Over the years I have had the privilege to do research in libraries and archives whose staffs have made my work both pleasurable and efficient. At the Folger Shakespeare Library, which has become a second home to me, I owe a great debt to Georgianna Ziegler, Head of Reference, and to Betsy Walsh and her staff in the Reading Room, whose courtesy and expertise are unparalleled: Rosalind Larry, LuEllen DeHaven, Harold Batie, Camille Seerattan and Alan Katz. I am grateful as well to the staff at the Shakespeare Centre Library in Stratford-upon-Avon, where I cut my teeth on promptbooks and performance materials forty years ago – particularly to Marian Pringle, Sylvia Morris, and the late Mary White. At the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham, where I spent a semester as a Senior Research Fellow, my work was facilitated by the many kindnesses of Director Kate McLuskie, Librarian Karin Brown and Administrative Assistants Juliet Creese and Rebecca White. I am grateful, too, to the staffs of the British Library and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; and, for their help in securing photos for this edition, I thank Helen Hargest at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Gavin Clark and Georgia Butler at the National Theatre Archives, Ruth Frendo and Cordelia Morrison at Shakespeare’s Globe, and Emily Hockley at Bloomsbury Publishing.

  My work on the play has been aided by numerous scholars and friends who read portions of the manuscript, offered unpublished material of their own, or provided other types of assistance. I am deeply indebted to Juliet Dusinberre for reading the critical introduction and offering the kind of trenchant critique that only a friend will; to John Jowett and Paul Werstine for combing through my work on ‘The Text’ (Appendix 1) and strengthening it with their scholarly prowess; and to Jim Siemon for offering helpful advice on my analysis of the Gloucestershire scenes. I am grateful, too, to Judith Anderson, Barbara Mowat and Gail Paster for sharing material with me that proved most timely for my research; to James Gibson for sending me a draft of his essay on Oldcastle before its publication and to Susan Cerasano for putting me in touch with him; to Ginger and Alden Vaughan for lending me research materials from their Arden edition of The Tempest; to David Lindley, Andrew Hope and Bob King for additions to the commentary; and to Ayanna Thompson and Harry Lennix for arranging a director’s cut of the then still unreleased film H4 to be sent to me. For years of stimulating conversation and insights which have improved the edition in less tangible ways, I thank my friends and fellow Shakespeareans Bill Carroll, Sam Crowl, Bob Miola, Jim Ogden, Carol Rutter, and Herb and Judy Weil. With a generosity that cannot be repaid, Miriam Gilbert shared with me her notes on the play, her encyclopedic knowledge of performance and her house in Stratford for a glorious semester in 2009; and Barbara Hodgdon, in her pioneering work on the play’s performance history, taught me to think about the fortunes of Part Two in an entirely new way.

  Other debts, equally profound but of a different sort, have been accruing for just as long. To Pat and Henry Tippie, who endowed the research chair I have held for nearly two decades, I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude. Their largesse has enabled me to spend extended periods of time at research libraries and to attend performances of the play by theatre companies in North America and abroad. Allegheny College Presidents Richard Cook and James Mullen, and Provost Linda DeMeritt, have given me unstinting support, granting me sabbatic leaves to further my research; and no request has been too trivial for the wonderful staff at the Allegheny College library, especially Linda Bills, Don Vrabel, Cynthia Burton, Jane Westenfeld, Rita Manning and Linda Ernst. I have profited from stimulating conversations with my colleagues in the Medieval and Renaissance Studies program – Amelia Carr, Jennifer Hellwarth and Glenn Holland – and from the encouragement of other colleagues, Diane D’Amico, Ben Slote and the late Fred Frank.

  My oldest colleagues and treasured friends Lloyd Michaels and Bruce Smith have, over many a lingering lunch, endured hours of lamentation about my editorial travails. Still have they borne it with a patient shrug, and with genial prodding have admonished me to get on with the task at hand. Kristin Goss and Grant Williams have offered me congenial company, good food and drink and generous moral support during my many visits to the Folger Library. Sally and Doug Caraganis years ago surprised me with an original playbill for Macready’s 1821 coronation production of King Henry the Fourth – Part the Second, which ever since has hung over my office desk as a reminder of how much work yet remained to be done. And what can I say of Beth Watkins? My debt to her is infinite. Long accustomed to hearing the chimes at midnight with me, she has borne so much and been fubbed off so often that it is a shame to be thought on. In a bold ploy to put my passion for this project in perspective, she alternated between assuring me that the world wasn’t waiting with bated breath for another edition of Part Two and threatening me with divorce if I didn’t finish the damned thing. I dedicate this volume to her, with love.

