The First Part of Henry IV depicts the early years of reign and ruling of The Prince Hal. Henry IV shows what is running through the mind of the king as he considers the times in which he has lived. Shakespeare portrays him, is the young man too much given over to self-indulgence to be able to be either man or king. His story is that of an accumulation of woes on the head of a king who can do no more than bewail them. Hal is aware of his inability to sustain the position to which he was called; his last speech is a beautiful example of his deficiencies as man and king. He knows that he and that he ‘wasted time’ so that now time wastes him, but the speech itself is further illustration of the conduct Hal is engaged in deploring. In this part of the play, the Prince Hal is portrayed as a new brand of politician in Shakespeare’s view able to transform and change social and political conditions.
In the political order, or the world of the state, the ruler is the divinely appointed head and chief, as the lion is among animals, the rose among flowers, the sun among planets, the dolphin among fishes, and the eagle among birds. To him all his subjects, his brothers no less than his humble dependents, owe prescribed duties. He also has certain obligations to perform, and the health of the body politic depends on this constant two-way traffic of duties and obligations. In its carefully ordered gradation of ranks, there is an interdependence of parts like that in the mechanism of a watch or an internal combustion engine, except that the two latter are human constructions, while the former is the creation of a God who rules the universe. For one part or one member, therefore, to arrogate to itself what was not granted by the divine plan was to jeopardize the whole, and to produce disorder. Such actions as the usurpation of the kingship, or a subject’s rising up against his immediate superior, were really sacrilegious, contrary to God’s law. Hotspur questions: “In Richard’s time,–what do you call the place?– A plague upon it, it is in Gloucestershire; ‘Twas where the madcap duke his uncle kept“(Shakespeare). This remark shows that Princes, no less than the most humble, were the playthings of Fortune. A large number of social changes and tracts were based on the ideas of the wheel of Fortune and the fall of princes. These ideas were pagan but, as they were applied, they could illustrate truths, for the awful spectacle of the ruin of the great or the daring could be taken as examples of God’s judgments.
From the beginning of the play, Hal receives education communicating with the poor and thieves. His teacher, Falstaff and Hotspur, try to change his behavior and teach Hal the ceremonies and etiquette of the monarch family. Shakespeare’s ideas about the world and about man’s destiny were compounded by notions such as these. Some of his ideas may seem to us to be more medieval than was appropriate to the experience of a person living at the end of the sixteenth century. Our own notions of the world in which we live might similarly be shown to be outmoded and antiquated. Our concern, however, is not with the truth or the validity of Shakespeare’s ideas, some of which may be antipathetic to us. It is not sufficient to say that the idea itself does not matter if its expression is moving or impressive, for it is difficult sometimes to separate ideas from their expression. It would be truer to state that the ideas — the items of belief or knowledge, the propositions — are transformed by the power of the writer. n any case a play is written for performance on a stage, and however much we feel that it means more to us when we read it than when we see it in actual performance, we must bear in mind what it was meant to be, and how it was given life on the stage. The stage is a complex organism, whether we think of the most recently built American university drama department’s million-dollar theatre or the platform in a school hall. Both use the same basic means for the purpose of engaging the attention of an audience. The play is not only the written words, the text, or the book which in writing, type or print represents the work of the playwright. This is only one element — though to most people the most important, and to some the only interesting element — in what constitutes a play. The play comes to life as the result of the work of several kinds of people. It is a text intended for acting on the stage by actors, and this involves the interaction of other arts besides those of writer and actor-of music, of dance, of the painter, of designer, of costumier. When all these things combine, performed before an audience, it becomes a play.
The character of Hal represents a new politician who tries to combine two contrasting worlds: the world of poor and rich. “Thy state is taken for a joined-stool, thy golden / scepter for a leaden dagger, and thy precious rich / crown for a pitiful bald crown!” (Shakespeare). Before the prince, or king, is finally ‘carried away by wicked spirits’ — an enactment of the Christian belief that this was the punishment of the wicked — he is alone on the stage. Here he speaks to the audience. He makes, in Willis’s words, ‘a lamentable complaint of his miserable case’. Here is the final underlining of the document of admonition the play must have been. The wretched prince, alone and ‘barefaced’, finding himself in the dire situation of one about to be judged, informs the audience of his plight. His words would be signed with the authority given to the last speeches of those about to die. Shakespeare did not set much store by critical notions of good art, and Jonson, who was a friend of his and praised his work warmly, never could get over his feeling that Shakespeare’s plays would have been better for more attention to the rules. When Shakespeare took up the subject of ideal kingship, as he did in Henry V, he was confronted with the difficulty of making his ideal figure seem both human and attractive. His task in Richard II was easier. The distance from the ideal was so far that both it and its reflection seem to be exaggerated and artificial. Yet to his picture of the king he brought all the resources of his early verse, and within the range of its possibilities, Shakespeare provided a well-defined likeness of a tragic figure, whose tragedy lies in his fall and its consequences which are moving. They leave a clear impression of a speaker who is both regarding himself all the time and keeping one eye on the beholders. Hal is taken up with his own woes, but not so completely that he does not care whether he is noticed or not. He wants those around him to be equally engaged in them. Hal is aware of himself all the time, and of an audience too. This produces one of two reactions in him: either he is aware that what he is doing, ‘wailing his woes’, is unworthy of himself and his situation; or he wishes his audience to mark what he does, for only so can he be satisfied that his woes get all the attention he wants them to have.
In sum, Hal represents a unique and new type of politician who tries to change and reform the state. In the histories, the action is often concerned with the conflict between two rivals, each with his band of supporters, and the matter at dispute is the succession to the throne, which is the whole of England, and really, therefore, the whole world, as far as an Englishman of that time was concerned. How many of them were able to grasp or describe this changed notion of the world correctly would be difficult to say.
Works Cited
Shakespeare, W. Henry IV Part 1. n.d.