English Renaissance Literature Course Tutor: Associate prof.

Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu

LECTURE 9
William Shakespeare’s Chronicle Plays/ Histories (2)

 The First Tetralogy

The First Tetralogy – Henry VI, Part 2

 most likely the first play of the Henry VI sequence, dating from 1590-1
 editions: quarto versions (1594 – The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of
York and Lancaster, with the death of the good Duke Humphrey: And the banishment and death of
the Duke of Suffolk, and the Tragical end of the proud Cardinal of Winchester, with the notable
rebellion of Jack Cade: And the Duke of York’s first claim unto the Crown; 1600 and 1619); The
First Folio (1623 – 2 Henry VI)
 The play focuses on continued scheming at the court, first between Gloucester and Beaufort, then
between York’s faction and the other lords. The infighting between the lords and the popular
uprising by Jack Cade show what happens to the nation when the king in power is too weak to rule
effectively. The play charts the rise and fall of many lords and lesser figures within the kingdom.
Main characters1:
– Lancastrians: king Henry VI; Queen Margaret; the Duke of Gloucester and his wife
Eleanor; Cardinal Beaufort, Bishop of Winchester; the Dukes of Buckingham and Somerset;
the Marquis/Duke of Suffolk; old and young Clifford.
– Yorkists: Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York; his sons Edward, Earl of March and Richard;
the Earl of Salisbury and his son, the Earl of Warwick.
– other characters: the petitioners Thump and Horner; Sander Simpcox, an impostor; Jack
Cade, rebel leader.
Main themes:
– the weak king: Henry VI, crowned while very young, never completely gains control of the
kingdom. He is pushed around by his nobles, who each have a scheme of their own, and by
Margaret, his French wife. Henry is a pious man, mocked by Margaret for his weakness. In fact,
Margaret manages to nearly reverse their gender roles, urging the King to flee and commanding the
army by the end of the play. Henry is powerless to stop her even from having an affair with Suffolk
(though banishing Suffolk temporarily weakens her).
He appears as a medieval character adrift in a Renaissance play: his appeals to divine
providence have the ring of sincerity, but they advertise his dislocation from the ‘real’ business of
life. E.g. the “mock-miracle” scene → the King’s naïve, outdated Christian credulousness /vs./
Gloucester’s wisdom and empirical rationalism.
– power struggles: The scheming of the nobles first comes to a head when Gloucester, protector of
the kingdom during Henry’s youth, is plotted against by Margaret, Suffolk and Beaufort, and killed.
After the death of this truly honourable man, no one remains to protect the King from York and his
supporters, who dominate the action thereafter. Both Henry’s weakness and the rebellion of the
lower classes create risk for the kingdom, but the real danger to England lies in the ambition of the
nobles of the court.
– violence inflicted on human bodies: It is symbolic of the failure of the monarchy and of the
kingdom being torn apart by feuding factions. As the body of the kingdom is threatened by popular

1
The present lecture contains only lists of characters that are meant to help the students better understand the
subsequent comments on different aspects of the plays discussed. Nevertheless, for a full understanding of the plays,
students are required to look on their own for full play synopses.

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English Renaissance Literature Course Tutor: Associate prof. Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu

revolt and civil war, this suffering first registers in the death and destruction of actual bodies. E.g.
Gloucester; Beaufort; Suffolk; Stafford and his brother; Lord Saye and his son-in-law; Jack Cade.
– the egalitarian tradition: Jack Cade seems to be a champion of the people, who appears when
Gloucester, the only noble who cared about the commoners, has fallen. Yet, he has also been hired
by York as part of a scheme to test whether the people support the idea of another heir to the throne.
Cade promises revolution: his new kingdom will only honour workmen, so artisans or skilled
labourers will fall in rank. Cade mobilizes the anger of the commoners against the nobles, directing
most of his violence against those who can read or write, thus exhibiting anarchic, carnivalesque
power. Yet Cade contradicts these same egalitarian claims by insisting that he will someday be
king, and from his mouth will come the new law of the land. His army seems to recognize his
hypocrisy, but they do not mind it, as they are stirred on by their dislike of the nobles. Like York,
Cade is an arresting figure opposed to that of the fatally weak king, and the kind of violence and
brutality that he represents offers a grim premonition of the future.

