Study Guide to Henry IV, Part 1 by William Shakespeare

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645425618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Guías de estudio
• Subtopic: Guías de estudio

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for William Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, the second play in Shakespeare's tetralogy portraying the succeeding reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V. As a historical drama of the sixteenth century, Shakespeare combines history and comedy to illustrate the rise of the English Royal House of Lancaster. Moreover, he remarkably devises a variety of rich texture, an enthralling view on historical politics, and a new take on characterization with his dynamic and unpredencent roles. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Shakpespeare’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

 

On April 26, 1564, William Shakespeare, son of John Shakespeare and Mary Arden, was christened in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon. His birthday is traditionally placed three days before. He was the eldest of four boys and two girls born to his father, a well-to-do glover and trader, who also held some minor offices in the town government. He probably attended the local free school, where he picked up the “small Latin and less Greek” that Ben Jonson credits him with. (“Small” Latin to that knowledgeable classicist meant considerably more than it does today.) As far as is known, this was the extent of Shakespeare’s formal education. In November of 1582, when he was eighteen, a license was issued for his marriage to Ann Hathaway, a Stratford neighbor eight years older than himself. The following May their child Susanna was christened in the same church as her father. While it may be inferred from this that his marriage was a forced one, such an inference is not necessary; engagement at that time was a legally binding contract and was sometimes construed as allowing conjugal rights. Their union produced two more children, twins Judith and Hamnet, christened in February, 1585. Shortly thereafter Shakespeare left Stratford for a career in London. What he did during these years - until we pick him up, an established playwright, in 1592 - we do not know, as no records exist. It is presumed that he served an apprenticeship in the theatre, perhaps as a provincial trouper, and eventually won himself a place as an actor. By 1594 he was a successful dramatist with the Lord Chamberlain’s company (acting groups had noble protection and patronage), having produced the Comedy of Errors and the Henry VI trilogy, probably in collaboration with older, better established dramatists. When the plague closed the London theatres for many months of 1593-94, he found himself without a livelihood. He promptly turned his hand to poetry (although written in verse, plays were not considered as dignified as poetry), writing two long narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He dedicated them to the Earl of Southampton, undoubtedly receiving some recompense. The early nineties also saw the first of Shakespeare’s sonnets circulating in manuscript, and later finding their way into print. In his early plays - mostly chronicle histories glorifying England’s past, and light comedies - Shakespeare sought for popular success and achieved it. In 1599 he was able to buy a share in the Globe Theatre, where he acted and where his plays were performed. His ever-increasing financial success enabled him to buy a good deal of real estate in his native Stratford, and by 1605 he was able to retire from acting. Shortly thereafter he began to spend most of his time in Stratford, to which he retired around 1610. Very little is known of his life after he left London. He died on April 23, 1616, in Stratford, and was buried there. In 1623 the First Folio edition of his complete works was published by a group of his friends as a testimonial to his memory. This was a very rare tribute, because at the time plays were generally considered to be inferior literature, not really worthy of publication. These scanty facts, together with some information about the dates of his plays, are all that is definitely known about the greatest writer in the history of English literature. The age in which Shakespeare lived was not as concerned with keeping accurate records as we are, and any further details about Shakespeare’s life have been derived from educated guesses based on knowledge of his time. Shakespeare’s plays fall into three major groups according to the periods in his development when he wrote them:

EARLY COMEDIES AND HISTORIES

The first group consists of romantic comedies such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1593-5), and of strongly patriotic histories such as Henry V (1599). The early comedies are full of farce and slapstick, as well as exuberant poetry. Their plots are complicated and generally revolve around a young love relationship. The histories are typical of the robust, adventurous English patriotism of the Elizabethan era, when England had achieved a position of world dominance and power.

THE GREAT TRAGEDIES

The second period, beginning with Hamlet and ending with Antony and Cleopatra, is the period of the great tragedies: Hamlet (1602); Othello (1604); King Lear (1605); Macbeth (1606); and Antony and Cleopatra (1607-8). Shakespeare seems to have gone through a mental crisis at this time. His vision of the world darkens, and he sees life as an epic battle between the forces of good and evil, between order and chaos within man and in the whole universe. The forces for good win out in the end over evil, which is self-defeating. But the victory of the good is at great cost and often comes at the point of death. It is a moral victory, not a material one. These tragedies center on a great man who, because of some flaw in his makeup, or some error he commits, brings death and destruction down upon himself and those around him. They are generally considered the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays.