  James C. Bulman

  INTRODUCTION

  THE PROBLEM OF BEING SECOND-BORN

  Like a younger sibling, Henry IV, Part Two has long lived in the shadow of the more popular Part One. Often viewed as an uninspired sequel, it lacks the earlier play’s exuberantly festive spirit and political urgency: its mixing of kings and clowns seems less purposeful; its plot, more digressive; its conclusion, less satisfying. And while it may have brilliant moments on which to stake a claim to greatness, these often fall outside the parameters of the play’s historical narrative and can be dismissed as irrelevant to the story of Prince Harry’s reformation.1 Audiences expecting a sequel that builds upon the royal victory at Shrewsbury are invariably disappointed, for Part Two instead duplicates the narrative arc of the earlier play for little apparent reason: another northern rebellion threatens King Henry’s tenuous hold on power, and the prodigal Prince of Wales again has to prove himself worthy of his father’s trust, as if he has never redeemed his indignities on Percy’s head in Part One. Furthermore, the play is larded with comic scenes featuring Falstaff and his followers which compete for attention with the play’s chronicle history, the two elements cobbled together seemingly without regard to narrative coherence or artful plotting. Such apparent disregard of conventional dramaturgy has led generations of critics to dismiss Part Two as a pale imitation of a glittering original, ‘a diminished shadow of its predecessor … that has always presented itself as 1 Henry IV gone sour’ (Booth, 270), a ‘rambling and episodic’ sequel whose concern with ‘political events [has] run down’ (Worsley & Wilson, 72), a ‘ramshackle grab-bag of a piece’ (David, ‘History’, 137), or an artless ‘patchwork’ of a play (Smidt, 109) in which nothing of note happens until the King dies, the Prince is crowned and the misleader of his youth is banished.2

  Yet these complaints ignore the peculiar merits of Part Two as Shakespeare’s most radical experiment in dramatizing English history. Though an integral part of the tetralogy on whose sweep of events it depends to be fully understood, Part Two nevertheless breaks the mould of previous history plays by including relatively little political history – events foregrounding power struggles among the nobility in Henry IV’s reign – and offering in its place a panorama of an England unrecorded by chroniclers. Unlike sequels that simply strive to repeat the successful formula of an original, Part Two has a darker tone and more ambitious aims than Part One. Its originality resides in the casual way it casts a wide net over England, gathering in groups of people whose unwritten histories rival in importance, and at times surpass, the chronicle history which concludes with Prince Harry’s succession. The fact that Shakespeare chose to dramatize comparatively little material about Henry IV’s reign following the royal victory at Shrewsbury in Part One liberated him to improvise, to explore and to envision history with a creative licence that his previous history plays, more deeply bound to their chronicle sources, did not.

  Part Two conceives of the final years of King Henry’s reign in terms of contemporary social history, with marginalized characters providing a gloss not only on events dramatized in the political plot but also, anachronistically, on English society in the 1590s. Drawing on oral traditions and popular nostalgia as a counterweight to the authority of chronicle narratives, the play creates a world rich in the quotidian life of Elizabethan subcultures and populated by characters more authentically realized than many of those drawn from chronicles – tavern hostess and whore, swaggering ensign and impecunious knight, menials and hangers-on, country justices and rag-tag recruits – who collectively paint a picture of contemporary English society more inclusive than one finds in any other Shakespeare history play. To this end, far from being a liability, an episodic structure serves the play well by taking socially and geographically diverse and unrelated characters into its generous embrace. My goal in this introduction is, in part, to unfetter the idiosyncratic brilliance of Part Two from the assumption that the play simply and unsuccessfully imitates Part One, and to recognize it as an imaginatively autonomous work which, more than any other of Shakespeare’s chronicle plays, broadens one’s sense of what history can be.

  A two-part play?

  It is not customary to regard Part Two as an independent play. For reasons I shall discuss later, a critical movement that reached its pinnacle in the mid-twentieth century, intent on linking Shakespeare’s English histories together as a cycle, relegated Part Two to a status subordinate not only to Part One but to the other plays in the second tetralogy as well. The peculiar merits of Part Two as an anomalous history of diverse social groups were subjugated to the demands of an overarching royal narrative.

