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Henry IV, Part One (Shakespeare Project Lecture) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-07-08 17:27:08
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

‘If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked...’

Our journey through the works of William Shakespeare continues, and we are meeting our first inexhaustible character in the brilliant Henry IV, Part One.

We’re discussing honour, psychological complexity, friendship, fathers and sons, roleplaying, metatheatricality, irony, and much more.

Timestamps:

  • 0:00 meeting inexhaustible characters
  • 1:00 on apprehending otherness
  • 2:00 round vs flat characters
  • 3:00 Shakespeare’s greatest characters
  • 5:00 how Falstaff is life itself
  • 8:00 the history of Henry IV
  • 9:00 on the legacy of Falstaff
  • 10:00 Falstaff, Hamlet & Will
  • 11:00 Hal, Hotspur & Henry IV
  • 12:00 Henry IV vs Richard II
  • 13:00 the main interest of the play
  • 15:00 ‘herein will I imitate the sun’
  • 17:00 Shakespeare’s history plays
  • 18:00 Hal’s machiavellian nature
  • 20:00 shifting friendship dynamics
  • 21:00 the cause of wit in other men
  • 23:00 ‘unless hours were cups of sack’
  • 25:00 living in the mode of irony
  • 26:00 roleplaying and playmaking
  • 27:00 ‘before I knew thee, Hal…’
  • 28:00 how lies can point to the truth
  • 29:00 on the highway robbery prank
  • 30:00 the sermons of Sir John Falstaff
  • 31:00 Shakespeare vs Cervantes
  • 33:00 how characters mark one another
  • 35:00 being a coward on instinct
  • 36:00 Falstaff & Hal’s roleplay
  • 38:00 Shakespeare’s metatheacricality
  • 40:00 the pain of learning to grow up
  • 41:00 insults & how friends speak
  • 43:00 on banishing all the world
  • 45:00 the father-son confrontation
  • 47:00 at the Battle of Shrewsbury
  • 48:00 how to get into character
  • 49:00 Falstaff’s discoursing on honour
  • 53:00 ‘I am no counterfeit…’
  • 55:00 ‘this is the strangest fellow’
  • 56:00 Shakespeare’s glorious rise
  • 57:00 your thoughts on Henry IV?

Recommended Resources:

  • The Hollow Crown: This television series continues to be my primary recommendation for adaptations of Shakespeare's histories. Simon Russell Beale, Tom Hiddleston, and Jeremy Irons are excellent as Falstaff, Hal, and King Henry IV.
  • Film Appreciation: You might also wish to check out the masterpiece that is Chimes at Midnight, directed by Orson Welles who is also superb in the role of Falstaff.
  • Give Me Life: Harold Bloom has a series of books dedicated to the most compelling Shakespearean personalities (Falstaff, Lear, Cleopatra, Iago, Hamlet) and his close-reading of Henry IV does a great job of honouring Sir John.
  • Character Appreciation: We are blessed with many great Falstaffs, but we might wonder which actor we're most drawn to. Perhaps Anthony Quayle. Or Simon Russell Beale. Or maybe Orson Welles.
  • Arden Edition: The Arden edition of this play once again proves to be a valuable resource because the annotations and introduction are brilliant.
  • The Prince: To get a sense of what we mean when we say a character is machiavellian, you might wish to peruse Niccolò Machiavelli classic political treatise.
  • The Falstaff Cure: Taking a cue from Hesketh Pearson's brilliant biography of Shakespeare, you might wish to experiment with learning some of Falstaff's greatest lines. You will be able to draw comfort from them in troubling times.

Questions for You:

1) What do you make of the character of Falstaff?

2) Can you see an improvement in Shakespeare's craft?

3) What line, passage, idea, or character most resonated with you? And what is your personal grading for Henry IV, Part One?

Happy reading, Bardolators!

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Comments

Heather Boo

Well, you suggested if we were thinking about joining into Shakespeare this would be a good time, so I did it. I am so glad. I haven't laughed that hard in a long time. My favorite passages were all the streams of fantastic insults, and I was just rolling. I read it but also listened to a dramatized audio version with Richard Griffiths playing Falstaff. He was just genius! I was skeptical about reading Shakespeare because it has been over twenty years since I studied in college. My father and I used to speak in Elizabethan English together when he was alive, so I was quite good at it. I don't know why I thought I would've lost it. It came right back. Interestingly, if you are interested in linguistics and language you may have heard of where I am from in Appalachia in West Virginia USA. There are pockets of the hollow where the Elizabethan dialect is preserved and studied. Often when these people would come to our hospital as patients I would need to translate for the foreign medical residents.

Terri Matter
>>113205363

Oh Heather that’s fascinating about the pockets of the Elizabethan dialect in Appalachia. I am going to have to learn more about that!

