Chapter 3 - In the Realm of the ‘unthankful King’: Violent Subjects and Subjectivities in the Henry IV Plays

Summary

This discussion, devoted to close readings of the Henry IV plays, reflects upon the ways in which the performance of violence in all its forms can signal cultural decay and ethical failure at a personal and collective level. However, in this dramatic world where the British nations query any authoritative claim upon the English throne, blood-letting also yields up a peculiar community of interest: strategic forms of cooperation, individual empowerment and group identity. Ultimately, we are thrust into a realm groaning under the strain of constant civil war, where even the king, ‘this ingrate and canker’d Bullingbrook’, has more in common with the rebels than he cares to acknowledge. Shakespeare’s fifteenth-century England is characterised by moral and social dysfunction, and the insatiable appetite for violence, widely in evidence in both plays, unsettles the persuasiveness of any claim to political authority made onstage.