SHAKESPEARE

What You’ll Love about… Henry IV Part 1 by William Shakespeare

Henry IV Part 1 is a mixed-genre play that juxtaposes comedy against political drama to expose the amorality and privilege of England’s rulers.

Robert Thew, “Falstaff, Prince Henry and Poins at the Boar’s Head Tavern (Shakespeare, King Henry the Fourth, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 4) .” Public domain, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Henry Bolingbroke successfully captured the crown in Richard II, but he struggles to maintain his grasp on it in the sequel, Henry IV Part 1. This struggle is, somewhat surprisingly, really a minor feature of the play, which is much more interesting when it showcases the criminal antics of Henry’s son Hal as a member of Sir John Falstaff’s troupe of ne’er-do-wells.

It’s kind of a picaresque pastoral that at once juxtaposes and equates the common thievery of the London underworld and the highfalutin business of national politics, with Sir John Falstaff as the pole around which it all seems to turn. Falstaff is a liminal figure whose rank of Knight allows him to have one foot in the seedy London underworld and one foot in England’s national affairs.

There’s an interesting moment at the end of Act 2 that illustrates this phenomenon well. During a conversation in a tavern in Eastcheap, Falstaff advises Prince Hal to practice what he will say when he meets his father the next day: “Well, thou wilt be horribly chid…