  The nature of the relationship between the two parts of Henry IV has always vexed scholars. There has been no agreement about whether the two parts were originally planned as one play and then divided during composition, or as two integrated plays about one king’s reign; or whether instead Part One was written as an independent play and Part Two conceived later as ‘an unpremeditated sequel’.3 Critics have often noted that episodes in Part Two echo those in Part One to an unprecedented degree, with a similar alternation of court and tavern scenes, the distribution of high seriousness and low comedy within them so nearly identical that structurally, according to M.A. Shaaber, Part Two ‘is almost a carbon copy of the first play’.4 G.K. Hunter likewise regards the plays as a ‘diptych … in which the repetition of shape and design focuses attention on what is common in the two parts’ (237).5 Rather than follow the proportions of Part One, however, Shakespeare relegates most of the royal history in Part Two to the final two acts – the King makes a brief first appearance in Act 3 and is not seen again until his deathbed scene in Act 4 – and grants a far larger portion of the play to Falstaff’s comic interactions with those low-life characters who frequent the tavern and, later, with the country justices and recruits in Gloucestershire. The number of lines spoken by the major characters in each play reveals this shift in emphasis. In the 1598 Quarto of Part One, Falstaff speaks 542 of the play’s 2,857 lines; Hotspur, 538; the Prince, 514; and the King, 338 – a parity which demonstrates an artful balance between scenes of comedy and chronicle history. In the 1600 Quarto (second issue) of Part Two, however, Falstaff speaks 525 of the play’s 2,861 lines; the Prince, only 293; and the King, 291 – a disparity which indicates the prominence of Falstaff relative to the King and Prince (King, 85 – 6, 188–93).

  Falstaff’s scenes in Part Two, moreover, unlike his scenes in Part One which thematically echo the preoccupations of its royal history, often bear a tenuous or even oppositional relationship to the political plot. Indeed, the chicanery and dishonesty that characterize Falstaff’s behaviour serve as a moral gloss on the play’s chronicle history, which dramatizes how the rebels, whose common cause is subverted by individual self-interest, are ultimately tricked by Westmorland and Prince John into a false amnesty – a substitution of machiavellian policy for the more honourable chivalric combat that concludes Part One at Shrewsbury, and a fitting climax to a play which throughout echoes the structure and situations of Part One only to re-view them with an eye towards human frailties, self-deception and cynical Realpolitik. If Part Two replicates the structure of Part One in a way that calls attention to their parallels, therefore, it does so with subversive intent; for at every turn, Part Two thwarts the expectations raised by such parallels. It offers policy in place of honour, substitutes disease and death for the celebration of living, and calls into question the official version of history to which Part One more resolutely adheres. Part Two is, as P.H. Davison argues, as much the ‘obverse’ of Part One as its sequel (9).

  Sequels do not demand consistency of character or continuity of plot to be effective; and indeed, Part Two quickly establishes its own distinct dramatic parameters. A new rebellion only tangential to that in Part One now threatens the King and must be suppressed; Prince Harry, whose chivalric honours won at Shrewsbury go unmentioned, again consorts with his tavern companions and once more must stage a convincing reformation; and old evidence of the Prince’s flouting of royal authority – the legend that he once boxed the Lord Chief Justice on the ear – is resurrected to create a new source of conflict. If the Lord Chief Justice is introduced as a voice of authority and judicial integrity to compensate for the reduced role played by the ailing King, other new characters are introduced to create a comedy more acerbic and less genial than that in Part One. The tart-tongued whore Doll Tearsheet, the hair-triggered Ancient Pistol, the aptly named Justices Shallow and Silence, the amorally pragmatic Davy and the yeomen and labourers who are recruited to serve in Falstaff’s charge of foot – delightfully plain-spoken characters with names such as Mouldy, Bullcalf and Feeble – all populate a world entirely independent of the court.