The First Tetralogy – Henry VI, Part 3

 date of composition: 1591-2
 editions: an octavo volume (1595 - The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good
King Henry the Sixth); two quartos (1600 and 1619); the First Folio (1623 - The Third Part of
Henry the Sixth).
 A continuation of the depiction of the War of the Roses, it ambitiously presents many significant
battles fought during the civil war, from the Battle of Wakefield (1460), when the Duke of York
was killed, to the Battle of Tewkesbury (1471), when Edward, York’s eldest son, defeated the
Lancastrians. → a ‘procession’ of four kingly figures + the clearest exposition of the horrors of civil
war.
Main characters:
– Lancastrians: King Henry VI; Queen Margaret; their son Prince Edward; Dukes of
Somerset, Exeter and Northumberland; Earl of Westmorland; Lords Clifford and Stafford;
Somerville; Henry, Earl of Richmond
– Yorkists: Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York; his sons Edward, Rutland, Richard and
George; Lady Gray; Earl of Warwick; Marquis of Montague, his brother; Lord Hastings,
their brother-in-law.
 Henry VI – the weak but pacifist king. As the representative of legitimacy in a time of social
disorder, he is fated to be thwarted and disgraced at every turn of the plot. Yet, Shakespeare has not
designed him only to be an object of scorn. Henry VI becomes more and more clearly a
representative of peace and its blessings. However, that does not change radically the final message
of the play: Henry VI dreams of a peaceful life away from regal cares, but his fantasy is abruptly
interrupted by a scene that reveals the ultimate breakdown of moral order and family ties (the
‘mirror scenes’ of father killing son, son killing father during the battle of Towton). A weak
monarch like Henry VI means chaos in a kingdom torn apart by selfish feuding lords.
 Richard III – the epitome of a new breed of power-brokers. Near the end of the play, Richard
kills Henry and declares that he had no father or brothers, thus, announcing his separation from
kinship networks that define the rest of the play. Richard blames his isolation on his deformity,
which makes a convenient excuse for his villainous behaviour. Yet, the relationship between
deformity and the breakdown of the social order is more complex than Richard portrays it to be.
Richard’s physical deformity is perhaps less the cause of his vicious behaviour, and rather an
outward sign of his inner evil.

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English Renaissance Literature Course Tutor: Associate prof. Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu

Main themes:
– the degradation of social ties, particularly those of family: The struggle for the throne is played
out among various branches of the descendants of Edward III; the Lancaster line followed Henry
IV, the fourth son of Edward III, while the York line descended from the third son of Edward III.
This struggle between opposing wings of the same family is no longer simply a matter of personal
loss or individual action, but corrodes the foundations of society itself, giving birth to a kind of
monstrous individualism. → the father-son and revenge themes: York, Clifford, etc. – unstoppable
cycles of violence.
– the assertion of individual will: Richard is interested in power simply for its own sake, and – in a
crucial development – he is prepared to murder his own family to seize it. By the end of the play,
Richard has announced his isolation from the titles of “son” or “brother,” and while he kisses
Edward’s new baby, he likens himself to Judas. The previous chapters of the War of the Roses served
to set branches of a family against each other; with no other enemies to fight, members of a single
family will struggle among themselves, and vicious ambition will threaten to bring down the nation.

Conclusions: Henry VI – the Trilogy

If there is a sense of continuity in the Henry VI plays, perhaps it is given by that they
demonstrate an unremitting breakdown of values:
– Part I begins as a patriotic adventure but ends with the nobles ranged against one another.
– Part II depicts the fragmentation of society, with different sections of English society in
conflict.
– Part III shows a country in breakdown as fathers murder their own sons and sons their
fathers. But Richard is prepared to turn against not merely his own country, nor even his
political enemies, but his own family – and it is his bloody path to power which occupies
Richard III, the next and final play in the historical sequence.

The First Tetralogy – Richard III

 sources: Holinshed’s Chronicles and Hall’s Union of the Two Noble and Illustrious Families of
Lancaster and York, but also Thomas More’s History of King Richard III (c.1513);
 date of composition: 1592–93 (most likely after 1 Henry VI and about the same period as Titus
Andronicus)
 publication: a quarto edition (1597, reprinted seven times) and the First Folio (1623).

