that ‘we seize into our hands, / His plate, his goods, his money and his lands’. The
disinheriting of Lancaster’s son, Henry Bolingbroke, strikes down the principle of
succession by which the king holds his throne, and gives the returning Bolingbroke
the perfect slogan for his march through England: ‘I come for Lancaster’. He comes
also for England.
Action is symbolic and symmetrical. Richard weeps to stand upon his kingdom
once again, but sits to hear sad stories of the death of kings; the sun rises, but Richard,
whose symbol is the sun, falls: ‘down, down I come, like glistering Phaeton, /
Wanting the manage of unruly jades’. He has a series of arias lamenting his fall,
deploying the sacred language which at Gaunt’s bedside had made him yawn. At Flint
Castle, the cross-over point, Richard has to ‘come down’ to the aspiring Bolingbroke.
There follow the symbolic garden scene, and the self-deposition arranged in
Westminster Hall so that Henry may ‘proceed without suspicion’ – a scene cut from
the Quarto as too dangerous. Henry says that in God’s name he ascends the royal
throne, but the Bishop of Carlisle points out that he lacks God’s blessing; which Henry
acknowledges. He deals with quarrelling nobles firmly, unlike the petulant Richard of
Act I. Henry ends the play with a vow to go as a pilgrim to Jerusalem to purge the guilt
of Richard’s murder. The Lord’s anointed is succeeded by an efficient pragmatist.
Richard invoked divine sanctions and did nothing; the usurper uses the language of
rights and does not put a foot wrong. The end has justified the means, but the ‘silent
king’ cannot now invoke the old sanctions; and he finds that he cannot sleep.
Richard II is a foundation for the three-play sequence topped out by Henry V.It
is also a tragedy, but Richard is not a noble tragic hero; he likens his passion to
Christ’s, but we pity him less than he pities himself. Shakespeare, however, did not
observe the tragic norms which Renaissance theorists had derived from Aristotle.
Histor y is raw and untidy, and has to be cooked and shaped to fit the mould of
tr agedy. Also, as Sidney noted, history shows that the wicked prosper, although
Shakespeare’s chronicle sources had found in it signs of a providential design. The
purpose of the tetralogy is revealed by the dying speech of Henry IV, who tells his
son that ‘the soil of the achievement [the guilt of usurpation] / Goes with me into
the earth’, and that his son’s succession is ‘plain and right’. For Henry V was not only
the hero ic victor of Agincourt: he paved the way for the Tudors. He married Kate of
Fr ance, brought her to England and died, whereupon Kate married Owen Tudor,
grandfather to Henry VII, Elizabeth’s grandfather.
Henry IV
Shakespeare took care with his foundation for the tetralogy.Richard II draws on
seven different sources, and transcends them; it is modelled on Edward II, but it
makes Marlowe look flat.
Shakespeare’s resourcefulness shows in 1 and 2 Henry IV and Henry V,plays very
different from Richard II. They mingle verse and prose, high and low, court and
tavern, royal camp and rebel camp in a many-sided representation of the life of
England. Falstaff ’s first words, ‘Now, Hal, what time of day is it, lad?’ create charac-
ter as decisively as Henry’s opening line, ‘So shaken as we are, so wan with care’.
Falstaff ’s hangover, his familiarity with his Prince, and his neglect of time are Theme
as well as Character. Shakespeare turns to profit the problem of Hal’s legendary wild
youth by creating a gloriously attractive drinking companion in Falstaff. Prince Hal
studies the common people he will have to lead in war; he learns their ways and
speech, and the part he will have to play. The rebel Hotspur scorns ‘the king of
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 119