Henry IV, Part 2
Act I

ACT I

INDUCTION

A personified Rumor helps link the two parts of the Henry IV plays. But it’s Rumor! with a cheeky albeit grim challenge:

Open your ears; for which of you will stop
The vent of hearing when loud Rumor speaks?
(Ind. 1-2)

Rumor brags about holding sway “from the orient to the drooping west” (Ind. 3). So after being brought into his confidence with his admissions that he’s a liar, we’re told incorrectly that Hotspur killed Prince Hal, Douglas was victorious over Henry, and the rebellion succeeded. This may have generically represented overzealous messengers of the time period, eager to break news first (Asimov, II 383) “Rumor was rife,” for example, as the 1585/86 Babington plot was brewing (Ogburn and Ogburn 723). These days it would be similar to networks and stations declaring elections prematurely.

Rumor also seems obliquely insulting to the general theater-going audience, the “wav’ring multitude” (Ind. 19) constituting “my household” (Ind. 22). And already the theme of illness appears, with a mention of Northumberland having been “crafty-sick” (Ind. 37).

Introducing a play with a personification like this seems creaky and old-fashioned at this point, and (unlike the case in The Spanish Tragedy) this character will not appear again. So why did Shakespeare resort to an obsolete gimmick made even weirder by it being an unreliable narrator and one who announces his unreliability?

As Ken Anstruther notes, rumours are woven into Oxford’s life, Prince Tudor theses not excluded. The 16th Earl of Oxford was dispatched to root out the rumours of the queen giving birth to a daughter in the early 1560s by Leicester, while Edward was about 10 or 11. Was this another reason why he was poisoned by Leicester, in addition to the lands and money? Perhaps Edward’s father knew too much and was a potential liability. We also have the rumours spread by Roland Yorke in 1576 regarding the parentage of Elizabeth Vere, exacerbated by Burghley’s failure to keep the matter private. Then we have Leicester’s Commonwealth, a massive rumour-filled document timed not far before the Henry IV plays.

SCENE i

A Lord Bardolph (not the same character as the low-class Bardolph) asks a porter, “Where is the Earl?” (I.i.1). He wants to speak with Northumberland, the head of the Percy clan, a powerful baronial family in the north of England, who failed to show up at the rebellion to support his brother and son. Bardolph reports to him the incorrect good news that the revolt was successful: “The King is almost wounded to the death, / And, in the fortune of my lord your son, / Prince Harry slain outright” (I.i.14-16). And Falstaff is Hotspur’s prisoner. Lord Bardolph acknowledges he has heard all this from “A gentleman well bred and of good name” (I.i.26).

A retainer named Travers enters a moment later with the opposite and grim truth. Soon Morton resolves the conflicting reports with his first-hand account. The issue of conflicting reports urges one to suspect Shakespeare of being topical, but this is the best anyone has come up with so far: “In much the same way as Northumberland heard the news of Harry Percy’s death from one of his retainers just returned from the battlefield, Philip of Spain heard of the capture of one of his chief plotters” in the Babington scheme (Clark 734).

Discussion dwells on the effects of differing types of news.

Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news
Hath but a losing office, and his tongue
Sounds ever after as a sullen bell,
Remembered tolling a departed friend.
(I.i.100-103)

Northumberland temporarily gives himself over to grief, paradoxically remarking,

In poison there is physic, and these news,
Havng been well, that would have made me sick,
Being sick, have (in some measure) made me well.
(I.i.137-139)

But his son Hotspur has been killed, and a moment later he is raging:

Let heaven kiss earth! now let not Nature’s hand
Keep the wild flood confined! Let order die!
And let this world no longer be a stage
To feed contention in a ling’ring act;
But let one spirit of the first-born Cain
Reign in all bosoms, that each heart being set
On bloody courses, the rude scene may end,
And darkness be the burier of the dead!
(I.i.153-160)

Restraint over “stomy passion” (I.i.165) is advised, and Morton tells also of royal forces moving even now against Northumberland. However, Richard Scroop, the Archbishop of York, has been raising an army to help fight Henry IV’s forces.

SCENE ii

Sir John Falstaff is accompanied now by a page, a diminutive fellow sent by Prince Hal, possibly as a visual joke in his physical contrast when accompanying Falstaff. The page reports that the doctor’s assessment of Falstaff is poor, based on an examination of urine. (Whoa! Look how far medical science has come!) Throughout this play we find an emphasis on illness (Wells 147), sickness afflicting both individuals and the nation itself (Wells 148). At the doctor’s reported attempt at humor, Falstaff remarks on his self-aware role as a comic inspiration or humor magnet:

Men of all sorts take a pride to gird at me: the brain of this foolish-compounded clay, man, is not able to invent anything that tends to laughter, more than I invent or is invented on me: I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men. (I.ii.6-11)

“Falstaff’s gift of gab is that of the Earl when in high fettle” (Ogburn and Ogburn 930).

The page also reports Falstaff’s credit not being honored, and that Bardolph is going to buy Falstaff a horse. The Lord Chief Justice has come to see Falstaff. Matter appearing in Famous Victories but omitted from its parallel position in Henry IV, Part 1 “may have included a scene in which the Lord Chief Justice sends for Falstaff, and another, or the same, in which Prince Hal delivers the famous blow on the Justice’s ear” (Smidt 111), referred to here (I.ii.57). This latter, historically, is an apocryphal incident, emerging in about 1531 (Asimov, II 388).

