HENRY IV.- Parts I. and II.

Preface.

The Early Editions. (I.) The First Part of King Henry the Fourth, entered on the Stationers' Registers, under date of February 25, 1597-8, appeared for the first time in a Quarto edition, with the following title-page:"The History of Henrie the Fourth; with the battell at Shrewsburie, betweene the King and Lord Henry Percy, surnamed Henrie Hotspur of the North. With the humorous conceits of Sir Iohn Falstaffe. At London. Printed by P. S. for Andrew Wise, dwelling in Paules • Churchyard, at the signe of the Angell. 1598." (Cp. Grigg's Facsimile edition.)

No less than five subsequent Quarto editions appeared before the publication of the play in the first Folio; they were issued in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, 1622. Other Quartos belong to the years 1632 and 1639. Each edition seems to have been derived from its predecessor.

The title of the play in the Folio is, "The First Part of Henry the Fourth, with the Life and Death of Henry Surnamed Hotspurre." The Cambridge editors refer the Folio text to a partially corrected copy of the fifth Quarto. The earlier Quartos were, however, probably consulted by the corrector.

(II.) The Second Part of King Henry the Fourth was first published in Quarto in 1600, with the following titlepage:"The Second part of Henrie the fourth, continuing to his death, and coronation of Henry the fifth. With the humours of Sir John Falstaffe, and swaggering Pistoll. As it hath been sundry times publikely acted by the

right honourable the Lord Chamberlaine his seruants. Written by William Shakespeare. London. Printed by V. S. for Andrew Wise and William Aspley. 1600." (Cp. Grigg's Facsimile edition.) The play was entered by the publishers upon the Stationers' Registers on August 23rd of the same year.

By some accident the first scene of Act III. had been omitted in some copies of the Quarto. The error was rectified by inserting two new leaves, the type of some of the preceding and following leaves being used; hence there are two different impressions of the latter part of Act II. and the beginning of Act. III. ii.

The text of this Part in the first Folio was probably ultimately derived from a transcript of the original MS. It contains passages which had evidently been originally omitted in order to shorten the play for the stage. "Some of these are among the finest in the play, and are too closely connected with the context to allow of the supposition that they were later additions, inserted by the author after the publication of the Quarto" (Cambridge editors). Similarly, the Quarto contains passages not found in the Folio, and for the most part "the Quarto is to be regarded as having the higher critical value."

Date of Composition. There is almost unanimity among scholars in assigning 1 Henry IV. to the year 1596-1597. (i.) According to Chalmers, the opening lines of the play " plainly allude" to the expedition against Spain in 1596. Similarly the expression 'the poor fellow never joyed since the price of oats rose' (II. i.) may be connected with the Proclamation for the Dearth of Corn, etc., issued in the same year. The introduction of the word 'valiant,' detrimental to the metre of the line, in Act V. iv. 41,

"The spirits

Of (valiant) Shirley, Stafford, Blunt, are in my arms," may perhaps also point to 1596-7 as the original date of

composition: the Shirleys were knighted by the Queen in 1597.

(ii.) The earliest reference to the play occurs in Meres' Palladis Tamia, 1598; while Ben Jonson ends his Every Man Out of His Humour with the words, "You may in time make lean Macilente as fat as Sir John Falstaff." In the Pilgrimage to Parnassus, acted at St. John's College, Cambridge, Christmas, 1598, there are what seem to be obvious reminiscences of the tapster's 'Anon, Anon, Sir.'* The point is of special interest in view of Mr. H. P. Stokes' suggestion that I Henry IV. was itself originally a Christmas play of the previous year, 1597.

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(iii.) General considerations of style corroborate these pieces of external evidence; its subtle characterization, its reckless ease and full creative power," its commingling of the serious and the comic, its free use of verse and prose, make the play "a splendid and varied historic tragi-comedy" rather than a mere "history,"—" historic in its personages and its spirit, yet blending the high heroic poetry of chivalry with the most original inventions of broad humour" (Verplanck). Henry IV. bears, in fact, the same relationship to Richard III., King John, and Richard II. that The Merchant of Venice does to such early comedies as Love's Labour's Lost, The Two Gentlemen, Comedy of Errors, etc. The simple plots of the earlier histories gave place to the more complex Henry IV., much in the same way as the simple love-comedies were succeeded by the polymythic method of The Merchant of Venice. As far as the introduction of prose is concerned, the case of the present play is specially remarkable; the earlier historical pieces, following the example of Marlowe's Edward II., contained practically no prose at all. Similarly, in his avoidance of rhyme as a

*Cp. "I shall no soooner open this pint pot but the word like a knave-tapster will cry 'Anon, Anon, Sir,'" etc.

