The judgments are easily multiplied, but it is worth noting that, although Davies’s commendation is specific to ‘the First Part’, Van Doren and Auden praise a play that doesn't exist: Henry IV. Both write about the two plays on the reign of Henry IV as if they formed a single, coherent dramatic conception. The two, howe

The play sets before us an intricately woven tapestry of high and low characters, of public and private motives, of politics and festivity, of poetry and prose, of history and comedy, of fact and fiction, allowing us to see and hear not only the

What now seems the greatest achievement of the play is precisely its ‘mingling of kings and clowns’ (Sidney, Prose, 114), what A. P. Rossiter sees as the ‘deep penetration that emerges from the conflict of serious and comic’ (Rossiter, 59). Falstaff is no longer the center of the play as it is understood today, but merely one pillar (though unquestionably a sturdy one) of its elegant structure. The comedy neither dominates nor is subordinated to the historical plot but is actually part of the same exploration of the historical world as is the overtly political action. Unlike Richard II and King John, its immediate predecessors among Shakespeare’s historical plays, Henry IV insists that history must be recognized as something more capacious than merely the record of aristocratic motives and actions. The comedy of the tavern world comments on these, with an often-withering insight into their compromises and self-deceptions, but, at least as importantly, the comedy assumes its own place within the drama of the nation. When Falstaff tells Hal in the tavern that ‘Worcester is stolen away tonight’, the reference is of course to the rebellion that is at the center of the historical action, but he judges its effect in an idiom and a measure impossible to imagine in the earlier histories: ‘Your father’s beard is turned white with the news. You may buy land now as cheap as stinking mackerel’ (2.4.349-51). As Howard Erskine-Hill says, this ‘is not only a sign of human distance from these events: it is a mark of a new kind of interest in them’ (Erskine-Hill, 79), the interest of people not directly involved in shaping the serious military and political action of the play but whose daily lives are inevitably changed by the events that swirl beyond their control.

No doubt much of its continued popularity has resulted, as Digges suggested, from the comic action, and, in particular, from the character of Falstaff. There are more references to the fat knight through the end of the eighteenth century than to any

Some topics in this essay:
Henry IV, Samuel Pepys, Prince Johnson, Howard Erskine-Hill, Lydia Webb, Hotspur’s King’s, King Hal, Sidney Prose, John Falstalff’, Shrewsbury Hal, henry iv, 1 henry, 1 henry iv, van doren, henry iv play, 3 523, play offers, play traces, title page, published 1598, design play, worthy heir,