The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
William Shakespeare · two history plays scored as one work for performance in two parts · each in five acts, the second opened by an Induction and closed by an Epilogue · written about 1596 to 1598 · scored on the Quarto of 1598 for the first part and on the Quarto of 1600 with the Folio of 1623 for the second; read from knowledge, no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
History play and comedy in one action; the chronicle, the morality play and festive misrule set against each other, scene for scene
Mythos
The prodigal son between two fathers; the Vice and the Lord of Misrule; Carnival against Lent; the usurper’s guilt and the crusade that ends in the Jerusalem chamber
Phase
From the rising of the Percys to the field of Shrewsbury, then through a second rising, ended by a trick at Gaultree, to the King’s death and the rejection at the coronation
Presentation
Drama; two plays of five acts, the second with Rumour’s Induction and an Epilogue, verse for the court and the camp and prose for the tavern, the highway, the recruiting yard and the orchard
Register
From the King’s grave, closed verse and Hotspur’s headlong lines to Falstaff’s mock-sermon prose, the drawer’s “Anon, anon, sir”, the Hostess’s malapropisms, Pistol’s rant and Shallow’s iterations
Scale
A kingdom divided on a map; two fathers and a son; a tavern, a highway, a battlefield and an orchard; the pressed men of a county
Governing Proposition
A king who came to his crown by usurpation faces rebellion from the Percys, while his heir keeps company in a tavern with an old knight, Sir John Falstaff; the prince tells the audience that his wildness is a policy, kills the rebel Hotspur at Shrewsbury, falls back into the tavern while a second rising is ended by a broken oath, is reconciled with his father at the deathbed, and at his coronation casts Falstaff off. The wager of the work is that a chronicle of state and a comedy of the people history does not record can be played as one action across two plays, each world judging the other, and that the comic giant can be loved for the length of both and then banished.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The King who opens the first part came to his crown by usurpation, and would answer for it with a crusade to Jerusalem. He cannot go. The Percys, to whom his crown is in debt, are rising against him, and their heir, Hotspur, is the warrior his own son is not: a soldier for whom honour is everything, and the prince’s double. Hotspur’s verse runs ahead of its own metre. He mocks a “certain lord, neat, and trimly dressed”, and he hungers for danger: “O, the blood more stirs / To rouse a lion than to start a hare!” (1 Henry IV, 1.3).
The heir, Prince Harry, is in a tavern. His companion is Sir John Falstaff, a fat old knight who lives by wit, sack and debt, and their talk in 1.2 is a game of insult and parody in prose; the prince calls him “my old lad of the castle”, a trace of the name the knight first carried. The tavern’s business is a robbery on the highway at Gad’s Hill. Then the prince is left alone, and speaks to the audience in verse. His wildness, he says, is a policy: “I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill” (1.2). The work has told us its end in its second scene, and spends two plays making us doubt it.
The robbery comes off in the second act, after carriers stir in an inn yard before dawn (2.1). The comedy and the chronicle are already set against each other. While the rebels plan to divide among themselves the kingdom the King took, the tavern takes a purse on the highway; the same act is done at both levels of the world, and each makes the other look like what it is.
Movement II
The great tavern scene of the first part (2.4) is full of voices: the drawer Francis with his “Anon, anon, sir”, the prince, and Falstaff telling the story of the robbery, in which the men in buckram who set on him multiply as he tells it, from two to eleven. A tavern bill is read, and among its items is “one half-pennyworth of bread to this intolerable deal of sack” (2.4). The reckoning of the tavern is kept as exactly as the King’s.
Then the tavern rehearses the scene the court has not yet played. Falstaff plays the King, a cushion for his crown, and reproaches the prince. Then they change places: the prince plays his father, and Falstaff, playing the prince, pleads for himself. “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world” (2.4). The prince, in his father’s part, answers: “I do, I will.” In four words, in jest, the whole end of the work has been spoken.
The rebels meet and divide the kingdom on a map among themselves (3.1). Glendower boasts of his Welsh magic, and Hotspur mocks him: to “I can call spirits from the vasty deep”, he answers “But will they come when you do call for them?” (3.1). Glendower’s daughter sings. Then the prince stands before his father (3.2), and the King reproaches him in earnest for what Falstaff has already said in play. The scene has been rehearsed, the audience hears it twice, and the son’s answer has been given already, in jest.
Movement III
Falstaff leads pressed men to the war, and when they are seen on the road he has his answer for what they are: “food for powder” (1 Henry IV, 4.2). The armies meet at Shrewsbury. Hotspur fights without his father: Northumberland fails his son.