†1464 lines of prose occur in 1 Henry IV., and 1860 lines in 2 Henry IV., out of a total 3170 and 3437 lines respectively.

trick of dramatic rhetoric, Shakespeare shows, in Henry IV., that he has learnt to differentiate between his lyrical and dramatic gifts. His earlier work in the department of history was indeed largely experimental, and bore many marks of Shakespeare's apprentice hand; none of these previous efforts produced a typically Shakespearian drama; in Henry IV. Shakespeare, as it were, discovered himself.

The Second Part of Henry IV., " at once the supplement and epilogue of the first part, and the preparation for the ensuing dramatic history of Henry V.," may with certainty be dated 1598-9. Ben Jonson's Every Man Out of His Humour, acted in 1599, contains an early allusion to Justice Silence.* It was probably not written, as has been maintained on insufficient ground, before the Stationers' entry of 1 Henry IV. in 1598, the title-page of the first Quarto of Part I., as well as the entry, imply that no second part was then in existence. Christmas, 1598,' may perhaps be the actual date of its first production.

The Sources of the Plot. The materials of both parts of Henry IV. were derived from (I.) Hall's and Holinshed's Chronicles, and (II.) from the old play of The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, which was acted before 1588, and of which editions appeared in 1594 and 1597 (Hazlitt, Shakespeare Library, Pt. II. i. 323).

(I.) On the whole, Shakespeare has followed history closely in this play; among the most striking deviations is, perhaps, Shakespeare's intentional change in making Hotspur and the Prince of the same age, in order to heighten the contrast between them. The characters of Glendower, Northumberland, Mowbray, the Archbishop, and Prince John, as well as that of Hotspur, have all undergone slight changes at Shakespeare's hands. Noteworthy errors (due to the original Chronicles) are:(i.) calling the Earl of Fife son to the beaten Douglas* Savi. What's he, gentle Mons. Brisk? Not that gentleman? Fasl. No, lady; this is a kinsman to Justice Silence.

an error due to the omission of a comma in Holinshed; (ii.) confounding the Edward Mortimer, prisoner, and afterwards son-in-law of Glendower, and second son of the first Earl of March, with his nephew the Earl of March, entitled to the throne by legitimate succession, at this time a child in close keeping at Windsor Castle. Hence, in one place, Lady Percy is correctly styled Mortimer's sister, in another she is referred to as his aunt (Lloyd, Critical Essays, p. 228; Courtenay's Commentaries on the Historical Plays, I. pp. 75-159).

(II.) The old Chronicle of The Famous Victories certainly provided Shakespeare with substantial hints for the comic element of his play,-" Ned, Gadshill, the old tavern in Eastcheap, the hostess, the recognition of Sir John Oldcastle, or at least his horse, down even to the race of ginger,' that was to be delivered as far as Charing Cross, meet our eyes as we turn over the pages," but, in the words of the same critic, "never before did genius ever transmute so base a caput mortuum into ore so precious."

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Falstaff. Sir John Oldcastle, one of the Prince's wild companions in the old play, appears to have been the original of the character subsequently called Sir John Falstaff. A trace of the old name is still to be found in I Henry IV., where the Prince addresses the knight as my old lad of the castle' (I. ii. 45): in 2 Henry IV. (Quarto I), the prefix Old. is found before one of Falstaff's speeches. The fact that " Falstaff" was substituted for Oldcastle" throughout the plays perhaps explains the metrical imperfections of such a line as Away, good Ned, Falstaff sweats to death' (II. ii. 112). In the final Epilogue the change is still further emphasised (vide Note on the passage, 2 Henry IV.). The tradition, however, remained, and in the Prologue to the play of Sir John Oldcastle (printed in 1600, with Shakespeare's name on the title-page of some copies) direct reference is made to the degradation the Lollard martyr had suffered at the hands of the dramatist :