Main characters: King Edward IV of York; his wife, Queen Elizabeth; his brothers, George, Duke
of Clarence and Richard, Duke of Gloucester, the future King Richard III; the two young princes,
Edward IV’s sons; young Elizabeth, Edward IV’s daughter; Lady Anne; Hastings; Buckingham;
Henry, Earl of Richmond.
Shakespeare’s manipulation of history
The play centres on the figure of Richard of Gloucester, afterwards Richard III, physically
deformed, ambitious, sanguinary, bold and subtle, treacherous yet brave, a murderer and usurper of
the crown. Bloody though he was, nevertheless, the historical King Richard III was not necessarily
more murderous than the kings who preceded or succeeded him. Nor is it likely that he was so
deformed, as Shakespeare portrays him. When Shakespeare wrote this play, Queen Elizabeth I ruled
England; Elizabeth was a descendant of King Henry VII, the ruler who overthrew Richard. Thus,
the royal propaganda of the Elizabethan era maintained that Richard was a monster, an illegitimate
ruler of England.
Richard III - the Machiavellian villain
 Richard III: an intense exploration of the psychology of evil, centred on Richard’s mind:

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English Renaissance Literature Course Tutor: Associate prof. Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu

–the “Vice” character of medieval morality pageants: Richard does not justify his villainy
and considers that his task is to persuade good characters to stray from the path of
righteousness.
– Machiavellian villain: Watching Richard’s breathtaking theatricality, Shakespeare’s
audiences would have thought of the Elizabethan “Machiavel,” the archetype of the
scandalously amoral, power-hungry ruler. → the first of Shakespeare’s great villains
Richard’s soliloquy that opens the play (1.1.) stresses out the profiling of the character along these
lines:

GLOUCESTER. Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums chang’d to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visag’d war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front,
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I-that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass-
I-that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph-
I-that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them-
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity.
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the King
In deadly hate the one against the other;
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false, and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew’d up-
About a prophecy which says that G
Of Edward’s heirs the murderer shall be.
Dive, thoughts, down to my soul. Here Clarence comes. (1.1.1-41)

Shakespeare stresses Richard’s theatricality so much that even as we gasp at his deeds, we are
astonished by his control over events. The strength of that power is revealed by the fact that other
people think him honesty incarnate. Even characters such as Lady Anne, who have an explicit
knowledge of his wickedness, allow themselves to be seduced by his brilliant wordplay, his skilful
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English Renaissance Literature Course Tutor: Associate prof. Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu

argumentation, and his relentless pursuit of his selfish desires. Shakespeare uses Richard’s
soliloquies brilliantly to control the audience’s impression of Richard, enabling this manipulative
protagonist to work his charms on the audience. A man who is that good at being bad must be
fascinating to watch; he unites dramatic energy with political power.
After he is crowned king and Richmond begins his uprising, Richard’s monologues end.
Once Richard stops exerting his charisma on the audience, his real nature becomes much more
apparent, and, by the end of the play, he can be seen for the monster that he is.
Themes and Motifs
 the allure of evil. When Richard claims that his deformity is the cause of his wicked ways, he
seems to manipulate us for sympathy, just as he manipulates the other characters throughout the
play. As a result, Richard III does not explore the cause of evil in the human mind so much as it
explores its operation, depicting the workings of Richard’s mind and the methods he uses to
manipulate, control, and injure the others for his own gain.
 the connection between the ruler and the state. The so-called window scenes in Richard III—the
conversation of the common people in Act II, Buckingham’s speech to the masses and Richard’s
acceptance of the crown in Act III - provide a glimpse of how the drama in the royal palace affects
the lives of the common people outside its walls. Richard III explores a theme Shakespeare later
revisited in Hamlet and Macbeth—the idea that the moral righteousness of a political ruler has a
direct bearing on the health of the state.
 the power of language. Richard’s extraordinary skill with words enables him to manipulate,
confuse, and control those around him. Interestingly, language also seems to be the only defence
against Richard, as shown when the princes match his skill at wordplay and thus indicate their
ability to see through his schemes. In such cases, Richard simply uses violence as an expedient and
has his enemies, including the princes, put to death.
 the birth of the Tudor dynasty. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Richard III as a Machiavellian villain
is in part designed to set up a glorious ascension for Henry VII at the end of the play. Though that is
not exactly the main focus of the play, it is important to realize that the history Shakespeare
presented in his play was still very much alive when he wrote it, and that the considerations of his
own time strongly affected his portrayal of the past.
 the supernatural. Richard III involves an extraordinary number of supernatural elements:
prophetic dreams, witchcraft, curses, references to devils and demons. E.g.: King Edward’s belief in
“prophecies and dreams”; Clarence’s nightmare that occurs just before his execution; Queen
Margaret’s cursing the Yorkists; the parade of the eleven ghosts that visits Richard and Richmond
the night before the battle of Bosworth. These supernatural elements create an atmosphere of
intense dread and gloom that matches the evil of Richard’s inner self, and also heighten the sense
that Richard’s reign is innately evil.

