2 - A Punishing of Mistreadings: The Turbulent Reign of King Henry IV Proceeds

Summary

The Kingdome of God is gotten by violence: but what if it could be gotten by unjust violence? were it against Reason so to get it, when it is impossible to receive hurt by it? and if it be not against Reason, it is not against Justice: or else Justice is not to be approved for good. From such reasoning as this, Successfull wickednesse hath attained the name of Vertue: and some that in all other things have disallowed the violation of Faith; yet have allowed it, when it is for the getting of a Kingdome. … This specious reasoning is neverthelesse false.

—Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 15, para. 4

The eponym of the two plays bearing the title King Henry IV is not in fact the principal focus of these dramas. This is a bit puzzling. After all, it is not as if Henry IV was merely a cipher in the turbulent events of his reign, or the pawn of more powerful and active men (as one might reasonably say about his grandson, Henry VI). Rather, as Shakespeare showed in Richard II, Henry Bolingbroke was a strong, popular, ambitious, talented, and vastly experienced nobleman capable of seizing for himself the Crown of England. Nor was the period of his rule one in which nothing of consequence happened. Had our philosopher-poet wished to, he could have woven an entertaining and instructive tapestry in which this Henry was the central commanding figure. He declined to do so. Instead, he used the father's reign as mainly the backdrop for a largely mythic portrayal of the son who will succeed him, and thereafter become England's most glorious warrior king, Henry V. ‘Mythic’, in that Shakespeare's portrayal of Prince Hal prior to his succession as a profligate young ‘wanton’ whose preferred associates are a motley collection of London's lowlife is pure invention. One companion in particular would seem scarcely credible as the crony of a Crown Prince: the immortal Falstaff, universally acknowledged to be a preeminent example of Shakespeare's creative genius.