Written. 1597 (?)
Published. 1600.
Source of the Plot. The play of The Famous Victories of Henry V. Holinshed's Chronicles.
The Fable. Northumberland and the other conspirators against the King learn that Hotspur, their associate, whom they failed to support, has been defeated and killed. The King's forces are now free to act against themselves. Northumberland retires to Scotland. The others under a divided command, make head against the King's troops under John of Lancaster. They are betrayed, taken and put to death. Northumberland, venturing out from Scotland, is defeated. King Henry's position is assured.
His safety comes too late to be pleasant to him. He is dying, and the conduct of his son gives him anxiety. He sees no chance of permanent peace. He counsels his son to begin a war abroad, to distract the attention of his subjects. Having done this, he dies.
Prince Henry begins his reign as Henry V by casting off all his old associates.
The second part of the play of King Henry IV is Shakespeare's ending of the tragedy of Richard II. The deposition of Richard was an act of violence, unjust, as violence must be, and offensive, as injustice is, to the power behind life. The blood of the dead king, and of all those killed in fighting for him, calls upon that power, and asks justice of it. Slowly, in many secret ways, the tide sets against the slayer, till he is a worn, old, heart-broken, haunted man, dying with the knowledge that all the bloodshed has been useless, because the power so hardly won will be tossed away by his successor, the youth with "a weak mind and an able body," the "good, shallow young fellow," who "would have made a good pantler," who comes in noisily to his father's death-bed with news of the beastliest of all the treacheries of the reign. Just as the play of Richard III completes the action of the Wars of the Roses, this play completes the action of the killing of the Duke of Gloucester at Calais. The wheel comes full circle, crushing many that looked to be brought high, making friends enemies and enemies friends. Life was never so brooded on since man learned to think, as in this cycle of tragedies. In this fragment of the whole we are shown the two classes in human life, the people of instinct and the people of intellect, being preyed on by two men, one of them greedy for present ease, the other for temporal power. Both men obtain their will. Those who give up everything for one thing often obtain that thing. But it is a law of life that nothing must be paid for with too great a share of the imaginative energy. All excess of the kind is unjust, as violence must be, and offensive, as injustice is, to the power behind life. King Henry IV fails in the hour of his triumph from his manifold failures in life during the struggle for triumph. Falstaff fails in the same way. The prize of life falls to the careless and callous man who has struggled only in two minutes of his life, once, when he played a practical joke upon some thieves, and a second time when he killed Hotspur, the brilliant intellect, the "miracle of men."
Many scenes in this play are great. Shakespeare's instinctive power was as large and as happy as his intellectual power. In this play he indulged it to the full. The Falstaff scenes are all wonderful. That in which the drunken Pistol is driven downstairs is the finest tavern scene ever written. Those placed in Gloucestershire are the perfect poetry of English country life. The talk of old dead Double, who could clap "i' the clout at twelvescore," and is now dead, as we shall all be soon; the casting back of memory to Jane Nightwork, still alive, though she belongs to a time fifty-five years past, when a man, now old, heard the chimes at midnight; the order to sow the headland, Cotswold fashion, with red Lammas wheat; the kindness and charm of the country servants, so beautiful after the drunken townsmen, are like the English country speaking. The earth of England is a good earth and bears good fruit, even the apple of man. These scenes are like an apple-loft in some old barn, where the apples of last year lie sweet in the straw.
All of those scenes seem to have been written easily, out of the fulness of an instinctive power. In the other scenes Shakespeare wrote with intense mental effort after brooding intensely on human destiny—
"how chances mock,
And changes fill the cup of alteration
With divers liquors,"