THE LATE ROMANCES

In the third period Shakespeare returns to romantic comedy. But such plays as Cymbeline (1609-10), The Winter’s Tale (1610-11), and The Tempest (1611) are very different in point of view and structure from such earlier comedies as Much Ado About Nothing (1599) and Twelfth Night (1600). Each of these late romances has a situation potentially tragic, and there is much bitterness in them. Thus the destructive force of insane jealousy serves as the theme both of the tragedy, Othello, and the comedy, The Winter’s Tale. They are serious comedies, replacing farce and slapstick with rich symbolism and supernatural events. They deal with such themes as sin and redemption, death and rebirth, and the conflict between nature and society, rather than with simple romantic love. In a sense they are deeply religious, although unconnected with any church dogma. In his last play, The Tempest, Shakespeare achieved a more or less serene outlook upon the world after the storm and stress of his great tragedies and the so-called “dark comedies.”

SHAKESPEARE’S THEATRE

Shakespeare’s plays were written for a stage very different from our own. Women, for instance, were not allowed to act; so female parts, even that of Cleopatra, were played by boy actors whose voices had not yet changed. The plays were performed on a long platform surrounded by a circular, unroofed theatre, and were dependent on natural daylight for lighting. There was no curtain separating the stage from the audience, nor were there act divisions. These were added to the plays by later editors. Because the stage jutted right into the audience, Shakespeare was able to achieve a greater intimacy with his spectators than modern playwrights can. The audience in the pit, immediately surrounding the stage, had to stand crowded together throughout the play. Its members tended to be lower class Londoners who would frequently comment aloud on the action of the play and break into fights. Anyone who attended the plays in the pit did so at the risk of having his pockets picked, of catching a disease, or, at best, of being jostled about by the crude “groundlings.” The aristocratic and merchant classes, who watched the plays from seats in the galleries, were spared most of the physical discomforts of the pit.

ITS ADVANTAGES

There were certain advantages, however, to such a theatre. Because complicated scenic, lighting and sound effects were impossible, the playwright had to rely on the power of his words to create scenes in the audience’s imagination. The rapid changes of scene and vast distances involved in Antony and Cleopatra, for instance, although they create a problem for modern producers, did not for Shakespeare. Shakespeare did not rely - as the modern realistic theatre does - on elaborate stage scenery to create atmosphere and locale. For these, as for battle scenes involving large numbers of people, Shakespeare relied on the suggestive power of his poetry to quicken the imagination of his audience. Elizabethan audiences were very lively anyway, and quick to catch any kind of word play. Puns, jokes, and subtle poetic effects made a greater impression on them than on modern audiences, who are less alert to language.

INTRODUCTION TO HENRY IV, PART 1

BACKGROUND OF THE PLAY

Historical

Richard II, the only son of Edward, the Black Prince, he himself the oldest son of Edward III, came to the throne upon the death of Edward in 1377, the Black Prince having died before his father. Henry Bolingbroke, also a grandson of Edward III, was the son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster and Edward III’s third son. Bolingbroke had been exiled to France by Richard, but returned when, upon the death of his father, Richard had seized the Lancastrian estates. With the aid of the Percies, a powerful northern family, Bolingbroke carried on a successful revolt, deposed Richard, and (presumably) had him murdered in 1399; he came to the throne as Henry IV. Shakespeare treats all of this in his Richard II, which is a study of kingship that has devolved upon a man who is at worst weak and at best one whose vision is poetical rather than practical. Bolingbroke was a usurper, though upon the death of Richard he might have been unquestionably the legitimate king except for one thing-a surviving male in the direct line tracing back to Edward III through his second son Lionel, Duke of Clarence. This potential claimant was Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March (Shakespeare confuses him with the Edmund Mortimer who married the daughter of the Welsh chieftain Owen Glendower). The Percies, disillusioned with Henry, rebelled. The two forces met at the Battle of Shrewsbury (1403), and the Percies went down to defeat. There is historical warrant for other details of the story (in Holinshed’s Chronicle), notably Glendower’s uprising, and the waywardness of the Prince.

