Henry IV, Part 2

Summary

The Second Part of King Henry IV is a play of aftermath. It opens with Rumour, a figure 'painted full of tongues', who boasts of spreading false reports that Hotspur won at Shrewsbury. At Warkworth the old Earl of Northumberland, who stayed away from that battle pleading illness, learns the truth from Morton: his son is dead and the King's forces are moving north. He throws away his crutch and vows revenge, but after his widowed daughter-in-law Lady Percy reproaches him for abandoning Hotspur, he retreats to Scotland and leaves the new rebellion, led by the Archbishop of York with Mowbray and Hastings, to fend for itself. In London Sir John Falstaff, now older, gouty and in debt, parries the Lord Chief Justice, who knows of the Gad's Hill robbery and warns him away from the Prince. Mistress Quickly tries to have him arrested for debt and a broken promise of marriage, then lends him more money. Prince Hal, weary and out of love with his greatness, visits the Boar's Head in disguise with Poins and overhears Falstaff slandering him to Doll Tearsheet, before being summoned to court. The King himself appears only in the third act, sleepless at midnight, envying the ship-boy who sleeps on the mast and brooding with Warwick on how the friends who helped him to the throne have become enemies. Falstaff goes recruiting in Gloucestershire, where his old acquaintance Justice Shallow reminisces about their youth at the Inns of Court; Falstaff takes bribes to release the able recruits Mouldy and Bullcalf and keeps the feeble ones. At Gaultree Forest Prince John of Lancaster persuades the rebels to disband by promising redress of their grievances, then arrests their leaders for treason, insisting he pledged nothing to their persons. At Westminster the King collapses on hearing of the victory. Thinking him dead, Hal lifts the crown from his pillow; the King wakes, accuses him of hungering for his death, and is answered with a speech of grief that reconciles them. Dying in the chamber called Jerusalem, Henry advises his son to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels and asks God's forgiveness for the means by which he gained the crown. As Henry V, Hal confirms the Chief Justice who once imprisoned him and declares that his wildness is buried with his father. Falstaff rides from Gloucestershire expecting favour, but at the coronation procession the new King answers, 'I know thee not, old man', banishes him on pain of death from coming within ten miles, and the Chief Justice sends him to the Fleet. An epilogue promises more of Sir John, with Katharine of France, and disclaims any portrait of Oldcastle.

Plot or Argument

• Induction: Rumour painted full of tongues

  Rumour explains that he will spread the false report that Hotspur triumphed at Shrewsbury, setting the play's concern with deceptive speech, report and expectation.

• Act I: Northumberland's grief and Falstaff's diseases

  At Warkworth Northumberland hears of Hotspur's death and throws off his sickly coif; in London Falstaff's doctor has examined his urine, and he jousts with the Lord Chief Justice over apoplexy, deafness and debt; at York the Archbishop, Hastings, Mowbray and Lord Bardolph weigh whether to rise without Northumberland.

• Act II: Debts, a widow's reproach and the tavern

  Mistress Quickly's officers try to arrest Falstaff; Hal confesses to Poins that his father's sickness grieves him though he cannot show it; Lady Percy shames Northumberland into flight to Scotland; and at the Boar's Head Pistol storms, Doll Tearsheet tends Falstaff, and the disguised Prince overhears himself abused.

• Act III: The sleepless King and Shallow's orchard of memory

  Henry IV's midnight address to sleep and his conversation with Warwick on the book of fate; in Gloucestershire Shallow and Silence recall dead companions, and Falstaff musters Mouldy, Shadow, Wart, Feeble and Bullcalf and sells exemptions.

• Act IV: Gaultree and the Jerusalem Chamber

  Prince John disbands the rebel army with a promise of redress and then sends its leaders to execution; Falstaff captures Colevile and praises sherris-sack; the King falls ill at news of victory, Hal takes the crown from his pillow, and father and son are reconciled before the King dies in Jerusalem.

• Act V: The new King keeps the Chief Justice

  Hal, now Henry V, asks the Chief Justice to be a father to his youth; Pistol brings word to Shallow's orchard that the old King is dead; Quickly and Doll are dragged off by beadles; and at the coronation Falstaff is publicly rejected and sent to the Fleet.

• Epilogue: A dancer's promise

  A speaker apologizes for an earlier displeasing play, promises a sequel with Falstaff and Katharine of France, and states that Oldcastle died a martyr and this is not the man.

Characters

• King Henry IV, the dying king

  Henry Bolingbroke, who took the crown from Richard II; sleepless, ill and troubled by the 'by-paths and indirect crook'd ways' of his reign.

• Prince Hal (Henry, Prince of Wales), heir, later Henry V

  Still associated with the tavern, privately grieved by his father's illness, and at last crowned as a king who repudiates his former self.

• Prince John of Lancaster, the King's younger son

  Cool commander who ends the rebellion at Gaultree by a promise he interprets narrowly.

• Sir John Falstaff, knight and recruiting officer

  Aging, gouty, borrowing and inventive, he turns every complaint into wit and expects to rise with Hal.

