Shakespeare’sRichard IIIis a play about a “real” historical person, a dead tyrant whose wickedness is guaranteed by textual authority. Throughout the play he moves downstage and “addresses” an audience that he assumes is familiar with him and his story. He performs frequently enough “before” that audience to make him seem aware of their scrutiny even when he’s bustling about upstage in the midst of his plots and perversions. It’s obviously important to him to maintain contact with, and also to maintain rhetorical control over, an audience to whom his present doings are (as we say nowadays) history. But...

Two groups of English history plays by Shakespeare appeared between 1590 and 1600, near the end of the long reign of Elizabeth (1558–1603). She was the last member of a Tudor dynasty that had ruled uninterruptedly since 1485, when Henry VII displaced Richard III from the throne. The historical range covered by the two tetralogies extends from the last days of Richard II in 1399 to the death of Richard III in 1485.

The most important of the sources from which Shakespeare drew his material were the chronicles of Edward Hall (1548) and Raphael Holinshed, the latter in the...

“Enter Richard alone,” and he tells us first what he has been trying to do, “studying how I may compare / This prison where I live unto the world,” and then why he “cannot do it”: “because the world is populous / And here is not a creature but myself ” (5.5.1–5). Nevertheless, he continues bravely,

I’ll hammer it out.

My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,

My soul the father, and these two beget

A generation of still-breeding thoughts,

And these same thoughts people this little world,

In humors like the people of this world,

For...

Since I am hardly the first to argue that the four plays of the Henriad should be read as a single text, I’ll begin by distinguishing my sense of its singleness from that of other critics who insist on its “artistic integrity,” “thematic unity,” and “organic” wholeness.¹ These critics advance divergent accounts of the patterns holding the Henriad together even as they agree on its structural or sequential coherence. They tend to be academic interpreters and armchair readers rather than theater-centered interpreters.

There are three reasons why I don’t find their claims and accounts persuasive. The first is that no...

Throughout the twoHenry IVplays, from his very first appearance in the second scene of part 1, Falstaff knowingly collaborates with Harry on the scenario titled “The Rejection of Falstaff ,” which is the subplot of “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” Harry’s resounding “I know thee not, old man” near the end of part 2 fulfills the scenario he entertained in the “I know you all” soliloquy that concluded the second scene of part 1. But Falstaff had already anticipated the scenario, alluding to it several times during the conversations leading up to this soliloquy.

Consider, for example,...

If for no other reason, act 2, scene 1 of1 Henry IVcan claim our attention because it introduces that noble piece of insulation, the horse—not quite in the flesh, but objectified in speech as the object of the speakers’ concern. It is introduced in a manner that raises questions about both its pedigree and its effectiveness. It is neither a steed nor a bounder but a poor honest ailing “jade.” After Hotspur’s Pegasean rhetoric in the preceding scene (1.3.197–200), the opening dialogue of act 2, scene 1 strikes an antithetical low note by introducing us to...

“And yet newHydraeslo, new heades appeare / T’afflict that peace reputed then so sure.” So Samuel Daniel in the third of hisFirst Foure Bookes of the Civile Wars. The editor of the New Arden1 Henry IVnotes in his comment on Henry’s opening speech that “the irony of Henry’s deluded hopes is present” in Daniel’s image.¹ “Head” in various senses crops up all over the text of the play, but the Hydra itself does not appear until act 5, scene 4, after the raging Douglas has killed two of Henry’s decoys at Shrewsbury (“The king hath...

In chapter 1, I referred to a brilliant study published more than fifty years ago by A. P. Rossiter, and I want to return to that study here. Rossiter wrote that “the difficulty of establishing the Right in . . . an England under no rightful king, is paralleled and parodied throughout in Falstaff ’s ‘manner of wrenching the true cause the false way.’”¹ “ParodiedinFalstaff’s manner” could mean “parodiedbyFalstaff’s manner”—that is, by Falstaff—but in this sentence it doesn’t. Rossiter is concerned with Falstaff’s “manner” as a factor in the network of parallels and contrasts...

To imagine Falstaff as subject is to imagine the speaker on the model of the actor. He performslikethe actor, but not as an actor. Hepresentshis representation of himself, and he continuously audits and monitors this performance. It stands to reason that the speech of only some, perhaps relatively few, speakers lends itself to such “thick” interpretation.

Of course, I may be overstating the problem: We’re not in danger of being swamped these days by an outpouring of thick and close interpretation. In our post–New Critical age, the opposite is more likely to be the case....

Only one of the three versions of the protagonist’s name adequately designates the consistency of his self-representation throughout the tetralogy. It may be that some purely irrational prejudice makes it easier for me to sympathize with a Harry than with a Henry, but I find the heartiness of “Hal” generally repelling. The cultivation of sympathy is not unimportant in an approach oriented toward reading “with suspicion,” yet there are more substantive reasons behind this preference.

One is to help counteract a tendency to emphasize discontinuity between1 Henry IVandHenry V—as, for example, in William Babula’s statement that...

Once more into the fray may be one time too many. Still, the vaunted generosity of the Shakespeare text seems both to seduce and to justify the interpreter into whose flanks the “more, more” of Blake’s madman digs its spurs. The battle between celebratory and cynical responses to Harry continues to rage despite irenic attempts to clear it up.

Norman Rabkin argued in 1976 that we seeHenry Vsometimes as a duck and sometimes as a rabbit, but never both at the same time. He attributed the incompatibility of rival interpretations to the “rival gestalts” of the play itself.¹...

Harry’s enthusiastic recourse to the scenario revealed in his “I know you all” soliloquy, and the obvious echoes of that soliloquy, provide a point of entry into the topic of this chapter. I’ll try to show that the drama of his transactions with himself, with Falstaff, with his father, and with the rest of the world unfolds coherently from the second scene in1 Henry IVthrough the tetralogy. In the preceding chapter I restricted attention toHenry V, and my aim was to demonstrate that in certain respects it is relatively self-contained. Once you distinguish Harry’s cause from his...

“May I with right and conscience make this claim?” That is the question. It is the question Harry puts to the Archbishop of Canterbury in the second scene ofKing Henry V(1.2.96) after the Archbishop has explained the legal basis of the king’s claim to the French throne. The first two scenes of the play connect the justice of his “cause” to the legality or validity of “this claim” to the French throne. As Harry had suggested before the explanation, his question may be of vital importance to him, but it will be even more important to those who...