The political lesson of the play: Civil disorder shakes a nation into chaos and inevitably raises a
tyrant to supreme power. His tyranny, corruption and crime may be put an end to only by the united
forces of those who stand for righteousness in the world (i.e., the Tudors).

 King John
 date of composition: c. 1595-97 (close to Richard II, The Merchant of Venice, 1 Henry IV).
 sources: Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) and an anonymous play, The Troublesome Reign of King
John (printed 1591), that is strikingly close in certain respects to Shakespeare’s play.
Characters:
– The English: King John of England, brother of the deceased Richard I; Queen Eleanor, their
mother; Prince Henry, John’s son (later King Henry III of England); Lady Blanche of Spain, John’s

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English Renaissance Literature Course Tutor: Associate prof. Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu

niece, later married to Louis the Dauphin; Hubert, a follower of King John; rebellious English
nobles: Earls of Essex, Salisbury, Pembroke and Lord Bigot; Lady Falconbridge and her sons
Robert Falconbridge, her legitimate son, and Philip Falconbridge, also known as the Bastard, her
illegitimate son by King Richard I;
– The French: King Philip of France; Louis the Dauphin of France, Philip’s son; Arthur, later Duke
of Brittaine, King John’s young nephew (the son of his elder brother Geoffrey); Lady Constance,
Arthur’s mother; Duke of Austria; Châtillon, ambassador from France to England; Count Melun;
– others: Cardinal Pandolf, a legate from the Pope; Peter of Pomfret, a prophet.

The reason for Shakespeare’s choice of John’s reign was the opportunity to dramatize its
events in a way that would make them serve as a favourable commentary on the political and
religious struggles in which Elizabeth was involved. The play with some departure from historical
accuracy deals with various events in King John’s reign. Anchored in the conflicts with Rome and
its claims to supremacy, the play shows concern with the ethics of rebellion, the unity of England
and the character of the good ruler, thus anticipating, to some extent, the political interest
emerging later in Henry IV. King John is an interesting and promising transitional play, which
occupies an important though lonely place in the Shakespearean canon.

 The Great Chronicle Plays

In the early chronicle plays Shakespeare detailed the disaster brought on the kingdom by a weak
monarchy. Now that he belonged to the prosperous middle classes, he shared his class’s ideal of
order, authority and security. Shakespeare the humanist still condemned absolute power and
oppression, but the bourgeois in him demanded a firm enlightened rule to check up any
manifestation of social chaos.
An overarching theme of Shakespeare’s “second tetralogy” – Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2
Henry IV and Henry V – is the so-called “Tudor Myth”, which held that the deposition of Richard
II by Bolingbroke fatally weakened the English throne and directly instigated the Wars of the Roses
– a conflict brought to a close only by the accession of Henry VII Tudor in 1485.

The Great Tetralogy – Richard II

 sources: Holished’s Chronicles, Hall’s Union and Daniel’s History of the Civil Wars; and
anonymous play Woodstock (c.1592) and Marlowe’s Edward II (1592).
 novelty of the play: a new development in the playwright’s composition of his histories. The
catastrophe is not caused by a villain, by fate or by the pressure of events, but by a serious flaw in
the protagonist’s nature.
Main characters: Richard II; his uncle John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster; his cousin Henry
Bolingbroke, John of Gaunt’s son; Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk; the Duke of York; the king’s
supporters: Bushy, Bagot, Green and the Duke of Aumerle; Exton.
Richard II: A complex character, Richard appears as petulant, childish, emotionally self-indulgent,
incapable of asserting his authority over factious noblemen but brooding and poeticizing over his
royal status once he is on the point of losing it, and Shakespeare manipulates the audience’s
sympathy towards him (first against, then in Richard’s favour). Actually, Shakespeare’s character
results from a combination of two trends of opinion regarding the king’s personality and rule:
– on the one hand, Richard was the Lord’s anointed, the last English king to rule in virtue of his
direct and undisputed descent from William the Conqueror;
– on the other hand, the Lancastrians supporting Henry saw him as a weak, foolish king who
voluntarily abdicated because he admitted his own unfitness to carry out his royal duties. (And
Shakespeare makes it plain just how vulnerable a king can be.)

