"Thought's the slave of life, and life, time's fool;
And time, that takes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop"—
and dies. The man who kills him says a few trite lines over his body, and leaves the stage talking of Falstaff's bowels.
Prince Henry, afterwards Henry V, has been famous for many years as "Shakespeare's only hero." Shakespeare was too wise to count any man a hero. The ways of fate moved him to vision, not heroism. If we can be sure of anything in that great, simple, gentle, elusive brain, we can be sure that it was quickened by the thought of the sun shining on the just and on the unjust, and shining none the less golden though the soul like clay triumph over the soul like flame. Prince Henry is not a hero, he is not a thinker, he is not even a friend; he is a common man whose incapacity for feeling enables him to change his habits whenever interest bids him. Throughout the first acts he is careless and callous though he is breaking his father's heart and endangering his father's throne. He chooses to live in society as common as himself. He talks continually of guts as though a belly were a kind of wit. Even in the society of his choice his attitude is remote and cold-blooded. There is no good-fellowship in him, no sincerity, no whole-heartedness. He makes a mock of the drawer who gives him his whole little pennyworth of sugar. His jokes upon Falstaff are so little good-natured that he stands upon his princehood whenever the old man would retort upon him. He impresses one as quite common, quite selfish, quite without feeling. When he learns that his behaviour may have lost him his prospective crown he passes a sponge over his past, and fights like a wild cat for the right of not having to work for a living.
There is little great poetry in the play. The magnificent image—
"Baited like eagles having lately bathed"—
the speech of Worcester (in Act V, sc. i) when he comes with a trumpet to speak with the King, and the call of Hotspur to set on battle—
"Sound all the lofty instruments of war,
And by that music let us all embrace"—
are all noble.
To many, the play is remarkable because it introduces Sir John Falstaff, the most notable figure in English comedy. Falstaff is that deeply interesting thing, a man who is base because he is wise. Our justest, wisest brain dwelt upon Falstaff longer than upon any other character because he is the world and the flesh, able to endure while Hotspur flames to his death, and the enemies of the devil are betrayed that the devil may have power to betray others.
The Second Part of King Henry IV.