Before the battle Falstaff asks himself what honour is, and answers himself in a catechism. Honour cannot set to a leg. “What is honour? A word” (5.1). On the field men march in the King’s coats, and Douglas kills one counterfeit king after another. Then the prince meets Hotspur, and kills him. Hotspur’s last words are given to time: “thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool” (5.4). He dies with the sentence unfinished, and the prince finishes it for him.
Beside the dead Hotspur lies Falstaff, counterfeiting death. The two answers to honour lie side by side on one field, the man who died for it and the man who would not, and the counterfeit that runs through the court runs through the tavern too. The battle is won, and the rebellion is not finished: the second part will raise it again.
Movement IV
The second part opens with Rumour, who speaks an Induction before the action begins. The world of the second part is slower and sicker: the kingdom is ill, and so is its King. Falstaff is old now and diseased, and set against the law in the person of the Lord Chief Justice; his wit is undimmed, “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men” (2 Henry IV, 1.2), but its subject is more often appetite, age and the body. The Hostess sues him for what he owes her.
The prince is absent for long stretches, and when he comes it is back to the tavern, as if Shrewsbury had not happened. The King cannot sleep. Alone at night (3.1), he speaks of the cost of the crown, and ends: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” The rebellion is rising again, and he is ill.
In Gloucestershire Falstaff and Justice Shallow choose recruits (3.2). They are called by name, Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble and Bullcalf, and the able ones pay to be let go; Feeble takes his chance with the plainest words in the work: “we owe God a death” (3.2). Shallow and Falstaff remember their youth, Shallow in iterations, Falstaff humouring him: “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow” (3.2). Shallow answers, “Jesu, the days that we have seen!” The old men of the orchard are time seen from outside, as the King’s sleepless night was time seen from within.
Movement V
The second rising has no battle. At Gaultree (4.1 to 4.2) Prince John parleys with the rebels and gives them his oath, and the rising is ended by a trick: the oath is kept in the letter and broken in substance. It is the political centre of the second part, a betrayal where the first part had a battle.
The King is dying. In the crown scene (4.5) father and son quarrel and are reconciled a second time, and this time at the deathbed. The King tells his son that he met the crown by “by-paths and indirect crook’d ways” (2 Henry IV, 4.5), and counsels him to “busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels”. The crusade to Jerusalem he wanted ends in the Jerusalem chamber.
In Shallow’s orchard the talk is of a sowing of wheat, and Falstaff borrows a thousand pounds of Shallow. The old King is dead, and his son is crowned. Falstaff comes to the new King, and the King does not know him: “I know thee not, old man” (5.5). Falstaff is banished. Then the Epilogue speaks, with a dance and a notice of a play to come, and puts one name aside: “for Oldcastle died martyr, and this is not the man” (Epilogue).
Act III · The Twelve
The first part passes the subtractive test almost whole. Every strand answers another: the robbery at Gad’s Hill against the rebels dividing the kingdom on a map (1 Henry IV, 3.1); the play extempore in the tavern (2.4) against the King’s interview with his son (3.2); Hotspur’s honour against Falstaff’s catechism, “What is honour? A word” (5.1). The second part replays the first one’s movement, and much of the replay is purpose, since its subject is time that will not move as kings intend; Shallow’s scenes are required by it. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is not required: some of Pistol’s ranting, the long rebel councils (2 Henry IV, 1.3 and 4.1), and the Epilogue’s dance and its notice of a play to come. About a twentieth of the whole could go without loss.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: rule is a performance whose authority is borrowed, and the man who would hold it must turn his affections into instruments. The King met his crown, he tells his son, by “by-paths and indirect crook’d ways” (2 Henry IV, 4.5), and counsels him to “busy giddy minds / With foreign quarrels”; at Shrewsbury men march in the King’s coats. The prince announces in his second scene, “I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill” (1 Henry IV, 1.2), and the work makes us watch the policy succeed at the cost of the one bond it shows without calculation. Against it Falstaff names what the state’s language hides: pressed men are “food for powder” (4.2), and honour cannot “set to a leg” (5.1). Prince John’s oath at Gaultree, kept in the letter and broken in substance, completes it. Held off the top because the inner life of rule is shown more than sounded; King Lear goes deeper into what such a disclosure costs.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The elevation is frequent and of three kinds. Comic transport: the men in buckram multiplying from two to eleven, and the play extempore with a cushion for a crown, ending in “Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world” and the prince’s “I do, I will” (1 Henry IV, 2.4), the one line in which the whole end stands. Heroic grandeur: Hotspur’s “O, the blood more stirs / To rouse a lion than to start a hare!” (1.3), and his dying “thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool” (5.4). Elegiac height in the second part: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” (2 Henry IV, 3.1), the chimes at midnight (3.2), and “I know thee not, old man” (5.5). What holds the axis is design: each summit is cut short by the next scene, and the work denies itself sustained terror.