Anonymous

Greetings fellow bardolaters! I joined the HCLBC a few weeks ago. This is my first post. By way of background, I waded through all of Shakespeare’s plays three years ago. This included reading commentaries of SparkNotes, Harold Bloom (Shakespeare: The invention of the Human) and A. C. Bradley (Shakespearean Tragedy). Not only was this endeavour entirely self-directed, it was accomplished in one year. It nearly became a race, with understanding and appreciation suffering as a result. For me, the HCLBC is an opportunity to enjoy a leisurely banquet and eschew gulped ‘empty calories.’ Having been raised in a small town in the U.S. Midwest with a strong honor/shame culture, I can somewhat relate to one of the play’s major themes in 1 H IV expressed by Falstaff’s question in 5.1.134 , “What is honour?” In my reading, Shakespeare uses three of the main characters to speak for a range of human concepts of honor: Falstaff is the practical, materialist view that honor is of little import if you are killed in battle, for example. Prince Harry is the transactional fellow who represents the cynical view that honor is occasion dependent and useful insofar as it can achieve your ends. Hotspur is the idealist (romantic?) version which is intimately associated with one’s self worth. To my dying day, I will remember my father’s words to me as a youth, “Warren, never do anything that would bring disrepute to the family name.” Another theme present in 1 H IV is the question of legitimacy of rule by King Henry. He is the usurper Bolingbrook, and his path to rule will be questioned by many, including Henry himself. I don’t believe that the concept of the Divine Right of Kings was raised specifically in the play, but it surely must lurk in the background. The rebels are led by those who helped the King (then Bolingbrook) achieve the crown, and the King’s apparent forgetting of this fact leads to feelings of ungratefulness on the part of the conspirators. There is also the point of honor raised by Hotspur in the King’s demand to turn over prisoners taken by Hotspur in battle. Given that Queen Elizabeth I attended some of Shakespeare’s plays and that King James I was his patron, Shakespeare must have approached the subjects of royal legitimacy and the Divine Right of Kings with much delicacy. And now I come to the outsized character of the play, the fat knight. When I first read this play three years ago, I admit that my view of Falstaff was similar to that expressed by one of Harold Bloom’s graduate students who informed him, “.. . . that Falstaff was not worthy of admiration, whereas the transformation of Prince Hal into King Henry V was exemplary. Her point was that Hal represented rule and Falstaff was a lord of misrule . . . . “ (p. 272). With the passage of time and my recent reading of the play, I have warmed considerably to the rotund rascal. In spite of Falstaff being a fatuous liar, thief, and inveterate deadbeat, I have come to appreciate what Bloom characterizes as his love for life. Falstaff appears to squeeze as much as he can from the plum. I no longer view Falstaff as a frat boy who never grew up; a leader of the Lost Boys. I could not help loving Falstaff a little, given the price he paid for loving too much. To quote Bloom (p. 294): “It is one of Shakespeare’s harshest dramatic ironies that Falstaff prepares his own destruction not only by teaching too well but by loving much too well.” Except for the Henriad, none of the history plays held my interest. Is that because none of them had such a character as Falstaff? Would any of the history plays garner contemporary audience interest without Falstaff or someone of his proportion? I doubt it.

Terri Matter
>>114286456

Welcome Warren. Great post! I do agree that Henry IV is several steps above the other history plays we have read previously. Did you have a specific order that you read the plays in? One of the things that I have found really rewarding in the Shakespeare project is that reading them chronologically allows one to see Shakespeare’s development as a playwright and lends itself to really seeking out the treasures and seeds of greatness in each of the plays. I think the two Richard plays were well on the way and I really found much to enjoy in them.

Theresa Garton

I thought Shakespeare was really beginning coming into his own. I thought a few of the characters here were a lot more fleshed out than in the previous plays. The story line was a little ho-hum for me, but looking back, I do think the interactions between the characters was more complex, and based on their individual personalities, as opposed to some of the previous interactions, in which even some more memorable characters like Richard III and Henry VI interacted with somewhat faceless "every men." As for Falstaff, I did find him a much more well rounded character than others we have seen. That said, he was not a character I liked. I dislike people who lie, even if they are "charming" and as either Ben or Harold Bloom said, very charismatic. Describing him that way - as a charismatic liar - reminded me of a certain politician, and made me dislike Falstaff even more. I'm sure he was entertaining to be around, but I wouldn't have liked to spend much time around such an untrustworthy and dishonorable person. I gave this story a score of 8, or B. I thought the story disheartening, and not inspiring at all. I don't suppose it was really meant to be, but it was hard for me to relate. My favorite passage was the Falstaff speech about honor.

Kate

Following on from my recent rediscovery of Chaucer, I decided to read Richard II. I followed that play with Henry iv part 1. I’ve worked out an excellent way for me to discover or rediscover the plays with my deep reading hat on. I read the play and and pick out my favourite speeches, I watch a really good performance, in this case The Hollow Crown version with Simon Russell-Beale, Tom Hiddleston, Jeremy Irons etc etc, I listen to Ben’s excellent lecture, I read the incomparable Arden intro and I read the chapter in Bloom’s Invention of the Human. I’m also reading The Eagle and the Hart which covers both kings. I shall now read the play again and check out any other rabbit holes that are suggested. I really enjoyed Henry iv part 1, possibly because it’s really Falstaff’s play. I find myself reading it through waiting for him to appear again. Favourite speeches: Act 1, scene 2, line 187 on ‘Yet herein will I imitate the sun … Act 2, scene 4, line 454 on ‘But to say I know more harm in him than in myself … Act 4, scene 2, line 12 on ‘I have misused the King’s press … Act 5, scene 1, line 129 on ‘Well, ‘tis no matter; honour pricks me on .. I’d give it an A or A- How’s that for immersion?