• The Lord Chief Justice, judge

  Once imprisoned the Prince for striking him; Falstaff's sternest critic and the new King's chosen counsellor.

• Earl of Northumberland, Hotspur's father

  Feigned sickness kept him from Shrewsbury; his rage at his son's death gives way again to withdrawal.

• Lady Percy, Hotspur's widow

  Delivers a eulogy of her husband that shames Northumberland into staying out of the new rising.

• Archbishop of York (Richard Scroop), rebel leader

  Justifies rebellion as a physician's bleeding of a diseased commonwealth and is arrested at Gaultree.

• Justice Robert Shallow, Gloucestershire justice

  Garrulous old man who exaggerates his wild youth with Falstaff and lends him a thousand pounds.

• Mistress Quickly, hostess of the Boar's Head

  Sues Falstaff for debt and breach of promise, then pawns her plate to lend him more.

• Doll Tearsheet, prostitute at the tavern

  Quarrels with Pistol and shows Falstaff a rough tenderness; arrested in Act V.

• Rumour, presenter of the Induction

  Allegorical figure who opens the play by boasting of the false reports he spreads.

Lessons

• The Prince who must disappoint expectation

  Everyone in the play has written Hal down according to his tavern reputation, and his father dies half believing it. Hal's vow in Act V to 'mock the expectation of the world' and his choice of the Chief Justice show reform as a public act that must be proved by deeds. Students can weigh whether the change is conversion, policy or the fulfilment of a long-held plan announced in Part 1.

  • Why does Hal keep the Chief Justice who once imprisoned him, and what does this say about the kind of king he intends to be?
  • Is Hal's speech over the crown in Act IV, Scene V sincere grief, skilful self-defence, or both?
  • What does Hal mean by 'My father is gone wild into his grave'?

• Falstaff's rejection and the cost of a public office

  The coronation rebuke is one of the most debated moments in Shakespeare. Henry V tells Falstaff to make less his body and more his grace and to fall to his prayers, yet he also provides him a competence and promises advancement if he reforms. The scene forces students to hold together justice, mercy and the cost of turning from old companions.

  • Read the rejection speech aloud: which lines are harsh, and which leave a door open?
  • Has the play prepared us for this ending, through the recruiting scenes and the Shallow subplot?
  • Can friendship survive when one friend takes on a duty the other cannot share?

• Uneasy lies the head: kingship and a troubled conscience

  Henry IV cannot sleep, sickens in body as his realm sickens in rebellion, and confesses on his deathbed that he came to the crown by crooked ways. His advice to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels is shrewd and morally ambiguous. The play invites reflection on how unrepented means shadow a ruler's ends.

  • What does the King envy in the ship-boy and the poor sleeper?
  • Is the dying King's political advice wise, cynical or both?
  • How does Henry's prayer for forgiveness compare with David's psalms of confession?

• A promise kept to the letter at Gaultree

  Prince John promises redress of grievances, the rebels dismiss their army, and he then arrests their leaders, claiming he pledged nothing to their persons. Shakespeare stages the episode without comment, leaving the audience to judge whether this is prudence ending a civil war or a betrayal of good faith.

  • Did John lie? Distinguish the words of his promise from what the rebels understood.
  • Does a good end, avoiding a battle, justify the means used to reach it?
  • How does the Archbishop's image of rebellion as medicine for a sick commonwealth hold up by the end of the scene?

• Old men remembering in a Gloucestershire orchard

  Shallow and Silence talk about the price of bullocks and the deaths of old friends in the same breath, and Falstaff privately mocks Shallow's invented wild youth. Yet 'We have heard the chimes at midnight' carries real feeling. These scenes show time, aging and self-deception with comic tenderness rather than satire alone.

  • Why does Shakespeare place a meditation on death beside talk of livestock prices?
  • What does Falstaff's soliloquy on Shallow reveal about Falstaff himself?
  • How does this play's attention to old age differ from Part 1's attention to youth?

Context

The play covers events from 1403 to 1413: the aftermath of Shrewsbury, the northern rising of Archbishop Richard Scrope in 1405, Northumberland's later defeat, and Henry IV's death at Westminster in the chamber called Jerusalem in 1413. Shakespeare compresses and rearranges this history. In the chronicles it was the Earl of Westmoreland who tricked Scrope into disbanding near York; the play gives the stratagem to Prince John. The legend that the Prince was committed to prison by the Chief Justice, and the tradition of his riotous youth, came to Shakespeare from chronicle and popular stage sources rather than from documentary record.

Composition

Usually dated c. 1596-1598, soon after Part 1. Shakespeare drew on Holinshed's Chronicles, Samuel Daniel's poem on the civil wars, and the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth. Falstaff had been called Oldcastle in early performances of Part 1, after the Lollard Sir John Oldcastle, and the Epilogue's disclaimer that 'Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man' reflects that change. The play was printed in quarto in 1600; some copies lack Act III, Scene I, which was added in a reissue, and the 1623 Folio text differs from the quarto in many passages.