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English Renaissance Literature Course Tutor: Associate prof. Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu

The play actually opposes Richard as the medieval king to Henry Bolingbroke as the
‘modern’ man of action, impatient with the stylized forms of medieval life (e.g. the deposition
scene as an inversion of the coronation ritual).
Richard really is a tragic hero: a man who blunders and is culpable, and who suffers
terribly for his mistakes. He cannot separate his official persona from his human identity, cannot
sever what some critics have called “the king’s two bodies”. Richard’s flawed, difficult journey to
self-knowledge anticipates, however partially, that of King Lear.
The self-indulgent lyricism of many of Richard’s own speeches reflects the predominantly
lyrical interest that seems to have been a feature of Shakespeare’s dramatic art at this phase in his
development (see Romeo and Juliet), but it also helps to build Richard’s character and to
differentiate it from that of his more realistic and practical supplanter, Henry of Bolingbroke.
Richard II is filled with poetic images identifying both protagonists with the elements. Richard
begins the play as a “sun-king of fire” opposed to Bolingbroke’s flood, but as the action progresses
the two steadily change place.

The Great Tetralogy – 1 and 2 Henry IV

 dates of composition: 1 Henry IV - most likely 1596; 2 Henry IV - late 1597, early 1598.
 sources: Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587) and possibly Halle’s Union (1548); Samuel Daniel’s
verse Civil Wars (1595), chronicles by John Stow and the anonymous play The Famous Victories of
Henry V (c.1580s); The Governor (1531) by the Tudor courtier Thomas Elyot and John Eliot’s
Ortho-epia Gallica (1593) (additional sources for 2 Henry IV).
 editions:
–1 Henry IV: quarto (1598, reprinted seven more times by 1632); First Folio (1623);
–2 Henry IV: quarto (1600); the First Folio (1623).
 historical frame: the rise of the English royal House of Lancaster (set in the years 1402–1403).

Novelty:
– Falstaff, Prince Harry’s fat, aged, and criminally degenerate mentor and friend: He has
many historical precedents: he owes much to archetypes like the figure of Vice from medieval
morality plays and Gluttony from medieval pageants about the seven deadly sins. His character also
draws on the miles gloriosus figure, an arrogant soldier from classical Greek and Roman comedy,
and the Lord of Misrule, the title given to an individual appointed to reign over folk festivities in
medieval England. Ultimately, however, Falstaff is a Shakespearean creation, second among
Shakespearean characters only to Hamlet as a subject of critical interest.
– The plays mix history and comedy innovatively, moving from lofty scenes involving kings and
battles to base scenes involving ruffians drinking and engaging in robberies. Their great strengths
include: a remarkable richness and variety of texture, a fascinatingly ambiguous take on history and
on political motivations, and a new kind of characterisation, as found in the inimitable Falstaff.
1 Henry IV
Plot lines: 1 Henry IV has two main plots that intersect in a dramatic battle at the end of the
play. The first plot concerns King Henry IV, his son, Prince Harry, and their strained
relationship. The second concerns a rebellion that is plotted against King Henry by a
discontented family of noblemen in the North, the Percys, who are angry because of King
Henry’s refusal to acknowledge his debt to them. The play’s scenes alternate between these two
plot strands until they come together at the end of the play.
Main characters: King Henry IV; his sons, Prince Harry (Hal) and Lord John of Lancaster;
Glyndwr; the Percys: old Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, and his son Henry nicknamed
Hotspur, Thomas Percy, the Earl of Worcester; Lord Edmund Mortimer; Falstaff; Poins;
Bardolph; Pistol; Mistress Quickly.

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English Renaissance Literature Course Tutor: Associate prof. Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu