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The myth is built, not evoked. The prodigal son is the frame of the whole action: the prince stands between two fathers, the cold king and the warm father of misrule, and the structure of the work is his choice between them. Falstaff carries the morality play’s Vice, Riot or Gluttony, the Lord of Misrule, and Carnival in its battle with Lent, and is never only these: he is a particular old knight with a debt to the Hostess and a disease. Hotspur is the warrior archetype and the prince’s double, whose honours must be taken with his life. Behind all of it is the usurper’s guilt, the crusade to Jerusalem that ends in the Jerusalem chamber. Falstaff has become an archetype in his own right: the particular made myth.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The inheritance is the chronicle play, Shakespeare’s own first tetralogy and Richard II and Marlowe’s Edward II, and the clowning of the popular stage. The swerve is to give the chronicle a second world of equal weight, in prose, made of people history does not record, and to let each world judge the other: the comedy does not relieve the history but criticises it, scene for scene, until the history play becomes a play about what history is. The second part swerves again from the first one’s success: a sequel with no battle, a hero long absent, and the comic giant made old, sick and cast off, a real risk to the crowd’s love. Held a step below the top because the double plot itself was not new; what is new is its weight and its function.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Substitute a single plot and the work loses what it knows. The alternation of court and tavern is the instrument: the play extempore rehearses the royal interview before it happens, so that when the King reproaches his son (1 Henry IV, 3.2) we have already heard Falstaff say it, and the prince, playing his father, has told us the end. The division of verse and prose is a map of the world, and the prince alone moves freely between them. The counterfeit is the form’s motif: Falstaff shamming death beside Hotspur dead, the King’s coats on the field. The two-part shape is itself knowledge, the second part’s slower and sicker movement enacting the time the first part spends. Held below the top by the second part’s replay of the reconciliation, where the repetition is not fully turned into meaning.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Four centuries of argument have not closed the questions the work sustains. Is the prince’s soliloquy in 1 Henry IV 1.2 the truth, or a mask he wears even for us? Is the rejection justice, betrayal or both? Maurice Morgann’s Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (1777), on whether Falstaff is a coward, is a founding document of character criticism; A. C. Bradley’s “The Rejection of Falstaff” (1902) argued that the end costs more than Shakespeare meant; C. L. Barber’s Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959) read saturnalia and its expulsion; Stephen Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets” read the prince’s power as produced by the subversion it contains. Each finds its evidence in the text, and none closes the others. Formal depth too: the symmetry of the prince and Hotspur, the reckonings, the chiming of time in both parts.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The field is English drama of the 1590s and, through it, the drama of Europe. The force: the history play reorganised so that the nation includes its unrecorded people, the comic and the political held in one action, and a comic figure given an inner life that exceeds the plot built to contain him. Held below the top because its reach runs strongest through one character, and the reorganisation of the history play is shared with Marlowe and with Richard II. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Falstaff passed into The Merry Wives of Windsor, into Verdi’s Falstaff (1893), which keeps the honour catechism, into Elgar’s symphonic study Falstaff (1913), which follows these plays, and into Welles’s Chimes at Midnight (1965) and Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991); and the mingling of high and low became, for critics from Johnson to the Romantics, the English answer to the classical rules.
Score: 9.2 / 10
More than four centuries. Both parts survive whole: the first in a good early quarto, the second in a quarto and a Folio whose differences are local, a scene missing from the first issue of the quarto, passages found only in the Folio, oaths purged; no part of the action is lost. The first part has been staged, read and taught without break since the 1590s; the second less so, and often within a conflation of the two, which an early manuscript and Welles’s film both make. The work has outlived its conditions: Lancastrian legitimacy and the Oldcastle quarrel are history, and the plays are read for what they pressed on. Charged: the second part’s narrower presence, the divergence of its two witnesses, and the Epilogue’s topical surface.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The command is of register, and the range is the widest in Shakespeare before Hamlet. Hotspur’s verse runs headlong, impatient of its own metre, mocking the “certain lord, neat, and trimly dressed” (1 Henry IV, 1.3) and answering Glendower’s “I can call spirits from the vasty deep” with “But will they come when you do call for them?” (3.1). Falstaff’s prose is built of antithesis, mock-sermon and parody of euphuism: “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men” (2 Henry IV, 1.2). Each low voice is distinct: the drawer Francis’s “Anon, anon, sir”, the Hostess’s tumbling malapropisms, Pistol’s rant patched from the playhouse’s own heroics, Shallow’s “Jesu, the days that we have seen!” (3.2). The King’s verse is grave and closed. Charged a little: the rebels’ councils in the second part are dutiful verse, and Pistol runs long.