Reception

Falstaff's popularity shaped the play's afterlife, and the Epilogue's promised sequel was not delivered as described: in Henry V Falstaff dies offstage. The rejection scene has divided critics since at least the nineteenth century, with A. C. Bradley's lecture 'The Rejection of Falstaff' a well-known landmark. Orson Welles's film Chimes at Midnight (1965) combined scenes from both parts and made Falstaff's fall its centre. The play is often staged together with Richard II, Part 1 and Henry V as a tetralogy.

Comparisons

• Henry IV, Part 1

  Part 1 sets Hal between Hotspur's honour and Falstaff's wit and ends in victory; Part 2 removes Hotspur, ages Falstaff, and replaces battle with sickness, deferred judgment and a final public choice.

• Henry V

  The dying King's counsel to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels looks ahead to the French war of Henry V, where Falstaff's death is reported by Mistress Quickly rather than staged.

• Richard II

  Henry IV's deathbed confession of 'by-paths and indirect crook'd ways' recalls his deposition of Richard, whose prophecy that Northumberland would turn on him the King remembers in Act III.

• The Merry Wives of Windsor

  Falstaff, Shallow, Pistol and Quickly reappear in a comic, domestic setting with no Prince Hal, offering a lighter version of the same figures.

• King Lear

  Both plays put an old king's failing body at the centre and turn on a child's love tested by appearances, though Hal's reconciliation with his father comes in time where Lear's with Cordelia comes too late.

• Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius

  Prince John's narrow reading of his pledge at Gaultree and the King's foreign-war advice invite comparison with Machiavelli's analysis of when rulers keep faith and how they unite a restless people.

Quotes

Medical Lens

Sickness is the play's governing metaphor and a literal condition of its characters. Falstaff's doctor inspects his urine; he lectures on apoplexy citing Galen, suffers gout and pox, and gives a humoral account of how sherry heats the blood and quickens the brain. The King is sleepless and then suffers fits that his sons call apoplexy before dying; Clarence attributes his decline to 'incessant care and labour of his mind'. Northumberland's feigned sickness, the Archbishop's language of fever, surfeit and bleeding for the commonwealth, and the King's cry of a kingdom 'sick with civil blows' turn humoral medicine into political analysis. Historically Henry IV suffered a serious illness in his last years that chroniclers described in various ways; the play's apoplexy is a dramatic diagnosis, and any modern identification is a reading, not a fact.

• Act 1, Scene 1

  Northumberland, who stayed from Shrewsbury 'crafty-sick', hears of his son's death and throws away his crutch and sickly coif, comparing himself to a feverish patient breaking from his keeper.

  Grief Mind Body
• Act 1, Scene 2

  Falstaff asks what the doctor said of his water (uroscopy), discusses the King's apoplexy as 'a kind of sleeping in the blood' with a reference to Galen, and curses his gout and pox.

  Physicians Doctors Ancient Medicine Humoral Medicine Syphilis Venereal
• Act 3, Scene 1

  Henry IV's sleepless night and his address to sleep; Warwick speaks of the kingdom's body as 'distemper'd' but curable with good advice and little medicine.

  Sleep Insomnia Mind Body
• Act 3, Scene 2

  Shallow and Silence recall dead contemporaries and consider death certain; Falstaff mocks Shallow's withered body while recruiting the unfit.

  Aging Senescence Death Dying
• Act 4, Scene 1

  The Archbishop describes the realm as diseased by surfeit and in a burning fever that must be bled, disclaiming the role of physician while adopting its language.

  Bloodletting Humoral Medicine
• Act 4, Scene 3

  Falstaff's soliloquy on sherris-sack: wine dries cold vapours in the brain, warms the blood and liver, and musters the vital spirits to the heart.

  Alcohol Humoral Medicine
• Act 4, Scenes 4-5

  The King falls ill at news of victory; his sons call it apoplexy and attribute it to care, observe omens, call for music and quiet, and he dies after his last counsel to Hal.

  Death Dying Mind Body Sleep Insomnia
• Epilogue

  The speaker jokes that Falstaff may 'die of a sweat' in the promised sequel, a phrase that can allude to sweating sickness or to the sweating treatment for venereal disease.

  Syphilis Venereal Death Dying

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write the private interview Falstaff believes he will be granted after the coronation, in which he and Henry V speak frankly about their past.

• Classroom

  Stage Act 4, Scene 5 twice, once playing Hal's crown speech as calculated self-defence and once as unguarded grief, then discuss which reading the text better supports.

• Essay

  Was Prince John's settlement at Gaultree just? Argue from the exact words of his promise and from what the play shows of its consequences.

• Poetry

  Write a short elegy in Justice Shallow's voice for one of the old companions he names, keeping his habit of mixing grief with farm prices.

Further Reading

• Henry IV, Part 1, William Shakespeare

  The first part, which should be read before this play.

• Holinshed's Chronicles, Raphael Holinshed

  Shakespeare's principal historical source for the reign.

• Oxford Lectures on Poetry, A. C. Bradley

  Contains the lecture 'The Rejection of Falstaff'.

• Shakespeare's History Plays, E. M. W. Tillyard

• The Fortunes of Falstaff, J. Dover Wilson

• Chimes at Midnight, Orson Welles

  1965 film drawing on both parts of Henry IV.