains tied to the tavern values he ostensibly rejects—evident in the penultimate scene when he offers to lie for Falstaff and in effect secure him a place at court (5.3.150-51)—so too is the rebels’ defeat accompanied by lingering doubts as to the security of Henry’s claim to power. The final scene, with its unsettling references to a residual rebellion in Scotland and Wales, suggests circumstances not all that different from those of the opening scene—thus reminding us that despite the king’s successes, there are those who remain skeptical of his legitimacy.
The reasons for this have everything to do with the deposition of Richard and the Percys’ involvement therein. Recall that Northumberland, Hotspur’s father, was loyal to Bolingbroke in Richard II. It is Northumberland who, during the deposition, repeatedly urges Richard publicly to read a confession of his supposed crimes (RII 4.1.212-17, 233, 243, 259). Hotspur also briefly appears in Richard II, introduced to Bolingbroke by Northumberland and pledging his service to Bolingbroke’s cause (2.3.36-50). Later, just as he is about to be imprisoned, Richard prophesies that Northumberland will one day regret having joined with Bolingbroke. For though the latter has become king, argues Richard, he will always suspect the Percys of disloyalty. Henry, argues Richard, will think that the Percys, having participated in the deposition of one king, will not hesitate to bring down another (RII 5.1.57-68).
Richard’s prediction could not be more accurate. Indeed, in 1 Henry IV it is Northumberland’s brother, Worcester, who offers a motive for rebellion identical to the one foreseen by Richard. “For, bear ourselves as even as we can,” he says, “The King will always think him in our debt, / And think we think ourselves unsatisfied / Till he hath found a time to pay us home” (1.3.279-82). This pre-emptive strategy—turn against the king before he turns against us—is only one reason why the Percys rebel. Another is that they feel they deserve to be treated more generously, given their instrumental role in helping Henry to the throne (1.3.10-13). A third, more problematic, reason is also offered: the claim that Hotspur’s brother-in-law, Edmund Mortimer, is the rightful heir to the throne, not Henry (1.3.139-50). The problem with this position, of course, is that the Percys said nothing about Mortimer back in Richard II when they supported Bolingbroke. Hotspur goes to great lengths to explain this apparent contradiction, arguing that their intention back then extended only so far as to help Bolingbroke reclaim what was rightfully his: the dukedom of Lancaster, Bolingbroke’s inheritance seized by Richard when Bolingbroke was in exile (4.3.54-90). Rather than a genuine motive, this argument is mere subterfuge—a legal pretext for what otherwise must be construed as high treason.
1 Henry IV is remarkable for its variety. Riotously funny tavern scenes alternate with the high drama of court politics, intrigue, and armed rebellion. Exuberant prose dialogue in the one world contrasts with the stately iambic poetry of the other. Drunkards, thieves, prostitutes, and pranksters occupy the same stage trod by princes, nobles, dignitaries, and national armies. Unlike the stylized and highly artificial world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the consistently ceremonial tone of Richard II, this play exemplifies a quality unmatched in any drama or work of fiction hitherto conceived: the illusion of the real. The variety of characters and their convincing depth; dialogue so effortless it seems but the transcription of recorded conversation; the seamless and complementary interweaving of two plots: these and other qualities make this play more than a history or comedy or any other generic label. 1 Henry IV, rather, is what we might call Theater of the World.
©Robert Whalen, 2025