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The complex Prince Harry is
at the center of events in Henry IV. As the only character to move
between the grave, serious world of King Henry and Hotspur and the comical
world of Falstaff and the Boar’s Head Tavern, Harry serves as a bridge
uniting the play’s two major plotlines. An initially disreputable prince who
eventually wins back his honor and the king’s esteem, Harry undergoes the
greatest dramatic development in the play, deliberately transforming himself
from the wastrel he pretends to be into a noble leader. Additionally, as the
character whose sense of honor and leadership Shakespeare most directly
endorses, Harry is, at least by implication, the moral focus of the play.
Harry is nevertheless a
complicated character and one whose real nature is very difficult to pin
down. As the play opens, Harry has been idling away his time with Falstaff
and earning the displeasure of both his father and England as a whole. He
then surprises everyone by declaring that his dissolute lifestyle is all an
act: he is simply trying to lower the expectations that surround him so
that, when he must, he can emerge as his true heroic self, shock the whole
country, and win the people’s love and his father’s admiration. Harry is
clearly intelligent and already capable of the psychological machinations
required of kings.
But the heavy measure of deceit involved in his plan seems to
call his honor into question, and his treatment of Falstaff further sullies
his name: though there seems to be real affection between the prince and the
roguish knight, Harry is quite capable of tormenting and humiliating his
friend and, when he becomes king in Henry IV, of disowning him
altogether. Shakespeare seems to include these aspects of Harry’s character
in order to illustrate that Falstaff’s selfish bragging does not fool Harry
and to show that Harry is capable of making the difficult personal choices
that a king must make in order to rule a nation well. In any case, Harry’s
emergence here as a heroic young prince is probably Henry IV’s
defining dynamic, and it opens the door for Prince Harry to become the great
King Henry V in the next two plays in Shakespeare’s sequence.
Old, fat, lazy, selfish, dishonest, corrupt, thieving,
manipulative, boastful, and lecherous, Falstaff is, despite his many
negative qualities, perhaps the most popular of all of Shakespeare’s comic
characters. Though he is a knight by origin, Falstaff’s lifestyle clearly
hardly matches the ideals of courtly chivalry. For instance, Falstaff is
willing to commit robbery for the money and entertainment of it. As Falstaff
himself notes at some length, honor is useless to him, “Can honour set-to a
leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. . . . What is
honour? A word.” (V.i.130–133) He perceives honor as a mere “word,” an
abstract concept that has no relevance to practical matters. Nevertheless,
though Falstaff mocks honor by linking it to violence, to which it is
intimately connected throughout the play, he remains endearing and likable
to Shakespeare’s audiences. Two reasons that Falstaff retains this esteem
are that he plays his scoundrel’s role with such gusto and that he never
enjoys enough success to become a real villain; even his highway robbery
ends in humiliation for him.
Falstaff seems to scorn morality largely because he has such
a strong appetite for life and finds courtesy and honor useless when there
are jokes to be told and feasts to be eaten. Largely a creature of words,
Falstaff has earned the admiration of some Shakespearean scholars because of
the self-creation he achieves through language. Falstaff is constantly
creating a myth of Falstaff, and this myth defines his identity. A master of
punning and wordplay, Falstaff provides most of the comedy in the play (just
as he does in Henry IV, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and
Henry V). He redeems himself largely through his real affection for
Prince Harry, whom, despite everything, he seems to regard as a real friend.
This affection makes Harry’s decision, foreshadowed in Henry IV, to
abandon Falstaff when he becomes king in Henry V seem all the more harsh.
The title character of Henry IV appears in
Richard II as the ambitious, energetic, and capable man, who seizes the
throne from Richard II. Though Henry is not yet truly an old man in Henry
IV, his worries about his crumbling kingdom, guilt over his uprising the
power from Richard II, and the vagaries of his son’s behavior have diluted
his earlier energy and strength. In Henry V he remains stern, aloof,
and resolute, but he is no longer the force of nature he appears to be in
Richard II. Henry’s trouble stems from his own uneasy conscience and his
uncertainty about the legitimacy of his rule. After all, he himself is a
murderer who has illegally usurped the throne from Richard II. Therefore, it
is difficult to blame Hotspur and the Percys for wanting to usurp his throne
for them. Furthermore, it is unclear how Henry’s kingship is any more
legitimate than that of Richard II. Henry thus lacks the moral legitimacy
that every effective ruler needs.
With these concerns lurking at the back of his reign, Henry
is unable to rule as the magnificent leader his son Harry will become.
Throughout the play he retains his tight, tenuous hold on the throne, and he
never loses his majesty. But with an ethical sense clouded by his own sense
of compromised honor, it is clear that Henry can never be a great king or
anything more than a caretaker to the throne that awaits Henry V.
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