2 Henry IV
Plot lines: Set in the early 1400s, it also mixes history and comedy, moving from “high” scenes
of kings and battles to “low” scenes of city taverns and country life, and continues to develop
on the two main themes of Henry IV’s struggle with the heavy burden of royal power and
Henry V’s transformation from a young hell-raiser into a wise king.
Main characters:
– rebel leaders, i.e. the Earl of Northumberland, the Archbishop of York, Lord Bardolph, Lord
Mowbray, and Lord Hastings;
– King Henry IV and his sons: Prince Hal/Harry (the future Henry V), Prince John of
Lancaster, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and Thomas, Duke of Clarence; the King’s
supporters: Earls of Warwick, Surrey and Westmoreland;
– Falstaff, Bardolph, Pistol, Peto, Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet; Shallow and Silence,
elderly country justices; Lord Chief Justice.
Prince Harry: He is at the centre of events in both plays, the only character to move between the
grave, serious world of King Henry, the ‘angry’ young man Hotspur and the power-craving
noblemen, and the comical world of Falstaff and the Boar’s Head Tavern from Eastcheap.
1 Henry VI is a kind of competitive comedy between Harry/Hal, Prince of Wales, and his
dashing rival Hotspur, son of the King’s main foe, Northumberland. This dynamic story of two
young sons competing for supremacy dominates the action of the play, offsetting the political
narrative and often threatening to eclipse it altogether.
An initially disreputable prince who eventually wins back his honour and the king’s esteem,
Harry undergoes the greatest dramatic development, deliberately transforming himself from the
spendthrift he pretends to be into a noble leader. He is, nevertheless, a complicated character. As 1
Henry IV opens, Harry has been spending his time with Falstaff and earning the displeasure of both
his father and England as a whole. He then surprises everyone by declaring that his dissolute
lifestyle is all an act, which proves him clearly intelligent and already capable of the psychological
machinations required of kings. But the heavy measure of deceit involved in his plan seems to call
his honour into question, and his treatment of Falstaff further sullies his name: though there seems
to be real affection between the prince and the roguish knight, Harry is quite capable of tormenting
and humiliating his friend (in 2 Henry IV). Shakespeare seems to include these aspects of Harry’s
character in order to illustrate that Falstaff’s selfish bragging does not fool Harry and to show that
Harry is capable of making the difficult personal choices that a king must make in order to rule a
nation well (as Henry V).
Sir John Falstaff: Old, fat, lazy, selfish, dishonest, corrupt, thieving, manipulative, boastful, and
lecherous, Falstaff is, despite his many negative features, perhaps the most popular of
Shakespeare’s comic characters. Though he is technically a knight, Falstaff’s lifestyle clearly
renders him incompatible with the ideals of courtly chivalry that one typically associates with
knighthood. Falstaff seems to scorn morality largely because he has such a hearty appetite for life
and finds the niceties of courtesy and honour useless when there are jokes to be told and feasts to be
eaten. Largely a creature of words, he redeems himself through his real affection for Prince Harry,
whom, despite everything, he seems to regard as a real friend/ a surrogate father. This affection
makes Harry’s decision, foreshadowed in 1 Henry IV, to abandon Falstaff when he becomes king
(in 2 Henry IV) seem all the more harsh.
In 2 Henry IV, his presentation as a recruiting officer is meant to attain a double goal: on the
one hand, to reveal new forms of his comic ‘business’, on the other hand, to suggest an attack on a
social evil. Falstaff describes how he takes bribes from able-bodied men on the draft list who do not
want to go to war; this leaves him with only those recruits who are penniless and poor-spirited. In
showing Falstaff eventually rejected by the new king Henry V, Shakespeare makes his meaning

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English Renaissance Literature Course Tutor: Associate prof. Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu

