There is nothing worthy to be called character-drawing in this scene; but there's just a hint of it in the last remark of Poins. According to his favourite companion the Prince was very “lewd,” and yet Shakespeare never shows us his lewdness in action; does not “moralize” it as Jaques or Hamlet would have been tempted to do. It is just mentioned and passed over lightly. It is curious, too, that Shakespeare's alter ego, Jaques, was also accused of lewdness by the exiled Duke; Vincentio, too, another incarnation of Shakespeare, was charged with lechery by Lucio; but in none of these cases does Shakespeare dwell on the failing. Shakespeare seems to have thought reticence the better part in regard to certain sins of the flesh. But it must be remarked that it is only when his heroes come into question that he practises this restraint: he is content to tell us casually that Prince Henry was a sensualist; but he shows us Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet engaged at lips' length. To put it briefly, Shakespeare attributes lewdness to his impersonations, but will not emphasize the fault by instances. Nor will Shakespeare allow his “madcap Prince” even to play “drawer” with hearty goodwill. While consenting to spy on Falstaff in the tavern, the Prince tells Poins that “from a Prince to a prentice” is “a low transformation,” and scarcely has the fun commenced when he is called to the wars and takes his leave in these terms:
“P. Hen. By Heaven, Poins, I feel me much to blame,
So idly to profane the precious time
When tempest of commotion, like the south
Borne with black vapour, doth begin to melt
And drop upon our bare, unarmed heads.”
The first two lines are priggish, and the last three mere poetic balderdash. But it is in the fourth act, when Prince Henry is watching by the bedside of his dying father, that Shakespeare speaks through him without disguise:
“Why doth the crown lie there upon his pillow
Being so troublesome a bedfellow?
O polished perturbation! golden care!
That keep'st the ports of slumber open wide
To many a watchful night!—Sleep with it now,
Yet not so sound and half so deeply sweet
As he whose brow with homely biggin bound
Snores out the watch of night.”
In the third act we have King Henry talking in precisely the same way:
“O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?...
- - - - - - - -
Wilt thou upon the high and giddy mast
Seal up the ship-boy's eyes, and rock his brains
In cradle of the rude imperious surge.”...
The truth is that in both these passages, as in a hundred similar ones, we find Shakespeare himself praising sleep as only those tormented by insomnia can praise it.
When his father reproaches him with “hunger for his empty chair,” this is how Prince Henry answers:
“O pardon me, my liege, but for my tears,
The moist impediments unto my speech,
I had forestalled this dear and deep rebuke.
Ere you with grief had spoke and I had heard
The course of it so far.”...
It might be Alfred Austin writing to Lord Salisbury—“the moist impediments,” forsooth—and the daredevil young soldier goes on like this for forty lines.