“In 2 Henry IV (I.ii) we learn that the Lord Chief Justice sent his summons to Falstaff before the latter’s expedition to Shrewsbury, which of course belongs to Part 1, and that Falstaff refused to come” (Smidt 111). The Lord Chief Justice also had no qualms about sending the Prince to do jail time. Also from an earlier version of the play the Quarto edition once provides the speech prefix “Old” (I.ii.121) for Falstaff (Gilvary 236).

Falstaff feigns deafness (I.ii.67) — a defense against Rumor? — but the Justice is persistent. Falstaff tries diverting the discussion by touting his own military importance, pretending concern about the Justice’s health and the King’s (I.ii.104ff), and issuing an insincere moralistic and platitudinous heap of rhetoric (I.ii.166ff).

The Lord Chief Justice acknowledges Falstaff’s service at Shrewsbury and says, “Well, I am loath to gall a new-healed wound” (I.ii.148), but watch it! The reference to the wound might refer to Sir Nicholas Dawtrey’s of 1584 received in Ireland in battling the Scots (Clark 739). Some Oxfordians detect a caricature of him in Falstaff, and in Sir Tophas in Lyly’s Endymion (Clark 738).

The Lord Chief Justice scolds Falstaff for misleading the Prince; Falstaff should be acting his age. But Falstaff claims he must join the King’s forces against the remaining northern rebels. The Justice wishes him well, and Falstaff hits him up for a thousand pounds (I.ii.222).

The attention to the enormous sum of a thousand pounds (cf. I.ii.193), as it appears so often in other plays too, brings to mind the Earl of Oxford’s annuity, granted by the notoriously stingy Queen with no explanation given and in wording identical to the formula for the granting of secret service money. More than coincidentally, the vicar of Stratford Parish in Warwickshire, the Reverend John Ward, reported in his 1661-63 diary the local rumor that Shakespeare had “supplied the stage with two plays every year and for that had an allowance so large that he spent at the rate of £1000 a year, as I have heard.” Hank Whittemore points out that Shakspere’s Stratford cash estate amounted to no more than £350, and that the remuneration here is oddly called an “allowance” rather than an “income” [“A Year in the Life: 1586.” Shakespeare Matters 2.4 (Summer 2003): 29-30].

Falstaff bemoans his empty purse as another kind of disease or “consumption” (I.ii.235f), reminding one of Chaucer’s “Complaint to His Purse.” Falstaff gives his page letters to be delivered to Hal, Prince John, and an old Mistress Ursula to whom he is vaguely engaged (I.ii.238ff). This “proclivity for letter-writing” is the same we saw in Part 1 (Clark 739, Smidt 113) and will appear even in Merry Wives. Sir Nicholas Dawtry was a prolific letter-writer; hence the page being sent with several to deliver (Clark 739).

Plagued by gout, Falstaff remains optimistic about his own irresponsibility: “A good wit will make use of any thing. I will turn diseases to commodity” (I.ii.246-248). Though fighting against rebel forces, Falstaff is a rebel himself — against seriousness and pious authority.

With Falstaff, the elder Ogburns detect a depiction of the gouty, resourceful, but unprincipled Burghley (Ogburn and Ogburn 717). Sir Nicholas Dawtry is noted above. And, as always, Oxford inhabits all his characters: “during his early forties, Oxford seems for a brief period to have increased in weight and girth” (Ogburn and Ogburn 930). He could also refer to a “wound” in the 1580s. And could he also be a sideways incarnation of Chaucer, who referred to himself as rotund?

SCENE iii

The Archbishop of York, Mowbray — the son of the Mowbray at the beginning of Richard II (Asimov, II 390) — Lord Hastings, and Lord Bardolph hold a council of war. The key question is Northumberland’s support — they don’t want to end up short on troops as Hotspur did, fatally. If Northumberland still represents Philip of Spain, he did rage in about 1586 about English comedies at his expense, hence the “bosom burn[ing] / With an incensed fire of injuries” (I.iii.13-14) here (Ogburn and Ogburn 723).

Hastings thinks they’re okay: Henry IV faces trouble from Glendower in Wales, from the French, from the north: “So is the unfirm King / In three divided” (I.iii.73-74). And besides, his treasury is depleted. So was Elizabeth’s in the mid-1580s: “Her generosity with Alençon, and her expenditure on the fleet and troops that accompanied him to Antwerp, had depleted her store materially, and the campaigns in Ireland and Scotland had been costly” (Clark 737). The Archbishop calls for a list of grievances against Henry’s misrule to be written up.

We witness another derogatory railing against the fickle common people, from the Archbishop here:

The commonwealth is sick of their own choice,
Their over-greedy love hath surfeited.
An habitation giddy and unsure
Hath he that buildeth on the vulgar heart.
O thou fond many, with what loud applause
Didst thou beat heaven with blessing Bullingbrook
Before he was what thou wouldst have him be!
And being now trimmed in thine own desires,
Thou, beastly feeder, art so full of him,
That thou provok’st thyself to cast him up.
So, so, thou common dog, didst thou disgorge
Thy glutton bosom of the royal Richard,
And now thou wouldst eat thy dead vomit up,
And howl’st to find it. What trust is in these times?
They that, when Richard liv’d, would have him die,
Are now become enamoured on his grave.
Thou, that threw’st dust upon his goodly head
When through proud London he came sighing on
After th’ admired heels of Bolingbroke,
Cry’st now, “O earth, yield us that king again,
And take thou this!” O thoughts of men accursed!
Past and to come seems best; things present worst.
(I.iii.87-107)