‘And is Old Double Dead?’: Nation and Nostalgia in Henry IV Part 2

Summary

The marking and remarking of history – personal or national – is arguably one of the most consistent topoi in the Western canon, let alone in Shakespeare; personal anxieties of ageing persist and prevail in vocal counterpoint to memorial reconstructions of ‘historical’ or political events. The two justices of 2 Henry IV, Shallow and Silence, are what Hamlet probably never intended in his reference to the players as ‘abstract and brief chronicles’ (2.2.524). And yet they are, in another sense, precisely ‘abstract’ if perhaps not quite ‘brief’ almanacs of both personal and political recollections that articulate the relation of war and remembrance to memory and nostalgia. So are several other representations of ‘geezerdom’ seen and heard throughout the second tetralogy: Gaunt, York and of course Falstaff. In this article I want to trace out the justices’ personal frames for measuring and remembering ‘history’ as localized and alternative versions of their play's (and the tetralogy's) larger concerns with time, succession, memory, obsolescence and war – all inevitable and simultaneously dangerous to incumbent order.

As one-fourth of the second tetralogy, 2 Henry IV inescapably focuses on time and remembrance, and on the national crisis sprung, two plays and a represented generation earlier, by Richard II's deposition, the consequent breach in succession, and on Henry IV's role in that breach. These of course are the play's large issues; in their midst Shakespeare pauses to reflect on time's passage and remembrance in terms more minutely focused.