Score: 9.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Glendower’s Welsh magic and his daughter’s song (1 Henry IV, 3.1), and the Gloucestershire orchard where Shallow orders Davy about a sowing of wheat (2 Henry IV, 5.1 to 5.3). One law governs both: time and its reckoning. Every world in the work keeps accounts, the tavern bill, the King’s debt to the Percys, the thousand pounds Falstaff borrows of Shallow, the Hostess’s suit, and every account comes due. The counterfeit runs the same way in court and tavern. The range is very wide, and the law holds through it. Charged: the prince’s second reformation sits uneasily with the first, as if Shrewsbury had not happened; he is absent from the second part so long that its halves pull at different centres; and the Epilogue speaks from outside the action’s law.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Held, not listed, and joined by one question: what a kingdom costs its people and its prince. The state: a usurping king, the rebellion of the Percys, a realm divided on a map, the law in the Lord Chief Justice. The family: two fathers and a son, Northumberland failing his own son at Shrewsbury, Lady Percy’s widowhood. Labour and the commons: drawers, carriers in an inn yard at dawn, the Hostess’s trade, the pressed men Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble and Bullcalf and the bribes that free the able. War, at Shrewsbury and in its sick aftermath. The body: appetite, age, the pox, sleeplessness, death. Consciousness: the prince’s double life, the King’s insomnia, Falstaff’s wit as a defence against death. The sacred: the crusade, the Jerusalem chamber, “we owe God a death”. History itself is an agent. Held below the top because inwardness is shown through performance, not sounded as in the tragedies.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well, The Imperishable and The Made at 9.4. Four centuries of argument over the prince’s soliloquy and the rejection of Falstaff, from Morgann to Greenblatt, with no reading closing the others; a text that survives whole in its early quartos and the Folio, the first part present without break since the 1590s; and a command of register from the King’s closed verse and Hotspur’s headlong lines to Falstaff’s prose and the distinct voices of the tavern and the orchard.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.6, held where the second part’s replay of the first is not purpose: some of Pistol’s ranting, the long rebel councils and the Epilogue’s dance and notice of a play to come, about a twentieth of the whole. Next above it, The Sublime at 8.8, its heights frequent but cut short by design, and The Inner Law at 8.9, held by the prince’s second reformation and by the second part’s divided centres.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.4, The Inner Law at 8.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.4, The Unconcealment at 9.3, The Archetypal Deep at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2 and The Swerve at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5, The Swerve by six tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.3. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of William Shakespeare’s two plays of Henry IV, written about 1596 to 1598, scored as one work for performance in two parts: the two plays together, with the Induction of Rumour that opens the second and the Epilogue that closes it. The first part was entered in the Stationers’ Register in February 1598 and printed in quarto that year; a single sheet of an earlier printing of the same year survives as a fragment, and the play was reprinted in quarto several times before the Folio of 1623. Modern editions take the Quarto of 1598 as copy-text; it is known here chiefly in the Arden Third Series (David Scott Kastan, 2002) and in the Oxford and Folger texts. The second part was printed in quarto in 1600, in two issues: the first lacks the King’s scene of 3.1, which the second supplies. The Folio of 1623 adds passages absent from the Quarto and purges many oaths. It is known here in conflated modern editions, the Quarto as copy-text with the Folio’s passages added, chiefly the Arden Second Series (A. R. Humphreys) and the Oxford and Folger texts. The Dering manuscript, which condenses both parts into a single play for private performance, is early evidence that the two were read as one action. The English is Shakespeare’s, with no translation between. No text was in hand: nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. English is quoted only where its words are certain, in modern spelling, and cited by part and by act and scene in the common modern division, since line numbers differ between editions; everything else is paraphrased. The sources are not part of the work: Holinshed’s Chronicles (second edition, 1587), Samuel Daniel’s Civil Wars (1595) and the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (printed 1598, acted earlier), which supplied the wild prince, the robbery, the Lord Chief Justice and a fat companion’s place. Falstaff was first named Oldcastle; the trace survives in “my old lad of the castle” (1 Henry IV, 1.2), the Epilogue to the second part disclaims the name, and a rival company answered with Sir John Oldcastle (1599 to 1600). Facts that could not be verified, among them the line counts of the two parts and their share of prose, the number of quartos of the first part before the Folio, the extent of the Folio-only passages, the date of the Dering manuscript, the complaint said to have been made over the name of Oldcastle, the frequency of allusion to Falstaff in the seventeenth century, the early stage history, and what Daniel’s poem changed in the ages of the persons, are not given.