Then comes the speech in which the Prince talks of himself in Falstaff's strain as one of “the moon's men” who “resolutely snatch a purse of gold on Monday night,” and “most dissolutely spend it on Tuesday morning.” A little later he plays with Falstaff by asking: “Where shall we take a purse to-morrow, Jack?” It looks as if the Prince were ripe for worse than mischief. But when Falstaff wants to know if he will make one of the band to rob on Gadshill, he cries out, as if indignant and surprised:
P. Hen. Who, I rob? la thief? Not I, by my faith.
Fal. There's neither honesty, manhood, nor good fellowship
in thee, nor thou earnest not of the blood royal,
if thou darest not stand for ten shillings.
P. Hen. Well then, once in my days I'll be a madcap.
Fal. Why, that's well said.
P. Hen. Well, come what will, I'll tarry at home.
He is only persuaded at length by Poins's proposal to rob the robbers. It may be said that these changes of the Prince are natural in the situation: but they are too sudden and unmotived; they are like the nodding of the mandarin's head—they have no meaning; and surely, after the Prince talks of himself as one of “the moon's men,” it would be more natural of him, when the direct proposal to rob is made, not to show indignant surprise, which seems forced or feigned; but to talk as if repenting a previous folly. The scene, in so far as the Prince is concerned, is badly conducted. When he yields to Poins and agrees to rob Falstaff, his words are: “Yea, but I doubt they will be too hard for us,”—a phrase which hardly shows wild spirits or high courage, or even the faculty of judging men, and the soliloquy which ends the scene lamely enough is not the Prince's, but Shakespeare's, and unfortunately Shakespeare the poet, and not Shakespeare the dramatist:
“P. Hen. I know you all and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours, that did seem to strangle him. ...”
If we could accept this stuff we should take Prince Henry for the prince of prigs; but it is impossible to accept it, and so we shrug our shoulders with the regret that the madcap Prince of history is not illuminated for us by Shakespeare's genius. In this “First Part of Henry IV.,” when the Prince is not calling names with Falstaff, or playing prig, he either shows us a quality of Harry Percy or of Shakespeare himself. Everyone remembers the scene when Falstaff, carrying Percy's corpse, meets the Princes, and tells them he has killed Percy:
P. John. This is the strangest tale that e'er I heard.
P. Hen. This is the strangest fellow, brother John.—
Come, bring your luggage nobly on your back:
For my part, if a lie may do thee grace,
I'll gild it with the happiest terms I have.”
Both in manner and in matter these last two lines are pure Shakespeare, and Shakespeare speaks to us, too, when Prince Henry gives up Douglas to his pleasure “ransomless and free.” But not only does the poet lend the soldier his own sentiments and lilt of phrase, he also presents him to us as a shadowy replica of Hotspur, even during Hotspur's lifetime. We have already noticed Hotspur's admirable answer when Glendower brags that he can call spirits from the vasty deep:
“Hot. Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come, when you do call for them?”
The same love of truth is given to Prince Henry in the previous act:
“Fal. Owen, Owen,—the same;—and his son-in-law,
Mortimer; and old Northumberland; and that sprightly
Scot of Scots, Douglas, that runs o' horseback up a hill
perpendicular,—
P. Hen. He that rides at high speed, and with his
pistol kills a sparrow flying.
Fal. You have hit it.
P. Hen. So did he never the sparrow.”