clear: frivolous doings are not compatible with a king’s responsibilities. Falstaff belongs to the
amoral world of the Boar’s Tavern, but not to the moral world of the dedicated Christian ruler.
King Henry IV: Though Henry is not yet truly an old man in 1 Henry IV, his worries about his
crumbling kingdom, guilt over his uprising against Richard II, and the vagaries of his son’s behaviour
have diluted his earlier energy and strength. Henry remains stern, aloof, and resolute, but he is no
longer the force of nature he appears to be in Richard II. Henry’s trouble stems from his own uneasy
conscience and his uncertainty about the legitimacy of his rule. With these concerns lurking at the
back of his reign, Henry is unable to rule as the magnificent leader his son Harry will become.
Themes and Motifs
- the nature of honour: Honour seems to be defined less by an overarching set of guidelines and
more by an individual’s personal values and goals:
– Hotspur – honour = glory on the battlefield and defending one’s reputation and good name
against any perceived insult;
– Henry IV – honour = the well-being of the nation and the legitimacy of its ruler;
– Prince Harry – honour seems to be associated with noble behaviour, but for a long time
Harry is willing to sacrifice the appearance of honour for the sake of his own goals, confident
that he can regain his honour at will. Harry’s conception of honour is so all-inclusive that he
believes that, by killing Hotspur, Hotspur’s honour becomes his own.
– Falstaff – honour = nothing but hot air and wasted effort that does no one any good:
What is honour? A word. What is in that word ‘honour’? What is that ‘honour’? Air. A trim
reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No.
‘Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction
will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. [5.1.133–40]
- the legitimacy of rulers: The play questions what makes a ruler legitimate, which qualities are
desirable in a ruler, when it is acceptable to usurp a ruler’s authority, and what the consequences of
rebelling against a ruler might be. The concept of legitimate rule is deeply connected with the
concept of rebellion: if a ruler is illegitimate, then it is acceptable to usurp his power, as Hotspur
and the Percys attempt to do with King Henry IV. While the criteria that make a ruler legitimate
differ—legitimate rule may be attributed to the will of the people or to the will of God—on some
level the crack in Henry’s power results from his own fear that his rule is illegitimate, since he
illegally usurped the crown from Richard II.
The qualities that are desirable in a ruler are explored through the contrast inherent in the
major characters: the stern and aloof Henry, the unpredictable and intelligent Harry, and the
decisive and hot-tempered Hotspur. Each man offers a very different style of rulership. In the end,
Shakespeare seems to endorse Harry’s ability to think his way through a situation and to manipulate
others without straying too far from the dictates of conscience. Harry emerges as Shakespeare’s
most impressive English king in Henry V.
- juxtaposed moral and social levels: statesmen and rebels; the king, his sons and his advisers;
Falstaff and his companions Peto, Bardolph, Mistress Quickly, and Doll Tearsheet; Percy and his
friends; the country justices Shallow and Silence. → Each of these levels reveal something about
England, about the relation between moral character and human behaviour, about the nature of men.
- doubles: Harry/ Hotspur; Falstaff/ the king; the Boar’s Head Tavern/the royal palace.
- high and low language: One of the characteristics that sets 1 and 2 Henry IV apart from many of
Shakespeare’s other plays is the ease with which it transitions between scenes populated by nobility
and scenes populated by commoners. One result of these transitions is that the play encompasses
many different languages and manners of expression. Although language is seldom discussed by the
characters, the sheer variety of spoken language in the play suggests that one of Shakespeare’s aims
in this work was to portray something of the scope of the English language. The play combines high
speech and low speech, poetry and prose, as well as various accents of Britain’s various locales.
Shakespeare uses various rhetorical and formal strategies to distinguish his various types of speech
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English Renaissance Literature Course Tutor: Associate prof. Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu

without sacrificing his unifying style: generally, for instance, well-born characters tend to speak in
verse, while commoners tend to speak in prose.
- British cultural stereotypes: Welsh characters such as Glyndwr (portrayed as an ominous
magician) and Scottish characters such as the Douglas (portrayed as a hot-headed warrior).

The Great Tetralogy – Henry V

 date of composition: 1599 (because of the reference to the Earl of Essex’s campaign in Ireland)
 sources: Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587); Halle’s Union (1548); The Famous Victories of Henry V
(c.1580s); Samuel Daniel’s poem The Civil Wars (1595), and John Stow’s Chronicles (1580) and
Annals (1592).
 editions: the ‘bad’ quarto (1600) and the First Folio (1623).

Main characters:
–the English: King Henry V of England (known as Harry); Dukes of Gloucester and Clarence,
Henry’s brothers; Duke of Exeter, Henry’s uncle; Duke of York; Earls of Salisbury, Westmorland
and Warwick; Archbishop of Canterbury; traitors to King Henry: Richard, Earl of Cambridge;
Henry, Lord Scrope of Masham and Sir Thomas Grey; Pistol, Nim and Bardolph, Falstaff’s former
companions; Hostess, formerly Mistress Quickly, Pistol’s wife; Captains Gower, Fluellen,
Macmorris and Jamy, serving in Henry’s army
–the French: King Charles VI of France; Louis the Dauphin, his son and heir; Princess Catherine,
his daughter; Alice, a lady attending Catherine; French noblemen: Constable of France; Dukes of
Bourbon, Orléans, Berri and Normandy; Lord Rambures and Lord Grandpré Montjoy, the French
herald; Governor of Harfleur
Henry V: the play’s protagonist and hero, a young man of great intelligence and charisma who
initiates all significant action in the play. His most prominent features:
– determination: Once he has set his mind to accomplishing a goal, he uses every resource at his
disposal to see that it is accomplished. This tactic may seem morally questionable, but it is a
valuable psychological weapon that Henry uses to pressure his enemies into doing what he
wants. Again and again, Henry acts in a manner that would be deplorable for a common citizen
but that makes him an exemplary king. (e.g. his political game with the French at Harfleur)
– facility with language: Henry’s rhetorical skill is a forceful weapon, the strength of which
nearly equals that of his army’s swords. With words, Henry can inspire and rouse his followers,
intimidate his enemies, and persuade nearly anyone who hears him. With Henry’s speeches,
Shakespeare creates a rhetoric that is, like Henry himself, at once candidly frank and extremely
sophisticated. Henry has a very special quality for a king: the ability to present himself honestly
while still manipulating his audience.
– commitment to his responsibilities: Shakespeare does not comment explicitly on Henry’s
motives for invading France, but it seems clear from his speeches about the weight of his
responsibility that Henry is not motivated exclusively by a lust for power or land. Henry clearly
takes kingship very seriously, and he is dedicated to fulfilling the obligations of his rank. It
seems clear from Henry’s undeniably uplifting speeches that Shakespeare intends for us to see
Henry as a hero, or, at the very least, as an estimable king. Insofar as Henry is a hero, he is made
so by his commitment to his responsibilities above his own personal feelings.
Themes and Motifs
- the nature of leadership and its relationship to morality: The play proposes that the qualities that
define a good ruler are not necessarily the same qualities that define a good person. Henry is an
extraordinarily good leader: he is intelligent, focused, and inspiring to his men. He uses all
resources at his disposal to ensure that he achieves his goals. Shakespeare presents Henry’s

