Typically dated around 1598 but probably coming from the mid-1580s (Ogburn and Ogburn 710), this play may have emerged when the material grew too massive to be covered in a single play. The source is Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (1587). Three rebellions against King Henry have transformed into two phases of a single rebellion as Shakespeare compresses the time from the Battle of Shrewsbury in 1403 to the death of the King in 1413 into this play (Asimov, II 381).
Shrewsbury July 21, 1403 to death of Henry March 20, 1413 (Asimov, II 382).
First quarto 1600 (Farina 120).
Thematically, the play involves issues of looking back, exploring the effects of time, of self-examination, construction of identity, the immanence of death. Yet it supposedly suffers in popularity compared with Henry IV, Part 1. “Boldly, Shakespeare unreformed Prince Hal. Once again he had to be made to go through the mill” (AsimovII 382; cf. Wells 146). So Part 2 may be an “inferior repetition” of Part 1, “but it was necessary if the incomparable Falstaff was to be brought back, and that meant it was worth the price” (Asimov, II 382).
“The two parts of King Henry IV are really a single drama in ten acts. Indeed the best things in Part II are invisible when it stands by itself” (Goddard, I 161).
“Having all this material, he relegated some of it to a sequel” (Smidt 110).
Not parallelism. Confusions “are more probably the results of carelessness in excerpting material from a one-play version for use in a new context, and of patching up the resultant gaps” (Smidt 113).
The Oxfordian perspective is that the play “is based upon events of 1585 and 1586 … the campaign in the Low Countries and the Babington plot” (Clark 733). Shallow may partly be Sir Henry Wallop, Justice of the Peace for Hampshire (Ogburn and Ogburn 718). Barkley, Pistor, and Mynne as Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym may have given way in revision to Marlowe, Peele, and Kyd (Ogburn and Ogburn 717).
Henry IV, Part 2, Act by Act
Further Resources
Filmography
Henry IV, Part 2.
Chimes at Midnight. A.k.a. Falstaff. Dir. and Starring Orson Welles. 1965.
Henry IV, Part 2. BBC Television, 1979.
The Hollow Crown. Starring Jeremy Irons, Simon Russell Beale, Tom Hiddleston. Neal Street Productions, 2012.
Best Editions
Bevington, David, ed. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. 6th ed. Pearson Education Inc., 2009. 826-872.
Bulman, James C., ed. King Henry IV, Part 2. The Arden Shakespeare. 3rd Series. Bloomsbury, 2016.
Furness, Horace Howard, ed. The Second Part of Henry the Fourth. A New Variorum Edition. Vol. 23. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1940.
Oxfordian Resources
Clark, Eva Turner. Hidden Allusions in Shakespeare’s Plays. 3rd ed. by Ruth Loyd Miller. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974. 733-748.
Farina, William. De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2006. 120-124.
Gilvary, Kevin. Dating Shakespeare’s Play’s. Tunbridge Wells, UK: Parapress, 2010. 235-240.
Ogburn, Charlton. The Mysterious William Shakespeare: The Myth & The Reality. 2nd ed. McLean, VA: EPM Publications, Inc., 1992.
Ogburn, Dorothy and Charlton Ogburn. This Star of England. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Pub., 1952. Esp. 723-729.
And Other General Resources
Goddard, Harold C. The Meaning of Shakespeare. Vol. 1. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951. 161-214.
Smidt, Kristian. Unconformities in Shakespeare’s History Plays. NJ: Humanities Press, 1982. 103-120. Smidt finds numerous time discrepancies suggesting significant revision, compression, and rearrangement of scenes.
Shakespeare Authorship Organizations
The Shakespeare Oxford Fellowship. Browse, get hooked, become a member.
The De Vere Society. Our Oxfordian friends and collaborators across the pond.
The Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable. We consider all possible authors behind the “Shakespeare” name.