  Furthermore, characters from Part One are reintroduced in different circumstances. The Hostess, for example, who was simply a tavern-keeper and claimed to be ‘an honest man’s wife’ (3.3.119) in the earlier play, is now a brothel-keeper and a widow who seeks to marry Falstaff in order to gentle her condition. She is a much more fully-fleshed character in Part Two, her idiosyncratic use of malapropisms and bawdy innuendo cunningly developed from hints in Part One. Bardolph, too, more obviously a man-servant to Falstaff – ‘I bought him in Paul’s’ (1.2.53) where masterless men went to seek employment – than he was in Part One, is given a new and larger role to play as Falstaff’s corrupt corporal. He also is said to be the man on whose behalf the Prince once struck the Lord Chief Justice (56 –7), suggesting that his behaviour has been ‘countenanced’ by the Prince’s royal favour.6 Above all, Sir John Falstaff is reconceived as older, more hobbled by disease and more cynical than his festive counterpart in the earlier play. He now operates as a free agent, no longer in the company of the Prince: until the final scene, they appear together just once, and then, only briefly. Rather than living by thievery and by the good graces of the Prince, he uses his reputation for valour falsely won at Shrewsbury to cut a fashionable figure in the world, and he tries to borrow a thousand pounds – unsuccessfully from the Lord Chief Justice, successfully from Justice Shallow – to finance his indulgences. Thus the core relationship in Part One between the Prince and Falstaff is moved to the margins in Part Two, and Falstaff is allowed to dominate much of the play with grand social and political aspirations which require a calculated exploitation of others. While differences such as these would be inexplicable if Parts One and Two had been conceived together as a single history, unpremeditated sequels afford authors the freedom to refashion characters in this way, for consistency must inevitably give way to good storytelling.

  Most critically, Shakespeare had to decide what to do with the Prince after his victory over Hotspur at Shrewsbury. The answer, apparently, was to pretend that his reformation as a chivalric hero had never happened. For most who come to Part Two after Part One, Harry appears unaccountably to have relapsed. Although he has just returned victorious from a military campaign, nothing is made of the honours he accrued in battle, and the promises he made to his father are seemingly forgotten. Instead, he again consorts with his lowborn friends; and although he declares that he feels ‘much to blame / So idly to profane the precious time’ (2.4.366 –7), when the King inquires after him on his deathbed, he is told that the Prince is dining in London ‘With Poins and other his continual followers’ (4.3.53). This report prompts the King to lament anew his son’s ‘headstrong riot’ (62) and to predict that when he inherits the throne, England will suffer ‘th’unguided days / And rotten times’ he has long feared (59 – 60). Shakespeare thus resuscitates Harry’s reputation as a scapegrace from Part One and resets the hurdle over which the prodigal son must leap once again to convince his father of his fidelity and the world of his worth.

  Of course, it is possible to regard this duplication of Harry’s reformation as a ‘symbolic arrangement’ in which the Prince learns chivalric honour in Part One and civil justice in Part Two7 – an argument which reinforces the belief that the two plays were planned together as one; or as ‘parallel and complementary phases of a process which is to be understood emblematically rather than chronologically’ (Smidt, 109) – a scheme which satisfies the neatness of formalist criticism more easily than it reconciles inconsistencies between the plays. Alternatively, one might agree with Geoffrey Bullough that ‘a pattern of repetition in political matters was essential to Shakespeare’s historical and moral purpose’, and that because ‘Shakespeare was not as yet interested in stages of growth in character’, he could conform to chronicle accounts ‘that the Prince’s behaviour was inconsistent and declined after Shrewsbury’ (Bullough, 4.159); or agree with Harold Jenkins that it is in the nature of legendary heroes such as the future Henry V to trace the same narrative arc in every story told about them, for folklore always requires such heroes to ‘be at the same point twice’ – and thus the Henry IV plays dramatize ‘not two princely reformations but two versions of a single reformation’ (Jenkins, 20 –1). But the fact that Harry’s apparent lapse has invited such diverse explanations suggests that none of them is fully convincing. Disputing that the Prince’s reformation in the two plays is a ‘single process’, Paul Yachnin adopts the perspective of an audience member viewing Part Two for the first time: ‘neither the King nor Worcester seems to think that Hal’s delinquency in the second play is anything other than a continuous and uninterrupted state of lawlessness’, he observes; ‘they do not seem to think Hal has relapsed after having been converted because neither seems able to remember that Hal has already redeemed himself in the first play’ (Yachnin, 119). The Prince’s conversion, in other words, is a self-contained narrative in Part Two; and with an amnesia facilitated by their being caught up in the immediacy of a compelling dramatic action, audiences can accept the logic of his reformation without having to recall his similar trajectory in Part One.