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English Renaissance Literature Course Tutor: Associate prof. Gabriela Iuliana Colipcă-Ciobanu

charismatic ability to connect with his subjects and motivate them to embrace and achieve his goals
as the fundamental criterion of good leadership, making Henry seem the epitome of a good leader.
By inspiring his men to win the Battle of Agincourt despite overwhelming odds, Henry achieves
heroic status. However, the play’s treatment of King Henry V is more problematic than it seems at a
first glance. Henry is a model of traditional heroism, but his value system is confusing. After all, his
sense of honour leads him to invade a non-aggressive country and to slaughter thousands of people.
He sentences to death former friends and prisoners of war while claiming to value mercy, and he
never acknowledges that he bears any responsibility for the bloodshed he has initiated. It is useful to
read the play with an eye toward these discrepancies, which Shakespeare examines in a complicated
exploration of the nature of kingship.
- the diversity of the English: The play introduces numerous characters which belong to different
social classes and nationalities united under the English crown during Henry’s reign. Many of the
characters represent large groups or cultures: Fluellen represents the Welsh, Pistol represents the
underclass, Jamy represents the Scottish, and MacMorris represents the Irish. These characters are
often given the stereotypical traits thought to characterize each group in Shakespeare’s day—
MacMorris, for instance, has a fiery temper, a trait thought to be common to the Irish. The
catalogue of characters from different countries both emphasizes the diversity of medieval England
and intensifies the audience’s sense of Henry’s tremendous responsibility to his nation. For a play
that explores the nature of absolute political power, there is something remarkably democratic in
this enlivening portrayal of rich and poor, English and Welsh, Scottish and Irish, as their roles
intertwine in the war effort under one king. In this way, the exploration of the people of Britain
becomes an important facet of the play’s larger exploration of power. As the play explores the ruler,
it also examines the ruled.
- male interaction: There are almost no women in Henry V. Catherine is the only female character
to be given many lines or presented in the domestic sphere, and most of her lines are in French.
With this absence of women and the focus on the all-male activity of medieval warfare, the play
presents many types of male relationships. The relationships between various groups of men—
Fluellen and Gower; Bardolph, Pistol, and Nim; and the French lords—mirror and echo one another
in various ways. The cowardice of the Eastcheap group is echoed in the cowardice of the French
lords, for instance. Perhaps more important, these male friendships draw attention to another aspect
of Henry’s character: his isolation from other people. Unlike most of the play’s other male
characters, Henry seems to have no close friends, another characteristic that makes the life of a king
fundamentally different from the life of a common citizen.

References
Daiches, David (1975) A Critical History of English Literature, vol. 2, London: Secher & Warburg
Dickson, Andrew (2009) The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, London: Rough Guides.
Dobson, Michael and Wells, Stanley (2001) The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press.
Gavriliu, Eugenia (2000) Lectures in English Literature I. From Anglo-Saxon to Elizabethan, Galati: Galati
University Press.
Hattaway, Michael (ed.) (2004) The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, Cambridge,
New York: Cambridge University Press
Shakespeare, William (2009) King Richard III. Ed. by Siemon, James R. London: Bloomsbury [The Arden
Shakespeare]

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