Dramatic Traditions

a. The “History Play.” History plays (or chronicle plays) were phenomena of the Elizabethan period, mainly of the years immediately following the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588), which has led to the conjecture that the national fervor of the times was a chief cause of the plays. But it is undoubtedly also true that the general Renaissance interest in history as a broad mirror of civilization (seen in the popularity of the Mirror for Magistrates, a work in the medieval de casibus, or “fall of great men” tradition) had much to do with it. Certainly, the increased interest in realpolitik, of which Elyot’s The Governor and Machiavelli’s Prince are well-known examples, also favored their production. The nature of the history play is a complicated subject, one which has been studied at great length by Lily B. Campbell in her book Shakespeare’s “Histories”: Mirrors of Elizabethan Policy. Suffice it to say that in the so-called “Lancastrian tetralogy” (Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V) Shakespeare displays a searching interest in the nature of kingship - the personality of the ruler - and seems quite clearly to be insisting through these plays on the essential rightness of Henry Bolingbroke’s seizure of the throne, both because of Richard’s weakness and his own strength, and because ultimately it brought a paragon of kingliness, his son Henry, to the throne as Henry V.

b. The “Native Drama”: Shakespeare’s sense of structure, his handling of verse techniques, his use of dramatic devices (such as the “messenger” for reporting off-stage action), were unquestionably influenced, at least indirectly, by the sixteenth-century interest in Roman drama. The “stock characters” of Roman comedy, for one thing, tended to reappear in English plays; Falstaff, whatever else he may be, owes something to the “braggart soldier” type of the Roman comedy. But Shakespeare’s deeper roots were in the native drama. It has been suggested, in fact, that Henry IV, Part One is really in the immediate tradition of the medieval morality play, with the young Prince (Youth) being tempted to a sinful life by Falstaff (Vanity). And there seems no doubt that Shakespeare’s masterful use of the double plot (a main plot involving the actions of the “noble” characters, and a subplot which parallels the action of the main plot for emphasis, irony, or humor) is in a tradition reaching back to the medieval Second Shepherds’ Play in which the birth of the divine Child is paralleled by the farcical actions of shepherds and their sheep. Needless to say, no debt to traditions of any kind begins to compare with Shakespeare’s transforming genius.

BRIEF SUMMARY OF HENRY IV, PART ONE

Act I

King Henry, in council in his palace, is celebrating a momentary lull in the civil disturbances besetting the nation, and he reiterates his former intention of visiting the Holy Land. He is told that the Welsh, under Owen Glendower, have defeated Edmund Mortimer, Earl of March. This is partly offset by the fact that Harry Percy (Hotspur), fighting in the north against the Scots, has defeated Douglas and refuses to relinquish his prisoners to Henry until the King promises to ransom Mortimer. Henry is annoyed with Hotspur, but even more annoyed with his wastrel son Hal, who could use a little of Hotspur’s moxie (or so Henry thinks). The next scene shows the Prince carousing in his London apartment with Falstaff, an amiable reprobate knight, and matching wits with him. They speak of a robbery to take place the next night. Privately, Poins, another of Hal’s low companions, reveals a plan to allow Falstaff and the rest of their cronies to take the purses but to set on them in disguise, return to their hangout, the Boar’s Head Tavern, and wait for Falstaff to come back and tell his monstrous lies about what happened. The next scene shifts back to the palace, where the Percy group (the Earl of Northumberland, his son Hotspur and his brother Worcester) has been summoned by the King. Hotspur tries to explain that he refused the prisoners because the King sent his message through an effeminate lord who rubbed him the wrong way. We see that Hotspur is something of a choleric individual. They still refuse the prisoners, and the King threatens reprisals. Left by themselves, the Percies discuss the King’s highhanded ways, and intimate strongly that he is suspicious of them because he fears they will try to overthrow him in favor of Mortimer. They decide to revolt.

Act II

The first scene shows one of the thieves, Gadshill, looking over some travelers at an inn in Rochester as prospects for the robbery. In the second scene, the robbery takes place and, as planned, the Prince and Poins steal the loot from Falstaff and the others who then run away in confusion. The third scene shifts to Hotspu...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to William Shakespeare
• 2) Introduction to Henry IV, Part 1
• 3) Textual Analysis
• 4) Character Analyses
• 5) Critical Commentary
• 6) Essay Questions And Answers
• 7) Bibliography And Guide To Research Papers
• 8) General Biography and Criticism